Posted on 10/28/2011 6:59:29 AM PDT by markomalley
October 31 is only three days away. For Protestants, it is Reformation Day, the date in 1517 on which Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to that famous door in Wittenberg, Germany. Since I returned to the Catholic Church in April 2007, each year the commemoration has become a time of reflection about my own journey and the puzzles that led me back to the Church of my youth.
One of those puzzles was the relationship between the Church, Tradition, and the canon of Scripture. As a Protestant, I claimed to reject the normative role that Tradition plays in the development of Christian doctrine. But at times I seemed to rely on it. For example, on the content of the biblical canon – whether the Old Testament includes the deuterocanonical books (or “Apocrypha”), as the Catholic Church holds and Protestantism rejects. I would appeal to the exclusion of these books as canonical by the Jewish Council of Jamnia (A.D. 90-100) as well as doubts about those books raised by St. Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate, and a few other Church Fathers.
My reasoning, however, was extra-biblical. For it appealed to an authoritative leadership that has the power to recognize and certify books as canonical that were subsequently recognized as such by certain Fathers embedded in a tradition that, as a Protestant, I thought more authoritative than the tradition that certified what has come to be known as the Catholic canon. This latter tradition, rejected by Protestants, includes St. Augustine as well as the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), the Third Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), the Fourth Council of Carthage (A.D. 419), and the Council of Florence (A.D. 1441).
But if, according to my Protestant self, a Jewish council and a few Church Fathers are the grounds on which I am justified in saying what is the proper scope of the Old Testament canon, then what of New Testament canonicity? So, ironically, given my Protestant understanding of ecclesiology, then the sort of authority and tradition that apparently provided me warrant to exclude the deuterocanonical books from Scripture – binding magisterial authority with historical continuity – is missing from the Church during the development of New Testament canonicity.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains that this magisterial authority was in fact present in the early Church and thus gave its leadership the power to recognize and fix the New Testament canon. So, ironically, the Protestant case for a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon depends on Catholic intuitions about a tradition of magisterial authority.
This led to two other tensions. First, in defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, I argued, as noted above, that although some of the Church’s leading theologians and several regional councils accepted what is known today as the Catholic canon, others disagreed and embraced what is known today as the Protestant canon. It soon became clear to me that this did not help my case, since by employing this argumentative strategy, I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.
After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.
Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge. Take, for example, a portion of the revised and expanded Evangelical Theological Society statement of faith suggested (and eventually rejected by the membership) by two ETS members following my return to the Catholic Church. It states that, “this written word of God consists of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.”
But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts. In other words, if the sixty-six books are the supreme authority on matters of belief, and the number of books is a belief, and one cannot find that belief in any of the books, then the belief that Scripture consists of sixty-six particular books is an extra-biblical belief, an item of theological knowledge that is prima facie non-biblical.
For the Catholic, this is not a problem, since the Bible is the book of the Church, and thus there is an organic unity between the fixing of the canon and the development of doctrine and Christian practice.
Although I am forever indebted to my Evangelical brethren for instilling and nurturing in me a deep love of Scripture, it was that love that eventually led me to the Church that had the authority to distinguish Scripture from other things.
Anti-Catholic flamers should show up any minute now.
I’m not familiar with Beckwith, but am familiar with the E.T.S.
He is a curious case.
As a former RCC, I have no desire or interest whatsoever in going back to Rome.
As the Catholic parent of a Catholic graduate of Baylor U, I’m gratified to learn that Beckwith now teaches there. Baylor was tough duty for a Catholic girl back in the day. LOL
"They [heretics] gather their views from other sources than the Scriptures...We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith" - Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.1.1 - Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.1.1 Sola Scriptura !
"I beg of you, my dear brother, to live among these books [scripture], to meditate upon them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else." - Jerome (Letter 53:10)
"There is, brethren, one God, the knowledge of whom we gain from the Holy Scriptures, and from no other source. For just as a man, if he wishes to be skilled in the wisdom of this world, will find himself unable to get at it in any other way than by mastering the dogmas of philosophers, so all of us who wish to practice piety will be unable to learn its practice from any other quarter than the oracles of God. Whatever things, then, the Holy Scripture declare, at these let us look; and whatsoever things they teach, these let us learn; and as the Father wills our belief to be, let us believe; and as He wills the Son to be glorified, let us glorify Him; and as He wills the Holy Spirit to be bestowed, let us receive Him. Not according to our own will, nor according to our own mind, nor yet as using violently those things which are given by God, but even as He has chosen to teach them by the Holy Scriptures, so let us discern them." - Hippolytus, Against Noetus, ch 9
"For how can we adopt those things which we do not find in the holy Scriptures?" - Ambrose (On the Duties of the Clergy, 1:23:102)"We use Scripture to answer heresy and preceive that it is power and truth." - Basil the Great
“Let the inspired Scriptures then be our umpire, and the vote of truth will be given to those whose dogmas are found to agree with the Divine words.” - Gregory of Nyssa (d.ca, 395) “On the Holy Trinity”, NPNF, p. 327
“We are not content simply because this is the tradition of the Fathers. What is important is that the Fathers followed the meaning of the Scripture." - Basil the Great (ca.329–379) On the Holy Spirit, 7.16
“Neither dare one agree with catholic bishops if by chance they err in anything, but the result that their opinion is against the canonical Scriptures of God.” - Augustine (354–430) De unitate ecclesiae, 10
"For among the things that are plainly laid down in Scripture are to be found all matters that concern faith and the manner of life,--to wit, hope and love, of which I have spoken in the previous book. After this, when we have made ourselves to a certain extent familiar with the language of Scripture, we may proceed to open up and investigate the obscure passages, and in doing so draw examples from the plainer expressions to throw light upon the more obscure, and use the evidence of passages about which there is no doubt to remove all hesitation in regard to the doubtful passages." - Augustine (On Christian Doctrine, 2:9)
Sola Scriptura !
Only the scriptures contain the teaching of the apostles and they speak to us through it, and that voice is louder and more perfect than any man made tradition!
"Having read [Francis Beckwith]’s book, I am appalled at the blatant misrepresentation of both the Reformed teaching as well the teaching of Roman Catholicism. His lack of knowledge on historical issues is forgivable, given his ignorance, but to misrepresent and caricature the Reformed faith and to misrepresent the salvation teachings of Rome is simply irresponsible and dishonest..."
-- from the internet article Why Scripture and the Facts of History Compel Me, a Former Roman Catholic, to Remain a Committed Evangelical Protestant
....I'd never even heard of the "Evangelical Theological Society" before this week, and I'm supposed to believe that the impact of Beckwith's conversion is equal to the Donut Repair Man's?
-- Alex Murphy, May 9, 2007
What do you call the Protestant confessions or the manmade tradition of only baptizing adults?
Every Protestant sect has its own tradition when it comes to interpreting the scriptures. So I have to let out a hearty laugh.
It certainly does for me and I would think for anyone wanting to know truth.
Error in understanding or inserting meaning that isn’t there.
>>Every Protestant sect has its own tradition when it comes to interpreting the scriptures. So I have to let out a hearty laugh.<<
That’s why I, and the early church fathers, insist on relying on the written words of the original writers of scripture. Error of departing from their words when making doctrine is in my mind no laughing matter.
When the Early Church Fathers are cited when only discussing Scripture, in carefully selected quotes chosen for the "Protestant ear" they of course sound Protestant. However, when these same fathers are cited in the context of their entire body of work it becomes obvious that the preached that the Holy Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church are conjoined into a single Truth arising from a single source.
They believed in the primacy of Scripture, but they didn’t embrace Scripture alone.
http://www.cin.org/users/jgallegos/trad.htm
They believed in the primacy of Scripture, but they didn’t embrace Scripture alone.
http://www.cin.org/users/jgallegos/trad.htm
"If we now consider the OBJECT of that FAITH which we Christians HOLD, and using it as a RULE, apply ourselves, as the Apostle teaches to the reading of inspired Scripture. For Christ's enemies, being ignorant of this OBJECT, (what object? The object of scripture) have wandered from the way of truth, and have stumbled on a stone of stumbling, thinking otherwise than they should think" Orat 3,28
"But our faith is right, and starts from the teaching of the Apostles and tradition of the fathers, being confirmed both by the NT and the Old." Epis 60
'Of course, the holy Scriptures, divinely inspired are self-sufficient for the proclamation of the truth. But there are also numerous works composed for this purpose by blessed teachers. The ONE WHO READS THEM will ==UNDERSTAND== the INTERPRETATION of the Scriptures AND will be ABLE to GAIN knowledge he desrires' C. Gentes 1 the only thing he refers to here is writings about scripture to help people understand. It is not talking about something that is not based on scripture.)
Bolding and coloring mine.
I have given you a list of church fathers who emphatically claimed Sola Scriptura as the only authority. To claim anything different is to call them liers.
So their “entire body of work” made parts of their statements false?
to seek nothing else
"I beg of you, my dear brother, to live among these books [scripture], to meditate upon them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else." - Jerome (Letter 53:10)
and from no other source.
"There is, brethren, one God, the knowledge of whom we gain from the Holy Scriptures, and from no other source. For just as a man, if he wishes to be skilled in the wisdom of this world, will find himself unable to get at it in any other way than by mastering the dogmas of philosophers, so all of us who wish to practice piety will be unable to learn its practice from any other quarter than the oracles of God. Whatever things, then, the Holy Scripture declare, at these let us look; and whatsoever things they teach, these let us learn; and as the Father wills our belief to be, let us believe; and as He wills the Son to be glorified, let us glorify Him; and as He wills the Holy Spirit to be bestowed, let us receive Him. Not according to our own will, nor according to our own mind, nor yet as using violently those things which are given by God, but even as He has chosen to teach them by the Holy Scriptures, so let us discern them." - Hippolytus, Against Noetus, ch 9
which we do not find in the holy Scriptures
"For how can we adopt those things which we do not find in the holy Scriptures?" - Ambrose (On the Duties of the Clergy, 1:23:102)
But when a single verse of the Bible is interpreted to support RCC dogma, the broader context should be ignored to maintain the doctrine.
Spock would say ... "facinating."
I may have found my next term paper topic.
Yet you cite the teachings of the Fathers of the church....
It seems we should find among the doctrines of scripture that of sola scriptura, but that is not what we see.
"All SCRIPTURE is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." 2 Tim. 3:16,17.
Want doctrine? Read Scripture. Want to find true correction? See Bible. Want to know what God's righteousness for man is? Refer to God's Word. Want to be perfect in God's eyes, completely and thoroughly furnished to be His workman? God's Word will THOROUGHLY furnish you.
I didn't say it. HE did. That's His promise. That Scripture is ALL we need.
Would Spock call the selective presentation of data from a very diverse dataset bias or simply dishonest?
Please note that I am not advocating the exclusion of any data or writing from the body or work produced by any of the Fathers. That is the domain of the Reformers.
It doesn’t say only in there anywheres.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.