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."
And Yah'shua still has the keys in Revelation 1:18.The verb in Matthew 16:19 is future tense.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua
Funny that Christ appointed a bunch of them (they were called "Apostles"). And those Apostles appointed bishops, who ordained priests and deacons. This "is" all in Scripture. You "do" believe Scripture, don't you????
And their successors are still "around and doing" today.
Of course it was. Peter didn't come into his authority until after Pentecost.
"And Yah'shua still has the keys in Revelation 1:18."
Cheez---you think the King doesn't have more than one set??
The keys in Rev 1:18 are the keys of hell and death.
Matthew 16:18 describes what ?
Mat 16:19 And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.
Now, now, we ALL know that Christ gave the Keys to a rock who WAS NOT Peter, what the rock did with them is anyone’s guess and since the Bible is silent they were probably lost. Someone with a metal detector may find an old key ring with an Aramaic inscription that says, “Property of Heaven, if found drop in any mailbox.”
I thought he tossed them in that big bin where the Highway Department keeps their gravel.
Matthew 16:18 not 19
It really doesn’t matter, because Benny Hinn decided to slum it in a Gulfstream IV and spent the extra money upgrading Heaven to keycards.
There are no keys mentioned in Matthew 16:18
When Yah'shua was speaking it, there were no verse numbers only full thoughts.
But now there are numbers and you gave me the number of a verse that does not mention keys.
We tend to think having authority means bearing a great responsibility, being VERY accountable, voluntarily imperiling yourself.
episkopos=bishop
presbyteros=elder
diakoneo=deacon
poimen=pastor/shepherd
How do you figure them all to be interchangeable?
Good point. We don’t say “the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops” for nothing.
I know that’s how I think of it, not some fresh tyranny, but rather the burden of duty.
All words are used by Paul in the same conversation addressed to the same group of men, the elders of the church at Ephesus.
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