"Hey man, lay off my personal (and very flawed) interpretation of Holy Scripture, or I'll call day the space aliens."
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."
"Hey man, lay off my personal (and very flawed) interpretation of Holy Scripture, or I'll call day the space aliens."
Hey!
It's the ROMAN EDIFICE
That has built shrines to such goings on; such personages! LOL.
There's been a terrible explosion
down at the HTML factory!
You forgot that the Bishop told them “Hokus pokus, Ad Valorem ad hoc.”
That’s all they need to know about it.
INDEED!
LOL.
I’m confused why your post led you to the Catholic church. You yourself mentioned that it was the persecution by the Roman Empire (Roman Catholic Church) that changed and altered the original documents. Doesn’t that make one wonder if God was trying to tell us not to follow the Roman Catholic Church.
LOL!
“He who hates My church, hates Me.”
Adoration - May 1
You said: I’ll take the errors of Protestantism
You seem quite zealous in pointing out the errors you believe are contained in Catholicism, and now I find out that you agree that there are errors in protestantism.
Would you please list what the protestant errors are so we might discuss them?
1. I’m not a breakaway. Have NEVER been the least bit of an adherent to the power-mongering clique leading the Roman magicsterical. Never will.
2. Not at all bothered by the authentic Mary.
3. Greatly bothered by the deceptive idolatrous, blasphemous hogwash Rome uses to the abusive destructiveness of unwitting RC’s and onlookers.
4. I don’t like the idea of folks needlessly headed toward hell unwittingly, due to deliberately manufactured idolatrous, blasphemous concepts and practices.
Reportedly so.
Helps them refine their strategies at deception.
O-kayyyyy.
Sure.
I try.
Much of the time, anyway.
” I don’t like the idea of folks needlessly headed toward hell unwittingly”
You seem to be doing it wittingly.
You see, I think you are in danger of judgment.
FWIW, no binding council has ever established the canon.
The Synod at Hippo (all churches were not there) was not binding nor was the Council of Trent (EO had already left) when the RCC finally declared what it believed the canon to be. The reason it was never needed was because there really was no great controversy and only a few books at the end of the NT were ever really in question. The councils in the early church were only called where questions of great controversy existed. The absence of any council for over 250 years after the end of the Apostolic Era shows how little controversy there was concerning what was and was not "Inspired".
I am assuming that should be easy since error internal to one's belief system are much more injurious than errors outside of it and need to be combated before they lead fellow believers away from Truth and into heresy.
“UFOtheology”
My theology is grounded in Scripture.
IF your construction on reality, including Scriptural reality . . . has no capacity to manage any understanding of looming UFO/ET realities . . . God have mercy on the blind leading the blind traps that have been well laid for such poorly informed souls.
How has my construction on spiritual realities mangled St John in the slightest???
When the stuff breaks out on CNN wholesale . . . and the global government is clearly in cahoots with factions of same . . . please take a pic of your jaw. I’d love to see it.
Took you long enough to catch on! LOL.
I bet if you read carefully and extensively and without a previously adopted agenda, you will find that it's not "a" propitiatory sacrifice but "THE" propitiatory sacrifice, that it is "one and the same" sacrifice as that made by Christ on the cross, once and for all and entirely sufficient, "sacramentally" re-presented (that is, made present, here and now), NOT repeated.
[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper "on the night when he was betrayed," [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.If I thought, as some seem to do, that the Catholic Church thought it was repeating Christ's sacrifice in the Mass, I never would have converted.
[From the Council of Trent, quoted in paragraph 1562 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church]
here
The priest offers the holy Sacrifice in persona Christi; this means more than offering "in the name of' or "in place of' Christ. In persona means in specific sacramental identification with "the eternal High Priest"(42) who is the author and principal subject of this sacrifice of His, a sacrifice in which, in truth, nobody can take His place."Today's sacrifice," the Greek Church stated centuries ago, "is like that offered once by the Only-begotten Incarnate Word; it is offered by Him (now as then), since it is one and the same sacrifice."
Thus, by virtue of the consecration, the species of bread and wine re-present (50) in a sacramental, unbloody manner the bloody propitiatory sacrifice offered by Him on the cross to His Father for the salvation of the world. Indeed, He alone, giving Himself as a propitiatory Victim in an act of supreme surrender and immolation, has reconciled humanity with the Father, solely through His sacrifice, "having cancelled the bond which stood against us."
(All emphasis added to make it easier to find the relevant words.)
My explosions are prettier than yours . . .
nnnnya nnnya nnnya!
The Exploding deceptions of Romanism all over the forum are a lot uglier than my fun with colors.
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