Posted on 05/11/2005 10:04:08 AM PDT by NYer
Um, yes in the bible the Apostles were not handing out bibles. That is true. The bible says that it would be impossible to "detail" the life of Jesus.
The Epistle writers generally only addressed problems in their respective churches, such as division at Corinth. Thus, the more common and agreed-upon teachings would not be normally commented upon, correct?
No, you are now emptying out the scriptures right before my eyes. I must say that I knew it would come to this because it always does when I have a good long heart to hearter with an RC. I feel that you are pouring out the bible like sand at our feet as I read. It is such a sad and tragic thing for me to see you do this. This is why I can really assume with confidence that you have not been reading it 3 times per year for the 18 or so years. Oh man this just crushes me.
Why goes into detail on the How's of worship if Ephesus is getting it right? NO writer of Scripture was intending on writing an extensive theological treatise on Christianity.
More sand poured out at our feet. What will be left when I get to the last paragraph. It is so becoming so clear to me why I don't find RC's who read the bible. A studious RC, also a rare find, will be led to other writings. I think I need a tissue. I see why RC's reflex to Word of God = Jesus and not the scriptures because an RC would not start emptying out Jesus like this.
That didn't occur until later when defending against the Jews and Pagan writers. Can you see where this is going?
Boy can I.
There is absolutely no need or warrant to believe that EVERYTHING that we are to believe is written explicitly in Scripture. We realize that God revealed to us His Word - ALL of it was initially given orally. Some of it got written down. Some of it was later used to argue with future heretics. I challenge you, from "Scripture alone", to defend the fact that Jesus is God.
Here again, that is an easy thing to do. There are cults out there that make it their corporate letter head and business vision to prove that Jesus is not God, like JW's and Mormons, but you will never prove anything from the scriptures to such people. Believe me, I know. The Scripture tells us everything that we could possibly need to know about the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is not in engineering requirements form, which is why we are charged to read it so much.
Arius found within the SAME Sciptures verses that questioned your idea of the clarity that Jesus is the same ESSENCE as God. There is plenty of evidence, from Scripture alone, to take Arius' viewpoint, that Jesus was like God, but not God. Without Correct Apostolic Tradition, how are you to KNOW which is the correct meaning of the writers of Scripture? YOU CANNOT!
You are so wrong here. I have no problem proving this to those who will believe, but as the bible says, those who won't believe won't believe if someone rises from the dead and tells them. If what you implied was true, than how could anyone resist RC rhetoric? But they certainly can.
Evidence of this is seen today within the THOUSANDS of Bible alone Protestants who argue over the "clarity" of Scripture without the use of Apostolic Tradition.
I don't want to start dissing the RCC again at this time, but I will only say here, that I've never seen 2 RC's who believed or understood their own doctrine the same way so this argument is hollow,,,sir. ;-) We're still keeping this nice. But if we were in my favorite bar sharing a picture of Bud Lite, I think my verbal response to this would probably start drawing attention.
Actually I should be saying that. What a terrible accusation I made and now that I read 962 I see that it was all just typed and to me. I will be giving it my attention one paragraph at a time since you spent all that time on me.
The "other" children of the woman in Rev. are you, me, and everyone else given to her by Christ from the cross, "Behold, your mother..."
"17Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus."
A wonderful bookend to Genesis! The "woman" (Mary) is declared the mortal enemy of the serpent (dragon) in the Garden, and her "offspring" (not only Christ - but by virtue of His gift of her from the cross, you, me, the whole Church) will do battle against him. In Revelation, John writes of this continuing battle taking place until the end of time, with the Mother of the Church suffering in sorrow as the dragon persecutes the Church. Yet she is brought to a place of shelter by the Lord, who promised that "the gates of hell shall not prevail".
Nice job on 1000.
***Nice job on 1000.***
(tips hat)
Fantastic post. One of the fundamental (no pun intended) flaws in "fundamentalist" interpretation of Scripture is the glaring refusal to apply context to their studies.
My favorite is the continual citation "call no man your father" as proof that priests are blasphemous creatures. Yet, this same group conveniently ignores the direct commentary of Christ that "no one is good but God". So by their standards, every utterance that a human being is "good" should also be blasphemy, but their standard applies only to verses that they believe provide fodder against Catholicism.
The same goes for the discourse on the Eucharist. Every verse in the Bible MUST BE READ LITERALLY according to fundamentalism, "but NOT John Chapter 6! No, not that chapter. That chapter is only SYMBOLIC, and don't try to prove otherwise because every other verse is literal but not JOHN CHAPTER 6!"
The other "do not touch" issue for fundamentalists is the whole "your church is not led by the Holy Spirit" label they put on Catholicism. Yet they blindly accept the four gospels from a Church not-led-by-the-Holy Spirit in its weeding out from nearly forty other gospels that were floating around Europe and Asia Minor when the canon was affirmed. Add to that the fact that for 300 or so years, the Church was evangelized through oral tradition and the letters of Paul, which were not for public consumption, only sought to advise church leaders on their catechesis, and furthermore predated the actual Gospels written in the late first century.
The next issue is the notion that the early church willingly refused to hand out Bibles to the flock in order to keep them submissive to the Bishop of Rome. This of course assumes that a mostly illiterate population could read (and of course, these were the people who naturally gravitated to the teachings of Christ), and it also assumes that the Church had a means of mass producing Bibles, since this was, oh, about a THOUSAND years before Gutenberg.
Heresy after heresy was uncovered, beaten down, and sent away during the early church, which was apparently not led by the Holy Spirit, which by logical extension, leaves every Protestant vulnerable to the distinct possibility they are following precepts affirmed and re-affirmed by a Church that held close to its traditions and rejected alternative, "protestant" points of view.
So the fundamentalist POV, which is extremely narrow, does not welcome context to its study of scripture, which is their fatal flaw. Some things are literal, some things are figurative, as you so well pointed out. God inspired the authors of the Old and New Testaments and made use of not only their knowledge, but literary devices which their contemporaries understood and employed in kind. So Revelation, for example, reads not only as an apocalyptic writing, but also a fascinating insight into the persecution of the Church while John was exiled on Patmos. The story of Job is not only a moral tale that expresses the omniscient authority of God, but a prophetic foreshadowing of Christ Himself. The major and minor prophets prophesied not only for their time, but every "time" thereafter, including the end times, which are solely focused on by fundamentalists.
There's limitless depth to Scripture. We cannot possibly unearth all of its treasures in one lifetime. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has unearthed nothing that is not already in Scripture, but within context and understanding of God's will, there is much more to be learned in the times to come. So when people decry the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption and the Co-Redemptrix, I feel sorry that they have reduced God to the role of an ancient-Hebrew Dominick Dunne and refuse to look below the surface of the miracle that is the Bible itself.
See you at 2000?
This popped up on my Pings today and thought it was somewhat relevant to the thread here.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1404783/posts
Hope this is clickable! I always have trouble with that!
I believe you key idea is "'Scriptural evidence' is always a matter of interpretation."
So you are basically promoting Catholic Relativism (but not really, for only RCC interpretation unlocks the absolute truth - right?).
Truth, as such, is subjective and "it's [truth is] always a matter of rival interpretations". Furthermore, you state: "No text by itself proves anything self-evidently".
On this thread and on many others where we have debated, I and many others have explained the Catholic (and on these points, the Eastern Orthodox largely agree with Catholics) view of authority in detail. You read what we write then restate it unrecognizably. In this case you accuse us of subjectivism.
We believe that Christ authorized a way to maintain non-subjective interpretation of Scripture: bishops. We recognize that others do not believe that Christ did this. We recognize that others (you) read Scripture in such a way as to deny the fundamental authority of bishops. But notice that they are then replacing that authority with another authority (their denomination's, their pastor's, their individual purportedly Holy Spirit-guided authority). We are not subjective and we do not say that truth is subjective. We say that one arrives at firm, non-subjective truth by a combination of Scripture plus authoritative interpretation.
We believe in this Christ-given apostles/bishop structure on the basis of the historical record: the Church recorded her history and it includes ample historical evidence that bishops succeeded the apostles as authoritative teachers and intepreters of Christ's message entrusted to them (which exists also in the NT which these apostles wrote down). This historical record outside of the NT is fully compatible, does not contradict anything in the NT, we conclude.
Of course, rival interpretations of the historical record exist. I am trained as a professional historian. I have studied how these rival interpretations of the historical record emerged. I have come to believe one interpretation of the historical record (Catholic-Orthodox) and to reject the others (Protestant Reformers, secular Enlightenment are the two main ones). Why? Because the Catholic-Orthodox one has been around continuously all the way back. The others consist in saying, "the Catholic-Orthodox interpretation of the historical record represents a manipulation of the record to buttress the illicit power of the bishops." But the people making that accusation (Protestant Reformers, Enlightenment philosophes) had an axe to grind: they had already concluded that bishops were the problem. So they seemed to me to be reading into their interpretation of the historical record their a priori prejudices against bishops.
Okay, as a thought-experiment, let's stipulate that bishops are the problem, that they did, having custody of the Church's record (both in Scripture and the tradition of their own predecessors in office), distort it and create a falsely-claimed Christ-given authority for apostle-bishops. If that's truly what happened in history (and this is an interpretation of the historical record), then how in the world would anyone be able to arrive at the true alternative reading of the historical record? Any alternative will be subject to the various a priori assumptions of the interpreter.
So, we are stuck: either (1) the apostle-bishops were really authorized by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit to receive and take care of and pass on and write down and interpret Christ's own message in Scripture and in authoritative bishop-interpretation, in which case we have access to the true story of who Jesus was and what he did
or (2) we have no way of ever knowing for sure what he said and did because these untrustworthy, non-Christ-authorized apostles-bishops are the sole source of the written record (the NT and their own surviving writings and homilies on the NT). If the successors to the bishops are not Christ-authorized and guided to intepret the historical record (including the NT), then we, 1000, 1500, 2000 years later will read into that record whatever we wish to, reflecting our own pre-dilections, assumptions, pre-judices etc.
Now, you may well say, "but the authorized interpreter of the NT that I believe in is the Holy Spirit. That's how I know that we can know the true meaning of Scripture, and the true meaning is not Christ-authorized apostle-bishops. I know that through the Holy Spirit."
The problem is that a thousand other well-meaning "Bible Christians" and mainline Protestants--pastors, congregations, individuals, denominations--each claims the Holy Spirit guided them to a slightly or greatly different "Clear and True Interpretation" of Scripture regarding infant baptism, bishops, ministers, Communion, praise bands etc. If that's how the Holy Spirit solves the problem, then why bother with Christianity at all? It would seem that the Holy Spirit has failed abysmally in making the meaning of the NT really clear.
So, you wanted a boiled-down version of our beliefs? Here it is: either the apostle-bishop system is Christ-given and Holy Spirit guided and true or there's simply no way to know what did happen "back then," no way to know that Jesus of Nazareth died and rose from the dead. In short, either the apostle-bishop system is true and trustworthy or Christianity is a pipe-dream, infinitely malleable to whatever modern-day "Christians" wish to make of it.
You continued: I am shocked that your idea of truth is so subjective. But I guess you perceive that it is in your favor to downplay the ability of God to communicate clearly through His Word and thereby to enhance the supposed authority of your group by believing you hold the correct "interpretation" without which the Word is inaccessable.
Get over your shock and listen carefully. You say we play down your claim that God can speak clearly through Scripture and give the true interpretation to your group. You insert motives, cynical motives in our heads.
But you surely believe that you have the correct interpretation just as we believe we do. If you did not believe really, truly, that you have the true interpretation, you would not be so persistent in rejecting ours and insisting that yours is the true, Holy-Spirit-given clear meaning of Scripture.
What's so hard about this? Neither of us is subjective. We both believe, not in "subjective" truth but in objective truth. We differ over the means by which God reveals the real, objective truth, the true interpretation of Scripture. We say it's by way of the bishops (authorized by Christ, based on a set of Scripture passages and additional early Church historical records that, we say, shows him doing that). You say, "no bishops," rather, God speaks directly through the Scriptures--but to say God does not use bishops is itself an interpretation of the various passages and, in fact, while you don't have bishops, you do not get your interpretation straight from Scripture anymore than I do. You listened to Pastor X and read commentary Y as you formed your interpretation of Scripture.
Yes, to be sure, you believe that it was the Holy Spirit working through Pastor X and commentary Y that brought you to your present clear understanding of the true meaning of Scripture. But we believe that the Holy Spirit did exactly that with our apostle-bishops.
Does this leave us with a simple "he said, she said" stand-off (your premise that I'm claiming total relativism)? No. You believe the Holy Spirit has clearly guided your group (and whatever other Bible-Christians or denominations largely agree with you) into the true meaning without apostle-bisops. (A) You offer "Scripture+Holy Spirit" while (B) we offer "Holy Spirit+bishops (+Scripture written by apostles)" It's not a mere standoff because A leaves us hopelessly fractured into 1000s of "true Holy-Spirit interpretations of Scripture" which in fact end up looking suspiciously like whatever basic cultural trends were taking place at the time the 500th or 888th or 945th "true Holy Spirit interpretation" came into being: Luther, Calvin (2nd generation Protestant), Pietist, Latitudinearian, Finneyite, Pentecostal, Seeker-Friendly etc.
Whereas (B) leaves us with Orthodox and Catholics who agree on virtually everything except the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome (on original sin and the procession of the Spirit we effectively end up at the same place by different routes). You can, of course, try to portray Catholics and Orthodox as hopelessly divided, but I'm sorry, if one steps back and surveys the 1000s of Protestants disagreeing over infant baptism, the nature of Christ's present in the Eucharist (even whether it's mere Communion or something more), predestination and free will, the role of the minister/priest, the role of bishops--on all these points and hundreds more, Catholics and Orthodox agree while Protestants disagree massively. The immense degree of unity among Catholics-Orthodox--those who have stuck with the Apostle-Bishop structure and the comparatively immense disunity among all (no exceptions) Christians who have abandoned the Apostle-Bishop structure in favor of "Scripture/Holy Spirit" is simply overwhelming.
You continued: Therefore it follows that a person must accept your interpretation of the Bible BEFORE he or she can understand it.
Close but misleading. What provides the key to interpreting the Bible the way we do is that we believe Christ gave us apostles/bishops. The role of these apostles/bishops are described in the NT but we believe that they existed and functioned as interpreters of Christ's message before that message was written down in Scripture, that Christ authorized them simply to preach his message. Part of their preaching was to write it down. Another part was to interpret it as disputes arose over his message. The disputes arose very early. So yes, prior to approaching the interpretation of Scripture one must decide what one believes about how Scripture came into existence and how its authority relates to Christ's authority and to the authority of Christ's apostles (and bishops).
You claim to believe that God communicates clearly and directly via Scripture and accuse us of downplaying that cynically because it serves our purpose.
Look, the reason we believe that Scripture alone cannot communicate clearly is logic and experience: the meaning of any set of words, the US Constitution, the Charter of the United Nations, the Torah, the Quran, Shakespeare's Henry IV--can be and inevitably is disputed.
It's a simple fact that, given a long enough period of time (a few weeks or months, usually) people do not agree about any set of words, formula, document. And it's a simple fact that those who claim, like you do, that the meaning of God's word is selfevident, clear because God makes it clear, do not agree among yourselves about what that selfevident meaning is--you are divided into thousands of groups based on your principle of self-evident meaning. Are your prepared to condemn to hell all those Protestant groups who disagree with you over infant/adult baptism, the nature of Communion, the meaning of the "gifts of the Holy Spirit," whether "praise bands" are good or bad, whether formal Creeds should be used or not and a thousand other things? Or do you say, "well, at least in large measure they agree with me on sola scriptura instead of bishops so I guess those who at least reject Catholic/Orthodox bishop-interpreters and accept "clear, self-evident Bible teaching" are on the right track"?
Experience shows that the Bible simply is not clear about its meaning. If it were, all Christians would agree about what the meaning is--unless you are prepared to say that those who disagree with you have rejected the clear meaning that God makes clear to those who will listen. But that would mean that those who don't see the meaning that is so obvious to you are rejecting God and headed for hell. DOn't you see that this leaves you and however many hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Christians agree with you broadly or in detail alone on the way to heaven and billions of other people who say they are CHristians headed for hell because they refused to see the "clear" meaning of Scripture. If the meaning of Scripture is so darn clear, why do so few people see the same clear meaning that you (and some, relatively few, others) see?
You asked in conclusion: Is this (sans my editorializing) a correct summation of your position?
No it was not.
"Calm down now. First, I have read plenty. Secondly, my pastor didn't have to tell me. I'm over 50, and have been to several RC weddings and a couple of funerals. I could not count the times I saw clergy and parishoners bow to statues of 'Mary' and 'saints'."
Bowing is not worship. I suggest you read the OT more closely and see the countless times that David bows to Saul and other such things. Kings have been bowed to throughout the history of mankind. Are you suggesting that during all of this time, men were considering the king as gods?
Regards
"OK, so you didn't just type them up between posts but you already had them written somewhere"
Sorry to disappoint. I typed it up as I went along...If you'll look closely, some of the syntax is pretty rough and there are a couple verb/noun tense disagreements. But like I said, my back won't let me sit too long... I did think over what I was going to say to you for 15 minutes or so before I began. Does that help? :-)
Regards
I'll get to your points asap.
But may I say in the meantime, your are truly a prolific poster!
Do your fingers hurt?
***Finally, God's beard is not biblical.***
Hey!
God the Son had a beard!
(and probably still does.)
Yes, it was a great post. Though I agree for different reasons.
I'm sure we all agree to disagree... but the conversation is worth it.
The only biblical hair is Samson's, Mary Magdalene's, and that anonymous slob's who had them counted. Repent.
"No, you are now emptying out the scriptures right before my eyes."
I don't understand what you mean. Does the Scripture give specific Liturgical formulas for Baptism? For the Eucharist? For the Laying of Hands to Commission? What EXACTLY is the worship like for these first generation Christians? Consider the Didache. It was written about the same time as the later section of the NT. You will note that there ARE such specifics in there, such as how to Baptize in case there is not cold running water nearby to immerse one in. These are just not in the Bible, but they are necessary, aren't they? What procedure did Corinth use to excommunicate the pervert in 1 Corinth? There are MANY such questions that are just not in the Bible. I am not emptying anything. The fact of the matter is that the Bible is made up of Letters written to different communities who were having problems with Judaizers or factional problems. They were not catechetical manuals. I am sorry to tell you this, but the Church did not need the Bible to continue to preach and teach the Word, to administer the sacraments, or to continue worshipping and praying to God and Jesus.
"This is why I can really assume with confidence that you have not been reading it 3 times per year for the 18 or so years."
I can only smile at that. I know people who are agnostic and have studied and read the Bible more than I have. Reading the Bible is meaningless unless the Spirit opens the meaning to the reader. Knowledge puffs up, remember?
"A studious RC, also a rare find, will be led to other writings."
Yes. That is why it is absolutely necessary that we accept Apostolic Tradition. If we read the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, we see how THEY interpreted Scripture. How they worshipped - specifically. What they thought of the Eucharist, Mary, Bishops, and Tradition. Thus, we SHOULD look outside of the Bible to fill in the gaps. Nowhere does the Bible itself say that it is the only thing necessary to come to a personal relationship with Christ.
"Here again, that is an easy thing to do. There are cults out there that make it their corporate letter head and business vision to prove that Jesus is not God, like JW's and Mormons, but you will never prove anything from the scriptures to such people. Believe me, I know."
Very good. Exactly the point I am making. The Bible alone does not lead to the Truth revealed by God. The Bible itself frowns on private interpretation - and this is why. We don't get the whole truth without the guidance of the Church.
"I have no problem proving this to those who will believe"
Now, you are refuting what you just said above.
"I've never seen 2 RC's who believed or understood their own doctrine the same way so this argument is hollow"
If that is true, then all I can say is that you don't know very many Catholics. I would say the vast majority within this thread agree on the role of Mary and the 4 dogmas defined by the Church. The Church allows flexibility on other matters, such as her role as Mediatrix. However, ALL Catholics believe in the dogmas defined by the Church -otherwise, they are Catholic no more. They have excommunicated themselves from the communion of the Church because Paul says we are of one faith.
Regards
It's not a matter of disrespecting, it's just plain inaccurate. Catholics are free to disagree about some things but must agree about other things or they cease to be Catholics. And that is different from Protestants, because of different authority structures. If two Catholics disagree about whether the Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima, they both remain loyal Catholics. If Catholic A adamantly and persistently (after being warned) insists that we lack free will or that Christ did not authorize the apostles (and their successor bishops) to absolve from sin, then the denier has denied irreformably defined Catholic doctrine and is no longer Catholic. This is true precisely because we have an agreed-upon structure for resolving disputes over free will and predestination or over the authority of bishops and even for resolving the question whether one has to accept Church-approved private revelation--in other words, what we are free to disagree over is itself defined, not because we just love to run around having our bishops define things but because disputes always are going to be arising and, unless we want to abandon any hope of unity, a means of resolving disputes has to be in place. We believe Christ authorized the Holy-Spirit-guided apostle-bishop way to resolve disputes and preserve unity.
And it has worked to the degree that an identifiable Catholic and Orthodox agreement over free will, bishops, priests, Eucharist, Scripture/tradition, etc. has lasted 2000 years. Yes, Orthodox and Catholics disagree about some things and are in schism over the role of the bishop of Rome, but the degree of agreement over 2000 years is unparalleled in recorded history. Have we failed always to listen to the Holy-Spirit-guided bishops? THe existence of our schism shows that we have failed. Yet despite that failure, we agree on an immense array of things over which thousands of different Protestant groupings disagree.
When you assert that there's no difference in the degree of unity with regard to (A) Protestants and (B) Catholics/Orthodox (then apostle-bishop tradition) you make an assertion that is mere blustering. Secular historians, Buddhists, Muslims--all outsiders who take any decent look at the array of Christian groups can see that on the one side is a fundamentally agreeing but messy-around-the-corners block of Catholic-Orthodox apostle-bishop Christians and on the other side a massively fissiparous, variegated set of thousands of disagreeing non-Catholic/Orthodox Christians who do not agree about baptism, free will and a host of other things.
The any two RCs that you claim are always disagreeing are either disagreeing about things on which loyal Catholics rightly may disagree while maintaining Catholic unity or, if one of them truly does not adhere to a clearly defined Catholic teaching, then by definition he has removed himself from the Catholic faith.
You might say, now that's too neat and easy--you just declare to be "non-Catholic" whatever person disagrees with Catholic teaching.
But if you respond that way, you have missed the point. Catholics (and Orthodox, in a slightly different manner) can make this declaration because there is such a thing as defined Catholic (and Orthodox--they maintain their boundaries by different means but fundamentally it goes back to the authority of bishops and councils) beliefs. In the case of fundamental disagreement for us, one of us ceases to be Catholic and the other remains Catholic based on adherence/rejection of apostle-bishop-teaching. Yes, the rejector can go around claiming to represent the "true" Catholic teaching (which is what Luther and Calvin did), but unless he's a bishop, he's blowing smoke.
Factually speaking, we are not divided in the same way you are. You are just blowing smoke when you assert equivalent disunity.
Excellent post on bishops and the history of the Church.
What is interesting is that conservative Protestants will deny the Church's authority, yet they accept those same bishops' determination on what IS Scripture AND they also deny the warped history of the Da Vinci Code and other such Neo-Gnostic history. They accept the same determinations made at Nicene regarding Christ (although it is clear that Scripture alone is undecided on the Essence of Christ compared to the Father). Why, if the Church's authority is unacceptable, do they unwittingly accept the Church's authority on these matters? Are they Catholic and don't realize yet? What is interesting also is the arrogance that they have when they think they know more than the combined writings of 2000 years of spiritual thought of God's revelation, some of which was written less than 100 years after Christ's resurrection...
Thanks for your posting.
Brother in Christ
Thank you for your comment.
I, too, find some interesting disconnects in Protestant theology. One of my favorite recent ones is the total denial of admitting the full meaning that the SAME COUNCIL considered the OT AND NT Deuterocanonicals as Scripture! So why do they toss out Tobit, but keep Revelation? The disconnect in logic is astounding!
Regards
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