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."
Hey, we found something we agree on. Good for us!
But all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Babies are innocent of the knowledge of sin so they pass!
I don't know that babies are innocent, though the sins of children are incidental, or carried upon their parents, until the age of reckoning.
Amen!
We use pita bread! Never had a snake in church yet because if there was, I wouldn’t be there! LOL.
Soory I missed your reply here. Dave, I don't know what you're talking about. It is what the passage says. Period. Was it not you that was trying to explain the passage with gasoline as necessary but not sufficient? I confess, I'm confused by your answer.
I read prayers to Mary every week in local newspapers, but never to Jesus. Hmmm.
Many years ago we had a priest in town who was a big gambler. Lots of gambling in the rectory...tch, tch.
It does for born again protestants (and Catholics, too).
My opinion on thousands of protestant (and other) churches is that God didn’t want ONE edifice spewing heresy and thinking they were the one true church and, like the
Tower of Babel, he dispersed them into other denominations. My opinion, only, of course.
also two Mary statues to the left...
Of course Mad Dawg is right here. I should have been a little more careful with “perpetuated through time”, as if the one sacrifice were a continuing event. It is not perpetuated “in time” but “in eternity.” At the Mass we enter into eternity and the sacrifice at Cavalry 2000 years ago is made present to us here and now. We err if we think of eternity as a unending series of discreet moments. For God all of time is but a single moment. In answering yes, I was looking more at the idea that the Mass “is not a different sacrifice from that of Calvary, but the same sacrifice.”
Anyone who disagrees with Roman Catholicism is a fraud, right???
Pot, will you please stop calling the kettle black (LOL)?
I’ve never chased a woman in my whole life....
The saints here meaning the believers on earth...
Saints in Lydda were believers, but you know that.
I don’t know anyone who identifies himself as a Bible Christian. A born again Christian perhaps...
You know better than that Mad Dawg. We know where our authority comes from.
The saints spoken of here are the believers, whom God calls his saints. It’s our prayers He’s talking about here.
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