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.
"It boggles my mind that even when presented with the Scripture by John that not all that Jesus said and did is recorded in Scripture, they still dispute that there was more to know about Him and about us as His followers."
Who gets to decide about the 'other things Jesus said and did'? And who decides just what the 'there is more to know about Him and about us as His followers'?
This is where man decides he can fill in the blanks and create doctrines and traditions based on conjecture. And this is exactly where religious institutions go off the track of God's Word. Making whole religions out of conjecture. And attempting to prove their doctrines by John's Scripture.
Which leads to animosity when the doctrines cannot be found in God's revealed Word to man. God is not the author of confusion, I'm sure you're aware. Nor is He a respecter of persons. He did not give those "other things" to a selected group of "insiders" to form new doctrines and traditions that are clearly not in the Word He has given to us.
“Looking” the same is not “being” the same.
Get past the surface appearances.
The bodies we will get will be different in function and needs and abilities, even if they LOOK the same. It will be a perfect body, which is WAAAAAYYYYY different than the one I am inhabiting now.
Sure He did. The Jews were a select group of insiders, the Chosen Pwople of God. And you call yourself a Christian!
And I'm with you, mm. Mine will be WAAAAYYYYY different than the one I am inhabiting now. No plates, pins, cages, or fusions in my lower back or neck. Complete perfection. Praise God!
Unless you end up in Purgatory.
First and foremost God wants you to live the Gospel. Jesus gave us a new Decalogue. His two greatest commandments are to love. His eight Beatitudes tell us how to love.
"This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you." - John 15:12
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
Okay.
What greater love is there than Christ dying for our sins, while we were yet sinners, and giving us this free gift of salvation through His finished work?
Perhaps you need to find the definition of "love one another" and what that truly means, Natural Law.
I dread Christmas. What an ugly season it will be!
A bit of relief:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYecrfQjEJU
Yes, i do understand the Incarnate Word.
What I am asking is do you see the difference between the Incarnate Word and ‘word” as in Holy Scripture?
Wrong again...Jesus came for the Jews only, at first...And Paul came for anyone who would listen...Even after he was commissioned to take the Gospel beyond the Jews, even to the Gentiles...
You want to see the scriptures again for the umpteenth time???
Does any of this really matter? We will be in a state of blissful adoration. Being forever in the presence of the infinitely perfect Lord will be such an awe inspiring experience that human appearances will be the furthest thing from anyone's mind. Any earthly or human considerations will be completely irrelevant.
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