“I would rather say that the NT, as well as the OT, were given to the church by the Holy Spirit, not a “creation” of the church.”
I don’t doubt for a moment that The Church finalized the canon under the inspiration of the HS, but I do not believe for one moment that the bishops who in council over the centuries arrived a consensus of what was “in” and what was “out” were some sort of spiritual automotons and certainly the records of the proceedings of the councils in which these decisions were made indicate a good deal of “horse trading” going on and more importantly a measuring of the authenticity of the teachings of various contending writings for inclusion in the canon against “what the Church always and everywhere believed.” Those beliefs are found in their nearest form today in Orthodoxy.
I do not mean to imply that a person could not contend that the NT may not in point of spiritual fact mean in places something entirely different from what those old Greek bishops thought it meant (the Real Presence in the Eucharist for example)but it does seem to me that if one professes to be a Christian and rejects the teachings of Rome and especially of Orthodoxy, one must be prepared to say that the Greek bishops and The Church at the time the canon was determined, were simply wrong and that it is indeed either a “divine coincidence” that men wallowing in error got the canon right or that they were used by the HS to keep Christianity on life support until the Reformers arrived in West/Central Europe more than 1000 years later to finally get it right...or both.
I, of course, don’t believe that for a moment.
***I don’t doubt for a moment that The Church finalized the canon under the inspiration of the HS. ***
Good, we agree on that. My concern is that when you say “created” it means a man made cannon. In other words, a story, uninspired, like the stories I write. Fiction, in other words. If what is in the book is not directed, inspired, created, protected by God, it is a work of fiction created by man. Do you see my point?
I will grant that the church has compiled, collated, collected, (insert any other “C” words here )the books of the Bible under the direction of the Holy Spirit who works in man. Can we agree on that?