[Blogger]

By faith in God. He promised to preserve His Word in Scripture. By faith, I believe He has done just that.

God preserved His Canon, not in a centralized organization in Rome, but through his universal church of all believers. All of God's local bodies of believers copied and passed the letters back and forth to one another and God preserved that which he wished to be preserved. In the end, a grouping of representatives from throughout all of the Christian realm gathered together and after prayer wrote down which books were canonical. By faith, I believe that they were inspired by God when doing so.

I have never claimed that councils were always wrong or unscriptural. Many times, they were led by people who truly wanted to honor and obey the Lord. And, just as God inspired men through plenary verbal inspiration to write Scripture, He preserved it through working through human beings.

These human beings, can fail. They can err. They can distort. We've seen throughout history various church leaders who were not leaning upon the Lord for guidance but rather were there because of personal ambition or because they were the second sons of European Aristocracy.

When the various local bodies of believers which make up the universal Church are led by people who speak that which is contrary to Scripture, I reject that leadership. Again, even Paul commended the Bereans for checking what he said in comparison to Scripture - so there is a precedent set.

[Kolokotronis]

"By faith in God. He promised to preserve His Word in Scripture. By faith, I believe He has done just that."

Where did God promise to preserve the canon of the NT as we have it today (any version; you pick)?

"God preserved His Canon, not in a centralized organization in Rome, but through his universal church of all believers."

Why are you Protestants so Rome centric? There is today and has been since Pentecost, far more to The Church than the Church of Rome. As a matter of historical fact, the Church of Rome played only a part, and a relatively small one at that, in the establishment of the canon. My God, Rome is like a bogeyman to you people!

"All of God's local bodies of believers copied and passed the letters back and forth to one another and God preserved that which he wished to be preserved. In the end, a grouping of representatives from throughout all of the Christian realm gathered together and after prayer wrote down which books were canonical. By faith, I believe that they were inspired by God when doing so."

All sorts of letters were copied and handed around the Churches. There were the Letters of +Clement to the Corinthians, the letters of +Ignatius of Antioch, of +Polycarp, the Gospel of Barnabas, The Shepherd, various letters attributed to the Apostles and certain Gnostic Gospels and none of them were placed in the canon, though a number were suggested as teaching tools. Bishops and Patriarchs regularly sent teaching letters to their local churches from the very beginning. The letters of +Ignatius may actually be older than Revelations. They may be roughly contemporary with +John's Gospel. Now as a matter of fact, a group of "representatives" of the worldwide Church did not gather together and determine the canon. It was a process of councils and commentaries by Greek speaking bishops and patriarchs of The Church (well, there were a few who spoke Latin) which eventually resulted, in the late 4th century in the canon The Church uses today (with the exception of most Protestants who use one more or less developed in the 16th century)except for Revelations which wasn't universally accepted until many centuries later. The Holy Spirit didn't come down and hand them the canon and say "These only and no others!" They made their various determinations based on what they perceived to be The Faith of The Church. Different prelates perceived different scriptures to be in accord with that Faith, but they all applied The Faith of The Church to a piece of scripture when determining if it was worthy to be placed in the canon. The Faith of The Church came first, then the canon, not the other way around. The only real reason to establish the canon at all was to assure a uniformity of scripture based teaching within The Church. The canon which those Greek bishops developed was and is absolutely in accord with what The Church believed and taught prior to its establishment. You must remember that while perhaps even a majority of the Faithful in the East could read, there were few if any books as such in circulation. The Faith was spread by preaching, not black leather bond collections of scripture read at home and individually interpreted.

The rub for Protestants who reject Holy Tradition (the various Marian doctrines for example but there are all sorts of Traditions) is this, that what we Orthodox hold as Holy Tradition is the exact same Holy Tradition that The Church of the bishops who established the canon did. The Liturgy I will attend in a couple of hours dates back to the 4th or 5th century. The oldest extant Liturgy, the Liturgy of +James, which is still used in Jerusalem and some monasteries and upon which our usual Sunday Liturgy is based, dates in its basics to before 200 AD. Orthodox Liturgies are so ancient in form that rabbis often remark how like Jewish Temple ceremonies they are.

There is a maxim in The Church, Lex orandi, lex credendi; that law of prayer is the law of belief. In other words, if you want to see what we believe, look at how we pray and what we say when we pray. The Liturgies of The Church, the various Western Liturgies (and there were and in fact are a number of them) and especially and oldest, the Eastern Christian Liturgies demonstrate, to a great extent, what those bishops of the 4th century believed. To be fair, you'd really have to read, or even better, experience, an entire Liturgical year of liturgies and devotions to get a full understanding, but simply reading the Liturgies will go a long way towards showing you what those bishops and priests and lay people of the first 4 centuries of The Church believed. Try reading the Divine Liturgies of +James, +Basil the Great, +John Chrysostom, the Sarum Liturgy, the Ambrosian Liturgy and the pre Trent Roman Liturgy. They are all available online. If the whole Roman thing bothers you, leave out the last two (though you really should read them). Once you've done that, you'll have an idea of where those bishops were coming from. And then remember that they believed in 7 sacraments, the Real Presence, the Assumption of Mary after her death, the Apostolic Succession, all sorts of things which Protestantism, in an effort to "not be Roman" threw out and argued that scripture didn't support those beliefs, despite the fact that those beliefs were among those upon which our scripture was measured.

"These human beings, can fail. They can err. They can distort. We've seen throughout history various church leaders who were not leaning upon the Lord for guidance but rather were there because of personal ambition or because they were the second sons of European Aristocracy.

When the various local bodies of believers which make up the universal Church are led by people who speak that which is contrary to Scripture, I reject that leadership. Again, even Paul commended the Bereans for checking what he said in comparison to Scripture - so there is a precedent set."

See, you're being "not Roman" again. Orthodoxy fully recognizes that hierarchs, even The Fathers, can and do err. Some of the most dangerous heretics of the early Church were Eastern Patriarchs. As +John Chrysostomos tells us, the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops! The Church is not simply the hierarchy, though in the West that notion, for better or worse reasons, has arisen. The guarantee that The Church is not heretical is the fact that The Church is the bishops, the clergy and the laity working together in the original "checks and balances" system. Whole councils of the early Church preached heresy, but The Church corrected these things and returned, very quickly actually, to orthodoxy. God promised that hell itself couldn't prevail against The Church and it hasn't. One need only look to the Orthodox Church and hundreds of years under Mohammedan oppression and terror to see that.