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."
References please.
References? Won't a little bit of thought do?
Do you think God is:
a) bound by time and subject to its onward march
b) the Creator of all things including time and therefore not subject to it, but rather outside of it
Your choice.
Amen.
Wow, 1620 posts?!? Where have I been?
Jump on in, Dawg, Happy to have you.
I don't know nothin' about no disparity and would be grateful for more details and all.
I was speaking to the disparity between the RCC and the Protestant churches.
When you have what is more of a HUGE extended family, than the dictatorship we are depicted as being, there is always some weird guy somewhere - or even a bunch of weird guys doing stuff that the rest of us question.
Nice to see that it is much the same across the Tiber as it is among us 'great unwashed'... Please be so kind as to give the Protestant denominations the same understanding.
In the 14+ years that I;ve been worsipping in the RCC the vast predominance of the preacing is what I'd call "Evangelical" in the sense that it is more and more often a proclamation of the Love of God in Jesus than a moral exhortation or an urging for folks to "Pay, Pray and Obey."
Praise the Lord! The Good News is what it's all about... Don't get that 'worsipping' though.. is that where the extra sacramental wine goes? :D
"Apparently God violated His own commandment" [excerpt]
Thank you for confirming that He CAN turn the Eucharist and Wine into His Body and Blood and that He CAN protect His mother from sin from the moment of conception and He CAN give one of His Disciples the Keys of Heaven.
" But of this one thing be not ignorant, my beloved, that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (2 Peter 3:8)"
Where do you find that in Scripture?
Anyone who tries to explain God with science will only make a mockery of both.
(psst: what’s a “Crevo debate”?)
BOOYAH!
God is outside the confines of time (In the beginning God). Time as we know it is nothing more than the Earth's relationship to the Sun, it has NOTHING to do with Heaven.
Where is that in the Bible?
Creation vs. evolution, threads that make ANY Catholic vs. Protestant thread look civil.
Where in Scripture can you not find it?
1 Thess 5:21
References? Won't a little bit of thought do?
Do you think God is:
a) bound by time and subject to its onward march
b) the Creator of all things including time and therefore not subject to it, but rather outside of it
Your choice.
What angel was prophesied in the Bible?
Don't succumb to this new age nonsense (which neither Catholicism nor Protestantism supports) that ANY of us become angels when we enter Heaven.
Darn Caught again (but at least you didn't see me worguzzling?Only slighly mo' better is that "Well, let's take that argument and apply it to YOUR side ...."
WE end up using a sledgehammer where tweezers and scalpel are called for. And I think that's because we think if we don't Win one for Jesus, the universe will be in peril.
Works righteousness .... Jesus can take care of Himself.
The presence of error and corruption in all out "Ecclesial assemblies" is better responded to with prayer than with, "Nyah nyah."
Who with a working brain, would deny that many committed Protestants or "Whatever I am it sure isn't in communion with the See of Rome"-ants deeply love Jesus and seek to do His will. And I dare say that there are two or three Catholics who have the same affections and intentions.
We each believe we have something precious. We each believe the other to be wrong in some important (if not ultimately important) ways.
Okay, end of insufferably self-righteous piety. LEt me foller along in yo' discussion, (bearing in mind that I'm leaving in a few minutes to create the appearance of industriousness and productivity).
"(psst: what’s a “Crevo debate”?)"
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