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."
That is of course distressing, but also interesting to me. You couldn't get "real" answers? Where did you look? It seems to me they're all over the place and I've been aware of them since my late teens. Augustine, Athanasius, Chrysostum, Aquinas, Dante, Newman, Sheen, Chesterton, ... and I didn't get these names from Catholics but from my secular college, and from just looking around.
sympathies. of all the stupid things I've done and said, I have to thank God that I've never been so idiotically arrogant as to make a remark like that.
alter Christus
Those who are Latin deficient may not know what that means...
1Co 14:27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.
1Co 14:28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God.
Yawn.
Let me ask you a question. Assuming (please humor me for just a moment) that on the Sixth Day of Creaton G-d literally credited a literal physically mature Adam and Eve, how old would they have been? Granted that they would have looked like people who (in our experience) have lived about twenty years. Would the fact that they had adult bodies have made them actually twenty years old? Well, would it?
Are you going to claim that G-d could not have created the first human couple in a mature state because that would make Him a "liar" (since in our experience mature bodies imply growth from infancy and ultimately from a zygote)?
This is the year 5768 from creation. All human history is included in that period of time, and the entire history of the universe is included in that period of time and the six days prior. The fact that natural processes as we know them today would require billions of years for certain things to happen do not in any way whatsoever mean that they could not have been (like Adam and Eve) created in a state that, by the laws of nature as we experience them, would have required a much greater period of time.
But of course G-d wouldn't do that, would He? At least people who think nature is holier than the Torah say He wouldn't. That would make Him (they say) a "liar." Never mind that the alternative makes Him out to be a "liar" anyway because His words in the Torah would not be true.
So if G-d is a "liar" (chas veshalom!) either in nature or in the Torah, I know which one is His Perfect Revelation--and it ain't nature!
But never mind. Perhaps you will tell your co-religionists (pinged above) that they are "un-Catholic" because they don't accept uniformitarianism.
No, he was not the first or second or even the third Pope. You guys got that all wrong.
Riiiight, that's what I thought you'd say.
A good friend of mine who is now an ex-catholic, just said the other day that catholics say they don’t worship Mary but many of them do.
Low salt?
A big AMEN, doc!
A good friend of mine who just converted to Catholicism just said the other day that your good friend made that up.
The unbroken testimony of two thousand years declares Peter the first pope.
The notion that he was not the first pope was invented out of whole cloth by anti-papal obsessives 1500 years later.
We northerners calls em ‘covered dish dinners.’
His church is the body of Christ, not the RCC. Youse guys got it all wrong...
Try the Episcopalians. They’ve spun out of control these past few years, sadly so.
IMHO, you need to have Christ in your life with a healthy does of the Holy Spirit to be able to read and understand scripture. Otherwise, it’s only a book.
IMHO, you need to have Christ in your life with a healthy does of the Holy Spirit to be able to read and understand scripture. Otherwise, it’s only a book.
IMHO, you are correct.
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