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.
I typically allow them to speak for themselves.
They think to speak for you, too.
Well, not my choice of words. Unfortunately they are deceived.
I blame Luther.
Yes you do. You use our bible without the books YOU CHOSE to throw out! Still ours.
"He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision." Psalms 2:4. "But Now".
"Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure." Psalms 2:5. "The Ages to Come". shortly..
But they have to insist that we accept their definition of prayer as being the same as worship in order to condemn us. And all of this asserted by those who claim to obey the commandments and in a forum that does not permit mind reading or the calling of anyone a liar we are repeatedly told that Catholics do not believe what we say we believe...go figure.
Isaiah 54:5 For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.
Isaiah 62:5 For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.
The Bible I use has never had anything ever shown to be in error. The Catholic Bible has many errors. Many things in the Catholic Bible have been proven wrong. Does that mean the Catholics are in error also?
Yep, especially everything denounced by God in scripture.
Say what? No Catholic denies that they pray to Mary and the Saints? Are you kidding me? Time and time again they deny it.
No. It means you choose and pick the parts you like.
Still our Bible. Get it straight.
Another Protestant trying to quote scripture developed by MY Church against me. Out of Context....BWAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAA!
There is your error. They only understand that we are still in this carnal flesh and will fail at times. The difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Protestants stand secure in the promises of Christ.
The Catholic Bible has errors; God does not err so obviously the Catholic Bible was not inspired by God. Get it?
He made sure that we really understood it so we'd really see our need for Him and realize all the more that we COULDN'T do it. He didn't do that to put us under more bondage than ever.
We're under the new covenant now. When we put our faith in Christ, the righteous requirements of the Law are fulfilled in us because Jesus fulfilled them with His righteous life and when we are in Christ, that is fulfilled in us.
Anyone who is in Christ is no longer bound by the Law. We are free in him, something that is quite obviously well beyond the ability of most Catholics to comprehend.
We are FREE. Do you not understand what freedom is or means?
Romans 7:1-6 1Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.
4Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Romans 8:1-4 1There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
What do you mean *ours*?
You said earlier you weren’t Catholic.
Which is it? Are you or not?
As compared to God who is subordinate to Mary?
As in He can't refuse any request of hers so that's why Catholics pray to Mary?
Talk about laughable.......
Thank you Jesus!
No, no elephants in the house/room at all. Here's a question that may clear the room. How many Roman Catholics actually bow their knee and confess with their tongues that Jesus Christ is LORD to the glory of God the Father? Kneeling in church hardly equates to the same thing in God's view. I'm surprised this truth hasn't seemed to sink in yet.
You need to READ. I said I am not ROMAN Catholic.
I am a member of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church of the East. (otherwise known as Eastern Orthodox for short)
There is one Bible. Then there is the one Bible with books thrown out by Protestants. Still our Bible.
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