I was boxed into a corner, with the only exit being a door to a confessional.
At this point, I thought, if I reject the Catholic Church, there is good reason for me to believe I am rejecting the Church that Christ himself established.
The map area in light green, the Iberian area, is the Catalonia of antiquity while the dark-green area is the homeland of the Basques. If we look at a map of Europe of the sixth century BCE (Figure 2), we can see how Spain fits into the overall picture of Europe in the early first millennium BCE.
That’s not a risk I was willing to take…It occurred to me that the burden was on me, and not on the Catholic Church, to show why I should remain in the schism with the Church in which my parents baptized me, even as I could think of no incorrigible reason to remain in the schism.1 And secondly, and more importantly, he believes the Protestant Evangelical faith is deficient biblically with respect to its overall teaching on the gospel, justification and salvation.
It is the subject of justification and salvation that Beckwith devotes most of his attention to in his book.
, because like him, I was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, attending parochial schools through my primary grades and a preparatory school run by a Benedictine monastery throughout my high school years. Beckwith, in my teens I turned away from the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity altogether but was converted in my early twenties and began attending a Protestant Evangelical church.
And for the past thirty seven years I have been a committed Evangelical Protestant. Beckwith’s book because he had been President of the Evangelical Theological Society at the time of his decision to revert to the Church of Rome and I was intrigued to learn the reasons that had formed his decision.
Prehistoric Spain was settled by the Iberians, Tartessians, Basques, and Celts (Figure 1).
While the Basques remained in the northern region centered around the Pyrenees, a distinct ethnic group eventually formed called the Celtiberians, tribes of mixed Iberian and Celtic stock who inhabited an area in the central part of the peninsula before the start of the first millennium BCE.
Information alone however, does not automatically result in transformation. When you have finished this book, I would also appreciate you contacting me at my e-mail [email protected] to let me know what impact this book has had on your life.
Many read self-help books, visit mental health websites, read the Bible, and retain only head knowledge. I am writing this self-help workbook for three major purposes.
A commercial genetic database reports the following genetic ancestries of Spanish residents they tested: 40% Celtic; 30% Iberian; 15% Germanic derived; 7% Viking (Scandinavian); 8% Arabic/Berber.
When considering these results, also keep in mind that correlation is not proof of causation, but these results are nonetheless illustrative of the intimate genetic relationship among Spanish Jews and Christians—and Muslims. There are hints from the Bible that the lands of the western Mediterranean were well known to the Israelites.
All of us, at sometime during our life, will experience anger, resentment, anxiety, depressed mood, feeling lost without purpose or direction, trapped in dysfunctional behavioral patterns, damage to our self-esteem, marital conflicts , family discord, and/or relational problems.