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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.
Yup. I’m 12. I started Freeping in grad school, when I was 0.
I’m on my iPad. Some typos get through ...
Yup, everything I say is illegitimate because I made a typo.
Petty, aruanan. Typical Roman Catholic nastiness. Started with the very first post.
What's petty is the crude attempts at humor that would only get a laugh in a junior high boys rest room. Did you really think that was a suitable remark for the religion forum?
This isn’t a sincere Religion thread. It’s Roman Catholics doing what they do best — trying to bait Christians into defending themselves againt your cynical attacks.
So you are saying that Catholics aren’t Christians?
Scripture is TRADITION. Even the Jews believe in the written Torah and the unwritten Torah.
The Eastern Orthodox and the ancient Churches of the East, which broke with Rome in the 5th century share the Catholic perspective on scripture and tradition.
Protestantism is a 16th century innovation.
Instead of trying to disprove the Catholic faith, try proving it with an open mind.
I did.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
If Evangelicals want to target the Mormons for deviating from Christian teaching, then Evangelicals deserve to have the same scrutiny delved against their own teachings.
It’s the pot calling the kettle black.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrneeans, 105 AD
“They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again. It is fitting, therefore, that you should keep aloof from such persons, and not to speak of them either in private or in public, but to give heed to the prophets, and above all, to the Gospel, in which the passion [of Christ] has been revealed to us, and the resurrection has been fully proved. But avoid all divisions, as the beginning of evils.”
The Evangelical denial that Christ is truly and corporeally present in sacrament of Holy Communion was unknown in the early Church except among the Gnostics.
Explain to me why the Ancient Assyrian Church of the East, which broke communion with the Catholic Church in 431 A.D. has a virtually identical doctrine regarding the sacrament of Holy Communion as the Roman Catholic Church despite having cut itself off at an early point in Christian history.
Perhaps then Evangelicalism is a form of Gnosticism because it seems to claim to hold some sort of hidden knowledge of how to properly interpret the scriptures that eluded the great fathers of the Church like St. Ignatius of Antioch who learned the scriptures and Christian doctrine from the apostles themselves.
By the working of the Holy Spirit and the will of God. Sometimes He even uses evil men to get done what He wants done.
>>Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle.<<
Have you ever had anyone tell you what’s in a book? See the word learned there? Has your pastor ever helped you learn what’s in the Bible? When he told you something did you ever open the Bible to see if it was true what he said? Did anyone ever tell you what was in the morning paper? Did you ever learn anything from hearing it from someone else who read it in a book? Doh!
>>"You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." James 2:24<<
Except in a verse above it states that the works are a of faith.
James 2:20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
And the verse above that tells us why. It’s because you have to have the right kind of faith and works coming from faith proves what kind of faith you have.
James 2:19Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.
So the works are only proving what kind of faith you have. It’s still the faith that justified.
>>St. John Chrysostom comments on 2:15 "Hence it is manifest, that they did not deliver all things by Epistle, but many things also unwritten,<<
2 Thessalonians was written in 55 A.D. and the book of John wasn’t written until about 90 A.D. so of course there were things that were still not written at that time. In fact 20 of the New Testament Books had not been written yet. But then again, it doesn’t say they weren’t written anywhere does it? It simply says they were delivered to those people in spoken word rather then in writing. Ever have anyone tell you what was in the Newspaper that morning?
>>Here he shows that there were many who were shaken<<
How did you here about the twin towers coming down? Did someone tell you about it or did you see it yourself? Were you “shaken”? Was it later written down because it was important?
If we target Mormons for believing they would become gods should we also target Catholics because they think they will become gods? After all, I’ve seen Catholics target Mormons for believing that yet the CC teaches that they will become gods also. Wouldn’t that be the pot calling the kettle black?
I would recommend that you ignore this charge. It is addressing Athanasius' Doctrine of Divinization or Theosis and has been hashed out ad naseum on these threads. These dufii can't seem to realize that when the persistently ram the Church with their ignorance it is not the Church that incurs the damage.
Ignorance. Maybe 2 Peter should be dropped from the Evangelicals’ New Testament.
2 Peter 1:3-4
“ 3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
You are engaging in cyclical reasoning here. What authority determined the canon?
The promise of God was that His word would not pass away. It was not the RCC that made that promise.
Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
God decided what of His word would “not pass away” not the RCC or any other earthly entity. It was by God’s authority.
CCC 460 The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature":78 "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God."79 "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God."80 "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."81
Absolute willful ignorance. We can see that by the repeated ignoring of the footnotes in the Article of the Catechism:
footnote 78: from 2 Peter 1:4-
"by which he has granted us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers in the divine nature."
footnote 79:
"Adversus haereses 3, 19, 1
But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: "I said, Ye are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but ye shall die like men." He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that might receive the adoption of sons?"
footnote 80:
St. Athanasius, De incarnatione 54, 3
As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God. If they be of man, then let him scoff; but if they be of God, let him not mock at things which are no fit subject for scorn, but rather let him recognise the fact and marvel that things divine have been revealed to us by such humble means, that through death deathlessness has been made known to us, and through the Incarnation of the Word the Mind whence all things proceed has been declared, and its Agent and Ordainer, the Word of God Himself. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God. He manifested Himself by means of a body in order that we might perceive the Mind of the unseen Father. He endured shame from men that we might inherit immortality. He Himself was unhurt by this, for He is impassible and incorruptible; but by His own impassibility He kept and healed the suffering men on whose account He thus endured. In short, such and so many are the Saviour's achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves. One cannot see all the waves with one's eyes, for when one tries to do so those that are following on baffle one's senses. Even so, when one wants to take in all the achievements of Christ in the body, one cannot do so, even by reckoning them up, for the things that transcend one's thought are always more than those one thinks that one has grasped."
"As we cannot speak adequately about even a part of His work, therefore, it will be better for us not to speak about it as a whole. So we will mention but one thing more, and then leave the whole for you to marvel at. For, indeed, everything about it is marvellous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe."
footnote 81:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pont_committees/eucharist-congr/documents/rc_committ_euchar_doc_20041010_turkson-catechisis-youth_en.html
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