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[Transubstantiation] was articulated but the concept existed. Jesus said it was a hard thing to hear. It is also a hard thing to explain. That is why we walk by faith and not by sight.

I assume you mean *not* articulated? Otherwise I don’t get your contrast with “but the concept existed.” In any event, yes, from early on, some in the post-apostolic period used language which could be understood as supporting some form of “real presence,” despite the lack of unequivocal Biblical evidence for such, and despite the presence of a patristic stream of evidence that it was understood metaphorically and NOT “substantially” from the earliest times.

But this is not what I am saying. I am saying that the specific form given in the Trent formulation, the one with the anathema attached to it, was not even hinted at until Radbertus. If words have any meaning at all, I do not see how the lurch forward into the Aquinian substance swapping model does not constitute novelty. Nothing in the NT record or any of the early fathers suggests the bread’s true substance ceases to exist (and undetectably so), and that this swap occurs on demand of the consecratory prayer of a sacerdotally empowered priest:

“If anyone says that in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denies that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only of bread and wine remaining, which change the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation, let him be anathema.” (Council of Trent, Second Canon, Thirteenth Session).

The Trent Canon goes well beyond anything in Scripture, and beyond the patristic writings as well. As I said before, even the Lutheran and Reformed confessions admit of some sense of real presence, either of which would arguably be closer in meaning to the Biblical text than transubstantiation. Simply finding small hints in Scripture that seem to support some aspects of a later, and much more complex doctrine, does not justify the statement that said later doctrine is not a later development. As a matter of history, it IS a later development.

In a way, our disputes are about specific passages in Scripture. These doctrinal developments come from debate over the nature of Jesus, the Good News and Scripture itself. In all these debates, it was the Church who settled the issue. I can’t list all the heresies, they are a matter of record, but when they came, the final authority rested with the Church weighing Tradition and Scripture to proclaim what was True.

No, it was not “the Church who settled the issue.” It was God, persuading through Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit. See especially Athenasius versus the Arians. It was a Biblical battle. What does Jesus say in that famous passage:

“I will build my church.”

Who builds the church? Jesus does. Is it Peter? No. Is it councils? No. Is it Athenasius? Not even. We must be very careful here. God is jealous of His glory:

Isa 42:8 I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.

What happened to the Pharisees? They were the magisterium, sitting in the seat of Moses. But they fell to idolatry, to taking glory to themselves that belonged to God alone, taking credit for “protecting” the common folk by building “fences around the law” designed, theoretically to ensure faithfulness to the law, but which in reality became burdens and barriers, keeping people from a true relationship with God. All that horror stemming from the sin of spiritual pride. That is why Jesus called them blind guides. Not because they lacked a good teacher of the law. They had had plenty of those. And how did they treat them?:

Mat 21:32-40 For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him. (33) Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: (34) And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it. (35) And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. (36) Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did unto them likewise. (37) But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. (38) But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. (39) And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. (40) When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?

So what can we see from this? The husbandmen had no problem understanding the wishes of the owner of the vineyard. They even knew the son was the true heir. There was no mistake or ignorance. There was just a devilish rebellion to what they absolutely knew was the rightful claim of the owner. They didn’t misunderstand it. They just rejected it.

So we can see here that the Pharisees’ unbelief does NOT make a good argument for a need of an infallible magisterium. They WERE the magisterium, they understood perfectly well who Christ was, by prophecy, by signs and wonders, by words that bring eternal life. But they were blinded by their own idolatry. They had set themselves up in the place of God.

Is Jesus God, truly God? The same God as God the Father? Was Jesus human, truly human? Is the Holy Spirit God? Did Jesus truly die? If so, did God die? Did God raise Jesus, or did He raise Himself? Is baptism necessary? Should children/infants be baptized? Do we keep the Sabbath or celebrate the Lord’s Day? Did Jesus bodily rise from the dead? What is the structure of the Church? What sacred writings are actually Scripture? Why these and not others?

We find very different answers to all of these questions. Some are Truth, some are heresy; all with claims to be derived from Scripture. Which are Truth? Which are heresy?

No, as between you and me, we have remarkable agreement on most of the issues you listed. The pattern for all those in which we agree was set in the Scriptures we both hold as Scripture. Those in which we do not agree require extra-Biblical sources for you to support.

But there is a trap here. You are making a consequentialist argument. And that would be reasonable to some extent if we were talking about a purely human institution. You would want to design it to work within the limits of human fallibility.

But Jesus is the One building His church. He has a right to build it however he sees fit. And one of the things that happens in the true church is you get heresies:

1Co 11:19 For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

But see how they have a place in the divine plan. They expose the truth, and with the truth, those who are approved, as Paul says. So it is the divine plan that matters, not the alleged pragmatic consequences of one ecclesiastical structure over another. Look first to the design, and the design will be found on the pages of Scripture (which Scripture is self-identifying by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the consensus of the faithful as a whole, and only later looked to by councils).

On then to Peter and the Inspiration of Scripture …

2Peter 1
(16) For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
(17) For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
(18) And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
(19) We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:
(20) Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.
(21) For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

And the underlying Greek …

16 Οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες ἐγνωρίσαμεν ὑμῖν τὴν τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ δύναμιν καὶ παρουσίαν, ἀλλʼ ἐπόπται γενηθέντες τῆς ἐκείνου μεγαλειότητος.
17 Λαβὼν γὰρ παρὰ θεοῦ πατρὸς τιμὴν καὶ δόξαν, φωνῆς ἐνεχθείσης αὐτῷ τοιᾶσδε ὑπὸ τῆς μεγαλοπρεποῦς δόξης, Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός, εἰς ὃν ἐγὼ εὐδόκησα•
18 καὶ ταύτην τὴν φωνὴν ἡμεῖς ἠκούσαμεν ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ἐνεχθεῖσαν, σὺν αὐτῷ ὄντες ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ ἁγίῳ.
19 Καὶ ἔχομεν βεβαιότερον τὸν προφητικὸν λόγον, ᾧ καλῶς ποιεῖτε προσέχοντες, ὡς λύχνῳ φαίνοντι ἐν αὐχμηρῷ τόπῳ, ἕως οὗ ἡμέρα διαυγάσῃ, καὶ φωσφόρος ἀνατείλῃ ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ὑμῶν•
20 τοῦτο πρῶτον γινώσκοντες, ὅτι πᾶσα προφητεία γραφῆς ἰδίας ἐπιλύσεως οὐ γίνεται.
21 Οὐ γὰρ θελήματι ἀνθρώπου ἠνέχθη ποτὲ προφητεία, ἀλλʼ ὑπὸ πνεύματος ἁγίου φερόμενοι ἐλάλησαν ἅγιοι θεοῦ ἄνθρωποι.

The first thing to notice in verse 19 is the bolded word “kai.” Kai is one of those amazing little multipurpose words in Greek that can have a variety of meanings depending on the context. It is most often translated as the simple conjunction “and.” What is perhaps less well understood about it is the role it plays in linking larger sequences than English sentences. In other words, while kai at times could show a strong linkage between clauses, at other times it amounts to a substitute for punctuation, which the earliest Greek Biblical texts did not have.

Despite this range of meaning for kai, some translators have chosen to *interpret* the text somewhat by giving “kai” the sense of “so,” attempting to show a causal link between the transfiguration and the the “more certain word,” as if to say the prophetic word was somehow “made more sure” by those events, or as you have put it, confirmed by those events. Obviously, nothing is objectively more certain than God’s word, whether given from Heaven in the hearing of the disciples, or delivered by the Holy Spirit to the pens of the prophets. So it is impossible that Peter here is referring to objective certainty.

Nevertheless, in defense of that position, one could surmise he was speaking of the greater certainty of his hearers, resulting from Peter’s personal testimony of what he saw and heard on that mountain. But he doesn’t actually say that. He is literally saying “…and we have more certain the prophetic word…” The “greater certainty” (bebaioteron) is an adjective which here seems most naturally to be amplifying the prophetic word itself.

However, there is no particular reason to use anything other than a simple “and” here. Peter is simply going from one proof to the next of what should convince the believer that Christ really will return, just as He promised. He first dismisses the idea that it was just a clever tale. Then he shares his personal testimony to the convincing reality of the Transfiguration, with God Himself speaking from Heaven. Yet he knows that is only his own personal experience, and that by itself it does not prove to anyone else the Second Coming will occur. So he moves on to the ultimate proof, God’s calling card, the absolute certainty of His written word:

Isa 46:9-10 Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, (10) Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:

Then what does he mean by “the daystar arising in your hearts?” We cannot begin to imagine, I think, what it will be like on that day when the dead in Christ will rise, and the living will be transformed, and we shall finally, eternally be with Him. We will go from walking in darkness with a lantern to the burst of full daylight, all uncertainty, all sorrow washed away in a moment, our old selves gone forever, the new creation He has made us standing in its place, joining hands with our Savior, when we meet Him face to face.

“know this first,” as if to say, this is the most important thing I’m telling you, lock this in, that God’s written word didn’t have its genesis (ginetai) in the private explanations of the prophets, but in the revealing of God’s word via the Holy Spirit. This appears to be the high note in his crescendo of proofs, that the most important thing we can know, if we desire to be certain of Jesus’ return, is that the Scriptures, which prophesy His coming in gory, are not man-made, but are a direct product of God, and therefore are reliable to the uttermost.

******And sonny I mean everything,*****

That is from your first post with the story of the diary, which I included in my response. Either the Bible does or does not contain the ability to know everything. I have not argued that it is not sufficient; I believe it is when one has been taught how to read and understand it.

Well, it’s my story, so I know what I meant. I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear, but the context is King Solomon’s mines, and the object of the “everything” is “everything necessary to get the good stuff out of those mines.”

So the sufficiency I am illustrating is the two-fold sufficiency in 2Tim 3:15-17, sufficient to lead one to salvation in Christ, and further sufficient to make one prepared for all aspects of the Christian life. The reason this definition of sufficiency is important is because:

1. It excludes the false notion that we Sola Scriptura folks are teaching the Bible is sufficient for everything. It is not. If you want to build nuclear reactors, you have to use material largely NOT found in Scripture. But if you want to know God and God’s Christ, and live a life pleasing to Him in every respect, then everything you need to know about that life of faith is present in that Book.
2. It is also important because if what is IN the Bible is enough to become a Christian and live right before God, then we know that whatever comes from outside the Scriptures is not necessary to either of those specific purposes. This is why we do not need to have in Scripture a complete catalog of all possible heresies. It's the counterfeit recognition problem. You’ve probably heard this before. As I understand it, banks do not teach all possible varieties of counterfeit money. That would be patently impossible. Instead they ingrain in their tellers the knowledge of the true currency. That way, anything fake is recognized immediately as a discrepancy from the true model. It is a much more efficient model for transmitting large amounts of truth in a very small package. Or again, like our dna, the error correction doesn’t have to “know” about all the possible bad mutations. It only has to know the true pattern. The mutations are recognized as the appear because they do not match the pattern of truth.

Here would probably be a good place to mention the terms formal versus material sufficiency. Perhaps I am oversimplifying it a bit, but I believe most current Catholic apologists, even yourself, essentially admit to the material sufficiency of Scripture, that is, that everything one needs to know for salvation and Christian life may be found somewhere in the Scriptures. Where there is disagreement is formal sufficiency, by which is generally meant the ability of an ordinary person to pick up the Bible and find the right information to be saved and mature as a believer. By denying formal sufficiency, the Roman magisterium seeks to retain its claimed necessity as the one infallible interpreter of Scripture.

By contrast, Protestants generally hold to what is called the perspicuity of Scripture, and this is largely misrepresented and misunderstood by most whom I have seen argue against it. The basic idea is that we believe God is perfectly capable of inspiring a text that ordinary people can understand with both heart and mind, IF aided by the Holy Spirit, and without denying the benefit of teachers in the church gifted by the Holy Spirit for the opening up of God’s word.

From a logical standpoint, the problem is you cannot have more than one Ultimate Authority. Any supposed harmonization between the two will inevitably result in one swallowing up the other. As with the Pharisees, their overambitious view of the magisterium led them to a place where their oral tradition undermined the Scriptural law of Moses. They became their own ultimate authority.

Protestantism rejects that model. Humans are fallen, corrupt, and corruptible. Even those who assume leadership roles in the church. There must be accountability to an Ultimate Authority, and that authority must either be those who claim to speak for God or the very words of God. It cannot be both. The risk of a wrong choice is idolatry.

Peace,