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.
Request your prayer cloth today! You can be healed - transformed - supernaturally blessed!
Submit your prayer needs so Pastor Parsley can pray over your needs as part of our Worldwide Miracle, Prayer and Victory service from Jerusalem Israel on Tuesday, November 15. Then you will receive a prayer cloth from Jerusalem saturated with the anointing of God. Find out that reaching out to Jesus is, WORTH THE REACH!
Breakthrough with Rod Parsley!
Whooaa! What, the net is possessed now?
On second thought if I lived next door to you I could just hook the house up to a truck and tow it away.....LOL
If you’re interested in the recipes for All Soul’s Day, go to Salvation’s Caucus thread:Daily Mass Readings, Commemoration of the faithful departed, post 31. Everything from “Dry Bones Cookies” to “St. Gall Cheese Balls”...hungry yet?
Do they do hot cross buns at Easter too?
Ooooooh, now THAT hurt...lol! Running out of valid arguments?
Is that kinda like a string of beads blessed by the guy in the pointy hat in Rome?
I can tell you one thing I would bet they DON’T do. Risen rolls...
When I want to move I just check for enough diesel in the tank, crank it up and drive off! I don’t even need no idol in the yard er nothin.
Don't you just hate it when those damned Catholic kids slash the tires on your house!
Around here, they just load up their Mary statues and what not and drive them around, in the back of their trucks. You haven’t lived until you see Mary going down I-45..
They don’t dare try to get through the gators in the swamps around here and them Catholic kids are scared to death of the dogs.
I-45 ey? We lived on our Yacht in a marina in Seabrook just off I-45 till Ike came through.
"Step on a crack, break a FReeper's back", perhaps?
Hope it’s ok if I combine two responses in one.
Sorry, your posts to me are the opinion of a fallible man and per your rule...
So don’t waste the bandwidth by replying then.
I surely have and I see that the the same silliness is being used by the RCC'ers here to justify a falsehood. Still.
The intercessory part of it is about Christians praying for others, not about whom one prays to; as in who is God. Pray also means ask. I can pray to you to pray for me. This would be asking for your intercession.
Well, you have part of it right. Intercessory prayer is to pray to God on behalf of others. I can pray to Him for you; you can pray to Him for me. But, as to the definition you assert, I would challenge you to do one thing:
After you read this, close your eyes, and utter a "prayer" to me and ask me to pray for you. I promise you: if I hear you, I'll tell you, because I'm still alive and here. However, if you ASK me by voice or writing in my hearing or reading, then I'll definitely know. Those who have already died and gone to Heaven are not omniscient and thus cannot hear any "prayers" from here.
Intercessory prayer is not the big issue; it's the Roman Catholic Church's false teaching of praying to anyone OTHER than God... like Mary... Saints... Angels.
That's the point. And here we are, hopefully back on line now on the point of discussion concerning intercessions, intercessory prayer and asking others for theirs.
Correct -- excluding ONE thing: prayer to anyone other than God. Not praying to the Saints, Mary, or anyone other than God -- Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Hoss
That would be superstition. Not like putting St. Don’t hurt me much if I crash on the dash.
Sorry, but that would be following the advice of a fallible man when I’m following your advice not to.
Sorry, no canna do..
Couldn’t ya just check with yer beads on a chain or somthin?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.