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To: annalex
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.

4,333 posted on 04/03/2006 5:30:16 PM PDT by Forest Keeper
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To: Forest Keeper
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.

4,337 posted on 04/03/2006 7:25:29 PM PDT by annalex
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