Rebuild Spirit

The Roman Catholic Church grounds its claim to universal authority in a specific historical assertion: that the church in Rome was founded by the apostle Peter. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter’s successor, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful.” This statement assumes not merely that Peter was associated with Rome, but that he established t

This essay is grounded primarily in the historical work of Will Durant , especially The Story of Civilization, Volume III: Caesar and Christ . Durant was not a theologian, an apologist, or a polemicist. He wrote as a secular historian of civilizations, attentive to structure, power, psychology, and institutional continuity. Precisely for that reason, his analysis is invaluable for examining Christianity not as a creed to be defended, but as a historical movement that entered

Much of Western Christian theology assumes that humanity inherits sin or guilt from Adam. From this assumption flow doctrines such as juridical original sin, purgatory as penal satisfaction, indulgences, and the treasury of merit. This post argues that this assumption is neither patristic nor logically coherent. The early Church does not teach that Adam’s personal guilt is transmitted to his descendants. It teaches that what humanity inherits is death , corruption, and ontol

Today’s discussion centers on The Error of the Pagan Religions , a fourth-century Christian polemical work written by Firmicus Maternus , and preserved for us in the modern English translation and annotation by Clarence A. Forbes (Newman Press, 1970). Before engaging the book’s claims about Roman religion and the persistence of the mystery cults, it is necessary to establish the work’s credibility; both in terms of authorship and historical reliability. The explicit of the s