I became an Anglican for a number of reasons, but chief among those reasons is this: Anglicanism allows me to be truly catholic. You probably know that the word catholic just means universal. So, for instance, when we confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed, saying that we believe in the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” we are affirming our belief that there is only one true church – it’s scope is…
Henri de Lubac lived and worked during some of the most violent and confused years in modern European history. In addition to the losses caused by the several wars that ravaged Europe, the violent events of the early twentieth century led to an acute emotional and intellectual anxiety for many citizens of the continent. The First World War, in particular, brought European confidence in unending technological and moral progress to a halt.[i] In 1922, the…
Priesthood in the Old and New Testaments A priest in the Old Testament is simply a mediator between God and the people of God. Likewise, the people of Israel, collectively, can be called “priests” since they are called by God to mediate salvation to the nations. We see this in Exodus 19:5-6, where God tells Moses to address the people saying… Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all…
I was reading a friend’s dissertation a few years ago and came across a great statement from an essay by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with which I was previously unfamiliar. Bonhoeffer remarked that American Protestant denominations were marked by the tragic tendency to be more concerned about “faithfulness to [their] own church history” than to Christian truth or the Word of God in its fullness. In Bonhoeffer’s mind, this tendency is distinctively American and quite contrary to the original spirit of Protestantism, which sought…
