Posted on 05/03/2008 4:38:34 PM PDT by NYer
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."
Fascinating . . .
So, to observe something in one’s own extended family and to logically extrapolate that to a broader group is automatically bigotry . . .
Except, of course,
When Petronski is doing it in reverse about Prottys?
LOL.
LOL
GTTM.
Amazing that you don't know that.
Take the original post and substitute the word black for catholic and white for protestant. Perhaps then it will be more obvious to you.
When it's negative stereotyping, yes it is.
If a black kid stole your bike, and you went on here to declaim all blacks as thieves, you'd be deleted.
Examine yourself. It's ugly.
Mary was part of the salvation process. How can you deny that?
= =
So was Judas.
So was Herod
So was the Roman soldier with the spear.
So was the bloke making the crown of thorns . . . and the bloke mushing it into His scalp.
Quite a group mary belonged to.
LOL.
Thanks for your affirmation.
Glad someone saw the wisdom of that assertion! LOL.
Is your latest post an example of how Protestants do consider Mary blessed?
Ugly.
Wellllllll, when so much of the RC magicsterical
dogma
is hair-brained in it’s toothpic foundation;
hair-brained in it’s RELIGIOUS political power-mongering concoction;
and
hair-brained in it’s promulgation and elaborations . . .
It’s not that difficult to understand how and why Protties might see the whole ball of wax one irratioinal big hairball!
Disagree if you want, but it is clear to me that there are exceptions. To find personal sin in the day old infant is ridiculous.
What there is in the one day old infant ... is a bent to sin, particularly through selfishness.
Given enough time, that child will sin.
Staggeringly evil.
If the infant dies before that selfishness is manifested, then all have not sinned.
Just like when you claim we believe Mary is a goddess—when we do not—grotesquely misrepresents our beliefs.
= = =
I don’t think so.
It merely describes your practices which logically flow from your grotesque rubber dogmas.
by your prayers, will deliver our souls from death.509
= = =
Mostly, I find that outrageous, blasphemy, idolatrous.
It does not. You bear false witness.
Dave, its hard not to go off on that tangent. That statue of Mary was HUGE, dead center of the altar and Christ was nowhere. Finally I found him in a tiny alcove off to the side, not even ON the altar. And He was about a fifth of the size of Mary. Try as you may to insist you don’t worship Mary, but I am hard pressed to believe that because of what I saw in that church. Mary had a place in that church in a preeminent position and Christ was secondary to her. You have no idea how offensive that was to see that.
Then you make of us liars.
No Petronski you do a fine job of that one all on your own. Might want to take it up with St. Mary's in Evansville. THEY are the ones who placed Mary in a higher position than Christ Himself.
I say I do not worship Mary, you say I do.
You bear false witness against me.
You bear false witness against me.
You bear false witness against yourself. That church says that you do by placing Mary in an exalted position over Christ.
Absolutely false. And I can see no difference between that and calling me a liar, which you've been warned not to do.
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