Started off with some of the very interesting comments made on the Catholic Answers Forums, and then moved to the specifics on the Staples debate, including reading the full context of both of the "Protestant" citations Staples offered. Looked at the broader issues of purgatory, and then moved on to some comments made by Dr. Brown on the issue of Calvinism. Went about nine minutes long, but got to everything I wanted to get to. Here's the program.

Don't forget, there will not be a DL on Thursday, as I will be flying to Georgia at that time.

Don't hold your breath for the invitation for me to be on Catholic Answers Live to discuss, oh, "Does John 6 Teach the Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Eucharist," (I'd do it in a heartbeat), but today we had Tim Staples on the program for 90 minutes to debate 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 and the doctrine of purgatory. You are invited to take your Bible and listen carefully to our presentations and interaction, and ask yourself a simple question: who handled the text consistently, and who gave evidence of engaging in eisegesis? We took a number of calls in the last 20 minutes as well, with (mainly) good questions. I encourage Catholic Answers to make the debate mp3 available to their audience, I truly, truly do. Tim got enough "ra-ra" shots in at the end (Mr. White teaches silly myths, the constant teaching of the church for 2000 years, etc.) to keep their regular donors happy, but I am not concerned about them. I debate for those who will honestly consider the arguments carefully, not emotionally. Here's the program.

And I would like to reiterate my willingness to not only debate a topic such as the one suggested above (and truly, wouldn't the Catholic Answers audience enjoy such an exchange?), but any number of others. I would also invite Tim Staples to do what Michael Brown and I will do in the future: a full, formal, video taped debate. We have been attempting to get Mr. Staples to do that for many years now, but it seems that Catholic Answers has adopted a "no debating folks who know us that well" policy. Perhaps CA's supporters might bring some pressure to bear upon them to start doing real apologetics again? Let's hope so.

TurretinFan joined me yesterday for an hour-long examination of Tim Staples' attempt to undermine Reformed objections to purgatory, specifically, his lengthy attack on Calvin's doctrine of God's sovereignty and providence found in his 5-CD series, published by Catholic Answers, on purgatory. Though we had much more material we could have covered, we managed to get to the key errors in Staples' understanding. Here's the program.

Today on the Dividing Line I spent the first half of the program responding to Bryan Cross and Frank Beckwith on the issue of sola scriptura. The fundamental attack upon the sufficiency of Scripture and hence its truly divine character and purpose in Roman Catholicism remains central to any discussion of the issues that separate us. Then I went to the "mailbag" and responded to a whole host of e-mails I have received. I may need to do this more often as it is simply impossible for me to type up responses to all the e-mails that make it past Rich's system to mine. Here's the program.