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."
If you are smarter than I (which is probably not hard) that doesn't mean that you are a genius, much less that you are as smart as God. If you can run faster than I (again, not hard) that doesn't mean you are the fastest creature or that you can run as fast as light.
If Mary and the other saints (and the angels as well, possibly) can "process" more communications and in more languages (somehow I don't think language is an issue, but suppose it is) than you or I can, that does not require her to be omniscient (to have all the knowledge that is) or omnipotent (to have all the power that is).
This is just a negative argument, not any kind of proof or anything like that. There's an important distinction between being able to do a lot more and being able to do anything, and between very great and infinite, and so forth.
So as the native of one of the wettest places on earth (if we're talking about Binghamton NY) but still not infinitely wet, much less entirely submerged, says in #150 , I'm not pretending to provide "evidence", but simply to turn aside the proposition that we attribute to Mary et al. omniscience or any other omni.
LOL. I see this thread has left orbit.
True... they are NOT in the full view and observation in Sun of the Day.. but a partial knowledge and view is better than nothing.. I salute them for being not total heretics.. mirages in the feast of Love(Jude)..
Standing in the SHADOW of "them" is at least in the general area..
Unless they are hiding (to gain advantage)and I pray they are not..
I'll repeat it for those of you in Rio Linda:
Logic is the tool of truth.
You don't have to agree with it, but it appears from your response that you have completely ignored or misunderstood it.
And, finally, although it's apprently too late, you might have wanted to consider the ramifications of poo-pooing "logic" while thinking you know the way to the "Logos."
Yeah, indeed.
Standin' in the shadow of Love ....
OK...here’s one of your prayers to a non-deity...There is a prayer to God but there is also a prayer to St. Christopher...
And no one is asking him to relay a prayer to God...
http://www.catholicsupply.com/existing/prmotorist.html
Yep...Just like the fact that Cinderella's coach turned into a pumpkin at midnight...
Fornication has brought down empires..
Love in the shadows has many names..
Of course it does...God chose Paul as the last Apostle...After Paul, there were no more Apostles...
Because you say so?
“Y’all make it persistently very tempting to label the RC edifice a cult.”
Coming from a UFO truth teller, that is rich. Hale Bop anyone?
Gone, gone are the topless Towers of Ilium.
This is an argument used by many Protestant churches but not all. Most of the mainstream Protestant chuches such as Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican believe the Church became corrupt during the Middle Ages. They did not reject the teachings and councils of the early church.
It turned into a rutabaga?
But here's an interesting thing to me. It is a ganerally accepted notion of the Buddhadharma that true wisdom will decrease over time, that as the interval lengthens between the paranirvana of the Shakyamuni and the present, the truth will be diluted and dissipated.
And here there are hints of the same kind of thought among Protestants. And I suggest, as a mere conjecture, that Our Lord promised that the Holy Spirit would guide, well, someone, into all truth -- though he had many things to say which could not be borne at the time. So the Christian "Scheme" seems to be that we will corporately will grow in knowledge of the truth - at least that's what the Bible, but not the Protestants, say.
The Protestants seem to think like Buddhists in this regard. The Muslims, on the third hand, seem to want to keep everything frozen in time and despise reason while making their book the ultimate authority.
You figure God loved His Son, Jesus??? You figure God was happy about the pain and humiliation??? You figure God suffered when Jesus, and because Jesus suffered???
You maybe think Jesus, when it was finally over, said to Himself; thank God, it is finally finished...And maybe God was saying, Hang on Son it's almost over, and finally, Son, it is finished...
You think God wants to keep Jesus on the cross until you guys are done with Him???
Jesus is NOT still on the Cross...And you can't put Him there...He will never be on a Cross again...
He is risen...
Jesus appeared to His disciples after He was raised...He was not on a cross...He said, I'm going away and will send the Comforter to take my place...
He DID NOT say, when you break bread and drink from the cup, I will climb back on the Cross...You figure that Jesus is in some sort of time warp so that for the last 2000 years He never left the cross???
Jesus died for me, but He is dying for you???
Do you imagine God the Father and God the Son (and God the Holy Spirit for that matter) are bound by YOUR perception of time and space?
For the purposes being discussed here, I would suggest that is a distinction without a difference.
You can either accept the explanations the Catholics give to you for their own behavior and understanding of the meaning (sometimes implicit) of their texts. Or you can set yourself up as ultimate judge of the internal disposition of others and arbiter of what their prayers mean.
Your choice.
Jesus doesn't resent His role.
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