Fascinating. Never heard of that term.
I do love to learn. Post much appreciated.
ping
Thank you for your diligence.
Corrections welcome, but I don’t think that the early church fathers had the Holy Bible as we know it today. The Holy Bible was a later development.
Again, corrections welcome.
The problem with a concept such as “Holy Tradition” is that it is not scripture and therefore not the inspired word of God.
So many people get these details wrong. Can't tell you how many times someone accuses us of believing that the Scriptures alone are the only authority and only source of knowledge for the Christian. Thanks for posting!
Yes.
It always best to stick to scripture and not read things into the Bible which are not there or make things up out of whole cloth.
One example: Mary ever virgin.
The Bible NEVER says anything like this. EVER. The Bible mentions:
1) That Mary was a virgin ONLY up to the time of her conception of Jesus. It NEVER goes any farther than that.
2)That Mary was married to Joseph.
3) That Jesus had brothers and sisters.
This doesn’t add up to someone who was a lifelong virgin to me.
And btw, the fact that Mary was married to Joseph, and that Jesus did have brothers and sisters takes nothing away from Mary and Joseph. The Lord commands us to be fruitful and multiply and Mary and Joseph did just that. Physical intimacy is in fact a gift from God given to all married couples. I see no reason why this gift would be denied to Mary and Joseph or our priests for that matter. There is nothing in the Bible supporting such a doctrine.
I'm sure that if all of us Protestants had a nickel for every time we had to correct someone's false idea of SS, we'd all be rich, rich, rich.
Again, thanks for the great post!
Hoss
Paul did! That is why he commanded Timothy to guard his doctrine in order to save himself and his hearers!
I always get confused about the term “Church Fathers.” If that means the Apostles, they had only the “Old Testament,” they didn’t write anything themselves, except letters back and forth to each other. At some point four guys sat down and wrote what they remembered, plus Acts. Then somebody decided the letters and memoirs constituted “scripture.”
God said to Moses, “Write this down.” Jesus never said to anybody during his earthly sojourn, “Write this down.” It just seems kinda strange.
We still know not what we do.
The original church was catholic (universal), and, continuing the Jewish scriptural tradition, the authority of scripture was appealed to constantly, Matt. 22:29, for instance, Jesus said to the Sadducees, “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.”
Quite an oxymoron, the Papists use of the scripture against Protestants on this forum.
These are the same ones who burned Protestant martyrs at the stake, like William Tyndale, for the “crime” of trying to get the Bible to the common people.
These are the same ones who once had the Bible chained to their pulpits.
And the same ones who use the scripture against the scripture-first Protestants - or attempt to, they neither know the scriptures, nor the power of God - on this forum... on one hand, while denouncing sola scriptura on the other. Go figure. What hypocrites.
Primacy of Scripture, yes.
Sola Scriptura, no.
Jesus gave the keys to Peter to “build my church.” (a human church, not a divine one)
Peter became the first Pope. Peter was human, not divine. All churches are human not divine.
No other Christian church was started with the blessing of Jesus other than Peter’s.
And, it continues, uninterupted to this day.
Primacy of scripture. Yep, Catholics believe that.
The “sola scriptura” mantra, in my mind, is anti-Catholic discourse.
I’m happy to be a member of a church that goes back to the time of the Apostles.
While every Christian needs to become personally familiar with the Holy Bible instead of letting somebody else interpret it for them as low-information citizens have done with respect to the Constitution, please consider the following.
Jesus had clarified in the Gospel of John that regardless that the hypocrite religous leaders of the Jews knew the Scriptures that they had nonetheless rejected Jesus as their Savior.
So Christians are ultimately dependent on the Holy Spirit to open their minds to Jesus and the Scriptures.
**Did the Early Church Fathers Believe in Sola Scriptura?**
NO!
There is God’s Living Word, His Eternal Truth, the Incorruptible Seed .... or there is the reasoning of men and his religion.
Choose wisely.
If they didn’t why did they go to all the trouble to gather the authentic books in a canon?
No. The doctrine of the Trinity is proof.
The canon of scripture of the New Testament is proof:
The early bible was oral. The apostles were dead when the early canon was being settled; the apostolic successors HAD to be relied upon for the information to even be considered as to what was to comprise the gospels and epistles. There was plenty of apocrypha out there being circulated. How does one know Matthew wrote Matthew, for example? (Sacred) Oral Tradition that was handed on infallibly settled these questions. If, otherwise, the today’s bible would be under question - maybe it contains apocrypha. ONE WOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO KNOW FOR SURE.
Why is C. Michael Patton’s (wrong) interpretation more authoritative than St. Paul himself, who specifically instructed the Thessalonians as follows:
2 Thessalonians 2:14:
Therefore brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned whether by word or by our epistle.
The traditions that the early Christians were specifically told were worthless and not to be followed were the manmade pharisaical customs: NOT the sacred traditions handed down by the apostles first in oral form and then later written down.
The bible’s seed form was verbal in its very nature and HAD to be passed down at first by the use of speech, not paper.
WHY did the ECF's close the canon so soon?
They had a chance to claim all their added traditions were SCRIPTURE but they BLEW it!