Scott Hahn and "fallible collection of infallible documents"

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You are way out of line for associating me with this. I never said I supported it all. I am flagging this as it is totally inappropriate.
 
Lol…just to be sure had to double check the definition of shun, in case I missed something…there was a post about shunning a hundred back or so, from somebody
 
I don’t believe that anyone here was advocating anything of the sort.
 
Someone made the comment that at least the CC does not discipline and shun and I asked why not because the early catholic church did. I never said I agreed with it.

Not sure the early church shunned like this.
 
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whatistrue said:
So how about we each do what we do and we can both see what happens in the end?
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Because we in the Catholic Church are instruments of salvation. The supreme mission given to the Catholic Church by Christ is the salvation of souls. The apostles were sent out on a mission. Here Pope Benedict XVI speaks about how indifference can lead to loss of The Faith…
The risen Lord instructed his apostles, and through them his disciples in all ages, to take his word to the ends of the earth and to make disciples of all people. 'But does that still apply?’ many inside and outside the church ask themselves today. ‘Is mission still something for today? Would it not be more appropriate to meet in dialogue among religions and serve together the cause of world peace?’ The counter-question is: ‘Can dialogue substitute for mission?’

“In fact, many today think religions should respect each other and, in their dialogue, become a common force for peace. According to this way of thinking, it is usually taken for granted that different religions are variants of one and the same reality. The question of truth, that which originally motivated Christians more than any other, is here put inside parentheses. It is assumed that the authentic truth about God is in the last analysis unreachable and that at best one can represent the ineffable with a variety of symbols. This renunciation of truth seems realistic and useful for peace among religions in the world.

It is nevertheless lethal to faith. In fact, faith loses its binding character and its seriousness, everything is reduced to interchangeable symbols, capable of referring only distantly to the inaccessible mystery of the divine.
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lanman87 said:
Back to the original topic of this thread.

If someone really wants to know a Protestant/Reformed perspective on the Canon of Scripture then they can find it on the Ligonier.org website. They have temporarily opened up most of their teaching videos for free. Even if you disagree with the conclusions you may still find the videos interesting, just to see how others come to conclusions.

All of the videos are less than 30 minutes long. There are six videos in total.

The Problem of the Canon

The definition of the Canon

The reason for the Canon

The Date of the Canon

The Authors of the Canon

The attributes of the canon
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I was able to watch all 6 videos. Dr. Kruger seems like a very intelligent, well spoken and likable person. Here is my critique for what its worth.
  1. -Im still unsure what this has to do with the 27 book NT canon. He seems to be constantly trying to defend the 27 books by giving a very good defense of the “21-23 books” he references quite often. I stopped counting the times he uses terms or phrases that show the difference of the books he can defend vs the whole of the 27 book canon. Early and often he speaks of “the core books”, “most of the canon”, “21-23 books”, “pretty good idea of the canon”, “boarders were a little fuzzy”, “disagreements were only about 4 or 5 books”.
I kept waiting for him to clear up the fuzzy boarders and he never did. I wondered when is he going to clear up the disagrements on the “4 or 5 books”. He never did. The fact that its “4 or 5” books and not “4” or “5” books is quite telling. It tells me he does not even agree how many books there were in disagreement.
  1. -He mentions in the 2nd video that “there was no vote on the canon” but he never does tell his audience what they were doing at the councils if they were not voting. I would like to know his idea on this.
  2. -Early in v3 he talks about the innate aspect of the church to have a canon. The “need” for a canon in the early church. He says the canon came “quite quickly”, “right out of the gate” to show how the writers knew the church “needed” the writings. He says “the canon would have been an early natural idea”. But never applies this to the historical aspects of the time frame that it was many years before they started their writings and many many years (near the death of John) before the finishing of the writings. He does not tie this fact to his assertions for the purpose of proving the writers “certainly knew they were writing scripture”.
Continued…
 
So Catholics should keep talking to people who are annoyed at the interruption until they convert to get a little peace? Or continue to assail an entrenched position rather than move on to a better prospect? Doesn’t sound like the most efficient use of limited resources to me, but that’s okay too.

Nor is it a matter of indifference but in some ways civility and in some ways accepting reality.
 
…Continued”
  1. -In an effort to argue that the writing are so important to the early church he tries to tie the NT writings to the new covenent. v3 At about the 15:30 mark he says “to say you had a covenant is to say you had a book (writing)”. And at 16:30 ish “you could almost hold up a book and say this is the covenant God has with His people”. Does this mean the new covenant wasnt complete until year 100?
  2. -v4 he reference Irenaeus “22 of the 27 books” and states this “clearly establishes scripture”. (again he is defending 22 books not 27 but i digress) He continues with partial lists coming from Muratorium Fragment, Theophilous, and Clement . Later he introduces Papias, Ignatius and Polycarp all having similar canons. Why dont these guys, the earliest fathers, purport a complete and proper 27 book canon if in fact what Kurger says in v3 at 20:10 “these books as soon as they were written would have born the authority and people would have recognized them as scripture.” is true?
I also find it very misleading how Dr Kurger mentioned in one of the early videos, dont remember where, that one of the aspects we can know we have scripture is that it was read in the holy assembly but never once addresses the growing number of books being read in the holy assembly into the 5th century.

In closing i would say that no body disputes the finding Kurger and most scholars say about the earliness and usefulness of the 22ish books. But im much more interested in the whole 27 books myself.

Peace!!!
 
Of course not. As Jesus said…shake the dust off and move on (but keep praying for them). I guess I misunderstood, I thought you were speaking in a general way about evangelization like Pope Benedict referred to. Sorry about that.
 
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Thank you for taking the time to watch the videos.

I do think it clears at least one of the Catholic talking points that I keep hearing.

That the church didn’t have any scripture in the first three centuries because the canon hadn’t been finalized. Dr. Kruger makes a good case that those 22 core books were considered scripture and spoke with authority the moment they were penned and they were universally considered scripture. This is one of the main talking points against Sola Scriptura, that there was no New Testament until the 5th Century. Well, that is a partial truth, there was no finalized list of a New Testament, but the majority of the text were considered Scripture by consensus of the church long before the 5th Century.

I also wish he had talked more about why certain books that got some traction to be scripture, ultimately lost that traction. We know of what, 9 or 10 books, that some church father somewhere quoted as scripture but was rejected by others. And they ultimately didn’t make it to the final canon.

However, his final video does a good summary of why protestants can be confident that the New Testament is the right set of books.
 
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I would also like to point out that his main purpose of the videos was not to refute the Catholic thinking of how the canon formed, although in the final video he does show that distinction. In the first video he makes clear that the reason for doing these videos is from secular attacks against Christianity in the form of questioning the canon.

I imaging if his purpose was to address the differences in Catholic/Protestant thoughts of how the canon was determined then he would have spent way more time than the last few minutes talking about that distinction.

I think I’m going to order his book on the subject, The Canon Revisted to see if he offers more detail than he did in these short videos.
 
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lanman87 said:
I do think it clears at least one of the Catholic talking points that I keep hearing.

That the church didn’t have any scripture in the first three centuries because the canon hadn’t been finalized.
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I cant say i have ever heard that the church didnt have any scripture. That the church didnt have a canon of scripture, yes, but not have scripture.
lanman87 said:
Dr. Kruger makes a good case that those 22 core books were considered scripture and spoke with authority the moment they were penned and they were universally considered scripture.
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Agree
lanman87 said:
This is one of the main talking points against Sola Scriptura, that there was no New Testament until the 5th Century.
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Not from my pov. The main point would be that since there was no canon and that there were many more books being considered as scripture than the 27 books, then the sola scripturist would have been using the other books as well. But thats just my pov.
lanman87 said:
Well, that is a partial truth, there was no finalized list of a New Testament, but the majority of the text were considered Scripture by consensus of the church long before the 5th Century.
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:+1:t2:
lanman87 said:
I also wish he had talked more about why certain books that got some traction to be scripture, ultimately lost that traction. We know of what, 9 or 10 books, that some church father somewhere quoted as scripture but was rejected by others. And they ultimately didn’t make it to the final canon.
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Me to!!!
lanman87 said:
However, his final video does a good summary of why protestants can be confident that the New Testament is the right set of books.
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I can agree with this but to only the 22 books. Not the full canon and not to the books that could have been left out based on the same criteria.

Thanks for the discussion-
Peace!!!
 
Thanks everyone for your thoughts. If you ever feel like discussion Hahn’s book again let me know. (Not that I necessarily expect another discussion anytime soon, seeing as this thread had 375 posts.)

🙂
 
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