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."
Getting up in the morning without pain is a blessing...
But I have to make a correction...God DID bless Eve...When she was sinless...
Gen 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
So this blows your logic right out of the water...
Mary could not have been more sinless that Eve...Therefore, her being blessed 'among women' was not for being sinless, or being made sinless; it was because she would bear Jesus...And Jesus was blessed as well...
The seventh day was blessed by God...
Noah and his sons were blessed...
And God blessed all the people that blessed the Jews...
Being blessed 'among women' had nothing to do with being sinless, although being sinless may be a blessing...
You've talked yourself into a conundrum now.
If being sinless is a blessing, then Mary must possess it in order to be the most blessed. If even one person (Eve) was ceated in a special blessed way and Mary did not posses this same blessing, then she could not be most blessed among all women.
Why? I would think it quite the other way, that according to the Bible ALL have sinned... Therefore, the likelihood is that Mary did too.
Knowing God has this power and knowing Mary would be the mother of Jesus, why would Jesus not honor His mother by creating her this way?
This is speculative, and can just as easily be turned about: Why, necessarily, would he do so? In fact, since ALL have sinned, wouldn't it be considerate of the Scriptures to suppose He did not?
Furthermore, the very understanding of Original Sin being a lack of a relationship with God becomes muddled if we are to consider a woman with God in her womb who simultaneously lacks a relationship with God. It does not follow.
And why not? Her relationship with God is defined as such, but that need not assume her to be sinless in any part of it.
I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers unto the third and forth generation of them that hate me.
As you state, there is no scriptural reason for Mary to be sinless.
When we say created "without sin" we mean without Original Sin at the moment of her creation. The same as Eve.
(And you are placing way too much literalness on the Scripture "ALL have sinned." Little babies and the retarded, for example, do not sin. So not all have committed personal sin.)
I have never observed that the RC magicsterical
is all that interested in evidence.
—rubber histories are sufficient
—rubber ‘bibles’ are sufficient
—rubber dictionaries are sufficient . . .
This is speculative, and can just as easily be turned about: Why, necessarily, would he do so?
How about because He had to follow the Commandments perfectly and one of them states you should honor your mother (and father)?
There are different definitions for logic...
Logic is the application of truth to discern additional truth.
We are not talking about ladder logic or hydraulic logic...
The context was that your logic and reason are gifts from God...
Here's one of the many definitions of logic:
The logic of a system is the whole structure of rules that must be used for any reasoning within that system. Most of mathematics is based upon a well?understood structure of rules and is considered to be highly logical. ...
Here's another:
the branch of philosophy that analyzes inference
You honestly think you can understand scripture using logic???
You think you can understand anything without logic?
I know that to be true.
When we say created "without sin" we mean without Original Sin at the moment of her creation. The same as Eve.
I understand perfectly, and it is this concept that I reject. It has no purpose, it is scripturally unsound, and sets forth a dichotomy (a sinless human other than Christ) that need not be there.
Yet your supposition does not make clear to me that it must be that He did so in order to fulfill the act of honoring her.
You don't like what the KJV says in that verse, eh???
So what Greek are you referring to??? And whose translation of it???
The scripture does not say Mary was blessed more than any other woman...It says 'she was blessed among women'...Maybe most women aren't blessed...
Why wasn't Mary blessed among everyone??? Why not Men??? Was Mary blessed more than a sinful man???
If she was sinless, one would think so...God didn't bother to mention it...
Maybe she was blessed among women because her blessing had to do with women only...Such as childbirth???
Post in English please.
Now I see your problem.
That crap you’re using went out in the 60s.
Absolutely...The scripture immediately comes to mind...
“My point still remains, that sinless is better than sinful. Don’t you agree?”
You miss the point. She was created innocent with the capability to sin. Untested innocence is virtueless so sinless was an empty category since it had not entered the garden at the time she was created..
A good point, and well stated.
Yes, they were introduced to a deeply pagan world that worshipped Ishtar/Semiramis, the Queen of Heaven, just as Isaiah said. They also made "hot cross buns" in honor of Tammuz.
Absolutely false. Amazing that blatant falsehoods can stand on a news website.
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