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The Nature of Faith: Trust in Relationships In general, faith can be understood as the acceptance of something as true based on the trustworthiness of the one revealing it. Any kind of deep friendship requires a trust between friends. Otherwise, the relationship will remain superficial, without any deep intimacy and communication of what is most important to both. In true friendship, each person speaks from the heart, revealing what is of deep significance. To accept as true what a frien …

Luther and the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura The doctrine that Scripture is the Christian’s only infallible rule of faith was popularized and promoted by Martin Luther, who, the story goes, affixed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg’s Castle Church in 1517. His Theses put forth a series of propositions for debate, focusing prominently on the doctrine of indulgences—see the Catechism of the Catholic Church(CCC), paragraph 1471—which he sought to challenge. Since indulgen …

The Author in his own words:C.S. Lewis’s Trilemma: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously poses a trilemma, sometimes called the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument, which works like this: Jesus presents himself as the Messiah, as the Son of God, and even as God. Given this, the three ways we can make sense of him are to conclude that he was delusional (believing he was God when he wasn’t), deceptive (knowing he wasn’t God but duping his followers into believing he w …

The Argument for the Great Apostasy If the early Church was the Catholic Church, why can’t we say that Christians just lost their way early on? That’s the argument many Mormon and Protestant theologians make. In Mormon theology, this idea is expressed in terms of a Great Apostasy that followed the death of the apostles: Following the death of Jesus Christ, wicked people persecuted and killed many Church members. Other Church members drifted from the principles taught by Jesus Christ …

The Leadership Roles in the Old Covenant In establishing his covenant with the Israelites, God also established three different leadership roles: priests, prophets, and kings. The role of the Israelite priests was to offer sacrifices as God described to Moses and his brother Aaron; Aaron and his descendants were to be the priests. The prophets were God’s spokesmen; he commissioned them to proclaim his laws and to warn the Israelites of the consequences when they violated these laws Beginn …