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.
LOL! You are clueless about the Scripture, also! Give it up!
And every apostate from the faith thinks they are an expert...
Not on your authority. I know more scripture and theology than you will ever begin to know.
Sure you will. Jim Jones and David Koresh thought THEY were being guided by the Holy Spirit also.
You don’t serve Koolaid at the home church do you? (SARCASM)
How interesting.
Just like the magisterium.....
They think they're experts. That must make them apostates.
That was 324 years after my church was started. The last book of my Bible was written around 96AD and the church I belong to was well established. Historical fact.
So does that guy in the pointy hat in Rome. Problem is, in his Bible are books that have been proven to be in error. The Holy Spirit would never ever cause something to be written that has errors in it. He must be wrong about being guided by the Holy Spirit.
Obviously some don't. I guess the Jews could say the Old Testament is THEIRS and only THEY can interpret it? I agree with you though, that what is called the Catholic Bible does contain errors not the least of which is the section they ADDED called the Apocryphal books - added to the Old Testament section. Even many of the early church fathers rejected them as divinely inspired. I prefer the Bible that God directed and has preserved.
No one claims to be a replacement for Christ.
That is very different thing than to be His representative.
We are all His representatives, but to a different purpose and to a different degree.
That Christ prepared the Apostles to spread His message and lead His church is clear in the NT. That the Apostles then prepared others to carry on after them is also clear.
Scripture does in fact say that those who believe in Him are part of His body the Church, as in the Church being one and we being many members of the one Body of Christ.
Come on.
Dontchaknow, the Baptist were the first church. They’re even listed.
John the Baptist.
Laugh while you can. BTW: I thought you said you weren’t Catholic? I could have sworn you said that..hmmmm...Anyway, your very words will convict you one day. As you try in vain to explain those very words, they will be your downfall. As surely as God is on His Throne and awaiting the last member of the Body of Christ to be saved.
Not only did the RCC not interpret that verse correctly but they forgot to continue on in that chapter and see that right after that He said to Peter “get thee behind me Satan”.
Vicar comes from vicarious which means a substitute. Christ does not need a substitute on earth either.
The problem that the RCC has is that neither the list of Bishops from Hyppolytus or from the Nicene fathers has Peter listed as one of the Bishops. The whole thing about Apostolic succession falls on it’s face for them.
If only they would open their eyes
Of course it is.
Everyone else gets it.
But then again, rules are made for everyone else. Right?
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