In this recent thread we saw yet another repeat of the hurtful and inaccurate claim that the Roman Catholic Church hid the bible away in the Latin language and kept it out of the hands of the common man.
It is difficult for me not to become impatient, hostile, and sarcastic when faced with this pernicious untruth. But it is a pernicious untruth, even if those spreading the lie don’t realize it.
Here is the truth about the Bible throughout history:
In the early days of the Church, there was no New Testament, and the Old Testament was not the Hebrew Masoretic scriptures that the Jews today call the Tanakh. The main “bible” they had in the time of Jesus and the original apostles was what is known as the Septuagint, a Greek language version that you can read about here. It was created centuries before the coming of Christ, and was used by the majority of Jews of the Apostolic era. Furthermore, almost invariably, when any of the New Testament authors quoted the scriptures they quoted word-for-word from the Septuagint, or from the Oral Torah, and not from the Hebrew writings directly.
The Church in the East (i.e. the Orthodox) has used the Septuagint as its Old Testament from the beginning, and still does use that. They also still use all the New Testament books in their original form, which was written in Aramaic and/or the same Greek as the Septuagint. Only fairly recently have the Orthodox began producing copies in languages other than Greek, but they are indeed producing them (see LXX.org for more information on a new English translation they’ve finished.)
In the early Church of the West, Latin was the most common tongue or “lingua franca” among Christians. And so the early church, the same church that now goes by the name “Roman Catholic,” produced a translation of the Septuagint and of the New Testament works. This translation was authorized and approved by the Church hierarchy of both the East and West. They called that Latin translation the “Vulgate,” which basically meant “of and for the common people.”
Thus, point #1 is that the Latin Bible was specifically created for the common people, and not to hide it from them. The Latin Bible was created specifically to give the common man easier access to the scriptures.
What it is also important to understand about this Vulgate was that it took years to produce, and had to be carefully studied and approved by the Bishops (i.e. the living descendants of the 12 Apostles) to make sure the translation process did not introduce any important errors. Anyone who’s ever learned a second language understands this: it’s easy to mis-translate something without intending to. So, once the Vulgate for the common people got final approval, the Church began the arduous task of copying it and distributing it for those who wanted it. All before the printing press.
Why the importance of no printing press? Simple: the only way to copy *any* book was to pay scribes to create hand-written copies. The most common hand-written copies that anyone might travel around with would have been partial copies. A complete hand-copied Bible in the era of the apostle Paul would typically be a gigantic scroll or collection of scrolls, and would take an entire year for a team of scribes to produce. It’s something a strong man would carry on his back or put on the back of a horse or donkey. And, paper and ink were also very expensive in their own right. Thus, before even the time of Jesus, a complete copy of just the Old Testament books would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money. They were so rare and so valuable that, in both synagogues and in Christian churches, they were typically kept in a secured location, and chained down so no one could steal them. One Christian Church or Jewish Synagogue might possibly have a complete copy, but many, especially in smaller congregations or in poorer areas, would not. They would have relied on word of mouth by the teachers (rabbis or priests) and would have had only partial copies to work from. Heck, if you just read the New Testament, it frequently instructs people to hold fast to the truths that they were taught, whether in written or oral form. That’s right in the New Testament, in more than one place.
If you don’t believe it would have been an incredibly lengthy and challenging task just to make a hand-copied production of the Bible, I give you a simple exercise: pick a Bible, any Bible, and beginning with Genesis start copying every line by hand. I’m quite certain that you won’t get more than ten minutes into such a task before realizing that gee, it really would take an *enormous* amount of time and energy to do that, let alone do it without error. Now imagine doing it with a quill and inkwell, not a ball-point pen.
Thus, point #2: it is false to assert that everyday Christians or Jews would have had Bibles to study “for themselves” in the 1st Century. They would normally have to go to the nearest Synagogue to even see a complete copy, let alone read from it, unless they were quite wealthy themselves.
Also, until fairly modern times, the vast majority of people, including most Christians, were not be able to read. Universal literacy is a very modern thing. Scriptures would typically be read out loud by someone (like the apostle Paul) to the mostly non-literate people they were preaching and teaching to. In the East, they used the Greek original, and the West primarily used the Latin translation of the Greek.
Thus, point #3: it is inaccurate to suggest that it was ever common practice for people to read the Bible “for themselves” in the early centuries of Christianity. Most would have needed the assistance of someone who was literate, and would have needed to be near a synagogue or church that had a copy even if they could read it. That’s what the Apostle Paul and the others would have been doing whenever they were depicted in the New Testament as teaching from the scriptures: reading it to people, and explaining what it meant, maybe with the help of someone else who could read. Usually it would have been in a synagogue, or some other location wealthy enough to have a complete copy.
Finally, the reason the Church in the West kept primarily to the authorized translation known as the Vulgate (i.e. the Latin translation for the common people of the West) was that it recognized an indisputable truth: translating something is hazardous, and the odds for errors go way up any time you do it. The policy became to just stick with the Latin or the Greek that most people who were literate could read anyway, and to produce only occasional, partial translations into other languages on an as-needed basis (if those other languages had a written language at all–many of them did not).
If you have to spend what amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce just one reliable Bible for, say, the Germanic-speaking people living up in Gaul, well, that’s a pretty tall order. Much cheaper and easier is to train deacons, priests, or bishops to read it, produce some partial copies in the other languages for the most important parts, and rely on the Church as a whole (the Church established by Christ, who himself never wrote any book or letter) to give people the right message with or without writings.
Now, let’s go back to my exercise above, when I challenged you to produce your own hand-written copy of the Bible: on top of copying it by hand, imagine that you speak both ancient Greek and, say, English. How confident would you be that you yourself could produce a 100% accurate English translation? I suggest that you would have to believe God Himself has given you that ability and would directly guide your hand to make sure you didn’t screw it up. Would you bank on God doing that just for you? Or would you need somebody, someone in authority, to examine your work and make sure you did it right?
Okay, now, let’s fast forward to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press, which both happened at roughly the same time. You can make a case that if there hadn’t been a printing press, Protestantism itself would have died out not long after the deaths of people like Calvin and Luther. But those early Protestants appeared at close to the same time as the printing press, and those early Protestants eagerly backed creating new translations, distributing them widely with the aid of that novel invention known as the printing press.
Now, it is true that the Church in Rome resisted and protested people making and distributing unauthorized translations some 500 years ago. But it also true that, within fairly short order, Rome began working on its own new translations authorized by the Bishops for greater distribution, because now instead of taking a team of scribes a year or more to produce one copy, you could produce multiple copies much cheaper and faster. A translation only needed to be done once, if at all, and copies were cheap enough that they could be distributed much more widely than ever was possible before the 15th Century. Although you still needed someone with apostolic authority (that is, a bishop) who spoke both languages well enough to check and make sure it was done right.
Thus, point #4: While the Church in Rome was very conservative about it, they responded pretty quickly to the advent of the printing press. They were just not as fast as the original Protestants. They may have been slow partly for political or pride reasons, and they may have been too quick to condemn alternate translations. But politics and pride aside, they recognized that any translation might introduce errors. Still, the Catholic Church did indeed begin producing new translations and Bibles for the common people who did not speak Latin anymore. Yes, the very the same Catholic church that fundamentalists like to spend so much time kicking around was producing and distributing Bibles in multiple languages within a generation or so of the invention of the printing press.
Indeed, to this very day you will find there are Bible study classes held in most Catholic churches, and most Orthodox. Because studying the Bible is a very good thing to do. The only problems the Church ever had was with hastily-translated, unauthorized copies like the original Gutenberg bible, or with trying to come to your own personal conclusions about how to interpret it (which amounts to the individual Christian delegating to himself the authority of a Bishop or Pope, which is nice and liberal and all but which more conservative Christians would have all sorts of trouble with).
It is the standing position of the Roman Catholics, and all varieties of Orthodox, and many other denominations (like the Episcopalians, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Union of Utrecht Christians) that the Bible all by itself is simply not sufficient. If you do not have the proper teachings (i.e. doctrines) that have always been held by the Church even before there was a New Testament, then you can create thousands of variant doctrines that don’t look a thing like what the early Church of Acts looked like or taught.
For anyone who is interested, here is another article on why the Orthodox believe Sola Scriptura is false doctrine. It answers point-by-point many objections of fundamentalists. Whether you agree with their conclusions or not, you ought to at least try to see where they’re coming from before pronouncing them wrong. Especially if you believe things like “they hid the scriptures away from the common people.”
The fact is that the majority of Christians of the world are not, and never have been, Sola Scriptura. Christians who are Sola Scriptura should at least try to understand why their Orthodox, Catholic, and other Christian brethren reject such a teaching. And, outsiders to the faith (say, Muslims or Jews or atheists or others) should keep in mind that if they come across an Evangelical Christian who’s reading from the Bible to show what he perceives as problems with the modern Church, there are pretty good odds that the most ancient varieties of Christianity have already addressed it. Ditto for any atheist who giddily cackles and rubs his hands as he “proves” this or that verse is a problem for Christians.
Indeed, that’s a trap that Muslims in particular seem prone to, at least from what I’ve seen: the Muslim tradition is that the Koran is a book written personally by the God of Abraham–not just any God, but the exact same God as the Christians and Jews. They believe that God Himself produced, with His Own Hand, a book in Heaven that was to be the final revelation for all mankind. Muhammed merely read it aloud to the early Muslims, according to Muslim tradition. Indeed, Muhammed tried early on to get the Rabbis in Israel to recognize that he was a prophet of God, and the original Muslims always made a habit of praying facing Israel. They believed from the beginning that their faith was a direct outgrowth of Christianity and Judaism. When the Jewish Rabbinical authorities refused to recognize Muhammed as a prophet, Muslims changed and started praying toward Mecca instead.
Why this matters is that, according to Muslim teachings (i.e. doctrines), the Old and New Testaments are very important, but contain numerous problems that God corrected or clarified in the Koran and gave to Muhammed. Thus, Muslim instincts are to go immediately to the Koran vs the Bible, and to argue with people who quote Christian or Jewish scripture to them on that basis. But that’s not the proper approach for a Muslim who wants to discuss things theologically with most Christians, because the vast majority of Christians (especially outside of North America) believe in some variety of Sacred Oral Tradition, as do a majority of Jews. To them, the message from God includes both written and oral teachings; sacred scripture and sacred tradition are one and the same, inseparable from each other, and when the Bible appears to contradict itself (which it often does if you just read it in a vacuum), the answer to that is usually found in the Oral Torah of the Jews or the Sacred Tradition of the original Christians.
Indeed, the New Testament frequently and approvingly quotes things that are found only in the Jewish Oral Torah–Jesus did so himself, directly, as did those who wrote the New Testament books. So, while to the Muslim it makes sense to go straight for the writings, a book called the Koran being the center of their faith, most Christians *don’t* go straight to the writings, because the book all by itself is not the center of their faith. The Church is what’s at the center of the faith, and is what Jesus actually created. The writings are merely one (indispensable and vital) part of the teachings. Most Christians look to the teaching authority of the Church, and the history, and the ecumenical councils, and the early Church Fathers, to give proper interpretation of scripture and what it means. So if you’re discussing things with a Christian, don’t assume that they are “bible-only” Christians and that you can just whip out a verse here or there to prove something to them. Most Christians consider that scripture abuse.
Heck, if you yourself are a Christian, of Catholic, Orthodox, or even some other variety, you yourself may not realize that your Church does not, and never has, taught that the Bible is all-sufficient by itself. Even Protestants like the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the Presbyterians have never taught that the Bible is all-sufficient by itself. When they say they’re “sola scriptura,” old-line Protestants just mean is that the Bible is the ultimate authority, not the only authority (i.e. they really follow what should be called Prima Scriptura, because they don’t deny that there are teachings outside the Bible that are correct and important.)
Regardless of your individual faith (or lack thereof), in order to say that everything important in Christianity is found in the Bible alone, what you have to believe is something that the Bible itself never claims: that the Bible is self-sufficient for all of God’s truths and contains all you need to construct a valid form of Christianity. What you further have to believe is that the original 12 Apostles were fools who did not know how to pick successors to carry on their message effectively, and that church fathers like Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who knew the original 12 apostles personally and were hand-picked by them as successors, allowed God’s message to be corrupted for well over a thousand years–and that God didn’t feel it was important enough to correct them in all that time.
Bible-only Fundamentalists do not and never have spoken for a majority of Christians, nor even a majority of Protestants. It tends to upset them when I say that, but it’s offered without any desire to be hurtful: Most Christians don’t read the Bible the way fundamentalists do, period. They just don’t. Now, that does not mean that the fundamentalists/Evangelicals are evil. Heck, it doesn’t even mean they’re wrong, because they might be right I suppose (even though I don’t believe it). Whether they are right or not is a completely separate question: it is still the case that they are not representative of Christianity as a whole, or even Protestantism as a whole. Maybe they are right and the rest of us have all been wrong for 2,000 years, but most of us doubt it.
I’ll leave you with another video from an Orthodox source, which completely lacks the fingerprints of anything from the sinister Vatican, and which is quite worth watching: The New Testament Church series.
To keep going, you’ll find part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, and part 6 here.
(Note to commenter TexasAgo3: While I would be overjoyed if you chose to join the Catholic church, I think you and your wife should watch this series, and start investigating this web site. What I would most love is to have you come back to the original faith, which I firmly believe the Orthodox are a direct and unbroken part of.)
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Your glaring mistakes not withstanding, I’m not going to debate the issue with you any longer. It’s obvious to me you’re rabid defense of Catholic doctrine, indifference to common sense and the lessons of history, makes your testimony on the matter questionable at best. And, in all honestly, seems more like an emotional knee-jerk reaction to things in your past than an honest, thoughtful, conclusion.
We’ve spoken about Ayn Rand’s hard reaction against communism that brought her to the polar opposite, yet very dangerous, side of that coin. She reacted so hard against that where she ended was dangerous as well.
It seems to me you’ve done the same. You’ve reacted hard against things in your upbringing, left the faith altogether at first, then, now, have come to rest away as far as you can from that defining force early in your life. But you’ve taken it one step further and tried to bring the rest of the Christianity along with you to further marginalize the branch of Christianity you disagree with.
You’ve made it such that not just you think they’re wrong, everyone that isn’t them agrees with you too!
It’s a defense mechanism and that’s fine. But at some point you have to get over it and remove the fog from your eyes. I’m not saying everyone agrees with me either! In fact I’ve said most Christians think what I believe is incorrect. But I’ve spent by entire life in Protestantism. From Lutheran to Pentecostal. And what you say and think about mainline Protestantism is flat out wrong and they don’t agree with you on as much as you’d like them to. Protestantism isn’t Catholicism for real reasons that persist to this day.  Not reasons 500 years old that have since been resolved.
Until you realize where your conflict with Bible-only Christians is truly rooted, there can be no meaningful discussion.
One last note:
Can you hide some of your text on the main page? The article is crazy long and a lot to scroll past if you want to look at other posts.
Bible-only Fundamentalists do not and never have spoken for a majority of Christians, nor even a majority of Protestants. It tends to upset them when I say so, but it’s just a fact, offered without any desire to be hurtful: Most Christians don’t read the Bible the way fundamentalists do, period.
I know that’s true, but in my part of the world (Texas – north of Dallas) every Protestant church I have attended with the exception of the Methodists, say that they teach and believe only what is in the Bible.
Of course, in practice, few of them do, but that is their claim.
What I would most love is to have you come back to the original faith, which I firmly believe the Orthodox are a direct and unbroken part of.
I don’t know; Orthodox is harder to spell than Catholic. Besides, you ended a sentence with a preposition. :~)
I guess I really stirred up a hornet’s nest the other day. I really don’t know why I wrote that much in my comment. It just came out. I intended to make a statement about Sola/Solo Scriptura but I ended up with a full personal religious history.
Maybe God thought I needed to get that out…
Â
Kevin: I say this with all charity, but, you can’t have learned much from the Lutherans if you believe they think the Bible Alone contains all necessary teachings all by itself. They don’t. Unless you’re in some splinter "Lutheran" group from mainline Lutheranism.
Other than that, all I can repeat for you is the fact that seems to upset you: the fundamentalist approach to exegesis is not agreed with by the majority of Protestants. The Presbyterians I grew up with rejected that approach quite firmly, and maintained a heavy respect for the Church Fathers and the major Ecumenical Councils, and openly taught things not directly in scripture (implied and supported by it, yes, but never spelled out directly). I didn’t make that up, I was taught it in my Confirmation classes and in years of Sunday School. And if I were to embrace any form of Protestantism, it would be the Lutherans or the Presbyterians or possibly the Episcopalians, who I have a lot of respect for even if I think they’ve made some mistakes.
I grew up Fundamentalist on my father’s side and Presbyterian on my mother and stepfather’s side, and I had problems with the fundamentalist approach as early as age 8 or 9. Well there’s a reason for that: their approach to the Bible is wrong. Which probably also explains why we’re seeing so many Evangelicals these days knocking on the doors of Orthodox churches to inquire: they know something is badly missing from Evangelical worship and lifestyle, even if they don’t know what. What they’re missing is the Divine Liturgy and the Sacred Oral Tradition that the Church, and the Jews, have always maintained.
The only person who looks to be getting emotional here is you, to be blunt, and your emotionalism shows most clearly when you repeatedly insist that I’m defending the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings, even when I bend over backwards to provide non-Roman Catholic sources that back up everything I say. Which I have, over and over. That’s because plenty of non-Roman Catholic groups, including major varieties of Protestantism, don’t agree with the fundamentalist approach to the scriptures.
Without meaning to give offense, I seem to have offended you again. Yet I can only note one more time that you continually ignore non-Roman Catholic sources I refer to and instead keep insisting all I’m doing is defending Catholic teachings. Have you not noticed the disconnect in your own logic there? Would it help if I provided you direct references to what Episcopalians, mainstream Lutherans, and mainstream Presbyterians teach and believe? Because I can, and what they’ll all say is that of course there are things outside of the Bible which are of central importance to the faith, things that you can’t find spelled out plainly and directly in the scriptures. Starting with the Trinity, and moving on from there.
All of the Catholic-only doctrines are things I’ve avoided mentioning. There are lots of them, including the role of the papacy, the specific doctrine of transubstantiation, the assumption of Mary, mortal vs. venial sin, and quite a few others. I don’t talk about these because you can’t be ecumenical when you do, they are specific to the Roman Catholic Church. But apostolic authority, the Oral Traditions of the Jews and the earliest Christians? Nope, those aren’t Catholic-only at all.
Texas: Oh yeah, I lived in Texas for many years, and for a time in Louisiana. That’s a big part of what is known as the "Bible Belt" and for good reason: bible-centric, bible-only Christians are the overwhelming majority there.
They don’t call it the Christian Belt, they call it the Bible Belt, because most of those folks put the Bible, and their own personal interpretation of it, smack square in the center of their faith as the only meaningful authority. That they so often disagree with each other, and that whenever there’s a problem in their church they just run off and form a new one, doesn’t get pointed out much, and it tends to make them very angry when you do point it out.
I don’t think you kicked off any storm though. Kevin’s viewed himself as a warrior defending the fundamentalist variety of Sola Scriptura doctrine for quite some time now, and always argues with me when I point out that most Christians don’t agree with it–but the fact is that they don’t, not even most Protestants do. The proof is right there for the looking.
I think you’re hungering for something important, Tex: a connection to things that the most ancient varieties of the Christian faith have always known and always taught and always practiced. I believe you will find most of that with the Orthodox, and I hope you give it a try. I do know that multiple Orthodox sources say the same thing: they’re facing a virtual stampede of fundamentalists/evangelicals pounding down their doors looking for what they’ve felt missing all along. And honestly, without being condescending, I think our friend Kevin would find the same thing there if he looked. But that’s just me, what do I know? :-)
Kevin: One thing I do want to get back to: in previous comments, you have claimed, boldly, that Jesus never once mentioned anything in Oral Torah approvingly. But I said in my article above that he did. Are you at least curious to know when and where, or are you that convinced that all I’m doing is spouting catholic doctrine? As someone who cares so much about the scriptures, I’d think you’d at least like to know when and where deluded Catlickers like me get the idea that Jesus quoted Oral Torah approvingly.
Because he did, you know. Got any idea where?
You can make a case that if there hadn’t been a printing press, Protestantism itself would have died out not long after the deaths of people like Calvin and Luther.
Indeed, there were movements doctrinally similar to the Protestant reformation which existed prior to the printing press, the most successful being the Waldensians, which was based on distributing a personal understanding of scripture through memorizing a vernacular translation of the scriptures (the founder was a wealthy man who commissioned a full written translation in order to found a teaching order (originally with the blessings of the Church, but they became a seperate movement when the Church decided the Waldensians were teaching dangerously wrong doctrine on key issues of faith), and the largely illiterate medieval Waldensians memorized copies by listening to more senior Waldensians reciting the scriptures). The Waldensians were much less successful than Luther or Calvin, but they did (barely) manage to survive until the Protestant reformation.
Dean,
Can we cut to the chase here?
Are you saying the traditions and doctrines as expressed through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church are prescribed by God and "necessary"?
Are you saying that you NEED other stuff for salvation (i.e. eternal existence in the presence of God at the close of the individual’s life on earth) instead of just acknowleging and accepting the Grace of God expressed through Jesus Christ?
Are you saying that if Catholic tradition conflicts direclty and transparently with words and context of Bible then the Bible is wrong?
P Mike,
It’s about angels and saints,
martyrs and sinners,
the Pater Noster,
the Ave Maria, as well as
Dominus Vobiscum
and et cum Spiritu tuo.
"They believe that God Himself produced, with His Own Hand, a book in Heaven that was to be the final revelation for all mankind. Muhammed merely read it aloud to the early Muslims, according to Muslim tradition."
Sorta. The Sunni teaching I am most familiar with is that the Qur’an in heaven which God created is not in any human language, which would profoundly limit its perfection. All the books of the prophets – not only the Qur’an in Arabic revealed to Muhammad, but also the Torah revealed to Moses, the Gospel revealed to Jesus, the Psalms revealed to David, etc. – are reflections of that perfect book in an imperfect human language. (Of those revelations, it is true that Muslims view the Arabic Qur’an as the most authoritative.) But, so as to communicate to humans on their level, the perfect truths of the book in heaven are communicated through symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, etc that are intelligible to humans. Therefore, the most profound spiritual truths of the Qur’an are not to be learned by looking no further than the literal interpretation of the text.
I should point out that Muslims also, in addition to the Qur’an, have several forms of "tradition". One is "Sunnah", or traditional practices of the Prophet Muhammad that were passed down orally through reports called "ahadith" (singular "hadith"). Secondly, "ijma", which is a broad consensus of the scholarly class on the truth of any issue which is given no determinate answer in either the Qur’an or Sunnah, could also be considered a form of tradition. Again, I can’t speak for Shi’ite doctrine on these issues, as I am much more familiar with Sunni teachings. In addition, Sufis (most of whom are Sunni) have their own oral traditions which have been passed down from teacher to student across the centuries (all Sufi lineages trace themselves back somehow to the Prophet Muhammad).
…the Gospel revealed to Jesus…
You need to work on this, Daniel.
P Mike, to respond to your comment I’ll preface it a little, then respond:
I’m a little annoyed (sorry, I don’t mean to be rude) by some of your phrasing given that I’ve bent over backwards to make statements that many other forms of Christian other than Catholics would agree with. Orthodox and Episcopalians would quibble with little I’ve said. Mainline Lutherans and Presbyterians would quibble with a little more, but not all that much. I try VERY hard to avoid talking about Catholic-only teachings without acknowledging up front that that’s what they are.
So, with all that said, here are my responses:
Are you saying the traditions and doctrines as expressed through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church are prescribed by God and "necessary"?
Some traditions are not necessary or direct from God. Things like when to celebrate Christmas, or taking a confirmation name, are man-made traditions and not directly from God.
But, the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Roman Catholic Church, the Union of Utrecht, and some Protestant groups (especially Episcopalians) do indeed hold that there are Sacred Traditions which come from God.
Are you saying that you NEED other stuff for salvation (i.e. eternal existence in the presence of God at the close of the individual’s life on earth) instead of just acknowleging and accepting the Grace of God expressed through Jesus Christ?
Catholic, Orthodox, and many other old-line Christian groups do indeed believe that salvation is a process and not an event.
Are you saying that if Catholic tradition conflicts directly and transparently with words and context of Bible then the Bible is wrong?
Nope. First because some traditions are man-made. Making the sign of the cross, for example, is man-made, something the Church calls a Sacramental.
But then there is Holy Tradition, which is every bit as authoritative as the Bible. Indeed, the Bible is an inseparable part of Holy Tradition passed down directly from Jesus and the original 12 apostles. Those Traditions (with a capital “T”) are Of God, and not Of Men.
Furthermore, Holy Tradition does not ever contradict the Bible. The Bible is an important part of Holy Tradition, and without Holy Tradition you can come to thousands of different theological beliefs and can “prove” just about anything you want with Scripture. Scripture can’t defend itself from that sort of abuse.
What good is an infallible book if you don’t have an infallible authority to interpret it? Who ever said the objective was to have people just read the Bible and decide whatever made sense to them about it? Where do you even find that in the Bible, or any sect of Christians in the first few centuries of the Church who taught that?
Holy Tradition is straight from God and does not ever contradict Scripture, period. If you think it does, then either you misunderstood the Sacred Tradition or you misunderstood the Bible. The Bible is a hugely important part of Holy Tradition, and is inseparable from it.
Furthermore, it’s not even *possible* to interpret the Bible consistently without some form of tradition. The only question is, will you follow the Traditions of God, or just whatever traditions of men you feel comfortable with?
I strongly recommend that you watch the video I’ve linked above, and check out some of the other Non-Catholic sources I point to (like this one). Please read ‘em, and at least acknowledge that they are not Roman Catholic references at all.
If my goal was to defend only Roman Catholic doctrine, we would have by now gotten into all sorts of things that the Roman Catholics teach that aren’t in most other Christian traditions; that includes things like Purgatory, Limbo, Mortal vs. Venial sin, the Assumption of Mary, and other beliefs unique to Rome. So let’s stop making this about the Roman Catholics, okay? If I wanted to make this about Catholic-only teachings I would have said so and would never have linked all those non-Catholic sources.
I suggest watching the video above, and also read this article by two non-Roman Catholics.
DanielH: I stand corrected.
McKiernan: I’m not sure whether Daniel mis-spoke when he said that the Gospel was revealed to Jesus. He may have been just careless with his words, or he may be following Koranic advice; Jesus appears in the Koran, you see, and there are stories in it about him that appear nowhere in the Bible. Some of what the Koran says about Jesus is in line with the New Testament, some is not. So it’s possible that the Muslims believe God revealed something to Jesus, whom they regard as a Prophet like Moses or Muhammed and not the unique and only Son of God.
I’m curious if it’s the former or the latter, though.
Raised as a Catholic too.
It really got my goat when ever I was getting serious about my beliefs, when the discussions would go to the "other" writtings/teachings that were not available to the lay persons. Why withhold the information? It felt like the church was holding my soul for ransom.
Then I found out that there were "different translations" of the bible. How in the name of …. are we to have meaningful dialogue if we don’t have the same foundations? Well, sometimes the differences can be revealing. Keep an open heart and mind, is what I try to do. Hey, I said try. Though, I do get lazy sometimes when someone come knocking at my door. (That aspect alone would keep me from that faith …too shy and I belive god wants me that way). So I just ask which bible they are using. Usually it is a "King James" translation. From what I have read in "Adam Nicolsons’ " book "God’s Secretaries: the making of the King James Bible" no effort was spared and one can take it at face value. So I should be set right?
Well, No.
Two books are missing from that translation. One being the book of "Wisdom". Now why would they leave that out? Doesn’t matter anyways, does it? Even if you could figure "it" (the whole question of being…?) your point of view would have changed with your experience etc… So don’t get too tied up. Be open to change, as it will come around and go around until you end up close to where you started. It is called "the way" the "trek" the "pilgrimage" ….life. Â
Life is a gift. You didn’t ask for it but here it is. Don’t get caught up with "What is the meaning of life". That question is flawed. It misleads. Meaning is what you give to life. You choose. You have to do it. As life is a gift given to you , you must give something back.
Meaning, meaning.
See it is simple.
Duncan: that’s the right idea.
I am often flabbergasted at Evangelicals’ assertions about the Bible. They seem to run in two camps: the King James Only crowd, and the It Doesn’t Matter Which Translation You Use crowd. But I’ve been in many Bible study sessions with fundamentalists, and they almost invariably fall into one camp or the other.
I’ve even had fundamentalists/Evangelicals try to tell me that the average Christian can walk into any Church, pick up whatever translation is there, and be fully comfortable with anything they read in it.
By the way, most of the "other" teachings are found in the Catechism. Translating and publishing all the works of the Church Fathers would be an enormous undertaking, as what we have of their work runs to hundreds of books. But the last I looked, they do sell a complete copy of all the surviving works of the Church Fathers; it’s comparable in size to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and costs in the same ballpark. Although I’m hoping one of these days that someone publishes them all for free on the Internet. But still, you have the issue there of translation.
(Also by the way, there are plenty of non-Catholic catechisms out there; Martin Luther even produced one.)
I’m just trying to explain what Muslim’s believe (though admittedly there’s some diversity there). Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the message revealed to Jesus:
So I don’t see how I made a mistake in explaining Muslim beliefs. Now if you mean that Muslims are mistaken (and Christians are correct), you are perfectly welcome to that opinion. I just am not terribly interested in that debate.
For the record, I believe that Catholics can be saved (which makes me something of a heretic, I think), but (I realize you will not agree, would not expect any Catholic to) I do not believe that being a member of the Catholic church (or any church for that matter) guarentees salvation. I believe that the Catholic "Holy Tradition" can be a barrier to salvation by those who want to use them as a subsitute for a relationship with God. That is a real problem with tradition, rules, and religous structure that both the Old Testament prophets and Jesus called out pretty clearly.
I do not believe salvation is a process as much as a starting point. I do not belive any man is capable of destroying the restoration of the God-man relationship that is salvavtion, although you can pretty much trash the relationship (kind of like a parent and a rebelious kid; the parent is always the parent).
It is my view that at least some of the Catholic Holy Traditions are in direct conflict with the Bible, and that was the core of the protestant reformation. I don’t have anything against tradition per se, but elevating compliance with tradition to a condition for salvation is explicity and contextually anti-Biblical.
I’ll point out that, on the historical facts, Dean is right (and Kevin D, I’m talking to you).
I’d quibble, I think, with some of his interpretations. For example, I would be a lot less charitable to the Reformation-era Catholics regarding their treatment of translators. But, yes, they did learn eventually. And ferreting out "the true victims" from that era is about as foolish as trying to sort out Israeli and Palestinian claims to modern Israel.
(Oh, and another nitpick: the early bishops as "descendants of the 12 apostles"? I didn’t think even the Catholics/Orthodox made that claim, unless you’re talking about the descent of spiritual authority.)
Plus, I’m a lot less certain about my Muslim history, so maybe there’s something wrong in that. But his Christian history is pretty sound.
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of bad translations of the Bible out there, even today. You really do need to watch out.
The Living Bible and Good News Bible err on the side of ease of understanding. They’re good for kids, but really have to be treated as paraphrases, and not translations; almost like Bible storybooks. I shudder when I see adults (even pastors!) using them.
A few are deliberately bad; for example, the "New World Translation" which was done to make the Bible conform to the preconceived beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And I’ve read about some of the very newest translations, like the NRSV and the TNIV, having a bit of a "political bias", where controversial passages have been tweaked a bit to fit someone’s idea of what the Bible’s "unified message" is. I haven’t looked myself, but if that’s true, those translations should be avoided like the plague they are.
I’ll give the "King James Alone" folks one bit of credit: they’ve picked a solid translation. Although, these days, understanding the meaning of the original 1611 English is itself a bit of a translation exercise. But trusting a random Bible in a random church? I can’t imagine anyone in any authority teaching that.
BTW, I read and recommend the NIV, which strikes a good balance between language difficulty and faithfulness to the text. Its translation footnotes are also excellent. As for Catholic Bibles, I must unfortunately plead ignorance, though I wouldn’t hesitate to follow the advice of your priest in that regard.
(And I speak as someone who can read the original Greek of the New Testament and Septuagint, and who has translated the entire book of 1 John himself.)
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
Duncan:
You might be surprised that Wisdom is in the original King James Version, though probably not in any editions you can find for sale today. It was marked as part of something called the "Apocrypha", which were books of uncertain authority that were included "just in case".
Today, the Catholics recognize them, while the Protestants and Jews do not. (All of the Apocryphal books predate Jesus.)
Who’s right? Who knows? I don’t recall that the Apocrypha contains any doctrines that would be controversial. And some of the books (Maccabees, for example) are priceless.
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
Unless the LCMS is a ‘splinter group’ I’d guess the Lutheran church most certainly DOES teach sola scriptura. In fact it is one of the primary tenants of the church (and one 0f the prime tenants of Luthers ‘Thesis’)
http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=2519
Sola scriptura does not nullify the concept of church traditions. Instead it gives is a fundimental base on which to set our traditions.  Heck, there are plenty of church practices that are not explicitly taught, but are a matter of Tradition, and indeed these things can be good. Traditions play an important role in clarifying and organizing Christian practice. However, these things can never be in disagreement with the Word of God, which makes the Word the ‘final authority’, a point in which you would, at least in passing, agree, because you have said that church traditions are never in disagreement with scripture. Â
It may be, that quite early on, many of these things were oral, but it appears the writings that eventually became the New Testemant, were quite viral in their spread, and quite early in the church were starting to be recognized as ‘scripture’ along with the Tanakh. Bottom line, from Jesus, to Peter, and right on down the line, the teaching was ALWAYS backed up with scripture.Â
There is nothing explicitly wrong with tradition, but those things are subject to scripture, not usurping, so in that you are incorrect, Dean. (I’m not a Lutheran, I do, however, have a good friend who is a Lutheran pastor) Heck even Luther himself is pretty clear on the matter: "The true rule is this: God’s Word shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel can do so."
As for traditions (works) saving you, Paul is pretty clear in his writing about faith. Tradition doesn’t save you. Faith (and this is a gift from God, not of ourselves) does. Christian living is not will-power religion. It’s the overflow of a new mind and new heart created by the Holy Spirit. It is supernatural. It is not something you can produce on your own by observing sacraments, or by any sort of work.
We have this pride in ourselves (christians), sometimes I think where we attribute our salvation to something we did, I.E. we ‘believed’ But the problem is, the natural man is set obliviously at odds with God’s law; indeed the natural man cannot follow God’s law (Romans 8:7) The bottom line is, grace is a gift, not a paycheck for something we’ve done, or will do, or are doing.Â
Works flow out of the new creature, not the new creature make. Indeed as James said ‘faith without works is dead’. But works without faith is equally dead. Works don’t create faith, they exude from the faithful. And that, in a nutshell, is at the heart of what Luther was so upset about, with the final straw being that Indulgance issue.Â
God assigns our faith. Literally, God measures out our faith. Faith is not ultimately or decisively our own creation. Ephesians 2:8, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.â€Â It can’t be any more clear than that. Paul may ‘often be hard to understand’ but it ain’t here. Â
Of course, if you are truly correct, Jesus would have been in the printing business.
P Mike: I see you continuing to say Catholic, Catholic, Catholic, Catholic. What we’re discussing here is not Catholic-only; most everything I’ve said is consistent with all varieties of Orthodox and several other groups, including important Protestant groups like the Episcopalians.
You may find it "clear" that the O.T. and Jesus condemned tradition, but given that Jesus directly endorsed things found only in non-written tradition, as did St. Paul, I struggle to see it.
Jeff: Regarding the bishops being "descendants" of the original 12 apostles, thank you for pointing that out, as it would be easy to confuse people. I always struggle with how to explain the concept of Apostolic Succession as understood by pre-Reformation Christian groups (as well as some post-Reformation groups) because so many Protestants don’t seem to know what it means at all.
But, "descendant" isn’t necessarily biological. If you check the dictionary, secondary and tertiary definitions of that word include disciples of a master, and, something deriving its characteristics from an earlier form.
What the Thomas Christians, the Assyrians, the Utrechtists, the Orthodox (and oh, did I mention the Catholics too?)Â all believe is, going all the way back to the original 12 apostles, their Bishops are in unbroken spiritual descent, as laid out in the book of Acts when they added Matthias to The Twelve. It’s not biological descent, but it is spiritual descent.
As for translations: I personally don’t trust the NIV, although I have to admit that it’s extremely readable and seems to do a pretty good job overall. When I’m in internet discussions like this one I tend to go for the NIV just because it’s online and is so popular.
If you want a Catholic bible, I recommend the New American Bible. But for a really good ecumenical book, go for the New Oxford Bible. That one may be the most “ecumenical” Bible in the English-speaking world, because it had heavy input from multiple Protestant traditions, and by Catholic and even Jewish scholars.
Jeff: Oh, one thing, the "apocrypha" books are getting more and more popular amongst Protestants. A number of them are putting them back because they realized removing them may have been a hasty decision. This probably has something to do with the increasing exposure here in the West to the various non-Catholic pre-Reformation groups who also still use them. A better term than calling them "apocrypha," which has a stinging negative connotation, is to call them the "Deuterocanon" books: basically, "secondary canon." None of those books is considered hugely important, but as a whole they contain significant stuff and they were also treated with reverence by the New Testament authors, who quote from them on occasion.
Buddy: Lutherans most definitely hold Sola Scriptura as one of their doctrines–after all, it’s one of the doctrines they created. ;-)
As I see it, we have the original Sola Scriptura as endorsed by the oldest lines of Protestantism, and, we have the more radical version of Sola Scriptura endorsed by modern biblical fundamentalists.
Original doctrine: "Scripture will settle any disputes on what is and is not proper tradition, as scripture is the ultimate Earthly authority."
More radical modern fundamentalist doctrine: "You don’t need anything but the Bible to construct a valid form of Christianity, scripture is all-sufficient, and if it’s not in the Bible it’s probably wrong."
I disagree with both doctrines, but I find the former far more defensible than the latter.
This may help to increase understanding: the Pharisees were the keepers of the Oral Torah. And Jesus did indeed condemn them. But Jesus was also fiercely critical of the Sadducees, who rejected Oral Torah and were in many ways the Fundamentalists of that era.
Jesus endorsed things in Oral Torah (of which Holy Tradition is an extension). He said that his followers should obey the Pharisees because they sit on the Throne of Moses. He just condemned the Pharisees of his day for being hypocrites who did not practice what they taught to others, for substituting the traditions of men for the Traditions of God.
The "Throne of Moses" is not mentioned anywhere in the Old testament, by the way. It’s out of Oral Torah. And Jesus endorsed it. ;-)
I assume, Mac, you are talking to me. Are you trying to say I am wrong about what Muslim tradition teaches?
But if your real target was Muslim belief, and not whether I accurately described it, I still think your criticism does not hold. Muhammad, after all, (like Jesus) wrote nothing down himself. It was Muhammad’s followers who recorded the words that were (according to Muslim teaching) revealed to him — so he wasn’t in the "printing business" either. I can’t see why a similar arrangement is ruled out with Jesus. I mean, I know you are not Muslim, so I wouldn’t expect you to hold those beliefs, but you have shown me nothing to rule out their historical possibility.
Dean, In Re Pharasee/Sadducee
It was actually in some cases the other way around. The Pharisees were the ‘super conservative’ sect in following the law, but quite a bit more open as to what the ‘law’ consisted of. The Sadducees were seen as ‘corrupt’ because they were open to adapting Hellenistic ideas into their belief system (although in the case of scripture itself, they were, as you said, very literalist) and were more of a ‘ruling class’. As such they were also seen by the Pharisees as ‘colaberators’ with Rome, which created an additional level of tension.
I’ll agree with you about the fundamentalists, though. I just think you make a similar mistake they make sometimes when you (probably unintentially) lump all protestants together.  As you say, there are plenty of us that are ‘sola scriptura’ and believe that the bible is indeed the foundation of all that is necessary for salvation, but also have no objection to traditions, catechisms, etc. Those things are just subservient to the written word. Indeed, I’d say that is the vast majority of Protestant denominations.Â
P.S. Consider this statement, off of one of the sites you linked above:
“The Orthodox Church does not set aside Scripture, but relies on Scripture as the standard by which all doctrines are measured. Anything within the life of the Church that is understood as extra-biblical tradition is either consistent with what we find in the Scriptures, or does not contradict Scripture in any way, period.”
I’d say that is consistent with 90%(+) of mainline protestant denominations. I feel that it’s a bit of a straw man making more of the fundi belief than is necessary. I often think the distinction is more one of misunderstanding & semantics (much like the distinction between armenienism/calvinism, of which I happen to lean more towards the latter, but grew up in former)
Dean:
Thanks for the clarification. As you say, not everyone will get what you mean by "descendant".
I do recall hearing good things about the New Oxford Bible. Maybe I should look more closely into it. But I am curious about your personal mistrust of the NIV. Any particular reason?
I suppose I don’t associate anything bad with "apocrypha", although I’ll freely admit to being strange. But words are just words; if "Deutero-canon" makes people happy, then cool.
I personally would encourage all curious Protestants to read the Apocrypha. In particular, if you want to know church history, the books of Maccabees are absolutely required reading.
Someday, maybe, I’ll write up my own take on the whole sola/solo/prima scriptura business. I don’t think I agree with anyone on that score. :-)
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
Just a nit to pick:
Your first definition of Sola Scriptura is not mutually exclusive of the claim that the Bible is "sufficient". By stating it is the final arbiter of all other dotrine, it is certainly considered sufficient for *that* task. Additionally, If your main religious text isn’t sufficient, you’ve done a crappy job of putting it together.
It seems to me that the difference between what we have been referring to as the Sola/Solo Scriptura is not whether the Bible is sufficient, but rather whether or not the Bible is exhaustive.
Daniel,
Sorry, I was challenging buddyellis, "There is nothing explicitly wrong with tradition, but those things are subject to scripture, not usurping, so in that you are incorrect, Dean."
McKiernan,
Well except Christ went around quoting the OT extensively, the entire premise of his discussion with the two on the road to Joppa was a trip through OT memory lane explaining how the OT proved messiah was Christ, and the entire premise of the first message of Peter was a trip through scriptural history explaining how messiah was Christ, etc, etc. And 5000 (men) were saved on that one occasion. As such, that is obviously all the information one needs to be saved. The traditions are simply icing on the cake, as it were.
Christ might not have carried around the written word, but the word was written on his heart.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart; you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up" (Deuteronomy 6:5-7).
Memorization of scripture was a practical requirement for a young Jew.
Frankly I think, as I said earlier, we’re arguing semantics. While the word might not have been widly prevelant in ‘print’ it was quite widely prevelant in wrote memorized form by large segments of the population, hung from tassels, written on doorposts, written in the hearts of men. "Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You" (Psalm 119:11).
Â
The whole Christian religion was in that same line of thought, especially in the early church, and it founded on scripture. Yes there are oral traditions, but they are all in agreement with scripture, or were canonized into scripture, and as such, this effectively makes SCRIPTURE the final authority on what a ‘correct’ tradition is.Â
And for what it is worth, he was in the printing business, for a long, long time. Or at least the ‘hand copying business.Â
Well, buddy, I hate to break the bad news but you just made all that stuff up.
That’s the beauty of protestantism; it cannot base its views on history so it finds solace in seeing the Bible as the sole source of Revelation while concomitantly serving the principle of personal private interpretation.Â
Kiernan
You gotta be a tad more explicit about ‘what I made up’Â The bible IS history, so your argument fails miserably.
Church history is certainly important, and worthwile, and frankly, for you to portray the whole of the protestant movement as anti-history is baseless and ignorant of the Protestant movement in general. While there are a small segment of protestant religions that fall under that spectre, the vast majority do not. Frankly the ‘private interpretation’ aspect of those churches is loony, and, at the outset, unbiblical.
Buddy, we are definitely mis-communicating.
Protestantism isn’t anti-history; was not my statement…
It has no original Christian history. It shows up only in the 1500′s as an anti-catholic movement.
Sola Scriptura
The first objective or formal principle proclaims the canonical Scriptures, especially the New Testament, to be the only infallible source and rule of faith and practice, and asserts the right of private interpretation of the same, in distinction from the Roman Catholic view, which declares the Bible and tradition to be co-ordinate sources and rule of faith, and makes tradition, especially the decrees of popes and councils, the only legitimate and infallible interpreter of the Bible.
In its extreme form Chillingworth expressed this principle of the Reformation in the well-known formula, "
The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, is the religion of Protestants.
"…it cannot base its views on history…"
Why not? Is it this idea?
"It has no original Christian history. It shows up only in the 1500’s as an anti-catholic movement."
On that basis, Roman Catholicism shows up only in the 1000s as an anti-orthodox movement, so it has no "original Christian history" either. :-)
Of course, you could switch the roles and be as accurate. But the greatest accuracy comes by recognizing all God’s revelation across the ages as his gift to all of us.
Or do you set yourself as the arbiter of who may receive God’s blessings, whenever they might have been given?
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
Okay, this has nothing to do with either Sola Scriptura or Catholicism so it ought not offend the overtly “sensitive” readers.
Its about psychological insight..there’s no dogma, no scriptura, no Popes.
A reasonable person might conclude, the essayist has something of value to say to entrenched religionists.
The Divine Center and the Human Margin
But what would I know.
Buddy: On the Pharisees and the Sadducees, I believe you are mistaken. Here, let me quote from this article, one of many:
The fundamental difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees is the interpretation of the Law of Moses (i.e., the five first books of the Bible, the Torah). The Sadducees maintained that the only way for truly pious behavior was to live according to the commandments in the written Law; the Pharisees, on the other hand, taught that the written Law had been given to the Jews and that they were free to interpret the Law. After all, the world had changed since the days of Moses. As a consequence, the Pharisees said that the ‘written Torah’ was to be supplemented with ‘the oral Torah’, the interpretation of the written Law by the Pharisee teachers, the rabbis.
That is not entirely fair to the Pharisees, since much of Oral Torah was (and still is) things God gave the Jews directly but that never got written down. Or so the Pharisees believed. But, as I said, the Sadducees were the Fundamentalists of their era of Judaism. They rejected the notion that any orally-transmitted teachings came from God, and insisted that only the written traditions mattered. The Pharisees believed that the Word of God was passed down in oral AND written form–and, at least in that issue, Jesus tacitly endorsed the Pharisee approach. As did the New Testament authors when they quoted the Oral Torah (which they did in more than one place).
The Sadducees died out as a sect in the 1st Century. Although some Jewish movements based on the same idea (you can rely on Scripture Alone to know God’s word) have cropped up since then, like the Karaites, mainline Judaism of all stripes today is based on the Pharisee approach, which firmly holds that Oral Torah is a vital and inseparable part of the written words. Ask any observant Jew and they’ll tell you so.
Jesus was fiercely critical of the Sadducees, and, as I’ve already mentioned, Jesus personally endorsed things found ONLY in Oral Torah and NOT in the written Old Testament books. He directly endorsed Pharisee authority, even though he savaged the Pharisees of the day for not practicing what they preached. It’s right there in the written books of the New Testament, you probably just didn’t notice if you come from a “Bible only” school of theology. ;-)
Buddy: I’m actually a little stung at the assertion that I lump all Protestants together, given the way I have bent over backwards to say that there is a *major* difference between Bible-only Fundamentalists and mainline Protestants, and how hard I’ve worked to keep what I’ve written about Holy Tradition as neutral and Not-Catholic as possible, and to point out that much of Holy Tradition *is* believed by mainline Protestants even though it’s rejected by Fundamentalists.
However, the quote you give on the Orthodox is somewhat out of context, because that one paragraph you noted would be endorsed by the Roman Catholic church as well. It is as I said: Scripture and Holy Tradition (not all tradition, just Holy Tradition) never contradict each other. It simply doesn’t happen, and if you think it has then you’ve either misunderstood the writing-transmitted traditions or you’ve misunderstood the orally-transmitted traditions.
The original Protestants started out with the idea that the scripture would correct errors that they believed had crept into Holy Tradition. That’s what Martin Luther believed, and it’s what mainstream Lutherans believe today (and the Lutherans also believe that they are the true Catholic Church by the way).
What makes me a little crazy is the tendency of people to think that the Christian world is divided into two groups: Catholic, and Not Catholic. What some Protestants (mostly Fundamentalists/Evangelicals) seem to have as their only reliable trait in common is that they define themselves as Not Catholic. It’s difficult to keep all that straight, because you have a lot of people, particularly Fundamentalists/Evangelicals, who believe they are entitled to speak for all Protestants, whereas all the old line Protestants that I’m aware of are about as critical of the Fundamentalist/Evangelical worldview as any Catholic is.
Jeff: The NIV was created in the 1970s by fundamentalist Evangelicals, under the imprimatur of the fundamentalist Zondervan corporation, with 15 scholars chosen by Zondervan in charge–and, although they did accept input from non-Fundamentalist Protestant groups, only Protestant Christian sources were allowed. In essence, they had a specific agenda in mind, to "correct" translations that were not in keeping with their own Protestant traditions.
Which, to me, also points out it simply isn’t possible to consistently approach biblical text the way the fundamentalists claim they do; you *must* have some form of tradition to guide you because scripture alone is not sufficient. The fundamentalist version of Sola Scriptura is impossible on its face. Instead, the fundamentalists create their own traditions, and sooner or later they wind up having to edit the scriptures to fit their traditions, even if they do it under the aegis of producing a "corrected translation."
One of the reasons I endorse the New Oxford Annotated is that it has a much more scholarly pedigree than the NIV, and was open to input from a wide variety of scriptural authorities, Jewish and Protestant and Catholic alike (although I don’t think the Orthodox were involved, the Orthodox would usually endorse the Catholic approach to scripture anyway).
Yu-Ain and Buddy and whoever else: Look guys, I’ve been bending over backwards to state that there are two versions of Sola Scriptura, the version endorsed by the original Protestants and the version held to by Fundamentalists/Evangelicals.
The Fundamentalists/Evengalicals believe that you can use the Bible Alone to answer all questions and to know God’s will. The original Protestants did not believe that, they endorsed Tradition but merely asserted that if the Bible contradicted Tradition, then the Bible always won.
Catholics object to both points of view, because we believe Holy Tradition (the Traditions of God and not the traditions of men) never contradicts scripture, and scripture never contradicts Holy Tradition; if you think either has happened, you either misunderstood the orally-transmitted teachings or you misunderstood the written teachings.
The Orthodox view is exactly the same as Catholics in that regard.
The Anglican Communion is somewhere between the Orthodox and Catholic view and the old-line Protestant view, but they definitely believe there is such a thing as Holy Tradition (i.e. tradition from God and not from men).
The old line Protestants generally find the Fundamentalist/Evangelical approach to scripture to be ghastly awful and wrong. Indeed, I know at least one Presbyterian minister who is more critical of the the Fundamentalist approach than I am. Lutherans, conservative Episcopalians, mainline Presbyterians, and other Protestants most emphatically *do not* take "Sola Scriptura" doctrine to the heights that modern Evangelicals do.
This is the entire reason that I so often try to separate the mainline Protestants from the "Bible Only" Christians. It is also why many people now argue that the original Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura should be re-named Prima Scriptura, because most of the old-line Protestants didn’t really mean Scripture Alone is all-sufficient, they just meant that Scripture was the final authority.
Dean I’m a little ‘stung’ when you continue to lump ‘evangelical’ (me) in with the fundies, because in doing so you are indeed lumping together the vast majority of protestants with those whackjobs, whether you realize that or not. In one sentence you say ‘fundimentalists vs mailine protestants, and the next sentence you are lumping the two together with ‘fundimentalists/evangelicals’ (when in fact a good portion of ‘mainline protestatants’ are in fact part of the evangelical movement.Â
The modern usage of ‘evangelical’ belies the historical meaning of the term, and applies mostly to socially moderate churches that are somewhere between social fundamentalists and the liberal churches. Maybe that is the way you are understanding the term, but I dunno..
From wiki:
Especially toward the end of the 20th century some have tended to confuse evangelicalism and fundamentalism, but they are not the same; the labels represent very distinct differences of approach which both groups are diligent to maintain. Both groups seek to maintain an identity as theological conservatives; however evangelicals seek to distance themselves from stereotypical perceptions of the "fundamentalist" posture, of antagonism toward the larger society, advocating involvement in the surrounding community rather than separation from it
And in re: Sadducees, they DID adopt Hellenistic ideas, were the ‘ruling class’ who maintained that they were the only direct decedents of the original priests.
They did follow the written word literally, and rejected oral tradition, and were otherwise pretty ‘fundamentalist’. At least when they weren’t open to adopting other ideas along side it (Greek mysticism/Hellenism) I suspect that as the ‘ruling class’ they had to in order to be considered ‘acceptable’ by the Romans, but I digress.
From the ISBE:
“Probably the priestly party only gradually crystallized into the sect of the Sadducees. After the return from the exile, the high priest drew to himself all powers, civil and religious. To the Persian authorities he was as the king of the Jews. The high priest and those about him were the persons who had to do with the heathen supreme government and the heathen nationalities around; this association would tend to lessen their religious fervor, and, by reaction, this roused the zeal of a section of the people for the law. With the Greek domination the power of the high priests at home was increased, but they became still more subservient to their heathen masters, and were the leaders in the Hellenizing movement. With the Greek domination the power of the high priests at home was increased, but they became still more subservient to their heathen masters, and were the leaders in the Hellenizing movement.
Buddy: Ah. I think all we have is misunderstanding my use of the capitalized "Evangelical." My usage and experience are not consistent with that Wikipedia entry.
Almost all Christian denominations consider themselves evangelical. The current pope spends much of his time working as an evangelist, as did his predecessor. There are Catholics all over the world as we speak carrying out Christ’s Great Commission.
This is a tricky problem, and it crops up a lot. For example, it is common shorthand form to refer to the Church seated in the Vatican as "Catholic." But in truth, most Christians consider themselves catholic, since all catholic means is "universal." Strictly speaking, all varieties of Orthodox, and most of the mainline Protestants (Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian especially) consider themselves part of the catholic church, or to in fact be THE catholic church.
So I’m never sure what wording to use. Luther and the other original Protestants had a set of doctrines they invented called the "Five Solas," of which Sola Scriptura was but one, and other more radical breakaway groups from mainline Protestantism have taken that "sola scriptura" to new heights and extremes that the modern mainline Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc. reject. This is why "Prima Scriptura" is increasingly coming into use; the old-line churches that created Sola Scriptura simply meant that scripture was the final authority, whereas the fundamentalists insist that it’s the only authoritiy, period.
It all gets more complicated by the fact there are those who call themselves things like "Evangelical Lutheran" or "Evangelical Presbyterian," which frankly gives me a headache trying to keep straight. %-)
OK agreed, I figured it was a terminology issue (which is why I stated above several comments back ;-)
I never said nor implied that there weren’t two different interpretations of Sola Scriptura nor did I ever say or imply that you haven’t made that distinction.
In both this thread and the earlier one, I have spent most of the time on trying to refine exactly that distinction. That I am coming to the conclusion that the distinction between them is slightly different than yours is not a claim that there is no distinction.
For example: All-Sufficient is somewhat of an oxymoron (but not entirely). Sufficiency means "bare minimum" and heavily implies that there could be more. All, however, does means complete, that there is nothing more, exhaustive. How can there be both more and nothing more? It is either complete or it isn’t.
Therefore, I think the better distinction between Sola and Solo Scriptura is the concept of Exhaustion not Sufficiency.
Explicitly –
Orthodox/Catholic: The Bible is not sufficient*.
Prima(Sola) Scriptura: The Bible is sufficient, but it is not exhaustive. There are proper doctines not included in the Bible. (Sufficiency is implied because if it were insufficient then it couldn’t be the final authority.)
Solo Scriptura: The Bible is exhaustive. Anything not explicitly stated in it is heretical.
*This will be poorly worded, so I apologize in advance. But I would love to get clarification of the cause/effect relationship of Bible insufficiency and Tradition. That is to say: Is it the insufficiency that causes the need for Tradition or is it the Tradition which causes the Bible to be insufficient? As I said before, I’m sorry if the question sounds argumentative or rhetorical. I really do mean it as an honest question.
"Solo Scriptura: The Bible is exhaustive. Anything not explicitly stated in it is heretical."
I, as would most of the ‘sola scriptura’ types, would argue that this is an exceedingly narrow definition.
P.S.
The primary difference, as I see it, is that Catholics believe there can be no proper interpretation of the bible, except through Apostolic Tradition, or specifically the Roman Catholic Magisterium. The Magisterium has final say and all authority, even if an interpretation or tradition is deemed wrong by a later Pope, (for instance ‘when the penny clings, a soul springs’) .
Protestants generally believe that the bible plain, and accessible to all — that is, it is perspicuous can properly be interpreted by the layperson (this is different than the idea of ‘private interpretation’– just because it can be properly interpreted doesn’t mean the proper interpretation is always being made)
The key implication is that scriptural interpretation and application do not raise to the same level of importance of scripture itself (i.e. they are ‘submissive’ to the written word). As such even ecclesiastical authority is viewed as subject to correction by the Scriptures, even by a ‘layperson’.  As Luther said, "a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it"
However as I’ve stated earlier, just because the bible is viewed as the ‘root’ or ‘final authority’ on all scriptural matters does not mean that tradition and history are meritless. We are just more ‘pragmatic’ about tradition and the fact that occasionally evil men manage to come to places of authority, even in the church.
Buddy,
Could you clarify a little bit?Â
It seems you are saying that as one who holds to Sola Scriptura that my description of Solo Scriptura is too narrow.
In some sense, I agree with you. But it’s the doctrine of Solo Scriptura that is too narrow (which is why I don’t accept it), not my description of it. I have several friends who belong to Church of Christ. Their denomination will not allow musical instruments in their worship services because "There is no mention of musical instruments being used in worship services in the Bible". The fact that there is no mention of them being prohibited either doesn’t seem to matter. It really does boil down to "If it’s not in the Bible, it’s wrong".
And just in case *I* haven’t been clear (or just perhaps too subtle) I am intentionally making a distinction between "Sola" with an "A" versus "Solo" with an "O".
The Church of Christ (there are several variants, but I grew up in one similar to what you are speaking of) are certainly no where near what I’d consider ‘mainline’ Protestants. In fact, many of them are on the far fringe of ‘fundamentalist’ often to the degree where women cannot even talk in church, must wear dresses, and have their hair literally covered.Â
The musical instrument thing always chaffed me. If God doesn’t change (which they’d argue is true) and instruments were fine in the OT temple, then why are they suddenly wrong? The answer would be an odd sort of dispensationalist thinking that many fundi churches subscribe to.  In fact, this line of thinking is the most COMMON thread that those churches have, rather than sola scriptura. They might tend to hold up that term as central to their beliefs, but IMO this is the sort of Protestant that Dean is referring to.
Dean,
Having been taught by at least one of the people involved in the NIV, I suppose I should be offended.
Joke! Joke!
Seriously, I can see your point of view. It was a mostly evangelical Protestant effort. I’ve read the notes they put in the beginning, and believe they made a stringent effort to be faithful to the text, and keep interpretation out of it, but you know how hard that can be.
FWIW, I compared the NIV translation of 1 John to mine, and felt it was superior and bias-free. But that could be my own evil evangelical bias showing, too. :-)
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
‘I have several friends who belong to Church of Christ. Their denomination will not allow musical instruments in their worship services because "There is no mention of musical instruments being used in worship services in the Bible".’
I’m not saying you’re wrong about your friends, but if that’s what they believe, they aren’t reading their Bible (or they’re not reading the same one I am). You can’t avoid mention of musical instruments in the Psalms; every upbeat song in there seems to mention harps, flutes, stringed instruments, cymbals, etc. And for examples of worship with instruments, see 1 Samuel 6:5 and 1 Chronicles 15:16, among many others.
Jeff Licquia’s last blog post..Damned If You Do
Yu-Ain: Well that makes a lot of sense! Especially your objection to the term "sufficient." And, I actually think this is all pretty darned good for a start:
Orthodox/Catholic: The Bible is not sufficient*.
Prima(Sola) Scriptura: The Bible is sufficient, but it is not exhaustive. There are proper doctines not included in the Bible. (Sufficiency is implied because if it were insufficient then it couldn’t be the final authority.)
Solo Scriptura: The Bible is exhaustive. Anything not explicitly stated in it is heretical.
I think we’re getting pretty close here. The Catholic/Orthodox perspective is pretty well described by your formula in the context of this discussion, but taken in isolation would not read right at all; the Catholic/Orthodox perspective is that scripture is perfect, holy, and inerrant, but does not suffice by itself to properly transmit the Traditions and Teachings of God. Scripture is one leg of a three-legged stool; the teaching authority of the Bishops, and the Holy Traditions of God are the other two legs. Take out any one of those three legs and the stool wobbles and sooner or later falls.
I struggle to get that into a pithy defintion, but as I say it looks to me like we’re getting close. Your take on scripture being sufficient but not exhaustive vs. exhaustive seems spot on!
As for why Orthodox, Catholic, and others (Union of Utrecht, Old Catholic, some Anglicans, Assyrian Church of East, and etc.) view scripture as insufficient all by itself, well, I’ve linked multiple articles on it, but let me try to get this into as compact an answer as possible:
The early Church didn’t rely on scripture to pass on Jesus’ teachings. They couldn’t. The Gospel was always transmitted orally for the first few decades, although gradually some writings did appear. The New Testament canon took, literally, hundreds of years to develop until finally the Church assembled its Bishops and respected scholars to nail down which of the many books that were floating around were authoritative, and just as important, which VERSIONS of those books were correct; in the pre-printing press era, all books were copied by hand, and if someone wanted to rewrite something, or to "correct" something, he could just do it and if he didn’t say anything about his "corrections" then likely it wouldn’t get noticed. The early Church had to filter out both spurious works, and also separate the incorrect versions from the correct versions of the books it did accept.
So, what guided their hand in making these choices? Well the primary answer is "The Holy Spirit." However, on a more mundane level, what they had to rely on was which scriptures were consistent with what all the Bishops in communion with each other already knew and already taught. This was the same process that was used to construct and/or endorse things like the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed.
Okay, so, they chose the books of the Bible because they believed that these books faithfully transmitted what they were already teaching and what they already knew to be true. If a book didn’t match that, then it got thrown out.
When I realized this, it completely changed how I viewed scripture: scripture was not created by the early Church in order to be the exhaustive reference; it was created by the early Church in order to be the touchstone for checking that our teachings were correct, and that faithfully taught the message of the Apostles. But it flowed from the life of the Church; the Bible did not create the Church, the Church created the Bible. It flowed out of the life of the Church, out of the orally-transmitted teachings that the Church always taught whether it had copies of the scriptures or not!
To the oldest lines of Christianity (that we know of), the book of Acts clearly describes the process of Apostolic Succession and where our bishops come from. It describes how it works just great! But the early Church never envisioned that we would eventually get radicals who expected scripture to spell things out for them to every last jot and tittle; everyone already knew what a Bishop was, and how he became a Bishop, the book of Acts just illustrated how the first Bishops came to be!
If you think of Scripture as being something that flowed out of the life of the Church, to be a touchstone and a guide and an inspiration, and NOT a book that was created to be the be-all, end-all reference for everything, it makes a lot more sense. At least, it does to me.
We can also back much of this up by looking at the writings of the Church Fathers, many of whom were people who knew the original 12 Apostles intimately and were hand-picked by them to continue to carry on the message. The Church Fathers also held that the written scriptures were holy and infallible, but that you cannot interpret them right unless you have the teachings (doctrines) that the Church has always taught, and the Traditions of God that everyone in authority in that day knew to be the Traditions they got from Jesus and The Twelve (such as the seven sacraments).
Talk to any of the very old line Christian groups I’ve mentioned, and they’ll tell you that of the things Protestants object to, many of them are things that the Church has ALWAYS taught that no one even thought was NECESSARY to write down because everybody knew it. And, that can be proven many ways:
Non-theological historical sources that talk about or depict the early Christians and how they worshiped and behaved.
The writings of the Church Fathers, including people who knew the original 12 Apostles intimately.
The Creeds, including the Apostles Creed that all of the early Christians believed and recited, even though it’s nowhere in the New Testament and no one’s even sure who wrote it
And, these days, we can go further; a lot of these were assertions that the Church in Rome was making during the Reformation era, and Protestants rejected much of it because, well, Rome just had to be wrong and they were gonna use the Bible to fix all of Rome’s errors. The problem that comes in is that when you contact non-Roman Catholic churches out in the East, including the Eastern Orthodox (split with Rome 500 years before Martin Luther), the Oriental Orthodox (split off from Rome in 451, a full thousand years before the Protestants), and the Assyrian Church of the East (one of the very oldest but isolated for about a thousand years from the mainline Church), they are often quite unanimous on many of the issues raised by the Protestants; they ALL maintain Apostolic Succession in EXACTLY the same way, they ALL use the same core creedal statements, they ALL maintain that Scripture is the highest expression of Holy Tradition but that Scripture can’t be understood properly outside of the context of the Church that created it.
So basically, to believe the Roman Catholics muffed it because it stopped paying attention to the Bible, you pretty much have to believe that all these other Christian groups did too, and that there simply were no Bible-believing Christians anywhere in the world for almost 1,500 years until Martin Luther came along to correct everybody. Which strikes us as a bit of a stretch.
None of this says that the men running the Church are perfect, or that corruption never occurs. But without the three-legged stool of Church Teaching (doctrine), the authority of the Bishops in communion with each other as the direct spiritual descendants of the Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures all working in unison, you will have a house with a foundation built on sand.
There are perhaps a half-dozen ancient Churches that share all of these beliefs who can demonstrate their apostolic succession and prove through history that they teach today exactly the same things they’ve always taught; there are, last I heard, over 30,000 varieites of Protestants. At some point you’d think those engaged in the Protestant experiment would notice the disconnect there. And some already have, I might add.
The line that sums it up best for me was from the Our Life In Christ guys, who are Orthodox, then they said that the problem isn’t that the Orthodox have a low view of the Scriptures and the Protestants a high one, because the Orthodox have always had a high view of Scripture; the problem is that Protestants have a high view of Scripture but a low view of the Church!
Anyway I gotta run, sorry if I’ve missed anyone else’s comments, I’ll be back later tonight!
Jeff,
I don’t belong to that denomination so I can only offer conjecture as to the apologetics around your counter evidence.
So here it goes (BTW, I didn’t see any mention of music in 1 Samuel Chapter 6):
The events in 1 Chronicles 15:16 were not a worship sevice. It was a procession, a parade of sorts, and thus does not apply.
Now, this would only apply if the prohibition only applies to worship services but not all forms of worship. I have no idea if the CoC would consider playing a guitar in private solitary worship inappropriate or not.
buddy,
I would agree that the CoC is not a mainline protestant church. And that what they call Sola Scriptura, really isn’t. It’s this new version we have been calling Solo Scriptura.
It’s this new version we have been calling Solo Scriptura.
Yu-Ain,
Have you ever gotten the impression, that you’ll soon be looking at the Soli Scriptura somewhere down the road ?
Nah, we’ll run into Sole Scriptura first. :-)
Yu-Ain,
Thank you. I appreciate your answer.
I have only one other question.
Where in the bible (s) does it say Martin Luther gets to correct everything in the year 1521Â AD ?
Okay, I’m back.
Buddy, I don’t know what "when the penny clings, a soul springs" is, as I’ve never heard it and a quick web search doesn’t bring it up. But just to clarify: the Catholic Church does not hold that the Pope can countermand the Magisterium so far as I know. What he can do is, in practical effect, make the final call if the bishops around the world can’t agree on something.
To be honest, I have real trouble with the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, but if you look into what the Church teaches about that, it doesn’t teach that he’s infallible in every word he utters; there are a number of preconditions he has to make before making an ex cathedra statement. And, so far as I know, in the entire history of the Church, only two ex cathedra statements have ever been issued by any Pope, and none have done so in our lifetimes. The main role of the Pope is administrative, and to be a final authority if the bishops in communion with each other can’t come to agreement.
Also, the Magisterium is considered just as "infallible" (meaning, has the authority to settle important questions), and so far as I know no Pope has ever overruled the Magisterium. Indeed, what we believe is that the Magisterium is what gave us the Bible in the first place, so if you doubt the Church that much, then, you should also doubt that the bible is infallible. It was this same Magisterium who gave us that Bible, after all. If they’re not infallible, how can the scriptures, particularly the New Testament scriptures, be infallible? The latter sprung from the former.
But yes, it would be perfectly fair to say that Catholics/Orthodox reject the notion that the Bible is clear and perspicacious all by itself, that lay people can be expected to just read it themselves and come to whatever conclusions they want.
Mc Kiernan,
Well, to be flippant, where does it say he can’t?
If you are looking for a serious answer then I would say that it wasn’t Martin Luther who was "correcting everything" anyway.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness
So, it is not Martin Luther who is correcting, but rather scripture that is correcting.Â
Further it doesn’t say "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for Bishops for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness". So it seems to me that Martin Luther certainly was not prohibited from being the instrument of scripture’s correction.
Dean,
The actual jingle was "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs" which was one of the central issues of the 95 thesis of Luther.
And ‘come to whatever conclusions they want’ is not how I would view layman interpretation. I would say that with the indwelling of the spirit, the bible is ‘clear and perspicacious’ (not all by itself) although there are some doctrines that are less clear than others.Â
However, it is quite clear in its central message. (compare Deut 30:11-14)Â When we (most protestants) speak of clarity, what we mean is that the Bible is clear when it comes to its central message.
Obviously if this idea is taken to an extreme the individual becomes the supreme authority on the meaning of Scripture by claiming revelation from the Holy Spirit to bring forth an interpretation not necessarily validated by the Church as a whole.Â
I wouldn’t subscribe to that, at all.
Dean,
Regarding the implied infallibility of the Magesterium:
That is only necessary if the Bible is seen as a construct of Man, and not of God. If the Bible is a construct of God, then the Bible could very well be seen as infallible in spite of the Magesterium’s fallibility. I think it would necessarily imply that the Magesterium was (and is) honestly seeking God’s will even if they got misinterpreted some doctrine. (God certainly wouldn’t guide them in compiling His word if they were the sinister force that some Fundamentalist Church’s claim).
Magisterium: a few selections
84 The apostles entrusted the "Sacred deposit" of the faith (the depositum fidei), contained in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, to the whole of the Church.
"By adhering to [this heritage] the entire holy people, united to its pastors, remains always faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. So, in maintaining, practicing and professing the faith that has been handed on, there should be a remarkable harmony between the bishops and the faithful."
86 "Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith.
85 "The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ." This means that the task of interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome.
Buddy: Well, that’s basically the main difference between Orthodox/Catholic Christians and the rest. Between Protestants, though, the difference is harder to put a finger on, but there is a big difference between the old-line Protestants like the original Lutherans and Presbyterians, who embrace the ecumenical councils of history and other ecumenical councils of their own, and the more radical individualistic sects like the Baptists and Pentacostalists who embrace the doctrine that the individual believer is primary.
As for Martin Luther’s accusations about the Church, it should be remembered that when he issued his 95 theses, the response he got within pretty short order was that he was right about around half of them and corrections to the Church were in order; much of the bad stuff that was going on was happening without Vatican approval (although possibly with a nudge and a wink, I really don’t know). But about the other half or so, they said he’d gone way too far and needed to retract them or he’d be excommunicated (and he basically said "fine, excommunicate me then!") Luther maintained the role of the Bishops and a heavy respect for the Ecumenical Councils of the 1,400 years that came before him, and to this day the most conservative Lutherans still consider themselves a part of the Catholic Church and wants to see the Church in Rome reform itself so they can be in full communion with it; the Church in Rome feels the same way, but both sides have certain non-negotiable items that will make that impossible any time soon.
Most Catholic sources I’ve seen acknowledge that Protestants have brought valuable changes to the practice of the faith and needed corrections, but, in the end, just like the Orthodox, full communion won’t be possible unless certain doctrines are brought back in line with what they believe has always been with the faith from day 1. Lutherans and other Protestants, of course, feel the same but in reverse. [shrug]
Yu-Ain: From our perspective, what you’d be saying here is that you trusted the Magisterium to have created and preserved an infallible Bible for you, but you don’t trust that same Magisterium to give you infallible translations and interpretations of it. And, further, you also trust that whoever gave you your translation was infallible, and/or you ultimately let it fall to yourself to decide what to believe of what you read in your translations (or the originals, if like Jeff you can read ancient Greek).
From the ancient Orthodox/Catholic perspective, we find that more than a little troubling; basically, you’re making yourself your own Bishop (or even your own Pope). It’s why I always said if I were to embrace Christianity again, it would be with the Orthodox or the Roman Catholics or, at most, the oldest lines of Protestantism, because it’s not about me or what I want to believe, but what God wants. If I trust the Bible, I have to trust the Church that gave it to me. Or so I see it; your mileage may vary. ;-)
I kind of see what you are saying, however, I see many instances where God has used fallible institutions to fulfill God’s infallible plan.
This doesn’t seem to imply, to me, that institutions involved then become infallible on that subject for all of eternity. Only that they were infallible just that once. Now they may be again at some future point. But so may others.
Given that they accepted parts of Luther’s theses shows that the Magesterium *can* make mistakes in doctrine. This suggests to me that when they make doctrinal pronouncements they should be given a great deal more reverence than Jim Bob the rural Baptist preacher of a 50 person congregation, but that they could still be honestly mistaken.
If I trust the Bible, I have to trust the Church that gave it to me. Or so I see it; your mileage may vary.
In some ways I do agree with this statement. But I’m one of those squishy types that thinks that both Protestants, Roman Catlickers :-) , and Orthodox are all a part of the catholic Church even if we do make snarky comments about each other at Thanksgiving Dinner.
Although I’m quite conservative in most of my theology, I’m actually squishy enough to basically think the same thing. Salvation is a process not an event. ;-)
It used to be that the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Catholics, and the Orthodox had all excommunicated each other and held firmly that everybody but them was going to Hell as a result. Well the Orthodox didn’t excommunicate the Protestants because the Orthodox weren’t present in any meaningful sense during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but the Catholics and the Orthodox excommunicated each other in 1054. And, starting in the mid to late 19th Century, the old-line Protestants like the Lutherans and the Anglicans became very interested in talking to the Orthodox, because they each thought, "oh look, we all disagree with the Pope, we must have a lot in common!" Turned out not so much, although there is still an active "Anglo-Catholic" movement which seeks to get the C of E and other Anglican Communion members in unison with the Orthodox (so the Anglo-Catholic are trying to get into full communion with the Orthodox, but not the Roman Catholic–get your scorecards, can’t appreciate the game without a score card!)
Although this points to something that not a lot of Protestants quite understand: the Catholic Church has always held that Jesus meant it literally when he said you couldn’t get into Heaven without drinking his blood and eating his body; what that historically meant was that if you were excommunicated–not allowed to take communion–it was just a given you were not going to Heaven, which is why it was such a heavy punishment.
The Catholics used to teach that all Protestants are going to Hell for the mortal sin of schisming Christ’s Church, and in any case they weren’t partaking of Christ’s blood and body so were doomed regardless. In recent centuries that’s cooled down a lot, especially since Vatican II in the 1960s. Now the Church’s position is that most Protestants are our brothers in Christ and need to be treated that way, and you can be excommunicated for saying they’re going to Hell; if nothing else, you don’t have that authority. We still view them as badly mistaken, but we hold that they can’t be held responsible for that, especially if they grew up Protestant. ;-)
Protestants are all over the map, depending on which ones you talk to there are so many varieties, but the oldest and largest lines of Protestants think pretty much the same of the Catholics, only in reverse. Who knows where it will all end?
I’ll then just close by saying that my only point in this discussion was to correct errors in what people say about the Church; an annoying problem for a lot of Christians, especially of the Bible-centric fundamentalist variety, is that they have inherited a bunch of ideas about what the Church teaches and believes, or taught historically, that are simply not so–or at least not fairly portrayed (we didn’t “hide” the Bible from the Common Man, that’s just garbage). If nothing else, amongst certain types of Protestants, Catholic-bashing is all the rage, and that needs to be answered (hopefully with calmness and charity, although sometimes I lose my cool).
I’m not to convert anyone to Catholicism, I’m just defending the faith (although y’know, I’m here to help if anyone’s interested in taking that journey, I’m glad I did!).
Amen, Dean.
Personally I’ve pretty well come to believe that most of the semantical arguments are a huge waste of time, in general, but they are fun occasionally. In the end, we all believe basically the same thing, we just disagree on the specifics. As long as we aren’t denying any of the central tenants of the faith, the rest is often just icing, anyway.Â
I think in general, that we do more damage to the faith when we decry others on minor elements, than we do in any other situation. Jesus said we would be known for our love for one another. Instead, we find too many occaions to hate, I think. There are ‘hills to fight and die on’ but often we seem to pick the smallest of elements and make a mountain out of a pebble. Whatever happened to forbearance?Â
While I happen to side moreso with Luther, Calvin (to some extent), John Gill, Spurgeon, moreso than the general position of the RCC, I can understand the arguments of the other position. And while I happen to think they are wrong, I do not, however, think the RCC is the spawn of satan :-D.
"While I happen to side moreso with Luther, Calvin (to some extent), John Gill, Spurgeon, moreso than the general position of the RCC, I can understand the arguments of the other position. And while I happen to think they are wrong, I do not, however, think the RCC is the spawn of satan :-D."
Buddy, that is truly and really a wonderful conclusion.
And then Dean adds by saying :
" that my only point in this discussion was to correct errors in what people say about the Church".
Okay, I think I get it.
Well, maybe,
Dean,
Just what errors in the past 69 comments or prior did you actually correct something ?
Please scroll to the top of this page and read the article that started this conversation. If you then have any further questions, let me know.
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