woohooo -- perhaps
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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.
Same church, different cities.
Why indeed would God give us the knowledge of right versus wrong, the gift of reason and freewill, and a sense of responsibility if we have no need of them? Why would He reveal His Word and make us subject to His law, known to us by the dictates of conscience, if it were pointless?
Obviously, you can't get the answer from your religion...Your religion doesn't know...
The answers however are in the scriptures...
You mean in a way that the natural man can understand it...
I've read some of Aquinas...I've read many modern commentaries...
Aquinas' commentary doesn't hold a candle to those who actually believe what the scriptures say...
I wouldn't waste any more time on Aquinas than I already have...
Now that's a stupid statement...There have been non Catholics long before that religion started in the 300s...
Look at Paul; don't call any man father; don't forbid any one to marry; don't prevent anyone from eating meat on Friday; there is only one mediator between God and man, and it sure ain't Mary...
And Peter; don't you dare bow down to me...
These guys were not Catholics...They abhorred everything the Catholic religion stands for...
But the extremely pagan Constantine, he took a real likin' to your religion...So much so that he made it the official religion of Rome...The Catholics and the pagan goddess worshipers could walk and live hand in hand...
No dog bone for you today Fido...What we believe in the scriptures has not a thing at all to do with your religion...We read the scriptures and believe what they say, as they say it...
We don't go for private, twisted interpretations when the words we read make perfectly good sense as we read them...
Your refusal to even consider the writings of Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church and a man recognized as a giant by many Protestant theologians speaks to the willful ignorance of Protestantism.
What is this fixation with Aquinas??? God trumps Aquinas every time...I'll stick with God...
I must have really hit a nerve, I'm a Bubba now...Time will tell you...I already know...
That's alright...Nothing wrong with Bubba...But it's gotta be CoolBubba...
They are lying right off the bat...God never willed any such thing...
You mean the Catholic historical record...No thanks...
I right now am a member of the original church...It doesn't have a pope...It doesn't have a building...It doesn't have a country/state...It doesn't pray to anyone but God...It doesn't/can't save anyone...
The original church did not come out of anyone's religious tradition...The church was the result of preaching and teaching that became written down and we have that same written record today...
We have the blueprint and the guide for the church...
wrong again. check out any historical church.
Yes there certainly is...We can repent and believe and trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior...And Jesus did not pay the penalty for 'eternal separation from God, otherwise known as Hell...People will pay that penalty themselves...
One is saved if one believes in Jesus, but belief is not a one time declaration of the so called “Sinner’s prayer”.
I can only assume you know very little about a sinner's prayer...
And this verse alone, proves that your are wrong...
Joh 5:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
And this:
Eph 2:6 And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:
You think Jesus is going to kick us out of heaven after we are already there with him???
He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.
It all comes with rightly dividing the truth (2Tim. 2:15)...
1Jn 4:4 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.
1Jn 5:4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.
1Jn 5:5 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?
As Christians, we have already overcome...You can't chose one verse over the other...You must reconcile all the scripture to understand it...
If a person has to HOPE to have eternal life in heaven
It turns out to be a good thing when people learn to understand what they are reading...
Rom 12:12 Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer;
Hope
ἐλπίς
elpis
el-pece'
Fromἔλπω elpō which is a primary word (to anticipate, usually with pleasure); expectation (abstract or concrete) or confidence: - faith, hope.
I don't know how you could prove it, but give it a try...
I'm going by what I read and hear...
You guys pray to Mary in the Rosary...You pray to Saints and Mary for everything from salvation and mercy to lost keys and real estate transactions...
It 'appears' that the only time you pray to God is during Mass which statistically is attended only once a month or so by most Catholics...
If you have some evidence of something different, would love to see it...
Try again...I don't understand German...
Neither have the accusers considered the role of symbolism in communicating and creating mnemonics for the teaching of Scripture to the illiterate and those who have no written language.
So you had to resort to borrowing pagan symbols to get the simpletons to understand Christianity???
If I was in charge of a religion, I'd invent my own symbols so's the dummies wouldn't confuse my religion with the pagan's...
I think not. One can find the struggle Paul was involved in against the inclusion of the worship of Diana in Acts 19. The merchants of Ephesus were none too pleased with Paul and the other Apostles and disciples teachings contrary to the worship and practices there.
Dead giveaway that this is the opinion of a fallible man invoking your rule.
Sorry, doesn't count.
These groups like boatbums will have fallen for the fake story that Paul just renamed the pagan “unknown god” Jesus.
which cb rule is that?
Different churches. Different problems.
People like that actually believe that all information on the internet is created equal, endowed by its creators with an unalienable right to attack the Church with immunity from scrutiny and review. Somehow they have convinced themselves and each other that every site slapped together by the Rev. Cletus T. Wormwood and the fine ladies of the Burning Cross Congregation's Anti-Papist Society is equal in merit and as deserving of respect as the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome, and Pope Gregory I, and Saint Bellarmine so they choose to remain blissfully ignorant.
"Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." - Luke 23:24
woohooo -- perhaps
You may also need the guide to English, right?
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