Posted on 05/01/2008 5:07:35 PM PDT by annalex
LOL
100% pure assumption on your part. It totally guides all your exegesis to your own detriment. How do you know that ANY of the church fathers got ANYTHING correct? You must assume it.
The text says "when He comes He will guide you into all truth." Unfortunately for us, Jesus was talking to the apostles, not us grunts. He said nothing like "When He comes, He will guide you into all truth, and any disciples that come after you will have inspired commentary so you will know the interpretation of all that I have said to you."
Again ... your authority rests with the Church Fathers, not detailed exegesis of the text ... supporting my assertion.
The apostles and church fathers were two different sets of people. Only the apostles were promised that they would be guided into all truth. The church fathers wrote none of the NT.
Logic and Christ's promises is why Catholics believe that the Church Fathers "got it right". Who do "you" think is more likely to have been correct---men who learned directly from the Apostles, or a demented monk a millennium and a half later??
"Unfortunately for us, Jesus was talking to the apostles, not us grunts. He said nothing like "When He comes, He will guide you into all truth, and any disciples that come after you will have inspired commentary so you will know the interpretation of all that I have said to you."
Actually, he said precisely that. He promised that "the gates of hell will not prevail" over his Church. The key flaw in the whole Protestant position is their assumption that that Biblical statement was a lie. You assume that "the gates of hell" DID prevail, for a millennium and a half, and then magically, with the advent of Martin Luther, suddenly no longer prevailed. Sorry, but that notion is simply neither logical nor supported by Scripture.
What exactly is your assertion? What text? What exegesis? I explained in the post you are responding to, in what sense the Fathers are authority. They are not the only authority.
The promises were made to the Apostles, not to men who learned from them.
Who do "you" think is more likely to have been correct---men who learned directly from the Apostles, or a demented monk a millennium and a half later??
Your question is irrelevant. WHEN a person lived has nothing to do with the main ingredients of proper Biblical interpretation.
Actually, he said precisely that. He promised that "the gates of hell will not prevail" over his Church.
And you extrapolate that to mean the church fathers provided inspired commentary so we will know the meaning of Scripture? What you assert is totally foreign to the text. Recall that after Christ said "He will guide you into all truth" ... He said "and He will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you." Who was present in the upper room? The Apostles. Since only the Apostles were present in the upper room, and since only the Apostles were spoken to by Christ, the promise of guidance into truth only applies to them. Therefore, it is correct to study the teachings of the apostles in the NT. When a difficult passage is encountered, the context and the grammatical structure should dictate the meaning, not what some church father thought about it.
And this is precisely what Protestants get wrong. What scripture means must be guided by the teachings of the Apostles, which teaching was delivered to their successors. When two (or more) meanings are possible for a given passage, those who were actually taught by the Apostles were more likely to "get it right" than someone later.
Who is more likely to give a better understanding of, for instance, the Gospel of John----Saint Polycarp or Martin Luther. My money is on Polycarp.
This is the only thing you have said that you got right. But what you keep arguing is that what scripture means must be guided by what the church fathers thought, simply because of when they lived. It doesn't matter if what they thought about a particular text doesn't fit the Biblical context, we are to blindly accept that since they lived 1900 years ago, they must be correct. At each point you introduce elements that are foreign to the text and before long it doesn't matter what the text means on face value; your interpretation becomes a mystical hodgepodge of allegorical musings that have little correlation to the authorial intent. Over a long period of time there are thousands of pages of commentary with the result that venerate no longer means worship and Christ is not really sacrificed on a daily basis even though the proclamation is "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast."
And so I suspect our discussion is over. I as a Baptist have the freedom of Christ in my heresies ... while you as a RC are locked into yours. I'm comfortable with that ... I'm sure you are too.
Wrong argument, and strawman at that. What I said was that IF a passage of Scripture allows two possible interpretations, we should be guided by the teachings of the Church fathers, not "because they lived 1900 year ago", but because they were TAUGHT BY THE APOSTLES.
"At each point you introduce elements that are foreign to the text and before long it doesn't matter what the text means on face value; your interpretation becomes a mystical hodgepodge of allegorical musings that have little correlation to the authorial intent."
And how do you know "authorial intent", if the passage in question can legitimately be read two different ways.
"Over a long period of time there are thousands of pages of commentary with the result that venerate no longer means worship...
Look up the words "dulia" and "latria" and report back. And the reason to use the Church Fathers rather than modern commentators is that the type of "iterative error" you postulate is LESS likely to have happened, not more!! You've got it precisely backwards.
"<...and Christ is not really sacrificed on a daily basis even though the proclamation is "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast."
PLEASE read up and learn what Catholics actually teach about the "Mass as sacrifice". Your notion is totally wrong.(and, btw, I've never even heard the phrase "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast"), much less seen it taught as dogma.
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