Free Republic

Like many divorces, this one began with small tiffs that escalated. After years of arguing over theology and administrative control, disputes among Episcopalians boiled over in 2012 when the local bishop and a majority of parishes left the national church. The aftermath flows Tuesday into the courtroom of a circuit judge in St. George who will decide the future of more than $500 million in church property - although her ruling is likely to be appealed. As the much-anticipated trial begins, two men will be in court, each in Anglican bishop purple, each claiming to be the rightful leader of...

“You’ll find our text this morning in the Old Testament…” I know this is a rare announcement on a Sunday morning, but when you heard it last, what did you think? “Oh no! Not another historical lecture.” “We’re going to get a whipping with the law today.” “Why? I came to church to hear about Jesus.” “What’s Israel and Babylon got to do with my family struggles?” Or maybe you didn’t just think it. You said it or emailed it to the pastor afterwards. And pastors are feeling the pressure. Some surveys put the ratio of Old Testament to New...

The Trouble With Calvin – Pt. 2 In my last post, I began a series of critiques of John Calvin’s famous “five points,” most often referred to using the acronym, TULIP, which represents Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistibility of Grace, and The Perseverance of the Saints (“once saved, always saved”). In this installment, we’ll deal with Unconditional Election.Calvin’s idea of Unconditional Election simply means that God “elected” certain men for salvation and others for damnation from all eternity, rooted in texts of Scripture, as we will see below, like Romans 9:10-12:And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived...

What is “let-go-and-let-God” theology? It’s called Keswick theology, and it’s one of the most significant strands of second-blessing theology. It assumes that Christians experience two “blessings.” The first is getting “saved,” and the second is getting serious. The change is dramatic: from a defeated life to a victorious life; from a lower life to a higher life; from a shallow life to a deeper life; from a fruitless life to a more abundant life; from being “carnal” to being “spiritual”; and from merely having Jesus as your Savior to making Jesus your Master. People experience this second blessing through surrender...

In the fundamentalist Bible church I attended as a child we would regularly have long sermons about the “end times”. These were based on an interpretative system of the Bible called “Dispensationalism”. The roots of this theology were the idea that history could be broken down into various “dispensations” or time periods and that God behaved differently and different things happened to the human race in these different dispensations. Part of this teaching was that the “rapture” would take place in which all the Christian people would be supernaturally whisked up into heaven and the sinners would remain behind. Thus...

Yesterday marked the 450th anniversary of the death of John Calvin. Here are nine things you should know about the French theologian and Reformer. 1. From an early age, Calvin was a precocious student who excelled at Latin and philosophy. He was prepared to go to study of theology in Paris, when his father decided he should become a lawyer. Calvin spend half a decade at the University of Orleans studying law, a subject he did not love. 2. Calvin wrote his magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, at the age of 27 (though he updated the work...

When it comes to the topic of if a Christian can fall from God's grace, the "once saved, always saved" people bring up the sheep example. Very oddly, they miss something. Jesus said, "28 and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. 29 “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand." John 10:28f. Jesus also said earlier, "11 I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His...

Praying to Mary, celebrating the Mass, venerating the Pope—you won’t find those doctrines in the Bible. And yet more than one billion Roman Catholics throughout the world follow such practices in line with the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. With that many Catholics around the globe, it’s likely you know some of them as relatives, friends, neighbors, or co-workers. Find out what they don’t know—the origin and error of Catholic doctrine—so you can help the Catholics you know out of the darkness and into the light.

Four Marks of the Church by Kenneth D. WhiteheadWe can show how the Church of the apostles resembles in all essentials the Church of today by showing how the early Church already bore the marks, or "notes," of the true Church of Christ which are still professed today in the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed declares the Church to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.Thus, the Church of the apostles was definitely one: "There is one body and one spirit," Paul wrote, "just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one...

In the late 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble established that the light we detect from galaxies is shifted toward the redder colors of the spectrum, indicating that they are moving away from us at enormous speeds. And the farther away galaxies are, the faster they are fleeing. Rewinding that expansion through mathematics — dividing distance by speed — indicates that something extraordinary happened about 14 billion years ago, when the entire universe was small, dense and exceedingly hot. Scientists such as Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaitre had anticipated the big bang — which Lemaitre described as a “Cosmic Egg exploding at...

Bart Ehrman, prolific author, New Testament scholar and former evangelical Christian, says it took him eight years to research and complete his new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Yet, a group of fellow scholars responded in their book, How God Became Jesus, by claiming that the Christian-turned-agnostic's "sloppy" scholarship on Jesus' divinity leaves much to be desired. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says his research reveals that Jesus, a first century Galilean, never claimed to be God, and that it...

Someone needs to explain to those (especially socialists) who have been misled otherwise–Jesus Christ did not preach public charity. In fact, he taught the opposite. Deranged, hyper-manic left wing comedian Lewis Black made a complete fool of himself Monday when he gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., delivering a slobbering, convulsive tirade in his usual style, that of a bombastic barroom boor who pontificates wildly in a blind rage on matters of which he knows next to nothing. Black claims that he is one of only a handful of true socialists still alive in American...

Full Title: Predestination: Should We Even Talk About It? Is the doctrine of predestination an obstacle to the usefulness of preaching? I’d like to begin a series on—get ready—predestination. Yes, I said that word. I know this is not the most popular topic to bring up among polite company; in fact, it’s downright divisive, isn’t it? In the fifth century, Augustine recounted in his letters that some said, “The doctrine of predestination is an obstacle to the usefulness of preaching.” And who wants an obstacle? In the sixteenth century, John Calvin had to go out of his way to state...

Maher began the monologue by declaring that America is “stupid” because 60 percent of the country reportedly believes the tale of Noah’s ark is literally true. He went on to slam the film Noah as “floating giraffe cr**,” but said it “must be doing something right” since it’s been condemned by both Muslims and Christians. And the fact that it might lose a lot of studio money, he joked, “may put it in hot water with the Jews too.”

Would a loving Jesus really teach about hell? Yes, and so does every New Testament author. Let’s consider what they teach.Hell in MatthewIn the Sermon on the Mount, often known for its emphasis on love and the kingdom, Jesus teaches the reality and nature of hell (5:20–30; 7:13–27). In Matthew 5:20–30, Jesus contrasts hell with the kingdom of heaven and warns that hell is a real danger to unrepentant sinners. The fire of hell, the justice of hell, and the extreme suffering in hell are particularly stressed. The unrepentant are warned to use extreme measures to avoid being cast into it by God.As...

Many skeptics assert that Paul of Tarsus (the apostle Paul) hijacked the early Christian religion, changing the theology from what Jesus originally taught. Usually offered as proof for this claim are the doctrines found in Paul's great theological work, his letter to the Romans. Without a doubt, the book of Romans contains the most complete exposition of orthodox Christian doctrines. Are these doctrines contrary to what Jesus taught? Do they conflict with the teachings of the Old Testament from which they were purportedly derived? If Paul really "invented" Christianity, then one would expect that his teachings would be different from...

Michael Hathaway, author of 10 books on psychic development, past lives, regression, hypnosis and spirituality, and a board certified Past Life Regression Therapist is one of the most respected hypnotists in the country. He published a book entitled, “It’s Time to Simplify Your Soul’s Code”, an easy how-to guide for discovering our unique special purpose and to enrich our life experience by delving into the aspects of higher self and soul contracts. In this book, Mr. Hathaway emphasizes the source energy of the loving universe as a means to connect to our divine purpose as incarnated souls. He brilliantly describes...

The President of the Episcopal Church's lay and clergy House of Deputies, the Rev. Gay Jennings has blasted laws in parts of Africa that she says, "are brutally repressive to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

For whom did Jesus die? For the sins of the entire humanity or only for the elect? This was the topic of a live debate between Messianic Jewish apologist Dr. Michael L. Brown and Alpha and Omega Ministries Director Dr. James White on RevelationTV.com Friday evening. The issue boils down to what the intention of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was in Christ going to the cross, said White, who heads the Phoenix, Ariz.-based evangelical Reformed Christian apologetics organization, as the debate began Friday at 9 p.m. EST. "Jesus' death on the cross was a covenantal death,"...

One of the most misleading headlines imaginable recently appeared over an opinion column published in USA Today. Tom Krattenmaker, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, set out to argue that there is no essential conflict between evolution and religious belief because the two are dealing with completely separate modes of knowing. Evolution, he argued, is simply “settled science” that requires no belief. Religion, on the other hand, is a faith system that is based in a totally different way of knowing—a form of knowing that requires belief and faith. The background to the column is the recent data...