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fireproofpoodle
Guest
And how do the church fathers come in?
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Nathan_Wagar
Guest
Hey, scroll down a bit in the apologetics forum and go to the fairly recent link “Living Tradition of the Church” by ziapueblo. I give a fairly succinct answer there.
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Nathan_Wagar
Guest
Never mind I’ll just copy and paste part of my response:
To give you sort of a quick example, the Bible did not fall out of the sky into your lap, with no guidance whatsoever. If you were to find a a letter on the ground written by a man two hundred years ago, you could interpret it however you pleased, since you wouldn’t know who wrote it, the context, what the writer was feeling, the point he was trying to make, what he was responding to, etc. Now suppose you knew the great grandchildren of the writer of this letter you picked up, and they knew of the letter and had passed down the story behind it and knew what it meant. They would guard against false interpretations of this letter or perhaps merely be able to more clearly illuminate what it means.
This, in essence, is the role of the Church. What isn’t written down is part of the tradition of the Church, and this is why Tradition and Scripture are two equally important pillars of the same divine source. Dogma can’t add to the tradition, it can only narrow down and clarify what was always there to begin with. Theological speculation is permissible until the Church makes a dogmatic proclamation.
Tradition means “to hand down”
To give you sort of a quick example, the Bible did not fall out of the sky into your lap, with no guidance whatsoever. If you were to find a a letter on the ground written by a man two hundred years ago, you could interpret it however you pleased, since you wouldn’t know who wrote it, the context, what the writer was feeling, the point he was trying to make, what he was responding to, etc. Now suppose you knew the great grandchildren of the writer of this letter you picked up, and they knew of the letter and had passed down the story behind it and knew what it meant. They would guard against false interpretations of this letter or perhaps merely be able to more clearly illuminate what it means.
This, in essence, is the role of the Church. What isn’t written down is part of the tradition of the Church, and this is why Tradition and Scripture are two equally important pillars of the same divine source. Dogma can’t add to the tradition, it can only narrow down and clarify what was always there to begin with. Theological speculation is permissible until the Church makes a dogmatic proclamation.
Tradition means “to hand down”
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Drawmack
Guest
Ever played the telephone game? How out of proportion do things get being handed to 5 or 10 different people? So, you’d like me to follow a telephone game that’s been played for 2,000 years?
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Nathan_Wagar
Guest
Even if you don’t accept that Christ is infallible and passes this on to His Church as He promised, the telephone game doesn’t apply because you have hundreds through thousands of people able to correct an error in teaching. It’d be like playing the telephone game about something that happened with Mom, except Mom is still there to correct the issue. Then we have the written manuscripts, the veracity of which has only been verified by the dicovery of the dead sea scrolls, as well as the fact that almost the entire New Testament can be pieced together by the quotes of the early fathers, which predate some of the manuscripts we have yet are still exactly the same. So I wouldn’t say that the game of telephone is an apt description of what has transpired here. This is not even taking into account the Jewish oral tradition, where memory retention of long passages of scripture/tradition was a part of the culture itself.
I am actually somewhat surprised you would even use this argument, since normally the “telephone” argument is used by atheists to denounce the veracity of Scripture itself. Even if Scripture dating went to the absolute earliest datings found among scholarship, the fact remains that for a few decades at least, oral tradition was how things were passed along. It would seem that the “telephone argument” doesn’t apply there. And then there’s fact that there was no established canon for a few centuries still, and yet the current canon does not seem to suffer from the “telephone game?”
I am actually somewhat surprised you would even use this argument, since normally the “telephone” argument is used by atheists to denounce the veracity of Scripture itself. Even if Scripture dating went to the absolute earliest datings found among scholarship, the fact remains that for a few decades at least, oral tradition was how things were passed along. It would seem that the “telephone argument” doesn’t apply there. And then there’s fact that there was no established canon for a few centuries still, and yet the current canon does not seem to suffer from the “telephone game?”
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VociMike
Guest
Depends on whether the players do or don’t have divine guidance and protection in keeping the story straight. Or don’t you think God is up to that task?
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CalCatholic
Guest
This ‘telephone game’ was played pretty well in the Church for almost 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, before the first word of our New Testament was written in 50/51 A.D. by St. Paul.
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