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I respectfully ask evangelical, protestant and sola scriptura proponents...
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CopticChristian
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Do you believe in Magic?
youtube.com/watch?v=o89iKsKw19M
Do you believe in question mark and the mysterions?
youtube.com/watch?v=rgfnCTp3p7U
Are you superstitiuos?
youtube.com/watch?v=2OJsYwLs7yE
Do you believe that the Church is the Mystery hidden for all ages and if hidden always there not seen and yet active in declaring the stone tablets to be Scripture and more…
youtube.com/watch?v=fWyaFPGeusg
This isn’t difficult. The unified Church (guided by the Spirit) eventually came to view NT books as canon or not.
Eusebius catagorized them as homologoumena recognized, antilegomena disputed (including James and Jude), spurious (which included the Didache, I think), and Heretical.
Jon
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joe370
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joe370
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joe370
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They deferred to the practice of sola scriptura.This is excellent; however to add, I would suggest how these all recognized the bishop of Rome as the final authority on matters of F&M…
Just joking…Certainly Peter would have to get to Rome and establish his leadership there and pass on the keys to a successor before any one could recognize Peter as the bishop of Rome. Peter didn’t just hustle over to to Rome and set up shop, immediately after Pentecost. Like the codification of scripture, things took time to develop.
Of course I will assume that you will of course disagree, since you are a protestant.
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pablope
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Hi, Jon…then could tell that to CalC…
This is what he said…“THUS my position: It IS possible to embrace Scripture as such with NO ROLE WHATSOEVER by The Catholic Church.”…that is why I asked him to demonstrate…for the 2nd time…to determine the canon from that list. If you read one of his previous post…he also said authorship was not important/necessary…unfortunately, i am technically deprived on how to post qoutations from the writings…without authors…for him to demonstrate also to determine the canon without knowing the authors.
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PRmerger
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That, pablope, is the most peculiar paradigms proposed on this thread, IMHO.
Authorship doesn’t matter? Well, it ought to matter, especially to someone who disavows himself of any authority beyond Scripture. For how in the world would someone know if this Christian text has been written by a Christian? By a witness to the resurrection? By a disciple of Him!
Of course authorship is relevant. And in the cases where authorship is in dispute or unknown, well, that’s why we have Holy Mother Church to discern whether the ancient text is theopneustos or not, despite being unsure about authorship!
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pablope
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Yes…in post 689…when I asked him to cite the chapter and verse where Mark claims authorship of the gospel of Mark. Of course, he could not cite such…that is why he said authorship is not important…otherwise, he would be acknowledging the authority of the CC in telling him about the canonicity of the gospel of Mark.
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joe370
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Portrait
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Dear CalChristian,
Cordial greetings and a very good day.
What I think is important to bear in mind is that Sacred Scripture itself gives no satisfactory proof of its inspiration, or even a list of its contents. We require some living authority to declare unto us: “This collection of books, consisting of these parts, has God for its author”. The collection of books themselves simply cannot say this. It was the living authority of the Church herself in the early centuries which gathered together the writings which we now call the New Testament and declared them to be inspired and thus authoritative. The fact is that but for her acceptance and recognition of them, their inspiration would have remained unacknowledged and there would be no such book as that which is now termed the New Testament. As St. Augustine said, “I would not believe in the Gospel had not the the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do so”. Catholics and Orthodox have several books in the Old Testament which Protestant Christians exclude theirs. Only a living authority can say whose list of books is correct; it cannot be dispensed with unless everyone is to decide for themselves which books comprise of the bible.
The whole issue between the Protestants and Catholics revolves around the issue of private judgement and always has done. The substitution of private judgement for a living infallible teaching authority is the root-error of Protestantism. Moreover, its destructive force is seen today, not merely in the multitude of ecclesial communions and sects, but in the denial of the Divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the bible itself, and other fundamental tenets of orthodoxy, regarded by the early Reformers as essential to orthodox Christianity.
With respect to the O.T. the Divinity of our Lord establishes the divine origin not only of the Christian religion, but also of the preparatory faith of Judaism. The Jewish religion was what it claimed to be, a religion given to the Jewish race by God, and the accounts of all pre-Christian revelation which its sacred books contain must be accepted as of divine authority. Thus the Divinity of Christ therefore assures us of His own revelation, and of the revelation given before His time, by Moses and others, to the Jewish race.
Trust that will be of some help to you, dear friend.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait
Pax
You’re right, Joe. AFAIK, there has never been a general council that has set the canon of scripture (wish there were). But the canon of the NT has been universally (so far as I know) accepted , even though some of the books have been disputed since the early Church.
Jon
Hi Pablo,Hi, Jon…then could tell that to CalC…
This is what he said…“THUS my position: It IS possible to embrace Scripture as such with NO ROLE WHATSOEVER by The Catholic Church.”…that is why I asked him to demonstrate…for the 2nd time…to determine the canon from that list. If you read one of his previous post…he also said authorship was not important/necessary…unfortunately, i am technically deprived on how to post qoutations from the writings…without authors…for him to demonstrate also to determine the canon without knowing the authors.
Since Cal is no longer able to respond, it is hard to know just exactly what he meant by this. In general, however, I think it is possible to embrace scripture without the a role of the Catholic Church, if by that one means those in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Not trying to parce here, but one doesn’t need Trent, Hippo, Carthage, to embrace scripture. One could look to the early unified Church, or even post-schism Orthodoxy.
OTOH, even Luther recognized the great role the Catholic Church plays in the history of Christendom:
To simply ignore the role of first the unified Church and later the western See in Rome in our understanding of the faith and scripture just doesn’t seem to me to be reasonable. Again, I’m not saying anything about Cal since he isn’t able to respond, but just speaking in a general way.
Jon
On the issue of authorship, this was a big issue for Luther, and one of the reasons he, following the lead of others throughout the history of the Church, had questions regarding James.
Jon
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PRmerger
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You are right here, Jon, in that one needs no council in order to embrace Scripture.
The point that all of us Catholics are trying to make to SS folks is that even SS advocates need an outside authority. Not to “embrace” Scripture, but in order to discern what IS Scripture.
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PRmerger
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Did he question Hebrews as well?
There were four, as I recall, all of which had been disputed long before Luther, that he questioned. But throughout Christendom, including Lutheranism, the 27 NT books are accepted as canon.
Jon
Some claim to not need one. They simply claim that they hold certain books as scripture, irrespective of what others, including Rome, believe. I’m sure there are some who see the Luther quote I posted above and vehemently disagree.
It is interesting that the Lutheran Confessions to not specify the books of the canon of scripture. IOW, we do not necessarily reject the deuterocanon, we just will not use it for determining doctrine, considering its historically disputed nature.
Jon
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PRmerger
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Yes, and I find this to be a peculiar form of intellectual dishonesty.
Is this the “I’ll know Scripture when I see it” paradigm?
I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, but also deadly serious.
How else does one discern what is Scripture without an outside authority?
How is it that you consider “historically disputed” to be a criterion for rejecting the deuterocanon yet also accept the “historically disputed” books of James and Revelation (et al) as theopneustos?
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Portrait
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Dear PRmerger,
Cordial greetings and a very good day.
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Indeed, all Christian’s can warmly ‘embrace’ the scriptures and should do so, but that does not mean that they can privately interpret them. Private interpretation leads a man along a subjective path to an ultimate quagmire of competing opinions and doctrinal chaos.
The notion of ‘bible alone’ was almost unheard of until Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. Moreover, if it were true then all Christians for up to fifteen centuries were in gross error as to the source of their faith, until God sent Mr. Luther to put everyone right. This means that, for all those centuries, Christ failed to keep his promise that the Holy Spirit would lead the Apostles to the whole truth and be with them forever, and that He Himself would be with them to the end of time. As a result, the sola scriptura theory destroys belief in Christ and the Bible.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait
Pax
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