Sola Scripturist Catholic

[goout]

Yes but again, these things are determined by objective criteria by men using reason.

What was that criteria in the very first council touching on the canon?

Where does Jesus fit into your order of things? Jesus is the summation of all revelation.
Let me ask you:
Is Jesus a book or a person?

When you talk about convening a council, and the importance of scripture, those things both lead to a person, not a book.
The book reveals a person, Jesus Christ.

 

[setarcos]

which traditions? Many early traditions have been trimmed away and many early traditions remain today which even though a direct offshoot of early Christianity have been deemed heretical. So by what standard is an early tradition judged heretical? An earlier tradition? Or perhaps a referral to sacred scripture? So how does one judge an early tradition divinely inspired or worldly misleading if they both exist as some sort of offshoot of Christianity started by early Christians?

 

[goout]

Of course, and absolutely, the Bible is the sole possession of the Church that is God breathed, and therefore ontologically superior to either tradition or the magisterium.

Not only that, but both tradition and the magisterium are subject to and normed by sacred scripture. Absolutely.

It’s just that the conformity of tradition and the magisterium to scripture alone occurs at the hands of the Holy Spirit within the Church, not at the hands of the reformers who have refused to heed the command of Christ and “hear the Church.”

Checks out?

If Christ is the summation of all revelation, then who is Christ?
Christ is the second person of the Trinity.
Christ is God Incarnate.
Because Christ is Incarnate, he walked the earth in the human condition.
Because he is fully human, Christ lived in a community.

Let’s stop right there and let that sink in. Christ didn’t come fully human to sit by himself on a throne, untouched by others, keeping to himself. And he didn’t throw a book at his disciples.
He touched people, breathed on them, sat around campfires with them, and formed community with them.

The scriptures come out of that community centered in Christ. That is Tradition.
It may offend you, but before the scriptures were, Christ is. And out of the community he founds come the scriptures. The New Testament scriptures were all written after Christ is ascended. Where were the scriptures before the scriptures were written? Living in the Tradition of the community.
Scripture and Tradition are all part of the seamless garment that is the Church.

 

[StAugustine]

And all I am asking is what exactly was the criterion used by the fathers to determine the authenticity of the scriptures? As men, using their reason, how did they make their determination? That’s my only question.

 

[11101]

I mean, even the Church’s phrase “Scripture and Tradition” implies that Scripture is the most important thing, because the division is 73 books, and then literally everything else written, said, or done, in the last 2000 years.

Also, the phrase, “the Bible contains all truths necessary for Salvation,” is a phrase you will hear quite often in Catholic circles (although you will hear distinctions about material and formal sufficiency).

 

[11101]

So, it seems that most of the Church Fathers, in choosing the books to use in their communities, relied on the apostolic origin of their Gospels and Epistles, as well as the fact they organically were part of their liturgies. Lex orendi, lex credendi.

Of course, not everyone in persecuted infant Christendom had access to all the books of the New Testament (look at our earliest lists of NT canon, and you will notice some absences), and some early communities incorporated books such as St. Clement’s Letters in their faith-lives, as equal to the other books of the New Testament.

You point to Athanasius’ canon. It was obviously controversial. The canon was fully defined at the Synod of Rome in 382, yes, not infallibly. Since you ask about selection, there, it seems to have come down to their place in tradition, their apostolic origin, their orthodoxy, and more or less their popularity.

As for the Old Testament, Diasporan Jewry largely used the modern Catholic Old Testament, and so the early Christians (who came mostly from Diasporan Jewry) used the traditional Scriptures they always had. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls contain some Deuterocanon with their canon. Significantly, this idea of a closed canon of Scripture is not something that gained a lot of credence in Jewry until at least the first century A.D. And if you were Christian, you probably saw the writers of the New Testament Scriptures as a continuation of that prophetic Jewish literary tradition (which you may have seen as including books Catholics don’t consider inspired, such as the Testament of Moses or the Book of Jubilees or the Book of Enoch).

 

[11101]

So, Scripture emerges from Tradition, guided by magisterium (part of Tradition), and all Tradition must find some place in Scripture, and be guided by Scripture.

The fact of the matter is, whatever the vagaries of the canon’s origin, it is ahistorical to say that any Christian alive today, defends and believes in the books of the New Testament for any reason other than a very long line of Christians told him those books were the Bible and were inspired.

It is dependent on tradition. You can say that Tradition is infallible or fallible, but the point is, you rely on it for an infallible thing. Obviously, whether you acknowledge it or not, whether the fourth century acknowledged it or not, you think that the whole body of Christian tradition, taken together, has some sort of infallibility, or at least very very high evidentiary significance.

 

[11101]

This is what I would say to the Protestant making the argument you submit.

Think about this as a man in Ephesus, during the early years. Paul was among you for years. He sends back a letter later. In terms of stuff that will end up in the Christian New Testament, this is the only thing you have access to.

It is a short letter. Did nothing Paul told you have weight while he was with you? Or did it suddenly become significant when he sent a letter back? What about all the stuff that isn’t in Ephesians, because you can’t run a Christian church based on that alone. DId you get it straight from the author’s mouth?

The very fact that most of Paul’s letters are him complaining that people have ignored what he told them, before he wrote the letter, while he was among them, indicates that Paul thought what he told them had authority, and was trustworthy.

Most scholars will tell you that Paul references letters which are lost to history in the canonized epistles. It is an unwarranted assumption to think the recipients of those letters would not have viewed those with equal weight. Were they wrong? Paul almost certainly viewed them with the same attitude. Was he wrong?

This is the context we have to put ourselves in when we read Paul explicitly telling us to hold fast to what he told us, orally, and what he heard, by word of mouth.

Also, when Paul says anything about Scripture, you get he’s talking about the Old Testament, right? I don’t think we should be shocked if we got to Heaven and Paul had no idea Philemon was inspired by God when he wrote it. He knew it was authoritative because he was an apostle (which he makes clear), not because he was inspired by God in a way few other people would ever be (which he probably did not know).

Or, perhaps consider Pentecost. None of the Scriptures get written until at least 50 A.D. So, it is fairly plain to me that the whole of the authority of the Church cannot rest solely on the Scriptures, otherwise, the Council of Jerusalem had not authority at the time it happened. Peter had no authority when people approached him like Moses and fell down dead before him. Paul had no authority in Thessalonica, so none of what he said was authoritative until he wrote the letter about it afterwards.

 

[tafan2]

Off the top of my head the criteria were:

1. had been used in liturgies extensively
2. apostolic origin
3. no conflict with the faith

It seems like I am forgetting one other, and cannot find the book that I read which detailed the criteria.

Can you please answer my previous question as to the definition of Sola Scripture you are using?

 

[Lucretius]

This is how I view it: the revelation of God to the world is firstly the actual, historical life, death, resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of the Living God. In this perspective, Scripture is still revelation too, but firstly Scripture is a written witness to God’s revelation by members of the early Church, and it is from here we can then talk about how it also part of the revelation.

Tradition, then, should be understood as another witness that also arises from the same source as the Scripture: the actual, historical life of Christ to his Apostles.

Under this understanding, it makes little sense to talk about Scripture being “more true,” because both it and tradition* are methods that this revelation is transmitted to us that also partake in the revelation as well. The eyes see and the hands touch the same thing, they are different ways of knowing the same thing. The key here is to understand that they are different ways of knowing some thing (methods) that arise from the same source (the historical expression of God).

Instead of thinking of the story of the Crucifixion as the revelation firstly, think of the historical event of the Crucifixion as the revelation, and the story as that by which we know the Crucifixion. The Apostles, after all, didn’t need the New Testament to know about the revelation of the Christ.

Sola Scriptura is part of modern thinkers general errors in epistemology, in particular the error of trying to reduce our knowing of truth to only one method. Sola Scriptura and scientism, for example, are the same erroneous spirit in different fields of knowledge. At least Sola Scriptura isn’t an obvious contradiction (although it has no basis)!

Now, with all this said, we might be able to talk about Scripture being superior to tradition insofar as Scripture being the Word of God, that is, that every word the Prophets wrote being agreed to by God. But even this approach might be problematic.

Christi pax.

*Tradition is a tricky thing to understand. Part of tradition involves the historical witness of the Church Fathers (via Trent), part of tradition involves reflection on revelation as mediated by the Church’s Apostolic teaching authority (via Newman), and part of tradition involves things that are part of the revelation, yet are in principle not things we can write down, like the Mass (do this in memory of me, not read this in memory of me) or the lives of the saints (models of the Gospel, proper images of Christ himself) (via Benedict XVI).

 

[tafan2]

This is how I view it: the revelation of God to the world is firstly the actual, historical life, death, resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of the Living God

Are you using “firstly” as primarily, or chronology? Public revelation started with Abraham and lasted until the death of the last apostle.

 

[Lucretius]

Not Chronologically, but ontologically. The revelation is the events themselves, and the Scripture and tradition are the methods by which we know them, and it is in this sense they are primary.

Christi pax.

 

[chessnerd321]

Many early traditions have been trimmed away and many early traditions remain today which even though a direct offshoot of early Christianity have been deemed heretical.

You answered your own question right there. When I say “tradition” I mean something which 1) still exists. And 2) Is orthodox. Tradition doesn’t just mean, as you seem to assume “something people thought in the patristic age.”

Scripture helped determine which of these patristic thoughts are traditions. And the traditions interpret and set the Canon. I don’t have time to answer more but if you respond I’m happy to put more of my thoughts out there.

 

[StAugustine]

No, but the substance is. Will you say the Assumption is substantially in the pages of scripture apart from a vague sense of allegory? Where?

 

[Gorgias]

Off the top of my head the criteria were:

1. had been used in liturgies extensively
2. apostolic origin
3. no conflict with the faith

It seems like I am forgetting one other, and cannot find the book that I read which detailed the criteria.

In use universally throughout the Church.

 

[Gorgias]

And all I am asking is what exactly was the criterion used by the fathers to determine the authenticity of the scriptures? As men, using their reason, how did they make their determination?

In a certain sense, the ‘criteria’ or the ‘reason’ doesn’t matter. What matters is that Christ gave Peter and the apostles the authority – his authority – to act. The fact that they used this authority to (1) create a Bible and (2) define its canon is all that matters; how they did it is merely of historical interest.

 

[tafan2]

Thanks for that. Quite obvious. My old age is starting to affect my mind.

 

[StAugustine]

Every authority on earth occurs through the excercise of human reason.

Therefore, what was the reasoning process?

 

[EvangAlived]

Every authority on earth occurs through the excercise of human reason.

Isn’t the Holy Spirit, sent to and on earth, as an Authority, as representative of Jesus Christ, and isn’t He above human reason? Doesn’t He give command to humans as well as to angels from Heaven?

Aren’t angels on earth, the good from Heaven, and the so also the evil that fell? Are these also not authorities that have nothing to do with human reason, and are above human reason? Are we not also to heed the instruction of the good angels, under the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit, who is the representative of Jesus on earth?

 

[Gorgias]

Every authority on earth occurs through the excercise of human reason.

Therefore, what was the reasoning process?

There’s one caveat that you’re not acknowledging, however. In this case – that is, in matters of faith and morals – the Church enjoys the protection of the Holy Spirit against doctrinal error. Therefore, regardless of the process, and regardless of the reasons they may have followed, we know that the Church’s definition of the canon of the Scripture is authoritative and correct.