How Can the Saints Hear a Million Prayers?
The Catholic practice of invoking the intercession of the saints assumes that the souls in heaven can know our interior thoughts. But for some Protestants, this is a problem, because it attributes to the saints a power that the Bible says belongs to God alone. In 2...
Did Mary Break the Rules of Heaven?
If there’s one thing Catholics and Protestants can agree on, it’s that whatever we believe can’t contradict Scripture. But some Protestants think the Catholic belief in Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven contradicts John 3:13. There, Jesus says, “No one has ascended...
Why Not Just Go Straight to Jesus
When talking about the Catholic practice of asking the saints to pray for us, a question arises from both Catholics and Protestants: “Why seek the help of saints when we can go straight to Jesus?” Protestants often pose this question as an objection. For Catholics,...
Spiritual Birth, Physical Things
In a previous article, I defended rebirth by water baptism in John 3:3-5 against several challenges. But there are a couple of more I think are worth considering. I’ll address each in turn. For example, some Christians deny the “water” because it doesn’t fit with the...
What “Baptized in the Holy Ghost” Means
“Are you baptized in the Holy Ghost?” This is a question you’ll often hear if you hang around Charismatic Christians—whether Protestant or Catholic. What they usually mean is, “Have you experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit in a powerful way?” Often they think a...
The Two-Pronged Protestant Dilemma
In a previous article, I argued that sola scriptura blocks a Protestant from having infallible knowledge of several books in the Bible, including some from the New Testament, like Hebrews, Mark, and James. The reason I gave was that neither Jesus nor the apostles, the...
The First Way to Prove God Exists (Cliff Notes Edition)
St. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways are well-known paths we can take to prove that God exists. The first way of the five argues from motion. Imagine a stone that’s being moved by a stick in my hand. There’s nothing about the stone itself that explains its motion. It’s in...
A Christian Can Lose His Salvation
When it comes to the possibility of losing salvation, Catholics have their Bible passages—John 15:1-5, Galatians 5:4, Matthew 10:22. But Protestants aren’t short on comebacks. One such comeback is employed by Protestant apologist James White. Whenever the above...
God and the Death of Innocents
One reason why skeptics don’t believe in the God of the Bible, the argument goes, is that he’s a slayer of the innocent. As one example, Exodus 12:29 reads, “The Lord struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt.” So, the question becomes, how can God be all-good and...
Baptized? No. Fully Catholic? Maybe.
The Church teaches that the desire for baptism, whether explicitor implicit, saves those who die before they can receive it. Yet, someone may ask, “If that person doesn’t receive the sacrament of baptism, is he ‘fully Catholic’”? If by “fully Catholic” one means...