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.
Amen bb! Count me in.
You’re IN! Thanks. I hope you have a blessed and peaceful night.
John 8:36 - If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
Hebrews 4:10 - For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.
Hebrews 4:11 - Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.
2 Peter 1:10 - Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall
John 6:29 - This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent
Luke 12:32 - Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Mark 5:36 - Be not afraid, only believe
There you again projecting a preconceived notion or belief into what has been written.
Negative. This has been stated repeatedly here.
>> Paul is an also. Not a primary.<<
There were no “primaries”. That notion was invented by the guys hoping to wear the pointy hat in Rome.
Negative again. There are many here who consider Paul to be the Apostle whom Jesus finally got right; He was just practising on the 12.
>> They were directed to the churches under Paul's jurisdiction<<
Jurisdiction? LOL We are no longer under the law. That language rings hollow to Spirit filled Christians.
If you have any doubt about Paul's jurisdiction over the churches in his diocese, you must reread his epistles.
1 Corinthians 9: 24* Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win.p 25Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.q 26Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. 27No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.*
What does Paul talk about here, if not works? This theme runs through his letters. You must first believe in God, then you must do over the long run. Salvation is not a one time thing - it is where you must be at the end of your life.
I suppose they will have to answer for themselves. Wouldn’t be fair for me to answer for them.
And I do not expect you to. However, they are there and they require debating as well.
Yes it does. To bad the RCC screwed up so bad by going back under the law.
We acknowledge the more than 50 commandments of Christ and do our best to follow them. Why is that so difficult for the children of the Reformation?
Well, let’s start.
Does the CC teach that Mary is the queen of heaven? Queen as in queen mother - the model of OT queens. The queen is not the (plural) wife; she is the mother of the King. Strike one.
Does the CC teach that Mary was bodily assumed into heaven?
No. It is thought possible but not taught as truth. Strike two.
Does the CC teach that speaking with those who have passed from this life other than Jesus is ok?
Define speaking, before I can answer that.
Does the CC teach that formally belonging to the RCC is prerequisite for salvation?
Negative. It only says that this is what Jesus taught and that there may be other avenues ie unborn children and those who desire salvation but do not have the participation in the Church. It does say that those who turn down the offer of salvation condemn themselves.
Does the CC teach that carrying those staffs, cups, monstrance etc with the symbols of pagan religions is ok?
Negative. We only carry the symbols of Christianity.
Any of those and I’m out. K?
I don't want you out. I want you in.
The evidence of Scripture is that there are certain men set apart who have hand laid upon them to be ordained into the service of God. Paul did not truly set upon his mission until the Council in Jerusalem laid hands upon him.
How many Protestants actually bow the knee? That is the elephant in the house that the Protestants here will not acknowledge.
A tad, but the only real difference is a matter of degree. Jesus didn't replace the Law, He set the bar for keeping it MUCH higher.
And you guys don't even try to keep it; you just have a mythology that you get to avoid it.
So good luck trying to keep what Jesus required of us if you can't keep the Law in the OT, the Ten commandments to start with, to make it easy.
So not only do you guys demand to declare your own salvation, you want to make it easy.
Let us know when you've got those down.
I don't answer to you.
And you missed the most important one. Submission to Christ.
If you do not submit to the Church, you do not submit to Christ.
If you think there's only those two options that you gave, you are in way bigger trouble than you realize.
Rebelling against God carries its own penalty.
YAWN. Yea, we know, we heard it before, in our navels, between our toes, in our cornflakes, in the mirror, yada, yada, yada. Funny thing though, if such a thing actually happens, why is it that most of us on this "side" are in agreement about the major tenets of the Christian faith?
You aren't. You are only in agreement about antiCatholicism. And in the chicken bones or dice for formulating theology.
This "true Church of Christ", I'm happy to say, consists of all those who hold to the same faith of those early believers. We are all part of that universal body of Jesus Christ, no time like the present to get used to the idea.
As long as they are not truly of the Church of Christ, but in some knockoff facsimile that only remotely resembles the Church that Christ Created and the Holy Spirit commissioned at Pentecost.
Apparently, so do you guys. Why is that?
Martin Luther wrote extensively on the state of his intestines. We don't.
Thank you for proving my point so eloquently.
All of them.
And it seems that exactly none of you guys consider yourselves under ANY of them at all; you just get a pass to salvation because, well, you declare it.
The Apocrypha wasn’t officially added until the Council of Trent was it? They needed it in there for its references to some of their doctrines not contained in scripture. They needed support for what the reformers were disagreeing with the CC on. They obviously didn’t care if they were accurate even historically with other stuff in the Apocrypha.
Apparently, you don’t know your history. He received his enlightenment sitting on the toilet. He suffered from chronic constipation. Historical fact.
Apparently, you don’t know your history. He received his enlightenment sitting on the toilet. He suffered from chronic constipation. Historical fact.
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