Rector (parish priest) at S. Francis Anglican Church Dallas, ACNA, husband and father. Devout Catholic. Creator of bespoke ecclesiastical vesture. (thee/thou)
Dallas, TX
Joined June 2015
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Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
Most Protestants read John 20:23 as a metaphor. "You can announce that God forgave them."
Read the verse again. Slowly.
"If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
A declarative power. Not an announcement of something God already did. The Apostles actually forgive, and actually retain.
And notice what retention requires. You cannot "retain" a sin you never heard. Retention implies investigation, discernment, a judgment call. That is judicial language, the language of a court, not a slogan.
Look at the context too. This is Easter evening. Christ breathes on the Apostles, a deliberate echo of God breathing life into Adam. He is creating something. A new office. Thomas was absent that night, and nobody claims every random believer wandered in to receive this breath.
The early Church took it literally. For the first centuries, Christians who fell into serious sin went through a formal, public process of reconciliation before the bishop and priests. Not a private prayer. A church trial of the penitent soul, with the clergy exercising exactly the authority Christ handed over in that room.
The "it's just a proclamation" reading appears nowhere in the first millennium of Christian interpretation. It is a 16th-century solution to a 1st-century text, invented because the alternative meant a sacramental priesthood had to exist.
So the question is honest, not rhetorical: if the verse only means "tell people God forgives," why did Christ give the Apostles authority to retain sins at all?
What does a proclaim-only reading do with retention?
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
Today, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, giving thanks for the faithful men and women in church history and those who continue to inspire us today.
@FideliumLondon joined All Saints’, Margaret Street for its patronal festival to explore this feast day and the hope it offers us all.
Sermon: Invitation to beatitude youtu.be/KNfCy-abSfY?si=zOUb… #ACNA #Anglican #Catholic #AngloCatholic #Saints #AllSaints #Heaven #Beatitudes @StFrancisDallas @fwanglicans @The_ACNA @diocese_ftw
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
The claim that priestly absolution is a medieval corruption has a problem: the Didascalia Apostolorum describes the practice while the Church was still being thrown to the lions.
This 3rd-century church manual, written generations before Constantine, instructs Christians on how to deal with sinners. Its answer? Bring them to the bishop.
The Didascalia portrays the bishop as a physician of souls and a judge. Not a motivational speaker. Not a Bible study leader. A man holding actual authority to receive confession, judge repentance, and readmit the sinner to communion.
The text describes a formal process of repentance and reconciliation. Public, ecclesial, mediated. The sinner does not simply whisper an apology to God in private and move on. He is reconciled through the Church, because the Church has been given the power to bind and loose.
The modern assumption says early Christianity was purely internal, a direct line between the soul and God with no middleman. The Didascalia flatly contradicts this. Before the Bible canon was even settled, Christians were being taught that restoration from serious sin requires a minister with authority to absolve.
That is not medieval Catholicism creeping in. That is the Church of the martyrs, practicing what Christ commanded in John 20:23: whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.
If confession was invented in the Middle Ages, who wrote this, and why were they teaching it while hiding from Roman persecution?
Litany and Sung Mass for All Saints' Day 2026-11-01 youtube.com/live/d0EA4w2yr8c… #ACNA #Anglican #Catholic #AngloCatholic #Saints #AllSaints #Jesus #Gospel #Truth #Beatitudes @StFrancisDallas @fwanglicans @diocese_ftw @The_ACNA
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
Heaven is composed of all those who here below were detached from the world, gentle, suffering, just, merciful, pure, peaceful, and persecuted for the name of Jesus. "Rejoice," Our Lord told them, "for a great reward is prepared for you in Heaven."
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
Modern Christians often assume the pastor is just a well-trained Bible teacher with a platform.
But in 387 AD, John Chrysostom wrote a treatise on the priesthood that would embarrass most of us. He didn't describe clergy as communicators or CEOs. He described them as bearing a power that outranks kings.
His argument, in On the Priesthood, is built on comparisons.
An earthly king can bind your body, confiscate your property, end your life. A priest, Chrysostom argues, acts on something kings cannot touch: the soul's standing before God. The priest's sentence reaches heaven itself.
And he goes further. The priest, he says, is entrusted with a body more precious than the whole visible universe, because the altar and the gifts laid upon it are the Lord's own.
That's not a medieval exaggeration. That's a fourth-century Antiochene monk describing ordination as an ontological change, a real participation in Christ's own ministry, over a thousand years before anyone coined the phrase "medieval invention."
Notice what disappears if Chrysostom is right. The "ordained Bible teacher" model collapses. If the office carries divine authority over the soul, then the minister is not a facilitator of your private forgiveness. He is Christ's steward applying it.
So here's the question worth arguing over: is Christian ministry a delegated divine authority, or a hired function? Because Chrysostom says you cannot have it both ways.
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
Happy Reformation Day to most Protestants celebrating Luther while rejecting so much of what he actually taught. Apparently, challenging the Catholic Church is enough to overlook some pretty serious disagreements.
Luther supported civil punishment of Anabaptists. He certainly wasn’t defending everyone’s freedom to interpret Scripture and start another church.
Here’s a list of what he believed: baptismal regeneration, infant baptism that forgives original sin rather than believers-only baptism, Mary’s perpetual virginity, Mary as the Mother of God, Mary’s assumption into heaven, Christ’s true body and blood present in the Eucharist, Communion conveying forgiveness of sins, private confession and ministerial absolution, making the sign of the cross, retaining religious images in churches, the permissibility of limited prayers for the dead, and the possibility of a genuine believer falling away from salvation.
How many of those beliefs would get someone accused of being “too Catholic” in your church today?
Oh, but wait. Semper reformanda. Always reforming, I guess?
All ready for All Saints' @StFrancisDallas Comr worship with us at 8am or 10:15am this Sunday.
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
It's fun to see Protties say "bible alone!" when the bible never says that anywhere and "faith alone!" when the bible, they say 'only in the bible remember" actually says "NOT by faith alone".
In Protestantism, you have to shut off rational thought, thinking, and just reject reality to keep protesting truth
The Right Rev'd Archibald Donald Davies, Bishop of Dallas (then of Fort Worth), pictured at the altar of St Matthew's Cathedral in Dallas.
This is terrible.
In New Testament times, it was understood by the Apostles that since final salvation was difficult and arduous even for Christians, the day of judgment would be of unthinkable severity for those who do not obey the Gospel (1 Peter 4:18). That's not surprising since the teaching of their Lord was that the way to God was narrow, difficult, and consequently, the majority simply don't make it, let alone the unbeliever (Mark 16:16)
20th-century Catholicism, however, attempting to maintain the mere technical validity of the text of Pascendi Dominic Gregis (1907), was enamored with abstract "possibilities" that could, given the proper intuitive grease, find their way in between the lines.
I agree with Dr. Ralph Martin when he says that something happened in that century that moved people from thinking non-Christians might be saved to thinking it was probable, to thinking it was nearly certain. The entire theological conscience of the contemporary Catholic seminary is pre-engineered to make this final product. That's why today, if a man is properly trained in a Roman Catholic institution, he will come out thinking that while a non-Christian MIGHT finally be lost, it is practically unthinkable that such a thing would happen.
Proof? You don't even need to have contact with Catholic theologians or their educational institutions. Spend time in the average confessional. Listen to the homilies.
I rest my case.
And it's not like we've not devised the button to calm the conscience of the innovator:
"[Yawn] Nothing new, Ybarra. The Church has grown up over time. As history shows, she goes through these unexpected and surprising growing spurts that shock the eyes of everyone, i.e., hello? Nicaea 325, Chalcedon 451, Nicaea 787, etc. We are going through that phase where we've moved past tribalism, nationalism, slavery, monoculturalism, racism, war, and now even retributive justice, the fewness of the saved, and the supposed 'poison' of false religions. As Ratzinger realized, we used to think that non-Christians had no hope because we were engulfed in the assumption of their culpability, but now we have a much bigger heart and can see that it is not likely for God to see them as culpable, but rather to even applaud their partial conformity to Him in their own way. Heck, we are all partial conformists!"
And that will usually leave the room speechless, for more than one reason.
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
This is odd. The Pope is now head of the sovereign Vatican City State. Is this a dual citizenship situation? This is worth exploring.
BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes history as the first pope ever to vote in a U.S. election.
The Vatican confirms the first American-born pope, Robert Francis Prevost, has submitted a mail-in ballot in his home state of Illinois ahead of the November midterms, exercising his right to vote as a U.S. citizen.
The Chicago-born pontiff continues to maintain his American citizenship while leading the Catholic Church. | @marthamaccallum @AmericaNewsroom
Fr. Timothy Matkin retweeted
James talarico calls the Bible “propaganda” #TXsen
