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.
I said claiming salvation without validation.
There is only One who validates one's claim of salvation and that validation is called the Judgement that every man undergoes (unless Jesus, Paul, and the entire NT is wrong).
Maybe you can explain the "plain meaning of what Paul wrote" HERE, for instance..
"Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that IN ME FIRST Jesus Christ might SHEW FORTH all longsuffering, for A PATTERN TO THEM which should HEREAFTER BELIEVE ON HIM to life everlasting." 1 Tim. 1:16.
Plus it wouldn't do any good. That's why I didn't bother.
Yep I should have pinged him. I thought I had. Didn’t even notice the slip up until now. Sorry Mark. Not pinging Mark was the source of my error? Could you find something more illogical perhaps? Or was that just for obfuscation?
There seems to be discrepancy among Catholics about the personal relationship thing. Some make fun of the Protestants for that claim and some seem to state they also have a personal relationship. It may even be the same people but I don’t remember.
Catholics believe in a relationship between Creator and created. We have awe and reverence for God and we worship Him. We do not believe in a beer and pretzel Buddy Christ. We believe that that simply reduces the concept of God to just another guy and that we will not accept.
I didn't say that. Do you really have that much trouble with reading comprehension? I see you do that sort of thing repeatedly.
Or was that just for obfuscation?
The obfuscation appears to be all yours. Go back and reread my post.
You must have missed all the passages that tell of Jesus sitting to eat with many different people. Even the Pharisees. I believe it was metmom who posted those verses already.
Easily the same claim is made about the Roman Catholic Church.
By the same people who created the Episcopalian Church, PCUSA and so on.
"In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel." (the gospel committed to Paul). ROm. 2:16. It is the gospel of the grace of God that saves. Without it, you are dead in your sins. There remains no other sacrifice for your sins if you have rejected the finished work of Christ on your behalf. God will judge men by that very gospel.
You know, the very ones that Catholics claim their church wrote down that Jesus said.
John 15:15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
Now Hoss, you know that they're not permitted to think for themselves concerning spiritual matters. They're told what to believe under threat of damnation. (All those anathemas, remember?)
*church fathers* brraaacckk....
Catechism Brraaaacckk.....
Magesterium Brraaacccckkk....
Bwhahahaha!!!
The Roman Catholic Church is not perfect, and the “Church” is that which was established by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, not schismatic, heretical protestants, who cannot even agree among themselves how scripture is interpreted. There are THOUSANDS of protestant sects? Do you truly think that these compose the “Church”? Get Real, please!
Valid meaning accepted for teaching by the Early Church, and the Ecumenical Councils.
I am not Roman Catholic, but there is sexual immorality in EVERY sect. You sound like a Catholic bashing person to me. It is amazing how everytime a Protestant begins to lose a debate, you bring up the sex crimes clause. This is because you can’t win an argument theologically, or any other way. The True Original Church is in two pieces, which will, with God’s help, soon be rejoined. The rest are splinters.
She died a natural death, and was resurrected and taken into heaven. This is referred to as the “Dormition” I believe this is in the Protoevengalian also.
Point taken. My apologies sir.
Negative. It is one half of the True Original Church, instituted by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and his Apostles. Your opinion won’t change the facts.
Strange. It is referred to as “Deception” where I read. That would be The Bible. Unless you have a Scripture that I haven’t seen yet.
The Church of England was created by Henry VIII, out of his lust for Anne Boleyn. It isn’t the Roman Church’s fault.
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