Posted on 11/12/2005 10:15:17 AM PST by NYer
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It does more than just tell us the pages on which the constituent books begin. It tells us that the Bible is a collection of books, and that implies a collector. The identity of the collector is what chiefly distinguishes the Protestant from the Catholic.
Douglas Wilson knows this. Writing in Credenda Agenda, a periodical espousing the Reformed faith, he notes that “the problem with contemporary Protestants is that they have no doctrine of the table of contents. With the approach that is popular in conservative Evangelical circles, one simply comes to the Bible by means of an epistemological lurch. The Bible ‘just is,’ and any questions about how it got here are dismissed as a nuisance. But time passes, the questions remain unanswered, the silence becomes awkward, and conversions of thoughtful Evangelicals to Rome proceed apace.”
Most Protestants are at a loss when asked how they know that the 66 books in their Bibles belong in it. (They are at an even greater loss to explain why the seven additional books appearing in Catholic Bibles are missing from theirs.) For them the Bible “just is.” They take it as a given. It never occurs to most of them that they ought to justify its existence. All Christians agree that the books that make up the Bible are inspired, meaning that God somehow guided the sacred authors to write all of, and only, what he wished. They wrote, most of them, without any awareness that they were being moved by God. As they wrote, God used their natural talents and their existing ways of speech. Each book of the Bible is an image not only of the divine Inspirer but of the all-too-human author. So how do we know whether Book A is inspired while Book B is not? A few unsophisticated Protestants are satisfied with pointing to the table of contents, as though that modern addition somehow validates the inspiration of the 66 books, but many Protestants simply shrug and admit that they don’t know why they know the Bible consists of inspired books and only inspired books. Some Protestants claim that they do have a way of knowing, a kind of internal affirmation that is obtained as they read the text.
Wilson cites the Westminster Confession — the 1647 Calvinist statement of faith — which says that the Holy Spirit provides “full persuasion and assurance” regarding Scripture to those who are converted. The converted,” says Wilson, “are in turn enabled to see the other abundant evidences, which include the testimony of the Church.” But the “testimony of the Church” cannot be definitive or binding since the Church may err, according to Protestant lights. (Protestants do not believe the Church is infallible when it teaches.) What really counts is the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. Without it, the Protestant is at a loss — but, even with it, he is at a loss. When young Mormon missionaries come to your door, they ask you to accept a copy of the Book of Mormon. You hesitate, but they say that all they want is for you to read the text and ask God to give you a sign that the text is inspired. They call this sign the “burning in the bosom.” If you feel uplifted, moved, prodded toward the good or true — if you feel “inspired,” in the colloquial rather than theological sense of that word — as you read the Book of Mormon, then that is supposed to be proof that Joseph Smith’s text is from God.
A moment’s thought will show that the “burning in the bosom” proves too much. It proves not only that the Book of Mormon is inspired but that your favorite secular poetry is inspired. You can get a similar feeling anytime you read an especially good novel (or, for some people, even a potboiler) or a thrilling history or an intriguing biography. Are all these books inspired? Of course not, and that shows that the “burning in the bosom” may be a good propaganda device but is a poor indicator of divine authorship.
Back to the Protestant. The “full persuasion and assurance” of the Westminster Confession is not readily distinguishable from Mormonism’s “burning in the bosom.” You read a book of the Bible and are “inspired” by it — and that proves its inspiration. The sequence is easy enough to experience in reading the Gospels, but I suspect no one ever has felt the same thing when reading the two books of Chronicles. They read like dry military statistics because that is what they largely are.
Neither the simplistic table-of-contents approach nor the more sophisticated Westminster Confession approach will do. The Christian needs more than either if he is to know for certain that the books of the Bible come ultimately from God. He needs an authoritative collector to affirm their inspiration. That collector must be something other than an internal feeling. It must be an authoritative — and, yes, infallible Church.
Where is there any bashing? This article simply points to the source of the Bible ... period. It is a statement of fact. Who gave us the Bible? How is that bashing anyone? Please excuse the ignorance.
Why private post? Is there something you do not wish to share with others in the forum?
Absurd. Aside from a "burning in the heart" or other such irrational reason, why would one accept the alleged "authority" of any church?
The Scriptures can be analyzed rationally and logically.
You get 10 protestants from 10 different denomiations together and ask them to interpret 1 passage from scripture for you and you are likely to get 10 different answers. Hence we get a new denomination every 2 days in the US on average.
Ya, someone is "assuring" these people of their interpretation, but it ain't the Holy Spirit, who is God and neither wishes to deceive nor can He be deceived.
The fact is, human beings cannot stand authority - we rebel against it constantly. We just can't stop believing the first lie of the serpent - God is a tyrant whose rules are preventing us from attaining true happiness. This is the lie that keeps on giving
Oh, Padre, you can do so much better than that! :( Po, Po, PO,(shaking his old gray head)!
Bless you! You have earned an A+ on your report.
"They arrived at it based on the spiritual nature of it's content, it's proximity to an Apostolic figure, and it's universal acceptance."
Very good, PM. Now, who were "they"? :)
Can anyone honestly say that they came to faith in a complete vacuum with only a Bible in their hands? Didn’t you learn the faith from your parents, teachers, pastors, other Christians, etc. first, and only later read the Bible under the "patronage," so to speak, of those people? And, once again, if I am a Calvinist, will I not form my beliefs around the tenets of Calvinism, making John Calvin my magisterium? If you are now patting yourself on the back for avoiding "institutional Christianity" and going with the "pure wheat" of scripture, then you prove your likeness to Calvin, Luther, Zwingly, etc., all the more. Like them, you are setting off to be your own pope, building your own one-man "Christian institution."
Someone somewhere has to make decisions about public revelation that are definitive. Otherwise, we can never claim to know anything. We call those decisions infallible. We can use another word - certainty, assurance - but a rose by any other name smells the same. Protestants have this as well: Calvinists interpret Romans 9 to teach strict Calvinism. If I question that it does, I will be met with correction. If that isn’t an authoritative magisterium, what is it?
The Book of Mormon says nothing about a "burning in the bosom." That idea is found in the Bible (Luke 24:32) and in the Doctrine and Covenants (9:8).
The Book of Mormon does promise that God will answer a sincere, faithful prayer:
And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost. (Moroni 10:4)
This verse says that God will manifest the truth by the power of the Holy Ghost; but it does not say in what form that manifestation will come. The "burning" that some speak of is not experienced by all. God may reveal truth in other ways.
I certainly don't argue that and I admit that I don't even know what the "official" Protestant position is on this. My argument would be that if we can all agree that the Bible is a gift from God to us for our benefit in knowing Him, and if we agree that the Word is divinely inspired, then why is it such a stretch that God also had a direct hand in the organization of the final text? Why would God go to all that trouble just to have us meditate on error?
What makes you think they'd disagree?
Regards
Certainly.
Why can not the same criterion hold true for believers today as it did for those of the 1st, 2nd & 3rd centuries?
In practice, it doesn't work. Look in the phone book under "Christian churches". Each and every one of them claim the guidance of the Spirit, don't they? Yet, the Spirit is NOT a spirit of disunity. Thus, we can only conclude that these groups are just WRONG! They are NOT hearing the Spirit, nor are they guided by Him, at least in all areas of belief. Fortunately, the Church has been given a means to determine what the Spirit is saying - the Magesterium of the Church - the authoritative teachers who define what the Church already believes in their liturgy, prayer, and practice.
The Spirit comes to us as the "sense of the faithful". But as individuals, we do not "bind and loosen". The Spirit has been given to the entire Church, not just to individuals who come to the exact same conclusion on all beliefs independently of each other. Experience proves this is not the case.
Regards
How do you KNOW? Paul himself warns his congregations at several different times to beware of false writings attributed to him. How do you know that what we have is Paul's writings?
The reason, of course, is that we trust the Church who has handed it down to us. Otherwise, how do you go about disproving such nutty claims that the Da Vinci Code is more correct? In the end, we call the Scriptures the Word of God because we believe that the Church has preserved just that - God's Word.
Regards
bookS plural.
Regards
"Very good, PM. Now, who were "they"? :)"
The early Church?
(waiting for the zinger...)
"PS: What else is "universal acceptance" but an appeal to the authority of the Church? I'm surprised you don't see this"
... but not an appeal to the heirarchy - i.e. the "authoritative, infallable Church". Rather an appeal to universal acceptance among all Christians.
Which came first? The Church or the Bible?
Answer: the Church
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