Posted on 10/01/2014 9:18:18 PM PDT by bad company
An interesting article. It’s good to see an Orthodox perspective .
Bold assertions, but consider the issue of the canon.
Protestants say that Catholics “added” seven books to the Old Testament. In fact, Luther even argued that seven New Testament books were not inspired, and rejected all doctrine from those seven books. (Modern Protestants have uniformly restored the seven New Testament deuterocanonicals to their bibles, so this has been forgotten largely.)
Catholics assert that they have always been part of the canon. And indeed, they were universally read as scripture in masses (the Catholic test of what is scripture) since the first century.
But the weird truth is that there had always been substantial grey shades to the biblical canon until the Council of Trent; before then, there had never been a universal synod declaring the content of the canons. At Trent, the Church had to look to the universal usage among the particular churches to infallibly discern the canonicity of the dueterocanonicals.
The Protestant assertion that St. Jerome rejected the canon is both malarkey (he explains that he was reacting merely to the impossibility of winning Jews over to the Church’s theology using them, since the Jews — not he — reject the deuterocanonicals) and also irrelevant (if he only came to accept the deuterocanonicals under duress from the Pope, does that not demonstrate that the Pope authoritatively asserted the matter to him?)
But the weakness of the Protestant position that any one of the deuterocanonicals is not scriptural doesn’t wash away the awkward lack of definition of the canon:
A medieval gloss of the bible warns of the futility of basing theological arguments on those books;
Jesus himself cites as scripture two books which didn’t make the Catholic canon; there were variations in the accepted New Testament canon for three centuries after Christ;
to this day, various Eastern churches hold additional books as canon (most commonly 3 Maccabees;
To this day, 2 Esdras (also known as 3 Esdras, or Greek Esdras) remains in a canonical limbo: It was part of many versions of the Septuagint, but the Council of Trent left it out of the list of books that must be defended as sources of doctrine, for the simple reason it had no unique doctrine. (It’s an abridged version of 1 Esdras, which itself is more commonly divided into two books, Ezra and Nehemiah.)
Truly, the bible is an expression of the Holy Tradition given to the Church by Christ. And while anything that is not in accord with the Scriptures is thereby revealed to be counterfeit to the Holy Tradition, and while it sustains that Holy Tradition, and while it breathes the life of that Holy Tradition within the reader of it, it is NOT the temporal source of that Holy Tradition.
"Martin Luther’s, “Hier, stehe ich!” (demanding that only a Scriptural argument would be an acceptable response to his position) would have been unimaginable four or five hundred years before.
What a preposterous statement without a smidgen of support--except in slandering scholasticism. Luther himself rejected "the schoolmen," so calling him a scholastic is silly. Mainly though, the idea that the Bible was not seen by the early Church as her final unarguable authority--the very Testimony of the Apostles....is ridiculous.
Were the books of the Bible dictated by one man in the words of Allah, like the Koran claims of itself? NO. But the Word of God and the supreme authority which the Church must obey? YES.
Much if not most of this is utter rubbish and not worth responding to further.
John 8
32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Nothing to debate.
Worthless article. Tears down the Bible more than Islam.
The Quran is not an ignorant book. It was very cleverly designed to invert Christianity in every respect for Muhammad’s evil and self-serving purposes. The author should read it.
A major difference between Islam and Christianity is the condescension of God.
Allah doesn’t lower himself to man, but God shown in Christianity and recorded in the Bible not only communes with man, He provided His Son to dwell with us and sacrificed Himself for our sins, so that we might be justified to live with Him.
Muslims, just like all men after the fall in the Garden, have the ability to discern between good and evil, but how Christians respond with righteousness and justice is different.
The Muslim may perceive unrighteousness, and demands judgment, but sees his delivery of justice as something identifiable with righteousness, worthy an eternal reward.
God has already provided the Judgment on the Cross. None of us are good, but only though faith in Christ might we be found righteous to be saved from condemnation.
Christians are not baptized into the Bible. Jews were circumcised and made part of the Covenant people before ever a word of Scripture was written. God revealed Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob some hundreds of years before Moses ever wrote a line.
Christians may rightly see Islam as an ersatz version of Christianity – an attempt to create a rival to meet the peculiar needs and desires of the man, Muhammed. The Quran is Muhammed’s distorted idea of the role played by a “book” in the life of Christianity and Judaism. It is his attempt to create a rival. But this book, unlike any writing or utterance of a Biblical prophet, came with new claims. The Quran is what a misinformed desert preacher thought the Christian and Jewish holy books looked like. It is a poor substitute and a caricature of those writings. In this sense, the Quran is more akin to the Book of Mormon, a fabrication that tells what Upstate New York con-men thought an ancient religious book should look like. It tells us much about the mind of 19th century Upstate New York, but nothing about God. The Quran tells us about the perception of a 7th century Arabian merchant, but nothing about God.
It is thus a supreme religious irony that such a misperception should have changed how Christians saw their own sacred texts. But, it can be argued, this is indeed the case. The movement from authoritative Church to authoritative book that occurs over the 15th and 16th centuries (the Protestant Reformation), should not be considered apart from the dialog with Islam in the two or three centuries that preceded it. It is worth noting that scholasticism in the West was largely begun in Andalusian Islam. It was not a natural development from within. Scholasticism was ultimately rejected in the Christian East.
Martin Luther’s, “Hier, stehe ich!” (demanding that only a Scriptural argument would be an acceptable response to his position) would have been unimaginable four or five hundred years before. The “Bible” had not yet become a Christian Quran. Today, however, many Christians are indeed, “People of the Book.”
Yesterday saw...a forceful plea from a key papal advisor [Bishop Salvatore Fisichella, the rector of the Lateran University and President of the Pontifical Academy for Life] to reject the idea of Christianity as a “Religion of the Book”...........the big debate over Dei Verbum at the time of the council pitted what was then known as the “two-source theory,” which held that Scripture and tradition are essentially two separate streams of revelation, against the “one-source theory,” which posited that Scripture is the lone source of revelation and tradition is an elaboration of it. In effect, Dei Verbum held that Scripture and tradition are interdependent and integrally related to one another.
-- from the thread Synod: Christianity not a 'Religion of the Book'
Yep.
Moses didn’t write scrolls until shortly before his death. For forty years Israel followed God’s very specific laws and built the Tabernacle. Moses had spent several periods of forty days in supernatural communion with God (witnessed by all Israel), and then taught for forty years before anything was written down.
James 4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Submit in Greek hupotassó - I place unde r, subject to; mid, pass: I submit, put myself into subjection.
Catholics relying on these leaders who are obviously ignorant of what the word of God says is not going to turn out well for them.
Jews are The People of the Book. THE people. No one else is.
Jews have many, many, many holy books. The Torah is the absolute pinnacle.
The rejection of submission to G-d and His Authority (and His laws) is the heresy at the heart of chrstianity that has made its current situation inevitable. Ditto for the creation of "natural law," a tactic to have G-d's Law without G-d.
Moses didn’t write scrolls until shortly before his death. For forty years Israel followed God’s very specific laws and built the Tabernacle. Moses had spent several periods of forty days in supernatural communion with God (witnessed by all Israel), and then taught for forty years before anything was written down.
A good point, but I don't think that's what the Eastern Orthodox priest author of the article is saying. It strikes me as just one more attack on the authenticity and veracity of the Hebrew Bible in the name of chrstian tradition.
Chrstianity does not have the authentic Oral Torah. All its oral traditions are ultimately attacks aimed at the Hebrew Bible, from ancient typology to modern historical criticism.
He ought to spend some time first in reading the bible...
The modern Evangelical phrase, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” has more in common with Muslim submission. For there need be no union implied in the question – many who have become Christians under the guise of this question have no perception of union whatsoever.
The saddest part of this hit piece on Christianity is that there are so many who will listen to this unGodly tripe, and believe it, without checking with what God says about it...
Luk_1:47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
Mary needed a Saviour...
Luk_2:11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
Joh_4:42 And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.
Jesus Christ was sent as the Saviour of the world but this moronic priest doesn't need one??? Do all those idiots teach this stuff...You'd better run away from them as fast as you can...
Nope...Moses started writing a couple of months after they left Egypt...
Exo_17:14 And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
And Moses continued to write during the 40 years as he was instructed...And Moses finished up here...
Deu 31:24 And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished,
Good thing there's no Prot bashing threads ever posted on FR......
Sheesh, Catholics brag on giving the world the Bible, that we should say *thank you* to the Catholic church for "giving" the world the Bible, and then turn around and at every opportunity they get, disparage those who adhere to it as being authoritative.
A non-Catholic simply cannot do anything right for a Catholic.
Yeah. Jesus kept saying, “It is written...” because he was a closet Muslim.
The problem with the Roman Catholic Church was that its teachings CONTRADICTED scripture.
Those of faith were, examples of which are found in chapter 11 of the NT book of Hebrews, beginning with Abel's blood sacrifice looking forward by faith to Christ's sacrifice, to Abraham's offering up his only begotten son looking forward by faith to Christ, followed by Moses and the temple blood sacrificial system.
And when the object of their faith came, the Messiah (Christ), the faithful Jews realized this is the one to whom their blood sacrificial system pointed, and accepted him. THESE are "the people of the book, no one else is."
Those who reject him and hate him, are no longer the people of the book, for the entire "book" points to faith in Christ. His blood offered, not just for Jews but the entire world.
....until they convert to Catholicism. Then, suddenly, everything they do will be right. So long as they convert to the "right kind" of Catholicism, of course.
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