Luther and Erasmus: The Controversy Concerning the Bondage of the Will

Protestant Reformed Theological Journal ^ | April 1999 | Garrett J. Eriks

[annalex]

I distinctly remember that my confessor says "I absolve your sin".

There is nothing wrong with that. He has the scriptural authority to do so, see John 20:23.

[jo kus]

To those who do not believe, the Bible is nothing, as the Koran is nothing to me. The Jews read the same Old Testament but believe in it differently.

The Protestants claim the same Christian faith as the Apostolic Church, but we are night and day apart when it comes to Trinity, Christology, Divine Economy, etc.

Well said. God bless your patience. I think I am going back to more constructive pursuits for the time being. I have found that my prayer life is not what I want it to be because this effort has taken so much time. Apparently, it has been a fruitless effort. Some false presumptions die hard. I wish you well in your efforts of repeating the orthodox/catholic point of view over and over again.

Brother in Christ

[Forest Keeper]

You need to look at it in light of Matthew 16:19 (and 18:18): "And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." In this you have Christ's promise to lend His Divine support to the acts of the Church.

I realize those are huge verses in Catholicism, along with John 20:22-23. I'm just not sure on what exactly is being transfered. I would say that only God has the power to forgive sins, and all binding and loosening comes from heaven, not from men. If one's position was that certain people were simply vessels for conveying all of this from God, without adding or subtracting anything based on their own opinions or humanity, then I would agree. However, if one's position was that God simply delegated His authority away from Himself, and let the individuals make human decisions based on their own opinions and knowledge, as a boss would delegate a task to a subordinate, then I would disagree.

[jo kus]

Annalex, I give you an "A" for effort, but we Catholics have so much good stuff to read already! Rather than read Calvin, perhaps you should consider St. Bellarmine or St Francis de Sales, who amply defend the faith against such ridiculous un-Christian theories as God is the creator of evil and that men are created specifically for hell. Reading such things will move you away from the God of Love - be careful.

Brother in Christ

[annalex]

He refers to these events as having actually been there to witness them. [...] if we are to take as as a parable Christ's words: "For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation," then the direct equivalency of this statement leads inexorably to Christ saying that his own death and Resurrection would be a parable.

This is the problem with most of these metaphorical readings of miracles, whether the Church allows for such reading or not. Christian faith is based on the miracles of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are most definitely not metaphorical. It is an inconsistent view to take these two on faith but dismiss the other miracles, such as the creation, the rescuing of the living creatures by Noah, the exodus, Jonah, the miraculous healing and raising the dead, and the miracles of saints as fables. Possibly some of them are, -- I have my doubts about St. George leashing the dragon with the princess's garter, -- yet others, such as Jonah in the fish, are connected to our faith in a direct way, even though they look like the stuff of fables. I prefer seeing the less believable to the modern mind stories as challenges to my faith, rather than some kind of burden of faith that I am happy to put down because the Church allows me to put them down.

Note also that it is the kind of attitude characteristic of Protestantism. What part of the Deposit of Faith can we amputate and remain Christians? Let us lop off the Maccabees. Are we still Christian? Great, let us lop off the Real Presence. Still Christians? Lop off veneration of saints, virginity of Our Lady, the priesthood, the sacraments... This is not a happy road to follow.

[annalex]

I find the belief in the sinlessness of St. John the Baptist entirely natural. I don't know why it is not dogmatic. Perhaps, because the parallel to the Ark of the Covenant, that is not to be touched by human hand, is absent in his case.

this elevates John over Mary

Not really, Jesus has prophets in view in that passage, and not His Mother.

[annalex]

I don't understand why John 20:23 is not sufficient for you. Can it get any plainer that that?

[annalex]

we have reached post #4300 and this is where we are at

Really, Forest. Every Catholic knows people who are excommunicated because of a second marriage, not being able to annul the first, people who go through years of supplying evidence and giving testimony and leading a chaste life so that they can marry after divorce. Divorce is a tragedy, and the Church sees it as tragedy, precisely because marriage is sacred. Disagree with the annulment system all you want, but cheap out it is not.

[annalex]

I do not believe that popularity equals truth

The patristic evidence is simply the sacred deposit of faith. It is not the issue of popularity; in fact, much of the patristic literature was written when the Arianism was the majority faith.

[annalex]

if one's position was that God simply delegated His authority away from Himself, and let the individuals make human decisions based on their own opinions and knowledge, as a boss would delegate a task to a subordinate, then I would disagree.

I would disagree too; this is why a Protestant pastor cannot absolve sin. Priesthood is an undelible mark that subordinates the actions of a priest to the will of God.

[Kolokotronis]

"I distinctly remember that my confessor says "I absolve your sin"."

Yes, "Absolvo te". I trust you didn't take my comments as a slap at the Latin form of absolution. I suspect you will find that it is said with the same meaning as in the Orthodox absolution. I could be wrong, though, and this might then be an example of the created vs. uncreated grace differences between the Latin and Eastern Churches.

[annalex]

Rather than read Calvin, perhaps you should consider St. Bellarmine or St Francis de Sales

Absolutely; I am ignorant of St. Bellarmine but I can attest to the devastation that St. Francis de Sales wrought on Calvin.

But we owe our opponents a degree of familiarity with their philosophy. The Institutes are praised as some masterpiece of theology unsurpassed in insight and clarity, so I figured I'd take a look at that wonder myself.

[Forest Keeper]

FK: "I think you mean that dogma is not possible because we just don't have the records to prove anything. Is that close?"

Not at all, -- where are your getting this?

I think it was from your statement "... Holy Tradition was committed to writing in a non-Canonical way as the patristic legacy, the hymnody and the iconography." I took "non-canonical" to mean "less official" and I surmised it was because there were not enough reliable records for them to be Canonical. I guess I just misunderstood, and I shouldn't have used the word "possible" the way I did.

[Agrarian]

A well-stated post in every way.

" I have my doubts about St. George leashing the dragon with the princess's garter..."

Was that really part of the "official" life of St. George for Catholics? Nothing remotely close to this is recorded in any Orthodox life of St. George that I have ever seen, and I had always assumed that the Catholic Church's life of him was the same. He is one of the greatest martyrs in the Orthodox Church, and other than St. Nicholas of Myra, he probably has the widest veneration across every Orthodox culture of any non-Biblical saint.

[kosta50]

Christian faith is based on the miracles of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are most definitely not metaphorical. It is an inconsistent view to take these two on faith but dismiss the other miracles, such as the creation, the rescuing of the living creatures by Noah, the exodus, Jonah, the miraculous healing and raising the dead, and the miracles of saints as fables

Yes it is. Faith begins where reason stops.

[annalex]

I took "non-canonical" to mean "less official" and I surmised it was because there were not enough reliable records for them to be Canonical.

There are several reasons for a book to be not canonical: not close enough to the circle of apostles, contradictions in some parts with the canonical scripture, subject matter not directly related to the deposit of faith left by Christ. Nevertheless, a non-canonical work supplies, at a minimum, evidence of the understanding of the early Church. It can do so even if the book or a book fragment in question is not as a whole dogmatically solid. For example, it is not necessary for a writing to be inspired to mention baptism of infants as a fact of life; we can conclude from it that the early Church performed it, and consequently that it did not consider scriptural passages, which describe only baptism of adults following a profession of faith by them, as excluding infants. Thus the Church was able to develop the proper theology of the sacraments in harmony with the practices of the early Church, even though the early Church saw no need to commit its liturgical praxis to parchment.

[annalex]

I simply picked the most fable-like aspect of an early saint I could think of. No, it is not official:

This episode of the dragon is in fact a very late development, which cannot be traced further back than the twelfth or thirteenth century. It is found in the Golden Legend (Historia Lombardic of James de Voragine and to this circumstance it probably owes its wide diffusion. It may have been derived from an allegorization of the tyrant Diocletian or Dadianus, who is sometimes called a dragon (ho bythios drakon) in the older text, but despite the researches of Vetter (Reinbot von Durne, pp.lxxv-cix) the origin of the dragon story remains very obscure.

St. George

[stripes1776]

Because the early apologists such as Clement and Justin Martyr and Irenaeus all claimed in their apologies that the Greek god was the same as the Christian God and all they needed was to add Christ. To the contrary, even Tertullian understood the utter heresy of this position when he exclaimed most famously, "What has Jerusalem to do with Athens"?

Tertullian doesn't define Christianity. Neither does the tribal god of the Jews. You have misrepresented the case. The early church acknowledged that all people had some knowledge of God, but incompletely. The choice between Athens and Jerusalem is a false one. In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew.