The Lord’s Supper. Part Two: The Early Church, 1st-3rd Century

In my first entry I looked at practices in scripture around the Lord’s Supper. In this entry we’ll be looking at what the earliest Father’s of the church believed on the subject.  In the 17th century the Primate of Ireland James Ussher publicly wrote in response to a Jesuit Polemicist on the subject of the …

Opposition to Incense in the Early Church Fathers and Anglicanism

There was a recent thread in a patristics group I contribute to on the topic of incense in the early church. As a topic it was never one I paid massive attention to but I found the ensuing discussion really fascinating. It’s not something done in my own tradition but I figured it might be …

Images in the Church. Part Three: Conclusion

Introduction In my first entry on the topic of image usage in the church, I looked at how the earliest generations of the Church engaged with imagery. In this, I saw what seemed an exclusively polemical treatment of images against the Paganism of the day. Moreso, a critique of the medium itself in devotional contexts. …

Images in the Church. Part Two: Use of images between Julian the Apostate and the Iconoclasm

Introduction In my last post I walked through a series of statements by early church fathers on the topics of imagery. Specifically regarding their polemics against Pagan idolatry but more broadly on the shortcomings of the medium itself in the words of the Fathers themselves. In this next piece, however, I am looking to examine …

Images in the Church. Part One: On the making of images

What follows is an attempt to chart the waters on what I feel is a healthy attitude to imagery in the Church. Different traditions have varying positions on the use of images, they also have different ideas on what they think others believe on this too. Any cursory glance online on this topic will highlight …

On Baptism and it’s timing. Part Four: Conclusion

Introduction Having looked at Baptism I am left with a number of impressions. On the one hand we hear everyone who is saved is baptised. On the other hand not everyone who is baptised is saved. What is more is that baptism takes a panoply of forms. It can be in the ark of Noah, …

On Baptism and it’s timing. Part Two: Witness of the Early Church

In the first part of this endeavour, I took a brief top-level view at the passages that had been raised by others, from scripture, during my discussions and reading on the topic on the timing of baptism. What I hope to subsequently address in this next, albeit not final part of my exploration is the …