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.
Oh, and don’t forget, it was us fallible men who were cautioned to “search the scriptures daily to see if these things be true”. The scriptures being the only source to infallible truth after all.
Which would still makes you very fallible.
Yes it does. Thus the need to rely only on God’s infallible word found in scripture. Obviously being a fallible man I know not to rely on the fallible men in pointy hats in Rome.
You know what? I’m just going to continue to post my “adequately sourced material”, ACCORDING TO THE RM, and you can wail and gnash all you want. I’ve got the time and the adequately sourced materials to produce LOADS of posts on the RCC. Don’t like it? Take it up with the RM. If the RM says it’s adequate, it’s adequate. Suck it up, buttercup.
No problem, we've seen this garbage before. Your "Bible Study" group must have quite a collection.
Do be careful though. Garbage is allowed on Open Threads up to very broad limits, but it's possible you can slip up and, accidentally of course, click on a banned website and repost their material en masse after slight cleansing.
I think that might become a tad obvious violation of the rule's intent on banned sites.
Sorry, sell your fallible opinion elsewhere. We’re all stocked up here.
"but it's possible you can slip up and, accidentally of course, click on a banned website and repost their material en masse after slight cleansing."
. I'm going to continue to post as you said was "adequate sourcing", RM. With acknowledgments, author's name, chapters, and page numbers. If that isn't good enough, that's all I can do. Just be ready to be spammed near death by those who want a link to a website that doesn't exist. An unfortunate situation caused by the inability to comprehend that there is no website or link to be given. Just acknowledgments of the sources used.
Before you do, you might want to read the entire profile page of the Religion Moderator. There's more to it than you seem to wish. It also has a paragraph that includes:
Certain sources have been determined to monger hatred and are forbidden. Sources that link to those sources are also forbidden.
If you wonder why this is so, just ask the RM.
Truer words were never spoken.......
Should have said “fallible man” so you’d keep your exemption.
As every student of rhetoric knows who ever controls the language controls the argument and we see a daily drumbeat to control the word usage and word definitions and limit them to a Protestant or a semi-literate English vernacular when discussing Catholic doctrine and theology. Don't give into it.
The term "cult" is a perfect example. Protestants use it as a pejorative when it has a rich and deep meaning within Latin and Catholic doctrine. Cult, from the Latin Cultus, meaning to care, to nurture, to educate, or to worship. It is where we derive words such as culture, cultivate, colony, cultrate, and difficult. None of those are inherently bad.
Even by the pejorative definitions, Christianity as a whole began as a cult. Within Catholicism there are venerative dedications* to saints and holy persons called cultus. Don't permit the ignorance of others to alter your language.
(*Preemptively, Catholicism, both Eastern and Latin Rite, distinguish between worship (Latin adoratio, Greek latreia [λατρεια]) which is offered to God alone, and veneration (Latin veneratio, Greek doulia [δουλεια]), which may be offered to the saints. Hyperdoulia is a special veneration offered to Mary.)
"Mary...should inspire all who cooperate in the Church's apostolic mission for the REBIRTH OF HUMANITY..The Church journeys through time..along the path ALREADY TRODDEN BY THE VIRGIN MARY." - Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 86,92.
"The Koran..has many passages concerning the Blessed Virgin. First of all, the Koran believes in her Immaculate Conception and also in her Virgin Birth...Mary, then, is for the Moslems the true Sayyida, or Lady. The only possible serious rival to her in their creed would be Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed himself. But after the death of Fatima, Mohammed wrote: "Thou shall be the most blessed of all the women in Paradise, AFTER MARY." - Fulton J. Sheen, "Mary and the Moslems," The World's First Love (Garden City Books, 1952); see also Malachi Martin, The Keys of this Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Capitalist West (Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 285.
And speaking of Fatima, how about this peace plan offered by the "apparition"?
"Say the Rosary every day to obtain peace for the world..Pray, pray, a great deal, and make sacrifices for sinners, for many sould go to Hell because they have no one to make sacrifices and pray for them..God wishes to establish in the world the devotion to MY IMMACULATE HEART. If people DO WHAT I TELL YOU, many souls will be saved and there will be peace." -Our Lady of Fatima's Peace Plan from Heaven (Tan Books and Publishers, 1983), inside back cover.
"And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication." - God. The Book of Revelation, Chapter 17, verse 4.
There is the way for all cults to unite, through Mary. Watch for Mary apparitions to increase EVERYWHERE. - Source: smvoice. My opinion, post #who knows yet.
Excellent point again, thanks.
Thanks for your concern. But I will trust that the RM KNOWS what is an adequate source and what is not. As I do not link to anything, and do not receive anything from websites, I cannot be of help in your concern.
Very good development that benefits the whole world as well.
Sorry, I don’t do links or websites. Please give your acknowledged source, author, title, chapter, and page number.
Yes, you said that, and that would be a clever dodge – well, if it weren't so obvious. It's all from your Bible Study Class which doesn't use the interweb either, I'm guessing.
It will be all coincidental if this thread becomes the equivalent of a banned site with your "LOADS of posts."
But then, perhaps it will turn out that I have a much higher estimation of the Moderator's intelligence in enforcing the intent of the Forum Rules.
You're doing links and websites right now.
This isn't going to work for you if you can't be less obvious than this.
So now you are attempting to scare the RM into believing that my posts, which are adequately acknowledged and credited, ACCORDING TO THE RM, will result in “the equivalent of a banned site”? You don’t seem to get it. The RM gave his/her approval of my sources. I will always give my sources. If I did not, that would be a problem. Insanity, I tell you, pure insanity with wailing and gnashing. In order to keep the message from the forefront. I am asking you one more time: prove it or shut up about it. I have received the only approval I need: the RM’s. If that changes, then we will take it from there. In the meantime, if you don’t like my posts, or my acknowledgments and credits given, don’t read them, or find a way to refute the message. It’s not the sources you despise, it’s the message.
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