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.
Adam and Eve were created without sin.
It is our free will that allows us to sin.
It is God’s grace that aids us in resisting temptation.
Mary was “full of grace” meaning she had all the graces she needed to lead a sinless life at the behest of God who chose her to bear His only Son.
She did not merit this on her own.
She had need of Jesus as Savior as we all do.
Absolutely not. Jesus was God.
>> “That they may be one, as you and I are one.”<<
Are you your husband? When you got married were you “one flesh”? Did that make you your husband?
Making me one with God does not make me God.
I also could not find any authentication of this “quote” by Pope Pelagius.
What I find though is proof that a little “knowledge” is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of one whose desire is to defame rather than edify.
Pelagius was a political schemer who courted the east over the west when in Constantinople because he wanted to be pope and thought that was his best chance. Since Constantine, there has been tension between the eastern and western churches. Pelagius hoped to profit from it in his quest, so if he made this claim, it was for his own gain at the expense of the church. History proves him wrong.
It is obvious that the protestant’s understanding of the office of pope and infallibility is sorely deficient.
The every word of every pope is not infallible, nor are the popes incapable of sinning.
He indeed was decrying the woman for claiming that Mary was blessed because she carried Jesus. Jesus said, “NAY, rather blessed are they”.
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, (Greek Menounge: nay surely, nay rather) blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
Catholics elevate and venerate Mary because she carried Jesus and that’s what Jesus said nay too.
Yet Jesus prayed that we would be one, as He and the Father are one. He prayed that we would abide in Him and He in us as the Father abides in Him.
It is silly beyond belief and I can’t say it enough to think that the church teaches that we become God in the sense in which you would like to think.
When Jesus confronts Paul, He says, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” but Saul had not persecuted Jesus. He was persecuting His followers.
You appear to be dancing around with your words. If, as Catholics claim, Mary was sinless for whatever reason then Jesus was not the only sinless human. That’s blasphemy.
CCC 460 The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature":78 "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God."79 "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God."80 "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."81
It doesn’t say “one with God” and it goes beyond being “sons of God” because it said that in the previous sentence then went one step further. You cannot read it any other way.
It is not I who dances around with words.
Just as Mary was ASSUMED into heaven by Her Son and did not ASCEND to heaven as Jesus did of His own power as God, she did not live a sinless life because of her own grace and power, but with that granted her by Her Son.
God, as He has done throughout salvation history grants to those whom He would use, the graces they need to accomplish His will. Whomever He calls He prepares and strengthens for His purpose.
St. Augustine or St. Ignatius of Antioch were just men as well.
Any believer has the same Holy Spirit guiding him into truth that inspired the Scripture that He guided men as they wrote.
The easiest way to know what God's thinking about an issue is to read and memorize Scripture. When someone fills his mind with that much Scripture, then he does see how Scripture interprets Scripture.
IknowJvette. It’s always some excuse isn’t it? Truth seeps out from that sewer and it’s attacked as “poorly catechized, not really a Catholic, demented, a heretic, a “self-described devout Catholic”, someone with a grudge against the church...whatever it takes to kill the messenger and hopefully water down the message. Is it just a coincidence that every ex-priest, ex-nun, ex-Catholic Church regular member who comes out of it and tells their stories are ALL saying the same things? How about it is simply “the search for truth” that led them out? And the inability to keep the church secrets secret any longer? No, I’m sure that’s not a possibility. I will tell you this. God knows. And God is not mocked. His truth WILL out.
A myth weaved out of whole cloth with no basis in scripture. A pagan belief from Babylon just as the queen of heaven is.
Are Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit one? Of course:)
But, Jesus is not the Father, and the Father is not the Holy Spirit and so on and so one and so one....yet....they are one.
It is not the intent of this author to propose that we become God in the sense in which you think here.
I am not the right person to explain the theology behind it, and I don’t expect you to find and read the entire writing from which this quote comes.
I can only assure you that the church most emphatically does not teach that we can become God.
Think in terms of the psalmist and the poetry, metaphors and such that are used in the psalms.
This author? That is from the Catholic Catechism for crying out loud.
LOL I read it.
>>I can only assure you that the church most emphatically does not teach that we can become God.<<
Don’t you recognize the CCC as in Catholic Church Catechism?
So you’re basically saying it’s going to be Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Jvette, etc, etc, etc,? Wow! You just said that men will become God.
When a protestant posts a defamatory quote which cannot be authenticated and a Catholic challenges it, that challenge is not an excuse, it is a justifiable defense.
I took the time to try to find the quote and the circumstances about which or around which it might have been said. Finding no other credible or unbiased source for it, I did comment on what I found out about the supposed author of the quote.
If defending a specious lie or clarifying something that on the surface may be confusing is making excuses, then I am guilty as charged.
I fell head first into the yawning trap you set when you posted an unsubstantiated quote by responding as if honest debate or inquiry was your intent. The fact that you did not defend your post or offer a less biased source for it is revealing.
Enjoy the glee you must be feeling from your cheap shot, you got me, smvoice.
He was God and Man, but was Mary the mother of the human Jesus only?
I like how protestants love to throw out the whole pagan thing when attacking the Church.
Careful, CB, many people believe that all of Christianity is plagerized from numerous pagan myths and beliefs.
For example,
The Virgin Birth
Dying and Rising from the dead
Promises of eternal life
Just to name a few.
That is not what I said.
But, if it makes you happy to think so, go for it.
Before he apostatized. That’s why he’s not referred to as a saint. The same goes with Origen.
Some of what he said was valid and others not so much.
But no single father can be taken in isolation from the broader consensus of the fathers.
I might point out that Luther and the Reformers held the fathers in esteem.
Luther and Calvin both believed that Mary was the Mother of God. Luther even believed in the Immaculate Conception.
He got his human nature from Mary and His divine nature was always there. If He had not gotten His human nature from Mary He would not have been of the lineage of David and would not have been the fulfillment of prophesy. Of course it is beyond our capacity as humans to totally understand.
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