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.
Can you say *hypocrisy*.
Condemned if you do, condemned if you don't.
Courtesy ping to post 3,195 for smvoice.
Badgering turns any thread away from the issues and towards the individual Freepers. It leads to flamewars.
Exactly. Which is my point.
Such an official interpreter is absolutely necessary if we are to understand the Bible properly. (We all know what the Constitution says, but we still need a Supreme Court to interpret what it means.) [http://www.catholic.com/documents/pillar-of-fire-pillar-of-truth]
Now who in their right mind thinks that the Supreme Court has not gone off track? I do think however that the comparison is accurate. The Supreme Court has become a tool that the powerfull use to impose evil and corrupt teaching and so has the Catholic Church.
AMEN!! That promise is better than gold - it comes from ‘I AM’.
“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven..”
And it still gets down to the problem of interpreting the interpretation.
You can add layers and layers of interpretation, just like the Pharisees did in Jesus’ say, and they had the people so bound up that they didn’t know whether they were coming of going.
Christ has set us free from the Law by fulfilling the righteous requirements of it and God imputes it to us, credits that perfect righteousness to our account when we acknowledge that we CAN’T do it ourself and we look to him in faith and trust to do it in us. God works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.
The Law was put in charge to lead us to Christ, not as a play book to earn our salvation by following.
The security of the believer is knowing that we are in God’s hands and He will not cast us out and that He will keep us until the day of redemption. It takes care of fear and worry that we haven’t made it, when anyone who is honest will know deep down inside that they haven’t made it.
I think pnsn hit it when he said that those who are not saved are jealous of the confidence and security of the believer.
God made salvation simple. Repent and believe.
the RCC makes it more complicated than it is or needs to be with all its requirements and rules and regulations.
God made it easy for a reason, so that ANYONE (whosoever) will may come.
Hey, in heaven gold is just pavement.......
Yes - and pure gold. That’s Our God - NOTHING is too good for His own.
Yes, D-fender, you have it all right. This is how Bible Study works. I attended a Bible Study in 1871 and received a copy of a catholic world periodical and have kept it all these years, through the 1st WW, the 2nd, man on the moon, Vietnam, 13 presidents, and 9/11, just waiting, waiting to be able to open it again and post something from it...
Hint: When a Bible study is studying something, say CULTS, they begin with gathering information on those CULTS, with sources, and compare them with what God's Word says about the last days, the tribulation, Rev. 17 and 18, one world government, one world religion, etc. And they compare the CULT beliefs and doctrines with God's Word. If they line up with what the Bible declares is another gospel, another Jesus, another spirit, they are a CULT.
Roman Catholicism is on the front burner because there are many who believe she is the Great Whore of Rev. 17,18, who sits upon many waters.
That said, what are the sources that confirm/deny that belief? They are given to you every time I post them. Would you like to continue this study of the RCC being Mystery Babylon, with adequate sources? It's up to you. We have 2000 years of sourced lies by the RCC to keep us busy for months. OR, you can get on down the road, and hope it's just my memory that is recalling this information, and not Church material. I can assure you it is acknowledged sourced material. It's up to you...
Just as the Pharisees did.
And they do have some rather compelling reasons to believe that.
Personally, I haven't noticed many posts begging the former Catholic freepers to "Come Back". If it makes you feel better, I don't care that you or others on here have left, and hope you find happiness. In fact, I think most of the former Catholics on here did the Catholic church a favor by leaving.
No *there’s* a definitely fallible opinion of a fallible man.
Yep, and it appears the fallible men in Rome are going to cause some rather severe problems for those who are left after Christ’s true church leaves this earth.
Oh, and don’t forget, it was us fallible men who were cautioned to “search the scriptures daily to see if these things be true”. The scriptures being the only source to infallible truth after all.
Bible Study it was, just like you said “I am NOT going to websites. The only *link* I could give is the link to the Bible study classes I attend.”
I’m just glad you remembered where it came from to clear this up, and you had it handy enough to type in.
Obviously the reason it came up in google searches jot for jot is the same calibre of sources have the same material.
I would bet we could find that folks used the exact same words and snippets and calling Catholicism a cult going back to Know Nothing Party and the KKK a couple of generations back.
If you were going to websites you could check it out.
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