Posted on 05/03/2008 4:38:34 PM PDT by NYer
Scripture, our Evangelical friends tell us, is the inerrant Word of God. Quite right, the Catholic replies; but how do you know this to be true?
It's not an easy question for Protestants, because, having jettisoned Tradition and the Church, they have no objective authority for the claims they make for Scripture. There is no list of canonical books anywhere in the Bible, nor does any book (with the exception of St. John's Apocalypse) claim to be inspired. So, how does a "Bible Christian" know the Bible is the Word of God?
If he wants to avoid a train of thought that will lead him into the Catholic Church, he has just one way of responding: With circular arguments pointing to himself (or Luther or the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries or some other party not mentioned in the Bible) as an infallible authority telling him that it is so. Such arguments would have perplexed a first or second century Christian, most of whom never saw a Bible.
Christ founded a teaching Church. So far as we know, he himself never wrote a word (except on sand). Nor did he commission the Apostles to write anything. In due course, some Apostles (and non-Apostles) composed the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament. Most of these documents are ad hoc; they are addressed to specific problems that arose in the early Church, and none claim to present the whole of Christian revelation. It's doubtful that St. Paul even suspected that his short letter to Philemon begging pardon for a renegade slave would some day be read as Holy Scripture.
Who, then, decided that it was Scripture? The Catholic Church. And it took several centuries to do so. It was not until the Council of Carthage (397) and a subsequent decree by Pope Innocent I that Christendom had a fixed New Testament canon. Prior to that date, scores of spurious gospels and "apostolic" writings were floating around the Mediterranean basin: the Gospel of Thomas, the "Shepherd" of Hermas, St. Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans, and so forth. Moreover, some texts later judged to be inspired, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, were controverted. It was the Magisterium, guided by the Holy Spirit, which separated the wheat from the chaff.
But, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church was corrupt and idolatrous by the fourth century and so had lost whatever authority it originally had. On what basis, then, do they accept the canon of the New Testament? Luther and Calvin were both fuzzy on the subject. Luther dropped seven books from the Old Testament, the so-called Apocrypha in the Protestant Bible; his pretext for doing so was that orthodox Jews had done it at the synod of Jamnia around 100 A. D.; but that synod was explicitly anti-Christian, and so its decisions about Scripture make an odd benchmark for Christians.
Luther's real motive was to get rid of Second Maccabees, which teaches the doctrine of Purgatory. He also wanted to drop the Letter of James, which he called "an epistle of straw," because it flatly contradicts the idea of salvation by "faith alone" apart from good works. He was restrained by more cautious Reformers. Instead, he mistranslated numerous New Testament passages, most notoriously Romans 3:28, to buttress his polemical position.
The Protestant teaching that the Bible is the sole spiritual authority--sola scriptura --is nowhere to be found in the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy that Scripture is "useful" (which is an understatemtn), but neither he nor anyone else in the early Church taught sola scriptura. And, in fact, nobody believed it until the Reformation. Newman called the idea that God would let fifteen hundred years pass before revealing that the bible was the sole teaching authority for Christians an "intolerable paradox."
Newman also wrote: "It is antecedently unreasonable to Bsuppose that a book so complex, so unsystematic, in parts so obscure, the outcome of so many minds, times, and places, should be given us from above without the safeguard of some authority; as if it could possibly, from the nature of the case, interpret itself...." And, indeed, once they had set aside the teaching authority of the Church, the Reformers began to argue about key Scriptural passages. Luther and Zwingli, for example, disagreed vehemently about what Christ meant by the words, "This is my Body."
St. Augustine, usually Luther's guide and mentor, ought to have the last word about sola scriptura: "But for the authority of the Church, I would not believe the Gospel."
1. 1600 YEARS at MOST.
2. Scholarship--using the term rather loosely--especially some centuries.
3. Founded by Christ? Utter hogwash. And, actually, a rather sizeable insult to His wisdom, knowledge, priorities and preferences as demonstrated by His attitude toward the bureaucratic RELIGIOUS political power-mongering clique of those days 2,000 years ago.
I'm reminded of the mother . . . who's son, under great smothering pressure from Mommy Dearest became a Dr. And at the dinner party with all her couple friends from the bridge club . . . and with son and his new wife . . . Mommy Dearest is going on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how she helped him study in high school. And helped him study in College. And paid for everything. And on and on and on and on . . . everything always with her the star of whatever event or action she was talking about . . . such that son came off like a very low grade and low class Walter Mitty.
That's about how the RC magicsterical and reps sound about Mary's trumped up grandeur vs Jesus The Messiah, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
Seems like one of satan's major tools is overblown Mommy Dearest gigs.
The ONLY “extra-biblical teaching” discussed on this thread is the 16th Century invention of sola scriptura.
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Boy that’s unmitigated hogwash.
Seems like on every RC post of more than 2-3 lines, there’s some UNBIBLICAL, HISTORICALLY INACCURATE, ILLOGICAL FALSEHOOD.
You should know . . .
AN OUTRAGEOUS DOUBLE STANDARD
IS part of the RC magicsterical's RUBBERIZED DOGMA mandatory not only on the part of the faithful but mandatory on the part of everyone everywhere--kind of like the Jihadi's--either be Muslim or pay tribute, or have your head cut off. No other options.
Only in this case--it's the routine double standard.
From the double standard treatment they demand and get from an unknown number of alternate mods . . . to the double standard of their rubber logic . . . to the double standard of how they demand, DEMAND to be treated vs how they insist on treating Prottys . . . It's all standard RC magicsterical duplicity. And it reaches back, pretty much, to the beginning of the RC edifice 1600 years ago.
WELL SAID.
CHRIST THE MESSIAH.
ALPHA AND OMEGA.
KING OF KINGS, LORD OF LORDS . . .
OUR ALL IN ALL.
ALL GLORY TO GOD
ALONE.
GOD ALONE ALWAYS AND FOREVER . . . not sharing His Glory with any flesh in any remotely God-head sort of way.
We follow God the way we believe He revealed He desires.
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Hogwash.
It is difficult to think of a truly Trinitarian RELIGIOUS group that is MORE inherently operating at more of a
STRUCTURED
DISTANCE from God . . . with all manner of many layers of trumped up ritual, personages, UNBiblical dogma . . . and the like.
AND ALMOST ALL my associations with RC’s in my personal network have repeatedly emphasized the facts of that horrendous distance. Ghastly. Horrific. And many in RC’s magicsterical will be paying some heavy duty fines for such, imho.
On that score, the words AND ACTIONS of far too many RC’s brazenly flaunt the falsehood of such an assertion.
I find it comical that Catholics will claim that God gave them the ability to reason, logical thought and common sense, and then they can use this reasoning to call God a liar...Correct God's mistakes by using the reasoning God gave them...What a hoot...
The Bible says that the curse has given us a sinful nature- not a propensity for sin, but sinful by default.
Not exactly...We do have a propensity for sin...Babies are not born righteous...Babies have no desire to be obedient to the will of God...Babies are born with a sinful nature...A propensity to sin...
Do we know how that works???
Not necessarily...
Are we supposed to know how that works...
If God thought it was necessary, He would have told us...And maybe He did tell us if we spend enough time in the scripture to find out...
But God said it's so...What human being would dare say it's not...
To call God a liar to justify Mary being sinless is certainly not something I would mess with...
Even their Catholic Jerome had far better sense than that...
Hogwash, as I've noted in my last posting to this post of yours. There's a list of verifications as I noted.
And indeed, that’s really what the Magisterium is: It’s a living witness, guided and protected from error by God the Holy Spirit, to give a living witness to the Good News of Christ. Without this unbroken line of witnesses (apostolic succession), all we have are dead words on pages, with no real connection to today.
Hogwash. I can't think of a deader collection of whited sepulcher bureaucratic political power-mongers heading any religion that still claims to be the least bit Trinitarian. Though virtually every RELIGIOUS even Christian club are hard at work trying to catch up on such scores. Sadly.
PROTECTING FROM ERROR???? WHAT OUTRAGEOUS AFFRONTERY TO HOLY SPIRIT! If He thought that such was what God had set up, He'd likely be worried about being fired over such a poor job of keeping such a duplicitous heretical clique of self-righteous elitists from error--serious error, bloody serious error, horrifice power-mongering and sometimes even WAR-MONGERING error.
One would think RC's would postulate something that was not so demonstrably the OPPOSITE of what their history PROVED thousands of times over.
The fact that anyone pretending to be the least bit knowledgeable about the UNRUBBERIZED HISTORY could remotely believe anything of the kind--"kept us free from error" . . . is mind bogglingly . . . words fail me . . . obtuse, clueless, horrifically duplicitous--all such words are far too weak to describe the phenomenon.
is, IMO, God’s message to us today to not rely on the “Bible alone”,
HOGWASH.
I believe that the most plausible explanation is that it's a VIVID OBJECT LESSON IN AVOIDING IDOLATRY OF ANYTHING TANGIBLE; AVOIDING ANYTHING BUT WORSHIPPING, ADORING, VENERATING, . . . THE FATHER, SON AND SPIRIT.
Welllll, I thought maybe there would be some new slant on somthing that would prove an interesting challenge to respond to. Sadly, it was the same old same old brazenly idolotrous, blasphemous, duplicitous hogwash.
Perhaps you'll have a better chance next time. Though, if this bunch of stuff is any clue, I sure wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Mary has no influence on Jesus to deliver souls, pizza, or a big screen tv (I'm not certain on the pizza and tv)...
Salvation is a personal decision...We have assurance and confidence that God doesn't need Mary's help and that God will finish what He started...
Php 1:6 Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ:
Accurately describing repeated behaviors is far from false witness.
Thankfully, God knows that better than I do.
It is my [simple] understanding that the trinity are the only omnipresence.
In other words, if Mary could intercede on our behalf, if she could even hear us, she could only listen to one of us at a time.
My apologies conservativegramma...Post 1311 was supposed to be addressed to SoothingDave...
Dave, its hard not to go off on that tangent. That statue of Mary was HUGE, dead center of the altar and Christ was nowhere. Finally I found him in a tiny alcove off to the side, not even ON the altar. And He was about a fifth of the size of Mary. Try as you may to insist you don’t worship Mary, but I am hard pressed to believe that because of what I saw in that church. Mary had a place in that church in a preeminent position and Christ was secondary to her. You have no idea how offensive that was to see that.
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Exceedingly accurate, imho.
Folks have built horrific dogmas amidst the RC magicsterical based on far less evidence than that. Yet they hypocritically decry our accurate descriptions of their behaviors when they repeat them soooooo extensively, intensely and so often.
You bear false witness against yourself. That church says that you do by placing Mary in an exalted position over Christ.
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I don’t know about individual hearts and motives, per se . . . certainly not routinely, anyway.
But your description is entirely accurate of far too many RC’s. That much is overtly evident repeatedly.
Excellent points.
That’s one of the healthiest states for some folks . . .
LOL.
The town of IGNORE in the State of Bangalore.
/joke
Since I am not permitted to read minds or draw conclusions about state of mind, I do not do so.
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SOUNDS
like progress.
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