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.
THANK YOU, mm. Judith Anne seems to spend a lot of time at forbidden websites, she’s almost a scholar on the subject. It’s not only disingenous, it’s downright deceitful. And I, for one, am sick and tired of the accusations. Prove it or shut up.
Well, if it makes the RCC look bad it must not be allowed to stand.
At the very least, when Jesus Himself quotes from them and calls them Scripture, that verifies it.
My point was that each of us has the Holy Spirit within us to protect us from charlatans such as organized the RCC.
Ah, but that is your opinion.
I believe the Holy Spirit leads me to find and follow Jesus through His Church.
Exactly. Destroy the message, the messenger, and anything else that could possibly shed truth on that den of deceit. Even if you have to resort to deceit and lies yourself to destroy it.
Cults believe they have a corner on the truth. They may use a specific set of texts to create their own truth, interpret the Bible according to a set doctrine, or hold the words of the cult leader equal with the words of the Bible or God. Cult members hear that the only truth lies within the teachings of the cult and access to other sources of spiritual wisdom may be restricted.
Read more: Criteria for the Definition of a Cult | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/info_10000969_criteria-definition-cult.html#ixzz1eI3EGUvY
Does that mean you should feel obligated to presume the worst about someone?
A quick google search shows the two sites, one copyrighted, and one forbidden, as the top two results.
Let’s not get personal, here.
Well, if you go to a site that the RM says “mongers hate” and pick up your quotes there, or at copyrighted sites, then you have to expect that your sources will be rightfully impeached.
As usual.
Do you believe YOU have a corner on the truth? It appears you do, from your posts. I disagree, should I then call you a cult member? So far, I have not.
OTOH, we believe that Scripture is the source of all truth, open and available to all, with no requirements of membership in our church or special interpretation by our church leaders only. The Holy Spirit will guide the sincere seeker into all truth and God will not let him go.
Do Catholics think that God is not capable of taking care of the spiritual growth and maturity of the individual believer Himself so that they have to do the job for Him?
The whole attitude smacks of the thinking that God is somehow going to botch the whole thing and lose souls because he can't handle it Himself.
Not when I did it.
And besides.....
SO WHAT?
Does that still mean you have to presume the worst about someone?
Can’t you just feel the looooovvvveeee...????
"For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him." 2 Cor. 11:4.
What is the gospel, according to the RCC? What does the Holy Spirit do, in the RCC? If you are being led to anyone other than Christ, you do not have the Holy Spirit leading you. If you are led to Mary to intercede for you, other saints to pray to, or visions and apparitions to heal you, give you new information from God, etc., it is not the Holy Spirit leading. The Holy Spirit always leads to Christ. No one else. What about Jesus? There is a false Jesus, one who tells you works are your way to him, who distorts and twists Scripture so that no man can understand without others telling them what it means. One who leads you to destruction, one "good" work at a time. This "jesus" leads one AWAY from the finished work of Christ and leads one TO works for righteousness.
Please do not get personal.
Again we are expected to imprint the limitations of English onto Scripture and accept what it gives us. It is similar to watching a modern High Definition movie on an old black and white TV. Father (πατηρ Pator) in Greek had three distinct meanings; genitor, metaph, and God. When Protestants tell us in English that we are to call no man "father" they are being way too vague to be taken seriously.
Another example of a post that can’t be discounted ey?
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