Born in Poland, I followed the traditions of the Roman Catholic religion for the first 18 years of my life: christened as a baby, having religious lessons, and attending Sunday ‘mass’ with my parents, as all the other children in my village did. I was taught to believe in God’s existence, the concept of…
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Over 460 years ago, on 4 February 1555, John Rogers was tied to a post in Smithfield, London, firewood was heaped around him, and he was burned to death — because he was an evangelical Christian. In the next three and a half years, nearly 300 more martyrs died in the same way. Our…
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Roman Catholic Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has died at the age of 85. According to the BBC, he served as a priest for more than six decades, having begun in Hampshire in the 1950s. It is reported that he was a personal friend of Pope Francis. He eventually went on to lead the Roman Catholic…
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The Council of Trent (1545-63) defined Rome’s response to the challenge of the Reformation. Three great problems stand out in the teachings of Trent: the doctrines of revelation and justification, and the church’s worship. Trent’s position on each of these demonstrates why the Reformation was necessary at the time. But it is often said…
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At this 500th anniversary of the Reformation we come to one of the main pillars, if not the pillar, of that Reformation: justification by faith alone, in Christ alone. Martin Luther wrote, ‘When the article of justification has fallen, everything has fallen’. He declared, ‘This is the chief article from which all other doctrines…
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During Easter 1985, Thomas Howard - a graduate of Wheaton College and a professor of English at Gordon College, both long-standing bastions of evangelicalism, and himself the product of a staunch evangelical family, whose sister is Elisabeth Eliot, author and widow of the evangelical martyr Jim Eliot - became a Roman Catholic. His conversion…
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'Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth' (John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, p.1). 'For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of…
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