How Do We Know the Early Church?

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How Do We Know the Early Church?

By Dr. William H. Marshner

“Deep In History” Conference
The Coming Home Network International
2004

Former Lutheran scholar Dr. William Marshner explores the sources of information about the early church and used by early Christian historians. How did early Christians learn and pass on the faith? Continue reading “How Do We Know the Early Church?”

Concept, Judgment, and Dogmatic Relativism

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Concept, Judgment, and Dogmatic Relativism

W. H. Marshner

1993

It is a central claim of Christianity that certain teachings formulated in the Mediterranean world two thousand years ago are divinely revealed. It is also a central claim that this revelation has been grasped and repeated ever since as the “same Gospel” — an achievement which heresies did not prevent and from which legitimate developments did not detract.

Traditionally, these two claims have been understood to demand the following explanation: the expressions used in formulating the original teachings have been understood within the main body of the Church with enough invariance, over all the intervening centuries and in widely different civilizations, to ensure that the “same doctrine” has been handed down.[1] Continue reading “Concept, Judgment, and Dogmatic Relativism”

Hans Küng: Infallible?

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Hans Küng: Infallible?

An Inquiry

W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
Vol. VI. No. 6
June 1971

Hans Küng calls the preface to his new book “candid,” a word whose ambiguity is the key to this deeply equivocal volume. In “candid confession” it implies a full disclosure of one’s subjective state; in “candid camera” it implies unvarnished portrayal of the objectively real. Küng wants it both ways: his own growing sense of isolation since the Council is simultaneously predicated of the vast majority of the whole Church. Küng claims to know of no one who “really” believes in the birth control ban; Ignaz Döllinger said the same a century ago about infallibility.

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The Scripture Game II

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The Scripture Game II

W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
Vol. V. No. 5
May 1970

The first part of this commentary on modem biblical scholarship argued that the Catholic biblical revival is producing suspicious fruits because the philological-critical method of exegesis has been misapplied to the task of Christian exegesis. It remains to show what Christian exegesis is, why it is theologically inevitable and how it can be defended against the charge of obscurantism.

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The Scripture Game

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The Scripture Game

W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
Vol. V. No. 4
April 1970

No Christian can object to increasing the knowledge or the influence of Sacred Scripture. Yet the wide diversity of benefits that are expected to flow from the current “progress” in biblical studies suggests anything but unanimity as to how the subject ought to be approached. Continue reading “The Scripture Game”