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."
God never told Eve she was blessed before she fell to sin...
You're trying to inject more logic...
Disagreeing with RC doctrine is not hate speech, unless George Orwell has anointed king.
AMEN!
Why did Luther not only NOT write a 96th Thesis, but continue to preach the Immaculate Conception? What of Calvin, Zwengli and Wesley, why did not of them “search scripture”? If they were so “wrong” on this what else were they wrong on?
It's common courtesy to ping someone to a post when you mention them by name.
And I didn't know Alex was the Religion Moderator. Alex, when did you get promoted?
8~)
You can say that again. Also, God’s word and it’s secrets you could say are revealed tot he believer. We are taught to test what we hear against the scriptures. Sad to say, but if the Pope starting saying that solely good works will get you to heaven, a ton of people would follow him into hell.
You're right...When I don't know something that I want to know, I learn it...I don't sit there and stab at it with logic and claim my logic is authoritative...
You can not tell if a thing is true unless it is writen explicitly in Scripture?
Does God hate dictionaries? What does "Blessing" mean? Do you think being created by God without sin is not a blessing?
I know that you want to believe that, but the truth is the contrary; they searched the scriptures to protect their understanding from "new ideas." New ideas are pure error; we need understanding of old facts, not new ideas. In 700 AD, Islam was a new idea.
And to answer your question, the Religion Moderator made the following suggesting in THIS POST HERE.
(Pinging all THREE of you.)
#2, you don't seem to know what "logic" is.
Logic is not any attempt to conjecture. Logic is the application of truth to discern additional truth. The thing about truths is that if you combine them in logical ways, they must be true.
God's angel Gabriel told Eve that she had found favor with God. I'd call that a huge blessing.
The Lord was foretold in the OT.
His blood sacrifice was foretold in the OT. (in many ways, and many places)
Blah blah blah.
You separate yourself from the Holy Sacraments of His Church and the results are obvious.
All true. And yet, the New Testament was new. The Bereans did not have closed minds to complex ideas. They did not eschew “logic.”
Sola Scriptura were new only in Enoch’s time; it’s been solid fact since.
A man in a saffron robe told me that at Toronto Pearson International while he tried to sell me a posie.
Honestly, RM - if you could me understand why the thread was pulled. I sent the following to the LM who pulled it.
THE EUCHARIST CHRIST
To Lead Moderator | 05/03/2008 7:46:34 AM PDT sent
You pulled a thread by this title (from this link http://contenderministries.org/Catholicism/eucharist.php) last night from the religion forum, providing only the comment “No thanks”. Please help me understand why this was pulled - what are the rules I violated in posting it.
I realize FR is not my property and want to understand how to play well here.
No. It was par for the course at the time.
Is it better to be with sin than without sin?
Well, of course not. But Eve was not without sin.
It's ridiculous to even ask the question, yet that is what your arguments imply.
How so? It is kind of like our nominee in this election- Many would call McCain a hero based upon what he once was. But that is silly. One is only a hero as long as one remains heroic. One cannot be a traitor and a hero at the same time.
God created Eve out of nothing, in a perfectly sinless state. How is that not a blessing?
It is incidental, It was the state of all mankind at the time (granted, only two of them)- Had not the Fall of Man occurred, every one of us would be in that state even now.
How can Eve be blessed when she and her old man are responsible for every single cursed thing upon this earth? It is silly to even consider.
Hatred, bigotry and false witness.
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