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I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant in San Diego waiting for the religious equivalent of a “blind date” to begin. A few weeks earlier, some Catholic friends of mine asked me to meet with their son while he was home from college. They wanted me to speak to him because he told his parents he wasn’t going to church with them anymore because he was now an atheist. They asked me, “Can you help him see he needs to start going back to church? Can you help him get over all this atheist stuff?” Then …

There are many books on the subject of salvation, and many of them share certain characteristics: 1. They focus exclusively on the subject of eternal salvation.2. They focus in particular on the doctrine of justification.3. They often ignore, in the interests of systematic theology, the way in which the Bible uses language.4. They are often written in a polemical, hostile style.5. Due to the authors’ unfamiliarity with the way other groups of Christians express themselves, they mistakenly …

When I was on the outside looking in at the Catholic Church, I truly believed the emphasis on Mary in Catholic theology led to a loss of focus on Jesus. My aim, in speaking with Catholics, was not only to debunk Catholic theology’s many myths about Mary, but also to point them back to what really matters for salvation: Jesus Christ.Often I would say to them words that I have since heard many times from scores of well-meaning Protestant Christians: “We can agree to disagree about Mary. After all, …

“When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:1).“Wise men” is a common translation in English Bibles, but it doesn’t give us a good idea who they were.The Greek word used here is magoi—the plural of magos. These terms may be more familiar from their Latin equivalents: In St. Jerome’s Vulgate, we read that magi came from the east, and an individual member of the group would thus be a magus.Who Were the Magi?Or …

The Myth: “The Reformers were holy men who struggled heroically to free the true Christian faith from the superstitions of Rome.”Martin Luther (1480-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) are generally regarded as holy and upright men appalled at the impiety, superstition, and corruption in the Catholic Church, and dedicated to returning the Christian faith to its pristine original form. But a closer look at their lives reveals that, in truth, they were arrogant men bent on refashioning …