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What Did the Early Christians Believe About Baptism?
Everett Ferguson, a Protestant elder, biblical scholar, and Church historian, has written what’s perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Ferguson spends hundreds of pages carefully combing through the evidence to expose the first five hundred years’ worth of Christians thought about baptism.His findings are neatly summarized on page 854: Although in developing the doctrine of baptism different authors ha
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Aug 1st 2022
The Early Church on Baptismal Regeneration
St. Justin Martyr’s First Apology dates to around 160. In the text we find Justin offering an explanation and a defense to the pagan emperor. That includes a description of what the Christians of his day thought about baptism:I will also relate the manner in which we dedicated ourselves to God when we had been made new through Christ; lest, if we omit this, we seem to be unfair in the explanation we are making. As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertak
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Nov 16th 2021
Advent Apologetics: How Can Words and Material Objects Give God’s Grace?
God
is eternal: he is outside of time, he has no beginning and no end. As described
in the very beginning of the Bible, he created the universe and everything in
it by his word, by willing it all to be. But creation does not just exist as a
neutral construct. Because it is conceived, created, and kept in existence by
God, it is good in itself; the very existence of God’s creation glorifies him.
This is seen in the cry of the Seraphim heard by the prophet Isaiah: “Holy,
holy, holy, the Lor
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Dec 8th 2020
Why Do We Have Sacraments?
CHALLENGE: If what is ultimately important is our faith in God, there is no reason for the Church to have sacraments.DEFENSE: Interior dispositions like faith are not the only thing that is important. We are also physical beings. The Church has sacraments because they correspond to human nature and thus Christ instituted them.Every religion has certain rites it regards as sacred. Such rites are a human universal, found in every religion, in every culture, which means they are rooted in human nat
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Feb 25th 2020
Is The Trinity For Real? One Man's Journey Through The Oneness Movement
In 1983, at thirteen years of age, I walked into a United Pentecostal church and had the experience of “speaking in tongues.” I was then taken, along with my mom and sister, to a baptismal tank and baptized “in the name of Jesus.” All of this took place at a “revival” service we attended at the invitation of a lady my mother knew from work.My family attended a Southern Baptist church in those days. Although we were not associated with a church in my earliest years, I heard the story of God’s lov
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Nov 9th 2018