Where Does Scripture State That It Is the *Sole* Rule of Faith?

[RalphP]

BobCatholic

“My comment still stands: There is nowhere in the Bible that says “only what is contained in the Bible is the Word of God” You’re free to refute that by posting the verses that say this.”

I don’t refute it. I don’t think I have refuted it. I just added that any words of God found outside the Scriptures must be measured against the words found in the Scripture.

“Yes, traditions of men can be fallible. That’s why one must stick to Apostolic tradition as commanded by scripture (2 Thess 2:15,1 Cor. 11:2, 2 Thess. 3:6)”

Agreed, but the million dollar question is, what are the oral Apostolic tradition? That is where our disagreements are.

Ralph

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Ani Ibi:

But what if kaycee never learned how to read and lived in a neighbourhood where no one knew how to read. What then?

kaycee:

Or I could get a literate person to read to me.

kaycee, if you lived in a neighbourhood where no one knew how to read, then where are you going to find a literate person to read to you?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

BobCatholic:

My comment still stands: There is nowhere in the Bible that says “only what is contained in the Bible is the Word of God” You’re free to refute that by posting the verses that say this.

RalphP:

I don’t refute it. I don’t think I have refuted it. I just added that any words of God found outside the Scriptures must be measured against the words found in the Scripture.Ralph

And somewhere in Scripture it says: “any words of God found outside the Scriptures must be measured against the words found in the Scripture.”

OK. Where?

 

[Man]

If Cyprian is not in the Bible, and kaycee subscribes to Sola Scriptura, then why is kaycee quoting Cyprian? Also the OP is: Where Does Scripture State That It Is the Sole Rule of Faith?

Kaycee is attempting to mitigate the magisterium arguments by discounting the Pope and Church fathers as well as the deposit of faith (Tradition). It is required that she do so in order to show that the Church became heretical at some point in history and therefor give the founders of other churches at least some right to break the church, which, is not a right at all, according to scripture. (2 Cor)

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Not following your logic here. What does reading the scripture to the iliterate infer here.

• Let’s say Sola Scriptura is valid.
• Let’s say you can’t read.
• Let’s say you can’t afford a handwritten Bible.

You could just have someone who has a Bible read you the Bible right?

• But then let’s say you do hard labour from dawn to dusk and therefore you have no leisure time to listen to someone read the Bible.

As far as getting saved, you are just plum out of luck. Aren’t you?

Also how likely is it that someone who is wealthy enough to afford a handwritten Bible would hang around in a field reading to the labourers and getting in the way of their work? How many labourers do you think would have gotten saved this way?

 

[Man]

And somewhere in Scripture it says: “any words of God found outside the Scriptures must be measured against the words found in the Scripture.”

OK. Where?

It doesn’t matter, because this is Prima Scriptura, which is Church etiquette, but (a big but) this is in determining Doctrine based on Dogma and Tradition… Thus, the three legged stool would still stand regardless…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Kaycee is attempting to mitigate the magisterium arguments by discounting the Pope and Church fathers as well as the deposit of faith (Tradition). It is required that she do so in order to show that the Church became heretical at some point in history and therefor give the founders of other churches at least some right to break the church, which, is not a right at all, according to scripture. (2 Cor)

:doh2: :newidea: :tiphat:

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Ani Ibi:

And somewhere in Scripture it says: “any words of God found outside the Scriptures must be measured against the words found in the Scripture.”

OK. Where?

Man:

It doesn’t matter, because this is Prima Scriptura, which is Church etiquette, but (a big but) this is in determining Doctrine based on Dogma and Tradition… Thus, the three legged stool would still stand regardless…

It does matter. Because if it is consistent with Sola Scriptura, then it will be in the Bible.

 

[Man]

It does matter. Because if it is consistent with Sola Scriptura, then it will be in the Bible.

I think it says teachings not words, but I can’t be sure, because I can’t find it. But, I’ll bet it starts with something that implies Tradition, it almost always does…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Man:

I see many ministers, especially televangelists make all kinds of wild claims about the Bible and the church with a series of “scriptural proofs.” Each one a divine revelation to them for the community.

kaycee:

Stop watching TBN and the wolves and hucksters. Should I define Catholics by Tetzel, the Popes of the pornocracy or today’s wayward priests?

You don’t have to define Catholics. You can go to the Magisterium to define Catholicism. Moreover, you can go there a century ago, today, and a century hence. It will be the same.

But in looking at the Reformist spectrum, where are we to go? Many if not most there make claims which vary widely and wildly from congregation to congregation.

Who is in charge? Who is the bottom line? Are you going to say ‘Scripture’? Gosh, Luther couldn’t even make his mind up about Scripture. And he authored Sola Scriptura. And therefore you are back to interpretations which vary widely and wildly from congregation to congregation.

Truth cannot contradict truth, kaycee. Yet interpretations among Reformers do contradict each other. How does one determine which one is true? Back to Scripture. Back to who interprets. Back to Scripture. Back to who interprets.

Do you not see that this is circular reasoning and therefore it is unreasonable? Yes or no please. Thank you.

Do you not see that faith cannot be unreasonable? Yes or no please. Thank you.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Silly me, I thought the Reformation occured partly because Tetzel was soaking the “little people” selling indulgences to build St. Peter’s Basilica. BTW that interesting “tradition” (selling indulgences) was halted, no?

Causes of the Reformation:

1. 
   *]Materialism followed closely on the heels of prosperity.
   *]Plagues emptied the seminaries, and thus many clergy lacked education and discipline among clergy slackened.
   *]The distinction between Church and State blurred.
   *]Competition took the form of some folks wanting to reform others while grabbing land and power for themselves.
   *]Quarrels among secular princes diminished papal power.
   *]The Renaissance fostered humanism.
   *]Nationalism took root.
   *]Scholasticism declined.
   *]Rebellion and war found a champion in the illness of Luther.
   Now as for the indulgences, I believe it was not indulgences but bribery which was one initiating incident.
   

   …secular rulers frequently forbade the promulgation of indulgences within their territories, consenting only on condition that a portion of the receipts should be given to them. In practice, therefore, and in the public mind the promulgation of took on an economic aspect, and, as they were frequent, many came to regard them as an oppressive tax.

   In any case, the Church responded to the list of grievances by means of the Counter-reformation. Those grievances having been resolved, did Luther and his buddies come back? No. Why? Because the real reasons Luther left were:
   1. he was ill and couldn’t think straight.
   2. he tolerated no authority over him.
   3. he trusted no one.
   4. he liked hobnobbing with the princes.
   5. he enjoyed having the power of life and death over others.
   In other words, Luther’s grievances were a cover for his need to scapegoat – and the Church was the biggest and safest target. Yet that did not stop Luther from tirelessly seeking additional ‘hobby’ targets like the peasants and the Jews.
   
   Here is some info on indulgences.
   

   …the doctrine itself has no natural or necessary connection with pecuniary profit, as is evident from the fact that the abundant indulgences of the present day are free from this evil association: the only conditions required are the saying of certain prayers or the performance of some good work or some practice of piety…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

=kaycee:

…Weren’t the wars of religion instigated by the papacy and RC monarchs bent on stamping out the Protestant movement? Think you need to read up on Julius II, Bloody Mary, Catherine de Medici, and Philip II—to name a few. And what about the Fourth Crusade? And the Inquisition.

Struggle all you want. We’ll be happy to deal with one war at a time. Start as many threads as you want on these wars.

The wars to which I was referring occured directly as a result of Luther’s influence.

Right from the very start, the Reformers used tactics of force

…one of the chief means employed in promoting the spread of the Reformation was the use of violence by the princes and the municipal authorities. Priests who remained Catholic were expelled and replaced by adherents of the new doctrine, and the people were compelled to attend the new services.

The faithful adherents of the Church were variously persecuted, and the civil authorities saw to it that the faith of the descendants of those who had strongly opposed the Reformation was gradually sapped. In many places the people were severed from the Church by brutal violence…

Of real freedom of belief among the Reformers of the sixteenth century there was not a trace; on the contrary, the greatest tyranny in matters of conscience was displayed by the representatives of the Reformation. The most baneful Caesaropapism was meanwhile fostered, since the Reformation recognized the secular authorities as supreme also in religious matters…

In this way the Reformation was a chief factor in the evolution of royal absolutism. In every land in which it found ingress, the Reformation was the cause of indescribable suffering among the people; it occasioned civil wars which lasted decades with all their horrors and devastations…

Germany in particular, the original home of the Reformation, was reduced to a state of piteous distress by the Thirty Years’ War, and the German Empire was thereby dislodged from the leading position which it had for centuries occupied in Europe.

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Oh and the little matter of the Peasant Massacre:

… [Luther] “dipped his pen in blood” and "calls upon the princes to slaughter the offending peasants like mad dogs, to stab, strangle and slay as best one can… His advice was literally followed. The process of repression was frightful. The encounters were more in the character of massacres than battles. The undisciplined peasants with their rude farming implements as weapons, were slaughtered like cattle in the shambles.

More than 1000 monasteries and castles were levelled to the ground, hundreds of villages were laid in ashes, the harvests of the nation were destroyed, and 100,000 killed. The fact that one commander alone boasted that “he hanged 40 evangelical preachers and executed 11,000 revolutionists and heretics”, and that history with hardly a dissenting voice fastens the origin of this war on Luther, fully shows where its source and responsibility lay.

And where do you think Hitler got his Seven points against the Jews from if not Luther himself?

In 1543, Luther’s animus probably reached its apotheosis in a vituperative pamphlet, On the Jews and their Lies (1543)*, *in which he urged the authorities to act against Jews with the utmost severity. A vile and calculating document, it drips with anger and contempt.

Four centuries later, the Nazis used quotations from this pamphlet, which was cited by the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer during the Nuremberg trials, to justify the Holocaust.

In August 1536, Luther’s prince Elector of Saxony John Frederick issued a mandate that prohibited Jews from inhabiting, engaging in business in, or passing through his realm. An Alsatian shtadlan, Rabbi Josel of Rosheim, asked a reformer Wolfgang Capito to approach Luther in order to obtain an audience with the prince, but Luther refused every intercession…

Paul Johnson writes that “Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543.”

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

He refers to Jews as a brood of vipers and children of the devil…miserable, blind, and senseless, truly stupid fools, thieves and robbers, lazy rogues, daily murderers, and vermin, likens them to gangrene… Luther advised "… “we must drive them out like mad dogs.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in an essay on Lutheran-Jewish relations, observed that “Over the years, Luther’s anti-Jewish writings have continued to be reproduced in pamphlets and other works by neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.”

The prevailing sentiment among historians is that “On the Jews and Their Lies” and other antisemitic writings by Luther laid the groundwork for the modern “racial” form of antisemitism — that is, the persecution, deportation, or even genocide of Jews…

Writing in Lutheran Quarterly in 1987, Dr. Johannes Wallmann stated:

The assertion that Luther’s expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation

, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti-Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.

Franklin Sherman, editor of volume 47 of the American Edition of Luther’s Works in which On the Jews and Their Lies appears… states in response to the claim that “Luther’s antipathy towards the Jews was religious rather than racial in nature” that Luther’s writings against the Jews are not “merely a set of cool, calm and collected theological judgments.”

“His writings are full of rage, and indeed hatred, against an identifiable human group, not just against a religious point of view… [Luther] cannot be distanced completely from modern antisemites.” Regarding Luther’s treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote: “There you already have the whole Nazi program…” link

Hitler’s Education Minister, Bernhard Rust, was quoted by the Völkischer Beobachter as saying that: “Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance … I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp Schrot und Korn]”.

Hans Hinkel… paid tribute to Luther in his acceptance speech as head of… the film department of Goebbel’s Chamber of Culture and Propaganda Ministry. “… with Luther, the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.”

Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.” The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words “of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

[Luther] “dipped his pen in blood” and "calls upon the princes to slaughter the offending peasants like mad dogs, to stab, strangle and slay as best one can… His advice was literally followed. The process of repression was frightful. The encounters were more in the character of massacres than battles. The undisciplined peasants with their rude farming implements as weapons, were slaughtered like cattle in the shambles.

More than 1000 monasteries and castles were levelled to the ground, hundreds of villages were laid in ashes, the harvests of the nation were destroyed, and 100,000 killed. The fact that one commander alone boasted that “he hanged 40 evangelical preachers and executed 11,000 revolutionists and heretics”, and that history with hardly a dissenting voice fastens the origin of this war on Luther, fully shows where its source and responsibility lay. link

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Let’s see what Reformation influence achieved in America.

The key element to understanding the radical Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is… the millenium… John Calvin’s doctrine of election made it possible to rethink the millenium in terms of physical reality. Now that one had living saints walking around on the earth, that is,

members of the Calvinist church

, one now had candidates for the one thousand year rule of saints.

Translating the rule of saints into a physical reality meant reorganizing the church into a political authority, which is one of the fundamental aspects of Calvinism… The millenarianism of the Protestant settlers of America had two other crucial aspects: the Ordeal and the final battle between good and evil…

Some Protestants believed that the conflict between Natives and Europeans would be a spiritual conflict and began to actively proseletyze Native societies. This proseletyzation, done in the best intents, seriously disrupted Native American society. Not fully welcome in their own societies, and almost completely unwelcome in European-American society, the converts found themselves between two worlds.

Those, however, who believed that the final battle would be a physical battle began a pattern of violence against the Native Americans… Native Americans… were reconfigured in the American imagination as instruments of evil. link

end of post.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

I suggest you try reading history from a less impartial source.

Implying that my sources are partial does not make them so. So far you have been light on logic and heavy on evasion. Any progress on those questions we asked you?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

kaycee:

Psalm 119: “I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on Thy statutes. I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey Thy precepts. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light for my path. The unfolding of Thy words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.”

The word as I have said an astronomical number of times before is not text.

The Word is the Second Person of God: Jesus

Therefore Scripture is not enough. The Real Presence is also necessary. We have not talked about the Real Presence yet, but there you have it. Try cramming the Real Presence into a book.

1 Cor 4:6 Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, **“Do not go beyond what is written.” **Then you will not take pride in one man over against another.

Going Beyond

John Calvin says Paul’s use of the phrase “what is written” is probably either a reference to the Old Testament verses he quotes within his epistle or to the epistle itself (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 4:6). Not only did Calvin not see in 1 Corinthians any support for sola scriptura, a theory he vociferously promoted, he regarded the verse as obscure at best and of negligible value in the effort to vindicate Protestantism.

Some commentators see in 1 Corinthians 4:6 an allusion to “what is written” in the Book of Life (Ex. 32:32-33, Rev. 20:12). This is quite possibly what Paul had in mind, since the context of 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 is divine judgment (when the Book of Life will be opened and scrutinized). He admonishes the Corinthians against speculating about how people will be judged, leaving it up to “what has been written” in the Book of Life.

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

What is certain is that Paul, in saying, “do not go beyond what is written,” was not teaching sola scriptura. If he had, he would have been advocating one of four principles, which are inconsistent with the rest of his theology:

(1) Accept as authoritative only the Old Testament writings;

(2) accept as authoritative only the Old Testament writings and the New Testament writings penned as of the date Paul wrote 1 Corinthians (circa A.D. 56);

(3) accept as authoritative orally transmitted doctrine only until it has been reduced to writing (scripture) and only while the apostles are alive, then disregard all oral tradition and adhere only to what is written; or

(4) the most extreme position, accept as authoritative only doctrine that has been reduced to writing.

The difficulties with these options are immediately clear. No Protestant would agree with option one, that the Old Testament is a sufficient authority in matters of doctrine.

Nor would he accept option two, for this would mean all New Testament books written after the year 56 would not qualify under the 1 Corinthians 4:6 guideline. Hence, John’s Gospel, Acts, Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, Titus, 1 & 2 Timothy, Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2, & 3 John, Jude, and Revelation would all have to be jettisoned as non-authoritative.

Option three fails because in order for sola scriptura to be a “biblical” doctrine there must be, by definition, at least one Bible verse which says Scripture is sufficient, or that oral Tradition is to be disregarded once Scripture has supplanted it, or that Scripture is superior to oral Tradition. But there are no such verses; and as we’ll see, 1 Corinthians 4:6 is no exception.

Option four is likewise untenable because it contradicts Paul’s express command in to “Stand fast and hold firm to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours” (2 Thess. 2:15). Thus, for 1 Corinthians 4:6 to support the theory of sola scriptura, Paul would have been talking out of both sides of his mouth, on one side demanding adherence to the written word only, and on the other urging fastidious adherence to both written and oral tradition.

And then there’s that small matter of the unity of doctrine among the apostles. If Paul had been promulgating sola scriptura in 1 Corinthians 4 he would have been in conflict with the practice of the rest of the apostles. Most of the apostles never wrote a single line of Scripture; instead they transmitted the deposit of faith orally. Did their oral teachings carry any less weight of authority than the written teachings of Paul or Peter or John?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

kaycee:

Word for Word in Scripture,

nope.

Then that settles it. Why? Because this is the title of the thread:

Where Does Scripture State That It Is the Sole Rule of Faith?