• Bullinger's context is 500 years removed from ours and must be read in a proper historical context to not superimpose our modern and personal perspectives (per his statement about imposing the most absurd sort of anachronistic categories upon the matter)


• Bullinger did not mean all individual churches of Rome; he meant only the leadership of Rome, the hierarchical structure. The people, Kevin asserts, were "largely" viewed as Christians.


• Rome's great blasphemy is therefore reduced to claiming authority and identity exclusively that she simply did not have. While she is not exclusively the true church, she is a part of the true church and still shared in the rights and privileges of the true Church of Christ.


• Kevin claims all of this is indicative of Bullinger's supposedly "fuller ecclesiology," one due to the continued presence of Word and Sacrament among the Romish churches. What Kevin means by Word and Sacrament is unclear, but appears to be synonymous with baptism, communion, and reading Scriptures.

capitulate /k«ÈpItjUleIt/ 
v.v. verb cease to resist an opponent or an unwelcome demand; surrender. Soanes, C., & Stevenson, A. (2004). Concise Oxford English dictionary (11th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Don’t you just love how he fires those shots without leaving a chance for anyone to comment on his site (not that anyone wants to interact with such a man)? What can be said about guys like this that only go as far back as Spurgeon, or at best Zwingly?

My belief is that context ought to be centered more in the concerns of the mind of the Church rather than the mind of the writer in the first place especially as we look to passages like John 6 where it is quite clear to me anyway that what is being presented is a whole lot more than just the arcane details of the miracles of Christ.

Nowhere do we get a clearer illustration of the folly of anti-sacramental, non-churchly Christianity than in John 6. Calvinists take a clearly Eucharistic passage and turn it into a treatise on predestination. It is not. I note:

1. This is a discourse about eating and drinking the body and blood of Jesus (6:32-33, 35, 41, 48, 51, 53-58), set in the context of the Passover feast (6:4). It is explaining how people find life through a believing participation in the Eucharistic meal, not how to distinguish God’s eternal decrees.

2. It is therefore the case that the distinction between groups which is the concern of this text is not elect vs. reprobate, but those within the Church who enjoy the benefit of the sacrament of the altar vs. those outside the church who do not believe and thus do not partake of Jesus’ body and blood.

3. Those whom the Father “gives” to Jesus (6:37) are not to be equated with the eternally predestined elect (though they would be included), but refers to all who enter the Church and partake of the benefits conveyed through the Lord’s Supper.

John 6:35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst. 36 "But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe.

   You know, sometimes I hear things. No, not those kinds of things. But things from the mouths, or pens, or as they appear on the blogs and web sites of others. Take Dr. James White, for example.
   A debate with him over the merits of Calvinism, a system of belief that has no business being associated with the name "Christian," let alone "Jesus Christ," appears unavoidable. That's a good thing. But until that happens, Dr. White can talk all he wants on his blog. He can post here, or there, or anywhere, if he chooses. But until he takes the stage with me, or until he gets on the radio to defend his traditions, he's just talking to himself, or only to those who already think as he does. Frankly, though he's talking, he's not really saying much of anything.
   As I told you months ago, Dr. White, and as I have offered to your friends at "The Bible Answer Man," and through others, by all means let us bring our differences out in the open, as we did with the Trinity. If you are so confident in your beliefs about the knowledge of God and the will of man, then surely you can pull some strings, somewhere, and talk to me, not just to yourself on your blog, or elsewhere only to those who think like you.
   I respect you as a person, James, and I admire your accomplishments. But you are teaching false doctrine, still, and so I cannot allow you to hide behind the shallow, in fact, hollow words of "amazing forms of argumentation," "lengths to which he [me] will go," and the like. There's nothing of substance there, and you know it. Yet you say it anyway, and so where does that leave us? The same place it always leads. So let's hurry up and get there.

The whole notion of “double jeapardy” [sic] is misguided, for (largely based on a misreading of Isaiah 53:4-12) it depicts the cross as a passive reception of punishment by God on the part of Jesus. Since Jesus was punished for our sins, we cannot be punished again. But the cross is not a place of punishment. It is a place of Jesus’ offering up to God a pure and selfless sacrifice, a sacrifice consisting of his willingness to suffer with and for us in our state of death and alienation. As the embodiment of the benevolent God, Jesus’ desire was to be with us (Matt. 1:23), and to identify with us (Isa. 53:12), wherever that might take him (Phil. 2:8). God was pleased with the death of Jesus, not because it quenched and satisfied his anger, and provided an occasion for him to rectify the demands of strict justice, but because the innocence and purity of the sacrifice of his Son was simply of more weight than the gravity of our sin. His merit outweighed our demerit, so that the whole world has now been objectively reconciled to God (i.e., God is willing to actually wipe away their sins through Jesus’ blood on the condition of faith and repentance), and now the world has to choose whether to remain outside of the household of God, or to come and enjoy the benefits of the reconciliation secured for them.

The Prophet said, "Amongst the men of Bani Israel there was a man who had murdered ninety-nine persons. Then he set out asking (whether his repentance could be accepted or not). He came upon a monk and asked him if his repentance could be accepted. The monk replied in the negative and so the man killed him. He kept on asking till a man advised to go to such and such village. (So he left for it) but death overtook him on the way. While dying, he turned his chest towards that village (where he had hoped his repentance would be accepted), and so the angels of mercy and the angels of punishment quarrelled amongst themselves regarding him. Allah ordered the village (towards which he was going) to come closer to him, and ordered the village (whence he had come), to go far away, and then He ordered the angels to measure the distances between his body and the two villages. So he was found to be one span closer to the village (he was going to). So he was forgiven."

1. Whereas there was once a true church in Rome, that church, the ancient and catholic church, knows nothing of the doctrines and practices of the upstart church in Rome and would have accursed the Romish church had it seen what it became.


2. Since Rome is an upstart church and not the true church, then for leaving the church of Rome, the Reformers cannot be considered schismatics.


3. The church will have evil and wicked men in the visible church, but the Romanists are the very worst of the enemies of God and therefore have neither the outward nor inward marks of the church.


4. A church may exist among the those at Rome, those who worship Christ and keep themselves from all popish pollution but this is akin to saying that God has preserved a church in a Turkish country.

For freely we confess, and with great joy giving thanks to God that hath delivered us we publish abroad, that we are departed from the Romish church, and that we do at this day abhor the same. But first of all we distinguish and put a diversity between the old church of Rome and the late upstart church. For there was sometime at Rome a holy and faithful church, which apostolic men and the apostles of Christ themselves did establish and preserve by the word of God: which ancient church was not only without the ceremonies there used and received at this day, but if she had but seen them, she would have accursed them.