Protestants and Sola Scriptura

Scripture, our Evangelical friends tell us, is the inerrant Word of God. Quite right, the Catholic replies; but how do you know this to be true?

It's not an easy question for Protestants, because, having jettisoned Tradition and the Church, they have no objective authority for the claims they make for Scripture. There is no list of canonical books anywhere in the Bible, nor does any book (with the exception of St. John's Apocalypse) claim to be inspired. So, how does a "Bible Christian" know the Bible is the Word of God?

If he wants to avoid a train of thought that will lead him into the Catholic Church, he has just one way of responding: With circular arguments pointing to himself (or Luther or the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries or some other party not mentioned in the Bible) as an infallible authority telling him that it is so. Such arguments would have perplexed a first or second century Christian, most of whom never saw a Bible.

Christ founded a teaching Church. So far as we know, he himself never wrote a word (except on sand). Nor did he commission the Apostles to write anything. In due course, some Apostles (and non-Apostles) composed the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament. Most of these documents are ad hoc; they are addressed to specific problems that arose in the early Church, and none claim to present the whole of Christian revelation. It's doubtful that St. Paul even suspected that his short letter to Philemon begging pardon for a renegade slave would some day be read as Holy Scripture.

Who, then, decided that it was Scripture? The Catholic Church. And it took several centuries to do so. It was not until the Council of Carthage (397) and a subsequent decree by Pope Innocent I that Christendom had a fixed New Testament canon. Prior to that date, scores of spurious gospels and "apostolic" writings were floating around the Mediterranean basin: the Gospel of Thomas, the "Shepherd" of Hermas, St. Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans, and so forth. Moreover, some texts later judged to be inspired, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, were controverted. It was the Magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit, which separated the wheat from the chaff.

But, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church was corrupt and idolatrous by the fourth century and so had lost whatever authority it originally had. On what basis, then, do they accept the canon of the New Testament? Luther and Calvin were both fuzzy on the subject. Luther dropped seven books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha in the Protestant Bible; his pretext for doing so was that orthodox Jews had done it at the synod of Jamnia around 100 A. D.; but that synod was explicitly anti-Christian, and so its decisions about Scripture make an odd benchmark for Christians.

Luther's real motive was to get rid of Second Maccabees, which teaches the doctrine of Purgatory. He also wanted to drop the Letter of James, which he called "an epistle of straw," because it flatly contradicts the idea of salvation by "faith alone" apart from good works. He was restrained by more cautious Reformers. Instead, he mistranslated numerous New Testament passages, most notoriously Romans 3:28, to buttress his polemical position.

The Protestant teaching that the Bible is the sole spiritual authority--sola scriptura --is nowhere to be found in the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy that Scripture is "useful" (which is an understatemtn), but neither he nor anyone else in the early Church taught sola scriptura. And, in fact, nobody believed it until the Reformation. Newman called the idea that God would let fifteen hundred years pass before revealing that the bible was the sole teaching authority for Christians an "intolerable paradox."

Newman also wrote: "It is antecedently unreasonable to Bsuppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself...." And, indeed, once they had set aside the teaching authority of the Church, the Reformers began to argue about key Scriptural passages. Luther and Zwingli, for example, disagreed vehemently about what Christ meant by the words, "This is my Body."

St. Augustine, usually Luther's guide and mentor, ought to have the last word about sola scriptura: "But for the authority of the Church, I would not believe the Gospel."

Thank you for your interesting and, if I may say so, discerning thoughts.

What jumped out at me was the seeming equivalence between "repeated" and "perpetuated".

I am quite ready to be shown that I did not understand you in this. But I do not think the terms are equivalent. And, to be sure, I'm not sure that either applies to what I am trying to convey.

Let's hack through the underbrush together, shall we?

In my alleged mind, "repeated" means that there is more than one instance of a thing. The cat walked on my computer yesterday, and the son of a gun repeated that act today.

Perpetuate, in simple terms, has a kind of "Drawn out" sense. It's one thing, but it goes on and on. A "perpetual motion machine" would never stop. A perpetual calendar is a device designed so that it can tell the time (or the date) as long as there is time to tell. (And let us not pass the word "tell" without paying homage by remembering that a bank "teller" counts out money and gives an account, which involves sorting and collecting transactions into different groups and giving a "tally", and these Anglo-Saxon word-meaning clusters exactly -- or very nearly -- follow the cluster of which Logos is a member. -- and the family of "count" and "account" is in there as well.)

Now, we immediately deny the concept of repetition. It's "once for all", and no one would have it any different.

Perpetual is closer to what we mean, but it's not it, not exactly.

IN one sense, the Son has always and will always be reconciling the world to Himself and to God. He is the Word spoken when God SAID, "Let there be light." And at the end of time He hands everything to the Father.

In a more temporally confined sense, from the Annunciation to at least the Ascension, if not to the Pentecost, His whole life on earth and its immediate sequelae are redemptive. That he submitted to inhabit the womb of His mother, that He was passively squeezed through the birth canal, He through whom that egress and all things were made, that He ever perspired, that He had to labor for the breath he quickly and freely gave up, that he suffered being palpated by Thomas and ate a bit of fish and led them out to a mountain - subjecting Himself to the constraints of our time and space ... all these are redemptive.

But finally we come down to the Triduum sacrum and to the especially mysterious three hours during which He hung on the Cross. And these we all readily understand as the apex, the climax of His redemptive work.

This is forever true. On a particular day, from around noon to around three o'clock, He through whom the worlds were made obeyed the properties of matter and the law of gravity, all made through Him, and let them kill Him. It will never happen again. It does not need to happen ever again.

Are we together so far?

Now this is what we say. That event is fixed in history.

We do not, I think envision it as stretched out, and we have already emphatically repudiated the very idea of repetition.

But as you claim to be able (and I agree) to see that even as being applied in the conviction, repentance, and forgiveness of sin in a particular period or periods of an individual sinner's life ... THAT cross THERE and THEN "coming true" for this sinner here and now.... are we still together?

Then let me continue with the elipses ... so we claim even more. THAT thing THERE and THEN is "Accessed" on our altars (we think). The there and then thing does not so much come up to our present as it stays where it is and we go back to it.

Digression on Memory

many of us have had he experience in which a smell calls up or takes us back to a time when we were joyful or melancholic. And because of the smell, we see the time and we feel the feelings. It is as tough our now had become then.

Most parents know the heart-rending satisfaction of having a child spread his wings and leave the nest. The day beofre my kid left home we went to Northern Virginia, from which the airplane would take her away from us to California.

And we drove briefly through the seminary where I had worked and longed so much to be a clergyman in the Episcopal Church. This was in the Fall of 2002 and I left he Episcopal Church and what I had thought was my heart's desire 8 years earlier.

After we let our child go from us through airport security, after we said a Rosary in the airport chapel, as we drove home, suddenly I didn't know where I was or WHEN I was. I was my childs' "primary care giver" and becuase she had been very sick and we had been told she would die a horrible and protracted death, this was one of the most amazing jobs I ever had. And now it was over and she must increase and I must decrease.

And I had worked for the day when she would no longer need me. And now it was here. And I had seen (as I think) through the phoniness of the Episcopal Church and (rightly or wrongly) had given up my whole life for Jesus and obedience to Him.

And it was all too much.

Short moral to a tediously long and self-indulgent narrative: memory (anamnesis) is more powerful than we usually think it to be, and memory of loss is more powerful still. It makes the past present. It warps time, maybe not in terms of physical science, but in terms of our selves.

Corollary: To refer, as we "Real presence types often do, as some "theories of the Eucharist as "mere memorial" is sophomoric and blind. Watch a war widow at some memorial of war dead, and I DARE you to use the word "mere".

So I am saying that whatever we may happen to feel like at this or that celebration of the Mass, we are with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who is Lord of Time and not it's subject. We are REALLY participating, in most important sense of the word "Really", in the past. We are in an event in which it no longer matters whether we are re-presenting (making present) the sacrifice of Calvary or Re-pasting ourselves.

It was one event, in one sense it was over and done with in about three hours. But one aspect of the miracle of the Mass, is that we are back then, or "back then" is now. I'm not sure it matters which is more precise.

Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy," I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

God is at once here and now, and especially with the humble and contrite, And in the High and lofty place where time and place, there and then -- here and now, are "plastic", malleable, stretchable, foldable. We think, "that was then this is now," and God says, "Not so fast." he continues,"I will take the offering at the nine o'clock Mass, I will take it beyond time and place it on my altar. I will take your here and now and include it, fold it into the there and then of that hill of shame and death 1,975 years ago. YOU see time as a given, so that it's 'once' or 'for a long time' or 'over and over again.' I can make your 'Then' now or your 'now' then.

I hope what I have written is and can somehow not persuade you of our position but convey a little more of what that position is.

“For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church ALONE, which is the universal help towards salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, that we believe that Our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the new Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those whould be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the people of God. Vatican Council II, p. 456.

It looks to many of us as though the CHURCH is the means to salvation, not Jesus Christ. It also seems that redemption is accomplished in the Eucharist. You also do not seem to believe that scripture is the sole authority for all belief and practices for those of us in Christ.

“It is therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, sacred Scripture and the Magesterium of the church are so connected and associated that ONE OF THEM CANNOT STAND WITHOUT THE OTHERS. Working together, each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.” Vatican Council II, pp. 755-756. Emphasis ours.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, #16, “the ways of reaching beatitude, through right conduct, with the help of God’s law and grace, through conduct that fulfills the twofold commandment of charity, specified in God’s ten commandments.

You find salvation in Jesus. Not in good works, although when you come to know Christ and come to faith in him, you are commanded to do good works. You WILL do good works when you are born again because the Holy Spirit within will draw you to those works.

I know how differently Catholics and Protestants view salvation, the eucharist, works, etc. I know there is no easy way for me to try to explain to you how important it is for you to delve into God’s word to see what He has to say about it. I just encourage you to do so with an open mind. Love and God bless. M

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