Posts

The Ecumenical Early Church: A Reply to Pastor Wedgeworth

Steven Wedgeworth operates the Wedgewords blog and is the Founder of The Calvinist International website. Last week he wrote a thought-provoking article for the Calvinist International website titled “The Myth of the Ecumenical Early Church.” This summer I plan to interact with Wedgeworth’s article in my columns at The Colson Center. However, before doing that I thought it would be helpful to…

We’re All Children Now – A Response to Bledsoe (and Leithart) on Orthodoxy

Peter Leithart (a minister in the PCA, author of multiple books on theology, literature, etc.) has recently re-blogged some thoughts from a counterpart in the “Federal Vision” movement, Rich Bledsoe. These thoughts were directed towards both Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church. For those unaware (likely the vast majority of you), the “Federal Vision” is a theological movement within present-day Reformed Presbyterianism,…

Ecclesiological Darwinism: Reformed Catholicity’s Denial of the Foundation of the Reformation

It has always been one of the central claims of the Protestant Reformation that what was being reformed was a distortion of Christian life. The foundational narrative of the Reformation has always been precisely one of return, which is why the watchwords ad fontes (“to the sources”) rang with such power. With an embrace of sola scriptura, it was believed the Protestant…

St. Cyprian’s Seamless Garment: An Answer to Peter Leithart on Church Unity

I‘m very grateful for the dialogue that has emerged in recent weeks with regards to the catholicity, unity and uniqueness of the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, particularly in an engagement with the camp calling itself “Reformed Catholic” (a minority group within the general Reformed tradition), represented most prominently by Dr. Peter Leithart. One of the assertions that this group has…

“The Limits of the Church” by Fr. Georges Florovsky

The following piece by Protopresbyter Georges V. Florovsky was originally published in 1933 in Church Quarterly Review. Where Florovsky does not translate foreign phrases, we have supplied a translation in brackets for non-specialists. It is very difficult to give an exact and firm definition of a ‘sect’ or ‘schism’ (I distinguish the theological definition from the simple canonical description), since a sect…