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.
Seriously? Is this a joke or some insider Dispensationalist thing?
How about rather we do it this way. We start with the 66 books that no one has ever been able to prove contain errors. Then, if any other books considered have proven to have any error whatsoever we determine those to be not divinely inspired and discard them as from the deceiver.
No thanks. You just want to be the fallible man with all authority, even over what is in the canon of Holy Scripture.
No thanks, I’ll stick with Christ’s plan: His Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth, guided by the Holy Spirit.
I would think you would remember your own rule on this without my constant reminders.
Yeah, didn’t think you would want to go there. Even fallible men know when the errors are so obvious it doesn’t take much to show they are from the deceiver not from God.
Sorry, you can’t exempt yourself from your own rule; you’re still just Fallible Man Talking.
OK, we simply let each person decide their own canon and interpretation of Scripture.........oh, wait, that has been tried and didn't work.
Actually it worked rather well for those of us who are thankful someone exposed the errors of those who were lying about what God really says.
Promoting books with errors like the following doesn’t add to confidence in the truthfulness of Christianity.
Tobit claims to have been alive when Jeroboam revolted in 931 B.C. and 210 years later when Assyria conquered Israel in 721 B.C. Then it says in Tobit 14 that he was 112 when he died. Oops!
In Judith we find an error of who Nebuchadnezzar was King of.
Judith 1:1 While King Nebuchadnezzar was ruling over the Assyrians from his capital city of Nineveh,
Nebuchadnezzar didn’t rule over the Assyrians he was King over Babylonia.
2 Kings 24:1 While Jehoiakim was king, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia invaded Judah
Why would anyone rely on books with obvious errors? The Holy Spirit inspired books have never been shown to have errors. The Catholic Church uses books with obvious errors to try to prop up their own errors.
Like I said earlier. I’ll stay with the books which have never been shown to have errors.
We’ve seen here lately posts about the “individual.” As if being a Christian was or could or should be an individual life, experience.
A Christian life outside the Christian community would be unthinkable to the Church, (excluding anchorites in vocations dedicated to prayer.)
I cannot imagine Scripture through this individualistic view.
Any thesis on errors that excludes Luther’s addition of ‘alone’ and his other “improvements” seems doomed from the start...
Then you similarly reject the books of Genesis and Exodus because of conflicting scientific and archaeological evidence or are you content that are right, just not yet proven scientifically?
Prove it.
Uh-oh, D-. You better check out this post 3430 that Natural Law posted to Cynical Bear. Your Catholic Bible Study may in interested in this, since you’re studying Genesis right now...
Yes, thank you, I did. From http://www.museeprotestant.org/Pages/Notices.php?scatid=6¬iceid=145&lev=1&Lget=EN:
Olivétan (1506-1538)
Olivétan is well-known for his French translation of the Bible, referred to as Olivétan's Bible. It was the first Bible ever to be translated into French from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. It is also known as "the martyrs' Bible".
Translation of the Bible into French
Pierre Robert, also known as Olivétan, was born in Noyon around 1506 and was Calvin's cousin. He studied in Orleans, and went to Strasburg to study Hebrew with Bucer. He then dedicated himself to teaching.
In 1532, at the Chanforan synod (Vaudois valley of the Piedmont region), the Waldensians, under Guillaume Farel's influence, decided to adhere to the Reformation. They also decided to publish a Bible in French. Farel gave Olivétan the responsibility of the translation. It took him two years to accomplish the task. This was the first time the original texts in Hebrew and Greek had been translated into French. Works of such scholars as Lefèvre d'Étaples were of great help to Olivétan. His Bible was printed in Neufchatel in 1535 and the introduction was written by Calvin, at the time only 25 years old.
The apocryphal books were printed in this Bible but a note specified that "they were considered as legitimate neither by the Hebrews nor by the Church as a whole" ("qu'ils ne sont point reçus ni tenus comme légitimes tant des hébreux que de toute l'Église").
Prove that there is equally critical evidence for the believability of Exodus as you presented for the Deuterocanonicals? It is all over the internet, just Google it. Much of it is from highly reputable academic sourced.
I won't present it because that would suggest that I believe or endorse it. I am not trying to prove Exodus wrong, only the problems associated with trying to disprove Scripture with something other than inerrant information. Your proof that the Deuterocanonicals are false is no more credible than the information from similar sources that Exodus and Genesis are false.
I think what you quoted is a somewhat different issue than what you specifically objected to, as Rome infallibly declaring itself to be the infallible OTC, which claim is not dependent upon consent of the laity or anyone, but which agree to implicitly submit to such decrees, is one thing, while forcing her members against their will to join and submit is another.
I did not contend for the latter and i think i provided for RCs having freedom for some degree of dissent in the majority of what she teaches and believes, yet i was objecting to the implicit assent of faith some teachings or teachers require, and which is required to be given to infallible teaching as a condition of being a RC, based upon the premise of assured infallibility which she autocratic declares she has.
Oh, no, no, no, no...Jehovah got a "makeover", doncha know. That there was the old Jehovah, the new Jehovah is a God of love now, and he wants everyone to just love everyone else and everybody should be nice and NEVER stir the pot. That way, everyone will all get along and the world will be at peace....la, fa, la, fa, la...;o)
To be Catholic means that we have chosen to believe that the Church was instituted by Jesus and given a role in the determination of Canon and the interpretation of Scripture with the same level of authority and believability as Scripture itself. You are free to reject that and remain out of Communion but you do not have a right to expectation that Catholics to do the same.
You failed to respond to my second point. Why do so many of you obsess over the Church when your greatest indictment of Her is that Catholics love Christ imperfectly by your standards? With 2/3 of the world population still non-Christian wouldn't you better serve God fishing for souls in that lake and not sewing discord with Catholics?
You were the one who contended that Genesis and Exodus had conflicting scientific and archaeological evidence. I simply asked you to prove what was in contention. If you can’t do so just say it.
Why?
Why would anyone waste their and their classmate’s time set aside for the study of Holy Scripture discussing science? Makes little sense to me. I can take science classes for that.
Don’t forget those famous words of Jesus: ‘Think not that I am come to send judgement on earth: I came not to send a sword, but peace. I think if we just allow each other to vent, then this can all be worked out..I shall send Oprah one day to show you the way of peace. Is that okay with everyone?....?’
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