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.
One correction: Purgatory is an invention of the Western Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church has never taught or believed in Purgatory. Nor did the Eastern Church Fathers.
Protestants did follow the same canon UNTIL the Roundheads under Cromwell decided to remove those books THEY felt were not correct. The 1611 King James Version originally included the Apocrypha, etc.
The Assyrians are NESTORIANS. Not a good example to use.
You are really asking for it. Honoring Jesus Christ and slandering his Holy Mother is blasphemous.
I wouldn’t go outside during a lightning storm, if I were u.
Could be dangerous.
I consider them an authoritative interpretation of Holy Scripture that are far more authentic than any iteration of 21st century Baptist preacher.
The feeling is mutual. Evangelicals are heretics whose definition of “Biblical” is subjective.
You haven’t looked too hard. Even the Orthodox regard the Pope as first and as the Successor of St. Peter, even though they don’t believe St. Peter’s prerogatives transferred to the Bishop of Rome.
That doesn’t change the fact Baptists are Nestorians plain and simple.
The Eastern Orthodox nor Greek Catholics who are under for that matter use the term purgatory, but their beliefs amount to the same thing.
It comes down to a matter of terminology. I might add that Rome doesn’t require Eastern Catholics to believe in superogatory works, etc.
Besides the whole notion of imputed righteousness is a 16th century innovation.
The church fathers on the state of purification after death (purgatory). http://www.cin.org/users/jgallegos/purg.htm
Do you believe that there is a human Jesus and a Divine Jesus?
Was Mary the mother of the human Jesus only?
St. Paul says to hold fast to tradition?
Aren’t you relying on traditions of men in the way you interpret scripture?
Lutherans, for example, would say scripture alone teaches that pastors can absolve sins and infant baptism.
The only difference is you refuse to see that you are relying on Baptist tradition when you interpret the scriptures.
The written record needs an interpreter. How do you objectively know that the liberal Protestants aren’t right?
After all, it’s just your word against theirs.
The Lutheran confessions cite the Deuterocanonicals as scripture paradoxically.
Luke 11:27-28 27 And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. 28 But he said, Nay rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
(Greek Menounge: nay surely, nay rather)
Since when are Baptists Nestorians? Nestorians believe that Mary gave birth to the MAN Jesus, that he was not born with two natures.
Baptists, though Protestant, believe mainstream.
That is a great link, but be careful when using Tertullian, or Origen. Both died heretics.
Correction: We honor him as Peter’s successor, and Primus Inter Pares, or “first among equals”. This was his title from the early Church.
Not the Vicar of Christ.
They are misguided. Pray for them. They reject the Holy Church, yet accept the scripture FROM that Church!
We Orthodox believe that all persons who die go to a place of repose. Until the judgement.
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