The law explains God’s expectations, reveals our inability to live up to the required standard of perfection, and sends us running with hair-on-fire desperation for a Savior.

John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was the face of opposition to the evangelical/Protestant teaching that was finding its way into 16th century England.

He wishes to be know as an archbishop whose most characteristic act is to read Scripture so as to be ready to share it.

I don’t remember any of my Episcopal seminary professors ever mentioned this important collection, and it was a happy day when I discovered them tucked away in a dusty corner of the seminary library.

Reflecting later on his ministry, he noted that after preaching sanctification as vigorously as he could for those years, he never brought one soul to Christ by his continual fussing.

I remember one time after hearing me preach a few times, he said to me, “Chuck, that was good, but you only have one sermon." Over these 40+ years of ministry I have come to see this as the high compliment he meant it to be.

Henry’s settlement was in many ways a political Reformation of convenience, and he clearly did not intend his heirs to embrace Protestantism. Nevertheless, his actions made a way for this outcome.

Athanasius died on May 2, 373. He is remembered as the church father who fought long and hard for Christ’s full divinity. Five times he was forced into exile, yet he remained faithful to his conviction that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.

In our church what cockatoo eggs be now a hatching, what errors of pelagianism. . . and other like damnable errors. . . by contentious men, which cannot abide to agree with the Church in the received truth.

Why schism is, at the same time, always regrettable and sometimes necessary - the only proper response to an institutional church that refuses to reform itself according the authority of Holy Scripture

Queen Elizabeth was excommunicated by Pope Pius V April 27, 1570, twelve years into her 45 year reign as Queen of England and Ireland. The pope dismissed her as a "heretic and favorer of heretics.”

Anglicans do not locate Christ’s real presence in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, but in the hearts and affections of those who receive by faith the grace offered in the sacrament.

Everyone would enjoy a beer with a person of personal piety who is that way because they have been with Jesus, and everyone would avoid the barstool next to a pietist!

The authorities are odd and little interested in music, so that I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution.

"Agnostic" was first used by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley April 21, 1869. Huxley was proud to be called Darwin's Bulldog.

"God told me..." is almost always a ploy to get what we want anyway, and it has been used to manipulate people from time immemorial.

The “three uses” of the law is now carved into stone, and so firmly that to question it is like bringing a live grenade to the cocktail party

Augustine begins with "It's a long long road" (Neil Diamond, "He Ain’t Heavy"). Sixteenth century reformers and the classical Anglican position agree, but they are clear that Jesus Christ walked it for us.

Simul justus et peccator is incredibly good news that explains how a holy God can relate to sinners like us.