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 …

Particular Judgement, the Early Church and the Harrowing of Hell

I recently sat in on a discussion about the afterlife wherein everyone present had a chance to reflect on their own views. I gave a potted answer of my own position there but what follows is an attempt to hash out my own position on this topic in more detail given its something that on …

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 …

Abuse, Ecclesiology, and the Eucharist

When news of the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church was popular news I became really interested in how the laity responded to what was unfolding. A reoccurring theme was that many laity were sick of the practices of many of the clergy but had nowhere to go because of their beliefs around apostolic …

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 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 …

Is the blood of the martyrs really the seed of the church?

The phrase attributed to Tertullian is one thrown about a fair bit during times we hear about the suffering of Christians around the world. In some ways its true, the church has always grown it seems and theres always been resistance to the church worked out in violence. Very truly I tell you, unless a …