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In which Bishopess Schori’s “Theo-fantastic” Curacao sermon is reexamined, evaluated, judged, and ditched. Brethren, Peace and good to all of you. I can't listen to this sermon! I’ve been asking myself what (or who) possessed Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishopess of the Episcopal Church, to deliver this sermon in Curacao. As you might remember, I commented on it not long ago on a previous blog post. I think I got the answer after reading a chapter of this book, God or Goddess?: Feminist Theology : What Is It? Where Does It Lead?, by Manfred Hauke....

1.) IF John Hagee, Perry Stone, and/or anyone else on TCT, TBN, INSP, WCT, etc, accept women as being able to occupy the positions of apostles, and/or prophets, and/or evengelists, and/or pastors and/or teachers (with such examples such as Paula White and Joyce Meyer (whom I believe operate as a pastor and teacher respectively)), and... 2.) IF they believe that women can occupy these positions within the sphere of the New Testament/New Covenant, and... 3.) IF they believe that the office of Rabbi (Messianic or otherwise) has been carried over into the New Testament/New Covenant, (with such examples as Kurt...

Full Title: “Gay Marriage” Shows Us Why Theology Matters. Three ways Biblically sound theology will help in the same-sex marriage debate To invite homosexuals to embrace themselves so that they are no longer lonely is agreeing with those on the left that God was wrong in ordaining the family as one man and one woman together in marriage. It is agreeing with those whom God is pouring out His wrath. It is agreeing with those who have cast off any notions of holiness, purity and piety in the church. It is, as I have said, theological suicide. Over the weekend...

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew. Excerpts appear below, with Lewis’ writing (complete with Rand’s highlighting and underlining) on the left and...

May 10, 2013 (HLIWorldWatch.org) - Polls show that most young people today, even those who identify themselves as Christians, have no problem with “same-sex marriage.” If young people today are at all aware of what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage and human sexuality, what they think they know is often only a caricature of the truth. They see it as simply a set of prohibitions established by men. But what the Church actually presents is a vision of the beauty of marriage as a sacred union between one man and one woman who are committed for life and open...

Are you saved? Have you ever been asked this question? Has anyone ever told you that Catholics think they can work their way into Heaven? The Catholic Church does not now, nor has it ever, taught a doctrine of salvation by works - that we can “work� our way into Heaven. And, the Bible does not teach that we are saved by “faith alone.� The only place in all of Scripture where the phrase “Faith Alone� appears, is in James 2:24, where it says that we are not justified (or saved) by faith alone. However, if works have nothing to...

Is Mankind Getting Dumber? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Do today’s children have lower I.Q.’s than yesterday’s? Yes, according to measurements of intellectual and emotional strength gathered from different countries and contexts. The results show the same basic decline and resist the notion that public or other forms of education are to blame. Could the cause instead lie within? Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree thinks so. He published a pair of essays in the journal Trends in Genetics, citing new discoveries that show why the human intellect is “surprisingly fragile.”1 This biblical creation-friendly notion didn’t sit well with the authors...

Coelacanths: Evolutionists Still Fishing in Shallow Water by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent report, published in Nature,1 on the genome sequence of the so-called living fish fossil, the African coelacanth, has some evolutionists scrambling to defend their story. This is because the coelacanth's DNA is similar to other types of fish and not land animals, thus forcing the evolutionists to postulate that the coelacanth evolved slowly.1 Although modern coelacanths are found in water about 500 feet deep, Axel Meyer, a member of the study team believes that ancient coelacanths may have lived in shallow...

THE PROTESTANT PRETENDED REFORMATION
IS NOT THE WORK OF GOD CHAPTER I.     Q. Can any one reasonably believe that the change in religion brought about by Luther is the work of God?     A. No one can believe it, unless he be utterly ignorant of the true nature of religion, and very unlearned in the matters of history.
     Q. Why do you make this answer?
     A. Because, in the first place, the author of the Reformation is not a man of God; secondly, because his work is not the work of God; thirdly, because the means which he...

Within moments of Pope Benedict’s announcement that he was abdicating the Chair of St. Peter, secularists began demanding that the College of Cardinals choose a less rigid, more progressive pontiff; in other words, a pope who would repudiate Church teachings on chastity, same-sex “marriage,� divorce, contraception, abortion, and priestly celibacy.Leading the charge was The New York Times, which devoted plenty of front page, above-the-fold space to castigating the Church and Benedict. The op-ed editor published, ad nauseam, the usual tired-old Catholic critics, including Garry Wills and Hans Küng.And the moment secularists realized that Pope Francis is not a South American liberation theologian, but...

Q: Okay, so what is the Christian account of how revelation occurred?As Elmer Fudd might say, “Vewy, vewy swowly.” Divine revelation didn’t happen in a blinding flash—such as God dropping the Summa Theologiae on top of a mountain and waiting for people to invent the Latin language so they could read it. (Though He could have given them magical spectacles that would translate it for them….) It seems that God preferred to slowly unfold His personality and His will for us through the course of tangled, messy human history. We might wonder why, and call up the divine customer service...

Hello Brothers and Sisters in Christ –We need to seek Jesus with repentance (Acts 26:20), fasting (Matthew 9:15, Mark 2:20, Luke 5:35), weeping, and round the clock prayer, until God visits as he did in the Welsh Revival, after the Revolutionary War, and just before the Civil War, and throughout the 20th century. The USA is in serious trouble with the LORD. This should be apparent from … American Christianity has until the coming revival been in decline and is helpless against porn, divorce, sin, … Despite the LORD telling us in Matthew 5:13 to be "salt", the Church in...

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he...

The Devil, You Say! Hardly had the shooting stopped at Sandy Hook Elementary School before the national commentary machine cranked up. Everyone and his dog had something to say: Most of it, as events would show, centered on the compelling need, or lack of it, for gun control. To the Rev. Dr. Bill Dickson, it seemed the time had come for a metaphorically deeper treatment, focused on the seething, slithering abode of evil itself and the inhabitants thereof. "Something shocking is going on in the world," Dr. Dickson, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, told me...

The video below shows “American tacky� in all its glory. A man who loved Burger King dies and his family honors him by taking the funeral procession through the Burger King “drive thru.� Free Burgers for all on the way to the Cemetery, hearse and all.I’ve seen worse, I have to admit. Probably at the top of the list is and “Funeral Home Drive- thru� where the deceased is actually on display in a window. No need to get out of your car and actually visit the family. No, that’s too much trouble and lacks the kind of convenience we...

Featured Term (selected at random):APOCRYPHA Originally writings that claimed a sacred origin and were supposed to have been hidden for generations; later, a well-define class of literature with scriptural or quasi-scriptural pretensions, but lacking genuineness and canonicity, composed during the two centuries before Christ and the early centuries of our era. Protestants apply the term improperly to denote also Old Testament books not contained in the Jewish canon but received by Catholics under the name of deuterocanonical. The following is a list of the Apocrypha: Apocrypha of Jewish Origin: Jewish Apocalypses; Book of Henoch; Assumption of Moses: Fourth Book of...

11 Biblical Tests of Genuine Salvation - In 1746, about six years after the Great Awakening, in which Jonathan Edwards was the primary instrument of God to preach the gospel and bring about the greatest revival in American history thus far, Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections. He wrote it to deal with a problem not unlike one we face today: the matter of evidence for true conversion. Many people want the blessings of salvation, especially eternal security, but no more. In the explosive drama of the Great Awakening, it seemed as though conversions were occurring in great...

Based on Romans 2:28-29, some have concluded that being Jewish is a spiritual rather than ethnic matter, and that people become "spiritual Jews" when they become Christians. Romans 2:28-29 reads, "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly neither is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God." For understanding this passage the near context of the passage is very important. Chapter 2:1-16...

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of...

“How could God let this happen?� That was the question asked of the former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, by Fox News host Neil Cavuto in an interview following the horrific slaughter of innocent school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, replied:We ask why there’s violence in the schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we do not want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That we’re not going...

In the history of Roman Catholic dogma, one can trace an evolution in the theory of tradition. There were two fundamental patristic principles which governed the early Church's approach to dogma. The first was sola Scriptura in which the fathers viewed Scripture as both materially and formally sufficient. It was materially sufficient in that it was the only source of doctrine and truth and the ultimate authority in all doctrinal controversies. It was necessary that every teaching of the Church as it related to doctrine be proven from Scripture. Thomas Aquinas articulated this patristic view when he stated that canonical...

After dabbling in creationism earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., clarified that he does believe that scientists know the Earth is “at least 4.5 billion years old.” “There is no scientific debate on the age of the earth. I mean, it’s established pretty definitively, it’s at least 4.5 billion years old,” Rubio told Mike Allen of Politico. ”I was referring to a theological debate, which is a pretty healthy debate. “The theological debate is, how do you reconcile with what science has definitively established with what you may think your faith teaches,” Rubio continued. “Now for me, actually, when...

What are the sources or inspiration for these subjects?Basically they are inspired by the documents of the Holy See, and in particular by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium. This was a deliberate choice so as to create an awareness of the vast richness, completeness and beauty of these documents which are, in some circles, hardly known at all. In this way, it is possible to present the essential and fundamental contents of the faith which are professed, not just by the individual Catholic, but by the Catholic Church throughout the world as it adheres to the...

Turkey fines 'blasphemous' Simpsons for poking fun at God • God offers coffee to the devil in one of the cartoon's episodes (ANSAmed) - ANKARA - Just about everything that could be said and written about the super-popular cartoon 'The Simpsons' had been, except that it was blasphemous. Now even that ''milestone'' has been reached, thanks to the watchdogs of Turkey's television stations under the Islamic-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the newspaper Hurriyet, Ankara's Council of Radio and Television (RTUK) has handed down a TRY 52,951 fine (about 23,000 euros) to the private broadcaster CNBC-E...

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.(Genesis 4:3)Cain believed in God. Furthermore he worshipped him. The account of the first murder in human history, took place in the context of worship. We would do well to consider the theology of Cain, for we are warned in the book of Jude that in the last days many within the church and outside of it would”go in the way of Cain”, plunging on into everlasting destruction. Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way...

And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.(Genesis 4:1-2)By now, Adam and Eve had been evicted from their home, the garden of delight, because of their sin. They were not allowed to remain, nor to eat of the precious “Tree of Life”, in fact it would have been spiritually disastrous for them to do so. They had rejected God’s glory. They chose not to...

Hitler's Muslim Nephew Comes to New York September 24, 2007 FrontPageMagazine.com Kenneth R. Timmerman What was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinking? Apparently the former Democrat believed that escorting Iran’s Hitler-wannabe president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the site of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero would generate a terrific photo op. “Here I am with world leaders,” that type of thing. After all, Bloomberg has already made his appearance at the “World Leaders Forum” at Columbia University, so he was in the zone. And last year, U.S. News & World Report crowned him as one of America’s “best leaders.” But...

A recent sermon by Pastor David Jeremiah has been weighing heavily upon my mind. He recounted the true-life story of contemporaries William Franklin Graham and Charles Templeton, up and coming young evangelists who began their ministries during the 1940s. Most thought Templeton, rather than Graham, would achieve greater things in the name of the Lord. But, in fact, the former fell away from his Christian faith – actually declaring himself atheist – while the great Billy Graham remained a good and faithful servant of the Most High. Pastor Jeremiah shared the story of Graham and Templeton to remind his congregation...

Pope Benedict XVI says the final book of the Bible, which he referred to as the Book of the Apocalypse, provides Christians with a vision of a Church fully in communion with Jesus Christ in prayer. “The Apocalypse presents us with a community gathered in prayer, because it is in prayer that we gain an increasing awareness of Jesus’s presence with us and within us,” the Pope said during his Sept. 5 general audience at the Vatican. “The more and the better we pray with constancy and intensity, the more we are assimilated to him, and the more he enters...

Orion is one of the most well-known and easily recognized constellations of the winter sky. The three bright blue stars in Orion’s belt seem to draw our attention instantly.1 Such stars are a strong confirmation of the biblical timescale. Most stars generate energy by the process of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in the stellar core. This is a very efficient power source. Theoretically, a star like the sun has enough hydrogen in its core to keep it burning for ten billion years. But that’s not the case with blue stars. Blue stars are always more massive than the...

Mid-East Prophecy Update - August 19th, 2012 Pastor JD argues from scripture how, with a certainty, we can know this is the final generation alive at the rapture of the church.

Late in life, Pope John Paul II gave a series of interviews subsequently collected in the book Memory and Identity (2005). There, in response to a question about the pervasive ideologies that had swept Europe during the past couple of centuries, and which had resulted in the slaughter of millions, he contended that in order to explain all this, we have to go back to the period before the Enlightenment, especially to the revolution brought about by the philosophical thought of Descartes. The cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) radically changed the way of doing philosophy. In the...

Featured Term (selected at random):FIDES ECCLESIASTICA See: THEOLOGICAL NOTES All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

The year 2018 will mark the 50th, or Golden, anniversary of Humanae Vitae (HV), in which Paul VI restated what had been, until 1930, an unbroken and universal Christian teaching. Today, on HVÂ’s 44th anniversary, the Bellarmine Forum is launching The Campaign for Humanae Vitae. Our goal is to gather a million signatures on our petition conveying to the Holy Father and our bishops our prayerful gratitude, encouragement, and support for their efforts to preach and to defend this vital teaching of the Magisterium.Why now? Consider this: my colleague on the Notre Dame faculty, Professor Gary Gutting, has proclaimed in...

In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world's first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported last week in the journal Cell. A team led by Markus Covert, assistant professor of bioengineering, used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium, the world's smallest free-living bacterium. ....

If you are a person of faith like I am, you like to imagine that the Creator created us with free will — in other words, even God doesn’t know who you are. You will let the universe know, you will announce to all creation who humanity is now that you have the power as a species to either preserve life or to destroy it. To either rescue the earth, or to drive an extinction wave like we’ve never seen before. Your generation will make this determination. Is the human species a species of locusts, that just came to devour...

Featured Term (selected at random):GENUS The qualities that are common to several species, abstracting from their distinctive differences. Thus a universal concept, like intelligent being, can be applied to angels and men. The supreme genera are called categories, or which the first (in Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas) expresses substance, and the nine others express accidental properties, namely quantity, quality, relation, place, time, action, passion, position, and state. (Etym. Latin genus, class, kind.) All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

“Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18 In “Against the Heathen,” early Church Father Athanasius reveals that pride and haughtiness preceded man’s fall into idolatry and paganism. A haughty spirit led them to make light of higher things, and deliberately disregarding what they knew to be true they began to seek in preference things in the lower or natural dimension. Thus they fell into worship of self, sexual pleasures and acquisition of status and things to the living God and higher things. The truth as to evil said Athanasius, “….is that it originates, and...

[SNIP........] You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.It was the moral indignation of British evangelicals like William Carey and William Wilberforce who demanded not dialogue and endless discussion, but the total elimination of the hideous practice of sati. Even more pertinently, conservative Christians should take a page of instruction from...

Discussions about eschatology and millennial views are sometimes dogged by questions about their importance and practical relevance.1 Yet early church history shows that belief in a particular millennial view, in this case premillennialism, was no small thing. In fact, it was a major weapon in the early church’s battle against the greatest enemy to Christianity of that era— Gnosticism. Donald Fairbairn argues this point in his article, “Contemporary Millennial/Tribulational Debates.”2 Fairbairn is a professor of historical theology at Erskine Theological Seminary and earned his doctorate in patristics from the University of Cambridge. I would like to summarize some of Fairbairn’s...

Are conservative Christians hypocritical and selective when it comes to the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality? With all that the Bible condemns, why the focus on gay sex and same-sex marriage? Given the heated nature of our current debates, it’s a question conservative Christians have learned to expect. “Look,” we are told, “the Bible condemns eating shellfish, wearing mixed fabrics and any number of other things. Why do you ignore those things and insist that the Bible must be obeyed when it comes to sex?”

Jesus says: "When I put in Zephaniah's mouth that I wll take away everything from the earth, I am having him prophesy what will happen the day before the eve of the last time. I then announced the same thing when I spoke about the destruction of the world, veiled behind the description of the ruin of the Temple and of Jerusalem. Later the Beloved prophesied it again in his Apocalypse (Rev.14:14-20, 19:11-21, 20:1-15). The voices follow each other. In fact, I can say that, as in a sacred building erected to testify the glory of the Lord, the voices...

Cardinal accused of wanting to end the pluralism of the academic centre The Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, a cradle of Liberation Theology, on Friday released a letter to the Vatican Secretary of state where they reject Cardinal Cipriani as confrontational as a dialogue partner in the process in which they are involved. "The only way to achieve full peace that the University and the Peruvian bishops want is if Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani ceases to be the interlocutor between the hierarchy of the Church and the college authorities", says the rector Marcial Rubio in the letter sent to Cardinal...

For some time, I have been raising the alarm that evangelical Christianity has been infiltrated by theological leftists. Among other things, this impacts our nation’s view of Israel. Recently, I was made aware of a movement of young evangelicals who are embracing what the British lecturer Paul Wilkinson calls “Christian Palestinianism.” Loosely, this means a Christian who supports the Palestinian Arabs, and dismisses Jewish claims to the land. Obviously, these “Millennial Generation” Christians (18-34) do not embrace Bible prophecy. Their worldview is different. A battle for Israel is being fought in the United States right now. Traditionally, Americans have supported...

To my surprise, one of the local Mormon churches asked me to speak at a special dinner gathering last week. They billed the night as a “fireside” chat. The theme was “I Believe in Christ”. The idea they seem to have intended to promote is that Mormons and Christians share the same faith in the same Christ. The local Mormon patriarch was slated to speak right after my talk and before my talk a married couple, a Christian man with a Mormon woman, were to share their “testimonies”. The night was designed, I believe, to assure the Mormon congregation that...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Arianne Gasser of Canton, Ohio, is proud to call herself a graduate student at a prestigious Catholic university, and she also is proud to call herself an atheist. The pride she has in her atheist status is part of what inspired her to travel from the Philadelphia area, where she is enrolled at Villanova University, to Washington in March to join thousands of other atheists, agnostics and other nonbelievers for the "Reason Rally," an event that was billed as an assembly to unify secular people nationwide. Carrying a sign that reads, "This is what an atheist looks...

It is well know that in the Western cultures of Europe and now in America, that the God ordained institution of marriage - which was ordained before the world began (Eph 5:28-33) - has been rapidly falling by the way side. This out right rejection of the institution of marriage is found mostly in liberal/progressive circles and is a progressive liberal trait. What is most alarming is that these "western" countries - which once embraced the Judeo/Christian moral absolutes of the Bible - are now secular wastelands reaping the whirlwind of their anti moral absolute rebellion. As history has always...

Click below (scroll to the bottom of this post) to listen to our special Holy Saturday podcast. Listen on iTunes or right click the link below. On Holy Saturday we meditate on one of the most obscure lines in the Apostles' Creed: "he descended into hell." What does this part of the Creed refer to? Is it biblical? Moreover, what does it mean to say Christ "descended into hell"? Did he experience the torments of wicked? Christ and the "Spirits in Prison"In 1 Peter we read that Christ continued to save souls--even after his death. For Christ also died for sins once for...

 Natural Family Planningby Sebastian R. Fama Natural Family Planning (NFP) seems to be the Catholic Church’s best-kept secret. It’s not that the Church wants it to be a secret. The message just doesn’t seem to get out. NFP is the licit alternative to contraception, or birth control as it is usually referred to. NFP is just as effective as any method of contraception and it has the advantage of causing no harm to the woman’s body with side effects and complications.Rather than tamper with a woman’s body, NFP works with it. It is important to note that NFP is not...

Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law. Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens,...