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.
That’s the book where the woman who supposedly was supposed to have been burned for listening to Paul’s teaching that all should stay virgins in order to get into heaven. While she is being readied for burning she sees “the Lord in the likeness of Paul” even though Jesus said they would not see Him again untill His coming at the end of time. Then when they lit the fire the ground opened up and hail and water came down and she wasn’t burned. As you read the stories of Thecla the virgin in that book you can understand why Tertullian called it heretical.
It becomes obvious by the writings that by the year 200AD the pagan influences had begun to engrane themselves into the “religion” of those the CC calls “church fathers”.
I get the impression that you read that stuff as if it is scripture. It’s pagan through and through as is much of the doctrine of the RCC.
Jesus was both God and man. God does not have a mother.
I would not take Tertullian’s pronouncement as valid. He was declared, and died a Heretic.
Scripture interprets scripture.
>> The only difference is you refuse to see that you are relying on Baptist tradition when you interpret the scriptures.<<
I’m not a Baptist nor do I rely on their interpretations.
>> The written record needs an interpreter.<<
So says? >> How do you objectively know that the liberal Protestants aren’t right?<<
Because they go against scripture as does the CC.
>> After all, it’s just your word against theirs.<<
Nope. It’s scripture against the interpretations of man.
Scripture says that Christ was tempted like any man but didn’t yield to temptation but you say He wasn’t the only one? You say that Mary also “yielded not to temptation”? You say that Christ was not the only one who was sinless? I call that blasphemy.
I believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church still him a father of the church does it not? So you would say that one of the fathers of the CC was a heretic? Yet doesn’t the CC also claim unanimous consent? Are you saying that not only do they not have unanimous consent amongst the various “fathers” but that they don’t even have it in each of the “fathers”?
The Apology of the Augsburg Confession quotes from Tobit and 2d Maccabees.
I never understood that when I was a Lutheran. Article 24 of the Augsburg Confession commends prayers for the dead.
It always amazes me how Lutherans say they believe in the Bible alone and Baptists say they believe the same thing, yet they have very little in common.
I remember in college joining the Protestant study group and being shocked how we all claimed to believe in the Bible alone and faith alone, but when it came down to the details, we actually had very little in common.
>> Aren’t you relying on traditions of men in the way you interpret scripture?<<
Scripture interprets scripture.
>> The only difference is you refuse to see that you are relying on Baptist tradition when you interpret the scriptures.<<
I’m not a Baptist nor do I rely on their interpretations.
OK, that of whatever Protestant sect you belong to.
>> The written record needs an interpreter.<<
So says? Is God not the God of unity not of division? 1 Corinthians 14:33 Yet you get a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Baptist, a Calvinist, an Arminian, etc. in the same room, I think you will find they can’t even agree among themselves what the Bible actually means.
Do the Baptists have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit or the Calvinists, etc.?
>> How do you objectively know that the liberal Protestants aren’t right?<<
Because they go against scripture as does the CC.
Aren’t you relying on your subjective personal interpretation? What apart from yourself leaves you to believe you have the correct understanding of what the Bible actually means?
Do you know better say than St. Augustine or St. Ignatius of Antioch for example?
>> After all, it’s just your word against theirs.<<
Nope. It’s scripture against the interpretations of man.
Aren’t you interpreting scripture and aren’t you a man?
Well, Tertullian wasn’t exactly orthodox throughout his career.
Maybe he became a good Protestant when he fell into the heresy of Montanism.
Every bishop is a vicar of Christ, per St. Ignatius of Antioch.
Then you reject the dogma of the hypostatic union. Correct?
Are you a Nestorian?
Nope, scripture interprets scripture. I don’t.
You keep talking about differences in belief among the Protestants. I would simply ask you this about differences. Do you believe like the Catholic Church that you serve the same God as the Muslims?
Christ was indeed both God and man.
The Nestorians believe Jesus had two natures, but that Mary was the mother of the human nature only.
And still be considered by the CC as a church father? Wow!
BTTT!
There is only one God.
Is it your claim that the Church teaches that we can all become God? Really? Again, silly to the extreme.
Tell me, CB, are you perfectly united to God as Jesus was?
Or do you understand that as long as we are separated from Him by our sinful states, we cannot fully grasp the perfection and glory of God?
Though Jesus paid in full for our sins so that we may one day share in His glory, we are not and cannot be perfect while in our bodies. We must certainly strive for such perfection, but without grace, we cannot hope to even come close.
It will only be in death, when our souls are released from the carnal world that we can be fully united to God, one with Him, as we praise Him forever in heaven.
“That they may be one, as you and I are one.”
Not likely as they were dead before the time it was written.
In this passage Jesus is not decrying the woman for her praise of Mary, but clarifying why Mary is blessed.....she heard the word of God and obeyed it.
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