Ping
“Many Catholic apologists have honed to near perfection the technique of blasting to smithereens the anti-creedal, anti-historical, anti-intellectual positions of “Bible-Only” fundamentalists.”
That’s quite claim. I’d like to see that, because I’ve seen nothing but sophism from the Protestant side trying to defend their own creeds.
Thanx, Ma.
"He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way.
He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart."
Whew. He did not refute the Catholic claim at all. It was mere beggaring by disclaiming.
First, it tacitly assumes the very thing that it is supposed to be proving. Both Catholics and Protestants take the Scriptures as reliable sources of information about God even if any given individuals in either camp cannot produce external supports for it. Protestants at least admit that this is what they are doing. Catholics, on the other hand (particularly the apologists), propose to treat Scripture "only as a historical document", which they then use to build up the authority of their Church. But in so doing, they ignore the fact that they are assuming that they "know" what books constitute "Scripture"--the very thing they deny that can be done apart from their Church!
But the Catholic apologist is not, at this point, accepting the evidence in Scripture because it is Scripture. Rather, he is looking at each book in Scripture as purely an historical document. Before we ask the question "is this divinely inspired," we merely ask is this accurate? At this point we are only treating it as we would the letters of Pliny or Josephus' histories. From the viewpoint of an historian, what do they tell us of the church?
Even without accepting them as divinely inspired and thus infallible we can see a church established by Jesus with an authority given to the Apostles who latter associated other men in its leadership. We can also see that they preached that Jesus was the Son of God who rose from the dead which they claimed to have witnessed. We also know that they gave their lives for their preaching. We can also compare what they proclaimed with what was written in the Old Testament. All this can be established before declaring that their writings are divinely inspired and thus infallible.
It is from this that we can accept the truthfulness of their testimony. Their testimony being truthful then they did indeed witness Jesus rising from the dead. From this we can have faith that Jesus is the Son of God. If he is the Son of God then the church has the divine authority that he gave to it. And then it is by this divine authority that we can accept what the church proclaims to be Sacred Scripture. Nothing in this is begging the question as the author claims.
Second, the claim that the identity and supreme authority of the Roman Catholic institutional Church can be established to be true solely by the use of non-inspired historical writings neglects to factor into its equation the fact that historical arguments are by their nature fallible, since they are constructed by fallible people who can never know all the facts and their inter-relationships with perfect clarity.
But no one has ever claimed that knowledge through historical documents is infallible, only that there is a high degree of certainty. This it true for all historical knowledge, including our knowledge that the present text of Scripture matches the originals. It is with this high degree of certainty that we can accept the present Catholic Church as that established by Jesus Christ.
Finally, the author does not address how, without an authoritative church, a Protestant can know what is the true canon of Scripture. His only response can be "I know it is true because I can feel it in my heart." Thus the Protestant's reliance on sola scriptura is reduced to sola opinione mea.
Oh what a tangled web they weave. Denounce Sola Scriptura then use Sola Scriptura for the authority of their magisterium.
Sola Historia!
Another great article! Thanks.
where to begin....her diatribe kind of suggests that the study of the history of Christianity began sometime last week....I’m certain that there were historians writing stuff down from day 1. History is an ongoing study wherever possibly...even the cavemen left evidence of who they were and what they did, ate, wore. Christianity, primarily Catholicism, has a recorded, written, pictorial, archectural history which is very well preserved and can hardly be disputed....
Like Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics believe that the current church organization is inspired and guided by God into truth. Before reading the quote below, make sure you are sitting down with your seat belt on!
"But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine. How can we know what antiquity was except through the Church? ... I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness.
The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour." (Henry Edward Manning, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation, 1865, p 227-228)
For those not completely bamboozled by the Catholic religion on Sola Scripture, but are truly searching for the truth of Sola Scripture issue, here is a site that offers every thing you need to make up your mind...And check all the links as well as their home page...
Sola hysteria, mom. The Romanists simply do not wish to recognize God and His Word as the supreme authority.