Deploring what’s deplorable

Biola’s Fred Sanders offers an excellent, thoughful response - let me call it a “rebuke” - to my piece on the “The End of Protestantism.” Sanders understands my targets: “the kind of small-minded Protestant whose heroes are Luther and Calvin, and who has no other heroes in . . . . Continue Reading »

Best Offense

I’ve said it before, but in the light of the response to my Firstthings.com article on Protestantism, it bears repeating: The best Protestant response to Roman Catholicism is a raucously joyous Catholic Protestantism. That’s how Protestants can encourage deeper reform within the Roman . . . . Continue Reading »

Paul and ekklesia

NT Wright observes ( Paul and the Faithfulness of God , 385 ), “It it still common to find ‘the church’ and related topics tucked away towards the back of studies of Paul, the assumption being that what mattered was sin and salvation and that questions about church life were . . . . Continue Reading »

Discriminating Jesus

“You have left your first love,” Jesus tells the church at Ephesus (Revelation 2:4). That’s a serious charge, and if we said it, it would be quickly followed by denunciations and charges of apostasy. But Jesus also knows that the same people persevere, that they test false . . . . Continue Reading »

Spirit in Church

Jenson points out ( Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God , 25) that, though the church’s witness is carried on and received by institutions and traditions, “no structures of historical continuity merely as such can assure the integrity of witness to reality that is other than . . . . Continue Reading »

From Saints to Priests

For all of Badiou’s aspirations to novelty, he falls into some very old early modern canards in his discussion of Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism . How, he asks, “does genuine saintliness . . . bear the ordeal of a History that is at once fleeting and monumental, one in which . . . . Continue Reading »

The uses of the past

Michael Dougherty writes to point out that many of reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic were “tragic” in the sense I use the term - that is, they were efforts to recover a pure past and to save the church from later accretions. Protestantism was born of such . . . . Continue Reading »

The tragedy of conversion

I’m talking about cross-Christian conversions, from Protestant to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, or the opposite. In calling such conversions “tragic,” I’m not suggesting that they always have adverse consequences for the convert. They may do, but not necessarily. In my view, . . . . Continue Reading »