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.
Can you think of any area where he hasn't? It IS curious that what you call "fluff" was actual Scripture verses that addressed the very question of the presence and purposes of the devil. I don't remember if you're one of the ones that believes Satan was and still is "bound" and unable to work his evil schemes in the world today, If so, then I would direct you to those verses that very clearly state Satan is active in the world and what his designs entail. He is the "enemy of our souls, the accuser of the brethren. In Acts 13, Paul is addressing a sorcerer named Barjesus who was trying to turn a person away from the truth of Jesus Christ, he tells him, "And said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?" This is the plan of Satan, to pervert the truth, to lead souls away from the truth and there is not one area that he has not tried to infiltrate. To be blind to this, is to allow his stealthy ways and false message to seep in, polluting the simplicity that is in Christ.
Your complaint is not against me. I just posted the Scripture.
Your complaint is with the guy you call a church father who wrote Galatians and those you call church fathers who canonized it.
Satan is hardly bound today. He has:
1. A regular system of evangelists, preachers and apostles.
2. These Satanic evangelists preach a gospel.
3. He has a system of doctrine.
4. He has a communion table.
5. He has a counterfeit righteousness.
6. He has counterfeit power, signs, and wonders.
7. He has a counterfeit Christ.
8. He has a counterfeit Spirituality.
And it's all for one reason: to obscure the truth of 2 Cor. 4:3-4.
Neither do we know them. So, as far as it being us merely talking about spirituality and not manifesting it, we could say the same thing about them. Didn't Jesus say something about when we judge another we are judged by the same measure?
"Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself." - James 2:17
"For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead." - James 2:26
Still and always, the problem for Paulism in St. James’s Epistle..
Still and always, the problem for Catholicism is found in Paul's writings.
Even Luther worked toward reconciling the epistle with his theology.
It seems your teachers have found it much easier: Just ignore the parts you don’t like or don’t fit your theology, whether it be St. James or Jesus.
How do you guys know when you did enough good works? Or good enough ones?
Ignore? How about understanding God’s Plan for mankind? Because it’s very clearly written. And available to anyone who bothers to study God’s word of truth, rightly divided. If the Holy Spirit is in you, then you have the ability to understand what He has written to you and for you. If not, then all the studying in the world will bring you nothing but confusion. The wisdom of man is foolishness to God. And we know He is not the author of confusion. Show me a religious institution that has more books on books of studies of doctrines and traditions and what God “meant to say” and I will show you one CONFUSED, deceived place.
I know what Catholics do when Paul is quoted. Here are Jesus' own words on the subject.
John 10:25-30 25Jesus answered them, "I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one."
Romans is written "to all in Rome."
I think you have license to throw out all the epistles now.
Of course there are parts of scripture that address certain audiences, and this is properly used to understand the meaning.
But dividing out entire books and dividing out Jesus's ministry...?
Hard to fathom, but easy to understand why it won't get very far. At least not as long as Christian means a follower of Christ.
Well, if you’re referring to “no one will snatch them..” you have likely heard the rebuttal: that this is of course true. But we can separate ourselves. Unless you are a Calvinist, you believe in free will. God does not force us to love Him now or in the future come what may; we may change our minds and hearts as many have.
Now, I still have the question for you, never answered, from a while back:
You said you believe all your future sins are already forgiven whatever they may be. Does this include blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?
"The wisdom of man is foolishness to God."
You are very wise.
You believe teachers – who were even wiser – who at long last rightly divided, and decoded, Holy Scripture 1,800 years after the Word became flesh and walked among us, teaching about the Kingdom of God.
These teachers are so wise they know that what the Incarnate Word taught about the Kingdom of God does not apply to us. Says so right there in Holy Scripture. No one was wise enough to see it before!
What a revelation your teachers had!
How much wisdom these men possess!
Jesus said that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the unforgivable sin.
Tell me, can a believer who has the Holy Spirit living in him blaspheme the Holy Spirit? Can he say that it is a demon living in himself?
The context in which Jesus made that statement was when the Pharisees were attributing to Satan the clear works of the Holy Spirit that Jesus was doing. They were stating that Jesus was demon possessed for doing miracles only God could do.
No, I don’t believe they can.
But I believe you said all your future sins are already forgiven. Yet there is that unpardonable one.
What I would conclude according to your theology as you have presented it is:
All your future sins are already forgiven, unless you commit the unpardonable one, in which case you don’t have the Holy Spirit living in you and therefore you lose the forgiveness for all your past, present and future sins that you once thought you had.
You are not making ANY sense.
Does the concept of being adopted into a family escape you? Do you disown your child and write him out of your will every time he does something wrong. And then reinstate him only when he repents?
Is he still not your son even when disobedient? Does the disobedience actually sever the relationship or only interfere with the lines of communication?
God is not going to send any redeemed child of His to hell just for not being perfect enough so as to miss repenting of a sin they failed to realize they committed.
And Catholics wonder why the God they portray comes across as capricious? It's on again/ off again salvation, all based on human effort.
It’s not God that’s capricious. It’s not God that does the rebelling.
It is man.
Your theology has you being omniscient about your future life, decisions and final judgement.
And therefore it makes no sense if I propose you might be wrong.
Not God, you.
If a believer cannot commit the unpardonable sin, then I have nothing to worry about.
The only way someone can commit that sin is as an unbeliever and at that point there was no forgiveness to lose in the first place because they never had it in the first place.
All your future sins are already forgiven, unless you commit the unpardonable one, in which case you don’t have the Holy Spirit living in you and therefore you lose the forgiveness for all your past, present and future sins that you once thought you had.I.e., you were wrong.
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