Dear Joel, Once we get past our agreement that perseverance in the faith should be considered a good thing, the doctrine of perseverance creates a large number of questions. Some of the disagreements that arise out of this are extremely subtle, so it is important to define our terms very carefully at the outset. According …
Love the One You”re With
Dear Joel, I have a little time free, so on to my next installment. This one will be less doctrinal than the others, but there are obviously doctrinal underpinnings. I want to address obedience and the affections. Another way to speak of this is in terms of covenant loyalty. I was recently in a conversation …
A Protestant Vision for Unity
Dear Joel, What I would like to do in this letter is sketch a Protestant vision for the unity of the Church. It is important to emphasize from the start that I am not addressed how unified the Church ought to be, but rather how unified the Church will be. The vexed question of church …
Authority and Clarity
Dear Joel, Thanks for your prompt reply. Let me suggest a format for our letters, if you don’t mind. I would like to respond to your letter in this one. After I do so, the ball is still in my court to move on to the next issue. If you respond to this response, then …
Private Judgment
Dear Joel, Thank you for bearing with my delay as I have been doing two things. First, I have been assembling my thoughts on this complicated issue, and secondly, I have been looking for an opportunity to lay them out in systematic fashion. In the letters that follow, I am not assuming that every issue …
Benedict XVIII
I have opened a new category for my blog here. Under Roman or Catholic? I hope to post my thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church (in the form of letters to a friend thinking about returning to Rome). While some of these letters are not fictional, some of them will simply be in that form …