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To: Gamecock; annalex
"Tradition is equal to Scripture. The reason? Tradition."

The Church has never said that, G. But you as a Protestant educated in the history of The Faith know that it was indeed Holy Tradition which was the yardstick by which the various claimants to canonical status among the many "scriptures" available in the first two or three centuries of The Church were measured for inclusion in the canon. What The Church, East and West, has said is that it is The Church which is the keeper of Holy Tradition, not you or me individually. Holy Tradition is made up of many things, the consensus patrum and the writings of individual Fathers when they are in accord with the consensus patrum, liturgical practices, various prayers and devotions, in sum, what The Church always and everywhere believed. This Holy Tradition is the living embodiment of The Truth about our Salvation through Christ. It is precisely because what you read as the scriptures is completely and absolutely in accordance with this Holy Tradition that The Church established the canon of scripture in the late 4th century and you can know (well, with the exception of Luther's fooling around with the canon)that what you are reading is The Truth. But the NT and the OT alone, in a void, are not obviously self-authenticating. And yet we know they are because The Church told us so 1700 years ago, long before anyone had ever heard of Luther and the other reformers. Any other understanding of the "authenticity" of the scriptures tends to wander off into Mohammedanism.

"Of course it falls apart when you consider that EO and RCs both cling to tradition, yet each considers the other schismatic. Whose tradition is right?"

I think you misunderstand the nature of The Schism. It has very little, if anything, to do with the Holy Tradition we are speaking of here. The nearest it comes to an issue of Holy Tradition lies in a few points within the consensus Patrum and, here's the big one, Papal Supremacy, which we Orthodox of course reject, especially its claims to infallibility and universal jurisdiction, but we would argue that these are extra-patristic innovations born of post hoc propter hoc reasoning and political conditions. The Latins of course disagree...but this has absolutely nothing to do with any notion that random individual Christians, as simply Christians, have either the ability or the authority to establish what the scriptures mean.
27 posted on 11/11/2006 1:38:36 PM PST by Kolokotronis (Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!)
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To: Kolokotronis

Am I correct in saying the Orthodox do not hold to many of the RC Marian doctrines and purgatory, as well as in the Eucharist, the host and wine become 'grace filled', rather than transubstantiated into the actual blood and flesh of Christ?


34 posted on 11/11/2006 1:53:09 PM PST by Ottofire (Fire Tempers Steel)
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