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Beginning to Dig Deeper: Answering Ten Questions From a Protestant Inquirer

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The following questions came from a sincere Evangelical inquirer into the Protestant Catholic faith. Having been exposed to the claims of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and other Christian denominations, they were hoping to clarify certain foundational questions regarding the larger Protestant tradition within which they happily identify. The questions themselves were well put and properly fundamental. Answering as a Confessional Lutheran Pastor, what follows will hopefully be helpful to others as they also may be thinking through these same issues. It does not pretend to be exhaustive. The answers are thus simple and not encumbered by excessive references, though for all that hopefully not simplistic.  1. Who has the right Canon?  The Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox cannot agree between each other as to what the right Canon of Scripture is. They each boast exclusively that their own “magisterial authorities” settle the issue “infallibly...
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T.F. Torrance and Penal Substitutionary Atonement

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T.F. Torrance and Penal Substitutionary Atonement Introduction Did the great theologian and Patristic and Reformation scholar T.F. Torrance affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement? In order to answer that question more fully, what follows is a series of quotations from T.F. Torrance’s magisterial book dedicated to the subject of the Atonement as accomplished, given, and received in Christ. There is minimal commentary, yet the following will show that T.F. Torrance most certainly affirmed the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). Appropriately, he resisted oversimplifications of PSA, artificial narrowings of it, and legalistic caricatures of it, all in an effort to positively maintain PSA according to its full, Biblical, theological, Patristic, and Reformation proportions. As such, it will be appropriate to outline very briefly the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which is quite simply to say that the justifying and reconciling atonement ( at-one-ment ) effected ...
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