Dan Chapa

That Camping could know when Christ will return or that James White could know that if Camping seeks to rescue his reputation, he will end up in hell? James White:  "I fear if you seek to rescue your reputation, you will end your life under the wrath of God. Your unwillingness to listen to counsel has already caused great damage to the cause of Christ. You have one final chance for redemption, sir. Do not remain stiff-necked. Repent and turn from your ways ."  ( link )

I recently reviewed what the Church Fathers had to say on the atonement and was pleasantly surprised by what I learned. They often said things that support my understanding of the atonement - penal substitution. Penal substitution is the idea that sin we broke God's law, His justice demanded that we be punished, and Christ satisfied God's justice by a substitutionary penalty. Sometimes this idea is fairly explicit in the Fathers. In particular, I found Eusebius' statement that in OT sacrifices, animals were slain in the place of men, prefiguring what Christ would do, as a very powerful affirmation of penal substitution. Clearly, the OT sacrifices were offered to God, not Satan, so if you view the sacrifices as penal substitutions, you are basically there. The other person that stood out to me was Theodore Abucara, who plainly taught penal substitution. While he was pre-reformation, he is probably too late to be considered a church father. Beyond Eusebius and Abucara, the ...

In one of the additions to the book of Daniel, Susanna makes a statement that I don't think would sit well with Open Theism.  Then Susanna cried out with a loud voice, and said: O eternal God, who knowest hidden things, who knowest all things before they come to pass, ( Daniel 13:42 ) It seems safe to say the OT Jews were not Open Theists.

Is it her people, her leadership, her beliefs?  The term catholic usually means universal, so one would think it's her 1 billion plus people spread throughout the world.  However, I recently pointed out that an overwhelming majority of Catholics use birth control.  ( link )  Does this mean the Catholic Church is OK with birth control?  Matthew Bellisario responded by pointing me to an earlier post he had written where he claimed all Christians up till the 1930's rejected birth control.  All Christians up until the 1930s interpreted this text as referring to Onan's punishment of death [Genesis 38 7:9] by his act of “coitus interruptus.” ( link ) I responded by quoting Jovinianus' alternative explanation in the 4th century ( link ). Matthew then made an interesting move; backing away from his claim of 'all Christians' to 'every Christian group'.  every Christian group before the 1930 interpreted this passage the way I am interp...

Jimmy Akin’s book the Father’s Know Best provides hundreds of quotations from the Church Fathers on various topics allegedly showing the link between the early church and modern Roman Catholicism. Of greatest interest to me were the 143 quotations from the Fathers in support of the Papacy. Reading the book gave me an opportunity to learn more about the Fathers. Below is a matrix of the results of my review. However, given my review I will risk providing some overall conclusions. I didn’t find anything in the Fathers that explicitly taught Papal infallibly or got into ex cathedra vs. non-ex cathedra statements by Popes. So right off the bat I would say the Fathers were not Roman Catholic. However, that doesn’t mean they were Southern Baptists either. Many times they were somewhere in-between. As such, I categorized each quotation from the Fathers Know Best on the Papacy in degrees of agreement. My categories were: 1. No objection 2. No biggie 3. Don’t like the wording, but OK ...

http://catholicchampion.blogspot.com/2011/05/luther-calvin-hitler-stalin-and-mao.html To give credit to Matthew, he is just following Trent the way the Church tells him he should.  He's being consistent - while many Catholics downplay Trent in an attempt to be more ecumenical.

It appears most Catholics ingnor Rome's extra-biblical requirements on birth control.  ( link )

The formating wasn't great so here's a link to a google docs format: http://www.danchapa.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-of-fathers-know-best-on-pope_10.html Jimmy Akin’s book the Father’s Know Best provides hundreds of quotations from the Church Fathers on various topics allegedly showing the link between the early church and modern Roman Catholicism. Of greatest interest to me were the 143 quotations from the Fathers in support of the Papacy. Reading the book gave me an opportunity to learn more about the Fathers. Below is a matrix of the results of my review. However, given my review I will risk providing some overall conclusions. I didn’t find anything in the Fathers that explicitly taught Papal infallibly or got into ex cathedra vs. non-ex cathedra statements by Popes. So right off the bat I would say the Fathers were not Roman Catholic. However, that doesn’t mean they were Southern Baptists either. Many times they were somewhere in-between. As such, I categorized eac...