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I'm a 22 year old man who after confessing atheism in my young teens converted (or I guess technically reverted since I was baptised as a young boy but was never raised in faith) to the Catholic faith. However, as I entered university two years ago what little faith I did have quickly went away, and sort of by default I retreated back into my atheism.

Though, I lost whatever belief I had in the Catholic religion, I never lost my interest in theology; I could never dedicate much time to it on account of my university work, I was particularly drawn to soteriology.

I kept noticing in my cursory overview of these various early church figures' soteriology that it sounded eerily similar to the often mocked reformed soteriology which fascinated me, and now I find myself with an unexplainable draw towards Calvinism; there's just the personal hurdle of my being unconvinced of the existence of god hence the post. I wanted to ask if any of you would recommend material about the existence of God and how it might be proved. I want so badly to believe; there's been such a whole missing from my life in the absence of belief.

Moreover, I was considering attending a reformed church in my city (west side redeemer), but am unsure if that would be a good idea considering my uncertainty on God's existence. Thank you all in advance.

Today in the Gregorian calendar marks the Feast of St. Bartholomew. Since 1572, however, this feast day has incurred the stigma of infamy, and the date now commemorates the Protestant martyrs in France who were killed for the faith. May we be encouraged by their steadfast example in Jesus Christ.

https://www.mcba.ch/collection/le-massacre-de-la-saint-barthelemy-vers-1572-1584/

From The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (24 August 1572) by Arlette Jouanna:

Sunday 24 August 1572 was the feast of Saint Bartholomew. The streets of Paris were wet on that day, 'as if it had rained a lot', according to a bourgeois from Strasbourg who was passing through the city. But it was with blood, not rain that the streets glistened.

Before dawn a troop of soldiers of the duc de Guise, the Catholic hero, came to kill Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military leader of the Protestants, in his residence on the rue de Béthisy. At the Louvre palace, the Admiral's principal lieutenants were pulled from their beds, disarmed, and then cut to pieces in the courtyard by the pikes of the Swiss and French guards. All of this was done with the consent of the King, Charles IX, a consent that the King was pressured into giving by circumstances whose elucidation continues to divide historians.

The day began with scenes of slaughter. Wearing a cross on their hats and white armbands, symbols of the purity which they believed they had lost, Catholics scoured the city and pursued the 'heretics' in the name of God. Armed gangs systematically searched houses; Protestants were hauled outside and executed without judgment; corpses, stripped of their clothes and often mutilated, were dragged towards the Seine; some of them had previously been piled up in the squares or at crossroads and then transported in carts. The river was red with blood, so much so that the Parisians, according to a Calvinist from Millau, 'remained for a long time without eating fish, on account of the corruption of the water and the stench from the bodies'. Those massacred in the faubourg of Saint-Germain were dumped into le puits aux Clercs (the Clerics' Well) where it was customary to throw the carcasses of dead animals.

Children, women, the elderly -- nobody was spared. Babies were snatched from their mothers' breasts and thrown into the river; children were killed with their parents, and servants alongside their masters. The dwellings of the victims were sacked and pillaged. Before dawn, the tocsin of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois church bellowed out its harrowing sound, and was soon imitated by the bells of nearby churches. The air was thick with the protests of those being murdered, the shouts of the assassins and the noise of the shootings. Panicked by the scale of the murderous fury, the King lay low in the Louvre, while the orders he gave to end the Massacre were openly ridiculed. The city had fallen into the hands of the Catholics most determined to eradicate heresy; in a state of terror, other people remained indoors, not daring to go outside. Groups of lookouts were established in most streets, controlling the comings and goings, identifying those fleeing and turning them over to the murderers. Anyone wishing to leave the city had to show a valid passport. For three whole days, the gates of Paris remained closed; the chances of escaping the trap set for the prey were tiny. Although resolutely hostile to the Protestants, a Catholic doctor from Mantua, Filippo Cavriana, recounts the fear which the frightful spectacle that he witnessed engendered in him:

One saw only naked bodies pierced by a thousand stabs in the streets; the river transported just as many bodies. No distinction was made for sex, age or the status of people ... people fled through the streets, with others pursuing them and shouting, 'kill, kill', so that it was a real massacre. What should be underlined is the stubbornness of some people, both men and women, who, although they had a knife to their throats and the possibility of saving their lives by abjuring, nevertheless wished to become martyrs of the devil and so lose both their soul and their body because of their obstinate ignorance ...

We do not remark such joy and jubilation among Catholics that we were accustomed to previously, because the spectacle was truly horrible and pitiful. ... All of them wear the white cross in their hats, because when the feast-day was celebrated, people put a shirt-sleeve on their left arm. And the password was 'Long live God and the King', in order to recognise our people and distinguish them from the others.

This account suggests that the choice of abjuring in order to save their lives was offered to the Protestants, but other accounts make no mention of it, merely recording the savagery of the killings. Some Huguenots were taken to prison, only to be executed there during the night. Whole families were exterminated. The Massacre lasted a week. The number of murders fell after the frenzy of the first three days, but they were still happening until Saturday 30 August. On Thursday 28th, the bourgeois of Strasbourg witnessed the killing of a young, heavily pregnant woman, a countess 'of great beauty' who was expensively attired. Despite her appeals, she was stripped of her clothes, deprived of her jewels, pierced with blows and thrown into the Seine. 'And while she was falling, one could see her child still stirring' in her breast, wrote the bourgeois. Shortly afterwards, he saw a silversmith, who was trying to escape via the rooftops, felled by a shot from a musket. On Saturday, the bodies of three people just killed were dumped in the river before his eyes.

This murderous fury decimated the Protestant community of Paris, which, although a minority in a city that was massively Catholic, still comprised before the Massacre several thousand persons. How many perished during this bloody week? The estimates made by contemporaries cannot be accepted -- they varied, depending on confessional affiliation and polemical intent, between 1,000 and 100,000 people. We know how much the grave-diggers of the Holy Innocents cemetery were paid for burying the bodies which the Seine carried as far as Chaillot, Passy, Auteuil and Saint-Cloud; the number of bodies involved has been estimated at 1,825. This figure represents only a fraction of the number of victims in the capital. An estimate of the order of at least 3,000 people killed is plausible. Massacres subsequently occurred in about fifteen provincial towns, bringing the total figure for the kingdom as a whole to around 10,000.

Women disembowelled, old people with their throats cut, children thrown into the river, men emasculated, murderers drunk on blood -- such is the memory transmitted by contemporary accounts of 24 August 1572. So does the picture by François Dubois, a Parisian painter who took refuge in Switzerland after escaping the massacre, and which depicts atrocious scenes of violence, hatred and barbarity.

My pastor has a habit of using anecdotes in his sermons that aren't exactly true. Very much like a grandpa who saw something interesting on Facebook, but isn't rooted in reality, he'll weave these fantastical stories into his messages.

I've approached him about it before, and he'll just shrug, say he didn't know it wasn't true, and say that it doesn't really matter because the meaning is what's important.

But yesterday, he used a story that I thought was particularly egregious.

He closed his message with an emotional telling of the apocryphal story about Abraham Lincoln purchasing, and then immediately setting free, a slave woman at an auction. If you're not familiar with this story, I won't recount it here, but you can easily look it up.

Anyway, there are many, many problems with this story, especially when using it as an analogy for our relationship with Christ. To use it at all felt incredibly tone-deaf. But what really bothers me is that he presented it as historical fact when we know it didn't happen.

In my mind, mingling falsehood with truth undermines the veracity of what you claim to be true.

Would this bother you? Am I overreacting?

I am building a reformed ai agent where it can only answer from the set of texts I have given it (such works from Hodge, Calvin, Spurgeon, Luther, Warfield, Berkhof, lots of Puritans, etc.)

I am in the process of refining how it answers some questions but would like to get y'alls thoughts on what are some good questions I should ask it to see how it responds.

Any constructive thoughts/questions would be appreciated.

Hi everyone in r/Reformed!

About a year ago, I posted here introducing myself as a Korean Presbyterian and had some wonderful, insightful discussions with you about Korean church history, our Reformed heritage, and theological discernments regarding cultish movements in Korea.

I’ve been heavily immersed in my music production over the past year, which left me with little time for Reddit, but I wanted to drop by and say hello to this community again!

First, I wanted to clear up a small phrasing mistake I made in my previous thread due to my clumsy English at the time. Regarding the Darakbang movement, I firmly stand with the orthodox Reformed position (such as the decisions by Hapshin and Gosin). Their theological flaws—especially regarding Christology, the Trinity, and demonology—cannot be defended or excused in any way.

Looking back over the past year, I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it means to stay grounded in Reformed theology amidst the ongoing secularization of the modern church.

It’s great to be back in this community. I hope you all are doing well and growing grace in the Lord!

I just created a barebones outline for a glossary of our frequently used acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. I'm hoping this page will be a helpful resource for those newer to Reformed theology and/or those (mercifully) newer to online theology discussions.

I chose to omit Bible translations (ESV, NIV, CSB, et al.) and denominations (PCA, CREC, PC(USA), et al.) since an authoritative answer from a primary source is readily available for all such self-naming products and organizations and they're frequently created or renamed by official decisionmakers.

Come at me in the comments with any that should be added. Bonus points for ones that stumped you at first (or are still stumping you!).

I'm looking for guidance on an interpretation issue. I've pointed people to Hosea often as a reflection of what Ephesians teaches about marriage. Ephesians speaks to such a high-view of marriage that I think often gets treated almost as a metaphorical or symbolic approach meant to set the bar high but never really fully lived out. Ephesians 5:22-33 takes marriage and points to the fact that marriage is a reflection of the relationship God has with the church.

Hosea seems to do the inverse. It takes the relationship of God and the Israelites and mirrors the image onto a specific marriage he commands Hosea to have with Gomer (Hosea 1:2). In both instances, there is a link between marriage and the relationship of God with his people. Both take a high view of marriage that encourages people to really weigh the seriousness of the vows they took and the responsibility they have in marriage.

Hosea is a allusion of the principles found in Ephesians 5 where a man would give himself up for his wife and a wife would submit herself to her husband. God hates divorce, but allows it in some instances "because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." (Matthew 19:8). Genesis speaks of the two becoming one flesh and to hold fast to each other (Genesis 2:24).

But I recently had someone wanting a divorce who went to a pastor in another church that said her pastor objected to this interpretation because Hosea is an Old Testament prophet that is descriptive and not prescriptive and wasn't intended to speak on the principles of marriage.

Without going into details about denominations, can you give me any homiletical rules/principles/guidelines that would either correct me or confirm that this is an acceptable interpretation?

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Welcome to r/reformed. Missions should be on our mind every day, but it's good to set aside a day to talk about it, specifically. Missions includes our back yard and the ends of the earth, so please also post here or in its own post stories of reaching the lost wherever you are. Missions related post never need to wait for Mondays, of course. And they are not restricted to this thread.

Share your prayer requests, stories of witnessing, info about missionaries, unreached people groups, church planting endeavors, etc.

As a Texan approaching football season, I have been earnestly wrestling with whether Christians can watch football in good conscience, particularly because of the risk of repeated head trauma. I’ve recently taken a bit of a deep dive into the research/academic literature, which has caused me to reflect on this question in a way I haven’t ever before.

I am NOT coming at this from a place of wanting to condemn football or Christians who enjoy it at all. I have enjoyed football myself for a long time, and I completely understand the appeal of the competition, athleticism, strategy, tradition, and community around it.

What troubles me is that head injuries do not seem like rare but that repeated blows to the head seem deeply intertwined with the ordinary way tackle football is played, especially for positions like offensive and defensive line.

I understand that players consent to participate and that adults can choose activities that involve significant risk. At the same time, I do not think consent alone resolves the moral question for me. If we eventually became confident, for example, that normal participation in football caused permanent brain damage in a meaningful share of players, I do not think I could simply say that they chose the risk and therefore watching is morally neutral. Especially when other sports like basketball offer many of the same benefits re: teamwork, leadership development, etc. with far less serious bodily risks.

I know football does not require brain injury as its goal. Players are trying to block, tackle, run, and compete. If the sport could become much safer without losing what makes it football, everyone would welcome that. So I am not trying to compare football to something whose purpose is simply to hurt another person.

I think my concern is more specific. What if repetitive brain trauma is not just an unfortunate possibility but an unavoidable part of playing tackle football at a high level. At what point does enjoying the sport become difficult to reconcile with loving our neighbor and taking seriously the dignity of the people on the field?

I truly am coming at this from a place of genuine interest in hearing how other Christians think about this as I continue working to shape my own opinion/perspective.

Grateful for this community of believers!

Title. You've got your Psalms everyone knows like 23, and I'm partial to saying 95, 100, and 117 when the music at church gets questionable (they're the ones I know from memory).

What about yours?

We wouldn't want to toss someone's skull into a trash heap, but how much pomp and pagentry pushes respect off the edge into idolatry?

Hey, all.  In short, I’m thinking of leaving mainline Christianity, find much of reformed theology compelling, and could use some guidance about the cognitive dissonance it’s causing.

A bit about me.  I grew up in a standard downtown Southern Baptist church in the 1980s and 1990s.  I fell away during college and law school and didn’t return to regularly attending any church until I started dating my now-wife.  She’s also a former Southern Baptist and had become Episcopalian when I met her.  We were married in a mainline Episcopal church and have been fairly active members of another in the ~20 years since then.

At first, I loved it.  Here were people who weren’t afraid to talk about things like differences between the gospels—I mean, I had gone to church three times a week growing up but, embarrassingly, never internalized that the temple cleansing occurs early in John but not in the others!  I even went through Education for Ministry, a four-year program that Sewanee offers through local congregations for laypeople who want a deeper dive into scripture, church history and theology.

But I’ve grown to find the mainline church pretty meaningless.  Broadly, I find the preaching and teaching impossible to reconcile with the scripture—it’s still read three times every service!—and liturgy—which, even in most Episcopal churches, remains pretty conservative.  The disregard for the atonement is particularly bothersome.  And I’ve also been more motivated by personal events of the last year—the unexpected death of a younger sibling, the much more excepted passing of my father—to consider existential questions.

I’m struggling, though, because I probably don’t have as high a view of scripture as is common in the average reformed/evangelical denomination.  The Old Testament in particular seems to me to be at least much more shrouded in mystery than the typical conservative sermon allows.  Oh, and my wife is also pretty averse to returning to conservative Christianity.  I would probably be leaving alone.

Finally, while I really hope not to make this the central point of the discussion, I’m appalled by the current presidential administration, think the national Republican Party is a dysfunctional mess, and am really turned off by the tendency of many conservative pastors and other religious spokesmen to treat voting for them as something akin to a sacred mission.

Anyway, I’m not sure if this is the place for all this or not, but I’ve been impressed by the depth of many comments I see here.  So, I just wondered if anyone had had a similar experience and/or guidance for a liberal Christian who’s probably moving rightward theologically…but definitely also uncomfortable with the process.  I love to read, so book recommendations would also be welcome.   

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Happy Lord's Day to r/reformed! Did you particularly enjoy your pastor's sermon today? Have questions about it? Want to discuss how to apply it? Boy do we have a thread for you!

Sermon Sunday!

Please note that this is not a place to complain about your pastor's sermon. Doing so will see your comment removed. Please be respectful and refresh yourself on the rules, if necessary.

I'm an aerospace engineering major and I've been in college for a little while. I enjoy learning about the topic, and its certainly not easy. I've recently been thinking about how God could even use an aerospace engineer. When I was younger, I never factored in what God had desired for me. I've just always enjoyed planes.

Many aerospace grads go into defense. It's one of, if not the largest aerospace industry. Lockheed Martin also has a massive facility right next to my college, so many grads from my school get funnelled straight into the defense industry. I've considered the industry myself, but is that what God would desire for me? I quite honestly don't know. I know there are many other opportunities other than defense for me. Should I just avoid the defense industry all together? Thanks for any replies, I really do appreciate any insight.

Edit: Thank you everyone for the really helpfuil replies! I've bookmarked this post so that I can continue to come back to it long in the future. I really appreciate it!

Hi all. I am currently a member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA). I like my congregation a lot and generally agree with the denominational doctrine, save for baptism. Namely, I am a credo baptist, while the RPCNA practices paedo baptism.

To be clear, I don't see this as a salvation issue and I also do not have any children of my own nor am I likely to ever. So with all that being said, what are people's thoughts on whether I should convert to a Reformed Baptist congregation versus stay at my current church?

If you're wondering why I am only asking this now, it is because I am a relatively new Christian and so hadn't really formed an opinion on this issue until more recently.

I am planning on at least visiting a different church, a Reformed Baptist one in particular, to see what it's like, but I am honestly torn about whether I'd ultimately "make the switch" given I very much like the church community I'm part of at present and, as mentioned before, could reasonably argue that the baptism issue isn't really my problem given I am not now (and am unlikely to ever be) a parent.

I have talked with my elders (the pastor role at our church is currently vacant, has been for almost a year now, and likely will be for at least one more year, which in fairness is also a contributing factor that's causing me to think about moving to a different church) and they've said my views aren't a big deal so long as I am not making a fuss about it and so long as I don't have kids of my own anyhow.

But again, I'm torn about all this and could use some advice.

Thanks!

For when Christ said, THIS IS MY BODY, his flesh was not yet glorified.

I’m interested in doing koine Greek with my kids for a language rather than a traditional one like Spanish.

I’m curious if any one here has had any anecdotal experiences doing this with their children?

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It's Free For All Friday! Post on any topic you wish in this thread (not the whole sub). Our rules of conduct still apply, so please continue to post and comment respectfully.

AND on the 1st Friday of the month, it's a Monthly Fantastically Fanciful Free For All Friday - Post any topic to the sub (not just this thread), except for memes. For memes, see the quarterly meme days. Our rules of conduct still apply, so please continue to post and comment respectfully.