Posted on 05/05/2015 8:14:00 AM PDT by Gamecock
We know Jesus was not married, sorry if I offended.
Is it by tradition, or by faith alone, that we can be sure the canon of 69 books is authoritative?
Either way, it seems to me that we don't know as a matter of sola scriptura that the 69-book canon is altogether our only authoritative source of truth and wisdom. So where am I wrong?
Wrong....
…2 Peter3:15and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, 16as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. 17You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness,…
Peter viewed Pauls letters as scripture as they were written...
The only rational doctrine. Be suspicious of “reasoning’s,” “tradition’s and extra scriptural fiat’s Scripture is the data; the premise from which all cautious exposition starts.
Not offended, it’s OK. The Scriptures and the Gospels are, however, silent on this issue. They give us practically no information on Jesus’s life before His public ministry which began when He was about 30 years old.
“If what is written in the Scriptures is not the source of our Faith then what is?”
Jesus.
God is the source of the only faith that matters. Born Again faith. He seems to almost always bring that faith after a Christian gives a non-Christian some bible based testimony, and it takes very little. For me it was "Believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven". That's bible based and came from a Christian to a non-Christian and then I believed.
And our source of information on what Jesus said and did comes primarily from what? The four accepted gospels, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John.
Not at all FRiend - He is betrothed. He has gone to his Father's House to make a place for her. One day soon, He will come for His bride.
They had Tanakh. If you cannot find Yeshua the Messiah writ large all over the 'Old Testament', then you are probably following the wrong guy...
He is on almost every page.
“And our source of information on what Jesus said and did comes primarily from what?”
I understand what you’re saying, but what you said earlier is incorrect. You said, “If what is written in the Scriptures is not the source of our Faith then what is?” The simple fact is, if we claim to have the same faith as the Apostles, then the source is Jesus for He taught the Apostles years before the Gospels were written. The Apostles, equipped directly by Christ and the gifts and guidance of the Holy Spirit, were able to teach men everything they needed to know and do to be saved and they did so even when not a single book of the New Testament was yet written.
“The four accepted gospels, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John.”
And where in scripture does it say that those four books are “accepted gospels”? Hint: It doesn’t. Scripture says little to nothing about what books are inspired scripture, “accepted gospels”, etc. No where in the Gospel of Matthew - or anywhere in the New Testament - does it even say that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew.
St. Irenaeus “As I said before, the Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied but one house. She likewise believes these things just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart; and harmoniously she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For, while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the tradition is one and the same” (Against Heresies 1:10:2 [A.D. 189]).
“That is why it is surely necessary to avoid them [heretics], while cherishing with the utmost diligence the things pertaining to the Church, and to lay hold of the tradition of truth. . . . What if the apostles had not in fact left writings to us? Would it not be necessary to follow the order of tradition, which was handed down to those to whom they entrusted the churches?” (ibid., 3:4:1).
“It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors to our own times—men who neither knew nor taught anything like these heretics rave about.
But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, that church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles.
With this church, because of its superior origin, all churches must agree—that is, all the faithful in the whole world—and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition” (ibid., 3:3:1–2
hmm, I never heard a Protestant ( honorary or otherwise ) speak of the authority of tradition or the need for all churches to agree with the Roman one.
If we have truly accepted Christ, then we are protected. It is the ones who are seeking who fall prey to cults.
Tv is really pushing ETs on earth. I do not know what their motive is.
I trust the Bible over any man and I do not care when they lived. Traditions can be wrong, too.
It is the ones who are seeking who fall prey to cults.
I just shook my head. Kinda frustrating, actually.
There is a reason some who profess to be Christian follow tradition. They don’t want to follow God as He instructs in His Word. Oh they will say, their traditions and the Word of God line up but it is clear they never do.
From Wikipedia: A Christian Bible is a set of books that a Christian denomination regards as divinely inspired and thus constituting scripture. Although the Early Church primarily used the Septuagint or the Targums among Aramaic speakers, the apostles did not leave a defined set of new scriptures; instead the canon of the New Testament developed over time. Groups within Christianity include differing books as part of their sacred writings, most prominent among which are the biblical apocrypha or deuterocanonical books.
What the Bible is was itself a project of the early church, from the First Council of Nicaea in 325 forward for a few hundred years. That first council was organized by the Roman Emperor Constantine, later ones by the Popes.
I find it amusing that "sola scriptura" advocates tend to overlook the it was the early church itself that decided what documents were to be included in the cannon. Even in the Jewish faith their holy scriptures were still being cannonized in early centuries after Christ.
The King James Version largely followed the decisions of the subsequent councils of the Catholic church. The "scriptura" of "sola scriptura" is therefore, largely the output of the acquired knowledge of the early Catholic church. Wikipedia gives more details on KJV:
James gave the translators instructions intended to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.[6] The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England.[7] In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew and Aramaic text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible – for Epistle and Gospel readings (but not for the Psalter which has retained substantially Coverdale's Great Bible version) and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament.[8]So, in suggesting the KJV one is agreeing that the best version of Christian scripture is the one that was built by employees of the King of England following his direction to make it adhere to the views of that church, largely based on the decision of Catholic clergy over preceding centuries.
It's been many years since my European History classes, but was not the Anglican Church schismed off from the Catholic originally by Henry the Eighth so that he could marry his favorite whores?
In summary the "sola scriptura" doctrine seems pretty indefensible from both a historical and doctrinal point of view.
It would make more sense if the scriptures existed in only a single canonical form, and one believed they had been passed on as written from God, a claim that Mormons and Moslems both make about their unique holy books, but which Christians and Jews have not claimed about their holy books (with the exception of the tablets that the Ten Commandments were engraved upon)
You belive in Scripture, correct?
Then why don't you believe this?
John 21: (We'll be using the KJV today to keep things on even footing): "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen."
The Bible Itself declares that it doesn't contain everything.
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