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Pope Leo X Condemns Luther’s Teachings In Exsurge Domine, the bull in which Pope Leo X formally condemns Martin Luther’s heretical teachings, the pope refers to Luther as “the wild boar from the forest” who seeks to destroy the vineyard, “an image of the triumphant Church” entrusted to Peter. The comparison of Luther to a wild boar is appropriate for two reasons: (1) wild boars are aggressive, short-tempered, and easily provoked, and they will not hesitate to attack h …

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 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 …

Despite the ruins of the Sexual Revolution being all around us, many Protestants are doubling down—not only continuing to support contraception, but starting to embrace other related practices that have historically been considered grave sins. And as usual, theirsola scripturaapproach is allowing them to re-interpret Scripture to find justification. For example, the debate over homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” in Protestantism is taking an almost identical trajectory to t …

  If the Council of Trent didn’t add the deuterocanon to the Bible, as its deliberations show, why do Protestant bibles exclude these books? Before 1599, nearly all Protestant bibles included the deuterocanonical books; between the years 1526 to 1631, Protestant bibles with the deuterocanon were the rule and not the exception. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the tide began to turn toward smaller bibles for Protestants. By 1831, the books of the deuterocano …