Tradition & Error

Paul says there is one baptism. The usual answer is that he means one chief baptism among several. This study tests that reading against every place the word one stands in the Bible, and then against the sentence Paul actually wrote.

Make a careful distinction from the text and the answer comes back as a prefix — hyper, ultra, too far. Then a verse arrives to enforce it. But Paul never wrote strive not about words, and the sentence used to forbid precision commands it in the very next breath.

There is an old way to get rid of a doctrine you cannot answer: go after the man who said it. Scripture answers it plainly. God published His own messengers' failures, kept using them, and never once made a man's record the test of his message. Weigh what was said, not who carried it.

A hymn written by a convert to Rome for the Catholic martyrs of England became the anthem of Protestant loyalty to inherited belief, and it travels that easily because it names no doctrine at all. Paul had a faith of his fathers too. He was exceedingly zealous of it, and he counted the whole inheritance loss.

Paul warned that Satan's ministers appear as ministers of righteousness, not as open enemies. This study examines why the counterfeit stands inside the Christian column rather than beside it, why sincerity, results and personal godliness cannot test a teacher, and what Paul actually gives the Body to test him with.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

Opposition to once saved, always saved seldom turns on the verses it quotes. This article traces the objection to its root — a righteousness a man built himself, and the distance from other men that grace erases — then divides the passages. Israel's salvation is an inheritance received at the end; the Body's was handed over at the beginning.

You have probably heard that the word translated sorceries is where we get our word pharmacy, and that Revelation therefore condemns the drug industry. This examines the method behind that claim, why the passages themselves refuse it, and what your King James already tells you without help from a lexicon.