“Some early Christians agreed” isn’t the mark of canonicity, but in either case I noticed you didn’t answer my question about Laodicea. Can you answer the question please?
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Deacon Ananias Vs. Matt Slick: Sola Scriptura
- Thread starter JCSteel
- Start date
You didn't answer my question, it was a specific question about whether textual analysis and criticism of internal/evidence as you say, is the correct criterion to determine authenticity of Scripture. I am forced to repeatedly try to infer your response to my questions because you are not answering directly. So it seems like you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong: no, textual analysis is NOT the criterion, it being God-inspired is the criterion.
So: How do you know Revelation is God-inspired? Hard mode: you can't say it self-attests.
Self attest.... That's new to me.
The point is though, those who argued for it's authenticity and eventually prevailed, as well as those who argued against including forgeries and so forth in the canon were part of the Orthodox church. A church that you claim is in error about the traditions that it has preserved among many other things.
So the question is: why would they be right about this? If the answer is they were guided by the Holy Spirit, then okay, but why were they not guided in any other regard?
This is the issue, because to hold this position you essentially are claiming that God abandoned the church in regards to its preservation of authentic Christianity but for some reason decided to help them preserve the canon of scripture accurately so that, over a thousand years later, people could get it right.
To me this is an absurd position to hold. Why wouldn't God preserve His church in it's entirety as He promised Saint Peter? He didn't say "the gates of Hades will prevail against the church almost immediately, but don't worry at least in the chaos I'll make sure the right books get canonised, so after a millenia and a half they can correct themselves."
Again, it is important to stress it was not a situation where people couldn't have got it wrong, like all they had to do was collect the scrolls together and that was it. We have knowledge of several texts and probably more existed at the time that were forgeries that promoted hersies and agendas.
Why not reduce it down further:
Pick a set of books of the Bible in any different age, appropriate for the form of the Protestant argument of the day....is it not still possible that someone could interpret it incorrectly?
There is not structure of the Body of The Church under that argument. Merely a bunch of individual interpretational elements.
If you have suddenly different interpetations of the same Word... Who is right and who is wrong? Someone can go on ad nauseum about correctness of XYZ interpretation...but there's no continuity of though to justify it.
Indeed. If you had 4 islands with 4 different groups who had no prior contact with Christianity and gave them each a Bible and told them that it was sufficient in itself to provide guidelines on all aspects of life, spirituality and worship etc. If you visted them again a generation later it is unlikely that their beliefs and worship would have panned out the same.
And this is precisely what we see with the advent of Sola Scriptura. If a Bible and the Holy Spirit is all you need then two people who never had any contact and were in completely different cultures could read it and come to precisely the same conclusions. Where that does happen it is because they are part of a wider group of believers who have their own interpretative framework...
We also see basically every heresy you can think of coming back along with women in rainbow stoles preaching the "sparkle creed". This is all because Sola Scriptura is an entirely flawed premise
"No, it [Scripture] is not sufficient to guide man to salvation, inasmuch as, firstly, it wasn't given to man from the beginning and, secondly, when it was given it wasn't the only authentic text, with regard to the salvation of human souls, because before it there was the Holy Tradition. Many years before Moses began writing the first books of the Old Testament, there was a sacred piety in the community of the people of Israel. Similarly, the books of the New Testament began to be written ten years after the formal foundation of the Church, which took place on the day of Pentecost. The Church chose and sealed as inspired by God the books of the two Testaments over one hundred years later. These then comprised the declared Canon of the books of Holy Scripture. Thereafter the Church maintained this Canon of Truth, inasmuch as it is the very "pillar and ground of truth." The Holy Spirit operates within all of this for the preservation of the truth about salvation. Where the Church is, says Saint Jerome, there also is the Spirit of God and where the Spirit of God is, there also is the Church and all grace --- since the Spirit is truth.
- Elder Cleopa
- Elder Cleopa
Jeremiah Branch
Orthodox Catechumen
Likewise if you had four islands with four groups of people and you gave them all books that have ever been considered as possible parts of the canon (Epistles of Clement, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Enoch, etc), what is the likelihood that each of them would recognize the same exact set of "self-attesting" 66 Protestant books? Spoiler alert: zero.
@GodfatherPartTwo probably we should move discussion on Sola Scriptura to this topic as it seems more apt.
Some questions I would ask in regard to this topic:
Why doesn't Christ instruct the Apostles to write anything down? If Scripture is the only God endorsed means of transmitting Christian doctrine it seems odd to me that Christ doesn't seem at all concerned with the writing down of anything. What He does do is instruct the Apostles to go out and teach verbally.
If one takes the most charitable possible position and say that Christians began to use the texts of the NT as the sole source of doctrine as soon as they began to appear before they were officially codified, you still have a period of time where there was nothing written pertaining to the New Covenant. This is extended when you consider that these texts would have taken time to be distributed so all of the extant writings at any time would not have been universally accessed by the entire Church. One necessarily has to posit that there was a time that Christianity existed and flourished without New Testament Scripture. So surely this renders false the claim that Scripture is a requisite for Christian faith. The Church existed before Scripture and gave rise to Scripture. I don't think you can just reverse that.
Finally I would like to ask. If we lived in a totalitarian anti-Christian society who dedicated themselves to destroying all Scripture and forced the Church underground. Lets say you get a couple of generations down the line who have received the Gospel in secret via word of mouth. Would it be possible for Christianity to persist under such conditions? If yes then Sola Scriptura is not a necessary condition for Christianity. If no then you have to contend with the problem that the Church preceeded Scripture even in the most charitable possible conditions. The doctrines of Christianity were mainly passed on via word of mouth in the beginning.
Some questions I would ask in regard to this topic:
Why doesn't Christ instruct the Apostles to write anything down? If Scripture is the only God endorsed means of transmitting Christian doctrine it seems odd to me that Christ doesn't seem at all concerned with the writing down of anything. What He does do is instruct the Apostles to go out and teach verbally.
If one takes the most charitable possible position and say that Christians began to use the texts of the NT as the sole source of doctrine as soon as they began to appear before they were officially codified, you still have a period of time where there was nothing written pertaining to the New Covenant. This is extended when you consider that these texts would have taken time to be distributed so all of the extant writings at any time would not have been universally accessed by the entire Church. One necessarily has to posit that there was a time that Christianity existed and flourished without New Testament Scripture. So surely this renders false the claim that Scripture is a requisite for Christian faith. The Church existed before Scripture and gave rise to Scripture. I don't think you can just reverse that.
Finally I would like to ask. If we lived in a totalitarian anti-Christian society who dedicated themselves to destroying all Scripture and forced the Church underground. Lets say you get a couple of generations down the line who have received the Gospel in secret via word of mouth. Would it be possible for Christianity to persist under such conditions? If yes then Sola Scriptura is not a necessary condition for Christianity. If no then you have to contend with the problem that the Church preceeded Scripture even in the most charitable possible conditions. The doctrines of Christianity were mainly passed on via word of mouth in the beginning.
Additionally, from the time of Abraham to Moses, the people of God were guided on the path of salvation solely by tradition. This is also the case when in the early Churches prior to the first written gospel and during the period when St Paul wrote his epistles. There is no possibility of denying an oral tradition of Christianity, and when you examine early Christian writings it is clear that this ecclesiology and tradition was in line with the Orthodox ecclesiology. Scripture is a product of holy tradition.
I’ve come to the conclusion that this debate is basically a waste of time except for impartial observers
I’ve come to the conclusion that this debate is basically a waste of time except for impartial observers
Christ sent the Holy Spirit, who carried the Apostles along to write the New Testament, as He did with the Prophets of the Old Testament.
No one's arguing this.
Not sure what you mean by this, the New Covenant was revealed in the Old Testament. It was the Apostolic understanding that Christ had inaugurated the New Covenant.
It is true that some Church Fathers did not have the complete canon. Whether you think they "flourished" is another matter and only speaks to the standard you are measuring them by. Though, it should be noted that all the Church Fathers, except for possibly Clement of Rome, came after the New Testament had been completed.
This would be like saying Israel existed before Scripture and gave rise to Scripture, therefore, Israel gets to define Scripture.
If we are to say Sola Scriptura is endorsed by the Apostles, we would expect to see that they took this stance regarding the Old Testament Scriptures. In other words that they would not endorse traditions or scriptures that are not a part of that canon, or adhere to doctrines drawn from outside sources.
The problem with this is that the Epistle of Jude references not only the book of Enoch, but a tradition regarding the Archangel Michael and the devil:
"Yet Michael the archangel, in contending with the devil, when he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”"
One has to ask why if they had a proto-Sola Scriptura mindset, the Apostles seem to not have any problem referencing wider traditions around Old Testament events and figures? And it is not limited to Jude, Saint Paul references Jannes and Jambres in his Second Epistle to Timothy (Chapter 3 verse 8), the names of two of those who opposed Moses that were derived from tradition, and not found in Exodus.
I anticipate that the rebuttal to this would be something along the lines that the Apostles had authority to reference traditions outside of Scripture, because they are the Apostles, but I think it can also be used to make the case that Sola Scriptura was alien to the Apostles, and they referenced these things because they had an appreciation for Holy Tradition. Which is further bolstered with:
"Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle." - 2 Thessalonians 2:15
The problem with this is that the Epistle of Jude references not only the book of Enoch, but a tradition regarding the Archangel Michael and the devil:
"Yet Michael the archangel, in contending with the devil, when he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”"
One has to ask why if they had a proto-Sola Scriptura mindset, the Apostles seem to not have any problem referencing wider traditions around Old Testament events and figures? And it is not limited to Jude, Saint Paul references Jannes and Jambres in his Second Epistle to Timothy (Chapter 3 verse 8), the names of two of those who opposed Moses that were derived from tradition, and not found in Exodus.
I anticipate that the rebuttal to this would be something along the lines that the Apostles had authority to reference traditions outside of Scripture, because they are the Apostles, but I think it can also be used to make the case that Sola Scriptura was alien to the Apostles, and they referenced these things because they had an appreciation for Holy Tradition. Which is further bolstered with:
"Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle." - 2 Thessalonians 2:15
The doctrine of sola scriptura makes no claim against traditions or teachings that do not directly conflict with the Scriptures themselves. Not sure what is so hard to understand about that. You're beating up a strawman of your own creation.
To put it as plainly as possible, when serious Protestants talk about sola scriptura, we're essentially saying that we use the Bible as a sort of measuring stick against which to judge all other teachings, traditions, philosophies and world views. We do this because the Bible was written under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit (and is thus the literal word of God) and is an unchanging standard (like God himself) that perseveres through time. Thus, if any teaching (whether from the world or from other Christians) runs directly counter to what can be plainly read and understood in scripture, then we reject it out of hand. It's really that simple.
The objections you raise about the early church not having compiled the totality of the Biblical canon are irrelevant and somewhat nonsensical. Clearly things were different in the Old Testament era and in the days of the early Church (especially prior to the printing press and the widespread availability of the Bible). But God was always working toward a plan - just like He was always working toward a plan to redeem humanity through the person of Christ himself. And God had a plan for the early church, just as he had a plan for the church in the Middle Ages and up through the modern era. God has always and will always provide a path for his faithful elect. And a large part of that plan over the past several hundred years has been in the widespread availability of the Bible, which has helped to spread the Gospel to literally every corner of the world, as Christ commissioned us to do.
Rejecting sola scriptura on the basis that it couldn't have logically applied in the days of the early church is sort of like rejecting the idea that fully grown man will have much different needs and behaviors than a newborn child. A newborn baby is weak and vulnerable, and special allowance must be made for its survival - just as God made special allowance for the early church to grow and thrive by divinely empowering the Apostles and inspiring the writers of the New Testament. Those days of the early church were foundational, the roots on which the faith would grow. And the writing, safekeeping and eventual widespread distribution of the New Testament represented the ultimate blossoming of the faith. But roots and flowers alike are of the same plant - one plant - just like we are all ultimately of the one body of Christ. And because this is clearly how things have unfolded through history, we can only assume that this was part of God's grand design, and all for His ultimate glory.
To put it as plainly as possible, when serious Protestants talk about sola scriptura, we're essentially saying that we use the Bible as a sort of measuring stick against which to judge all other teachings, traditions, philosophies and world views. We do this because the Bible was written under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit (and is thus the literal word of God) and is an unchanging standard (like God himself) that perseveres through time. Thus, if any teaching (whether from the world or from other Christians) runs directly counter to what can be plainly read and understood in scripture, then we reject it out of hand. It's really that simple.
The objections you raise about the early church not having compiled the totality of the Biblical canon are irrelevant and somewhat nonsensical. Clearly things were different in the Old Testament era and in the days of the early Church (especially prior to the printing press and the widespread availability of the Bible). But God was always working toward a plan - just like He was always working toward a plan to redeem humanity through the person of Christ himself. And God had a plan for the early church, just as he had a plan for the church in the Middle Ages and up through the modern era. God has always and will always provide a path for his faithful elect. And a large part of that plan over the past several hundred years has been in the widespread availability of the Bible, which has helped to spread the Gospel to literally every corner of the world, as Christ commissioned us to do.
Rejecting sola scriptura on the basis that it couldn't have logically applied in the days of the early church is sort of like rejecting the idea that fully grown man will have much different needs and behaviors than a newborn child. A newborn baby is weak and vulnerable, and special allowance must be made for its survival - just as God made special allowance for the early church to grow and thrive by divinely empowering the Apostles and inspiring the writers of the New Testament. Those days of the early church were foundational, the roots on which the faith would grow. And the writing, safekeeping and eventual widespread distribution of the New Testament represented the ultimate blossoming of the faith. But roots and flowers alike are of the same plant - one plant - just like we are all ultimately of the one body of Christ. And because this is clearly how things have unfolded through history, we can only assume that this was part of God's grand design, and all for His ultimate glory.
I would respond by saying that the Apostles not only quote the book of Enoch, which neither Protestants or Orthodox view as canonical, but a pagan Greek writer. It doesn't mean the works they quoted were God-Breathed, it simply points to the fact that they could create an authoritative application from those sources.
Jesus chastises the Pharisees for nullifying the Scriptures for the sake of their tradition. It is demonstrable from the text that the Apostles understood themselves to be writing Scriptures as the Prophets from the Old Testament did.
What these traditions are is up to the question, we have the Pauline corpus which should clue us in, but I've noticed that what you believe these traditions referenced were will change depending on which church you attend.
The widespread availability of the Bible has resulted in numerous innovative interpretations of scripture and various versions of the gospel and new ideas which nobody believed prior to the reformation.
Declaring that you use the Bible as a measuring stick against which to judge all over philosophies and worldviews presupposes that your interpretation of scripture is correct. A claim anybody can make. This is the problem Protestantism has no solution to.
You had this prior to the Reformation as well. Doesn't mean the Bible should be gatekept.
If the solution is "pick a church and pretend it's infallible," then any Protestant can do the same, some of them already do.
Do you believe that the words the Apostles wrote had an objective meaning when they were inscripturated or were they not able to be understood for centuries until they were given a meaning by a later source?
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It’s not simply picking any church. The Orthodox Church has extremely robust historical claims as well as a deep monastic spiritual tradition that has helped preserve her doctrines.
I believe that the scriptures have an objective meaning, but they need to be read in the light of the Church, because it is clear that self-interpretation is no standard whatsoever.
I recognize that it has big claims, that it claims to be the only true church and all others have apostatized. Is there a standard to test that claim or do I have to take it at face value from the Eastern Orthodox Church that it is the only true church?
What does "read in the light of the church" mean? Are you saying that what the Apostles wrote in the 1st century should be read in light of 2nd Nicea, which convened in the 8th century? You are still working with a subjective interpretation in that case, and an anachronistic one at that. If the Scriptures have an objective meaning within their own context then they are already operating as a standard.
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If by “face value” you mean to just accept these claims without further investigation, then no, of course not. Read church history, attend liturgy, read the lives of Saints, visit a monastery etc. my belief and trust in the church was sealed by experiences beyond intellectual debates.
I mean that to separate scripture and tradition is to lose the fullness of the truth. If someone reads scripture and starts a ministry claiming it says X and another Y, then the tradition of the church solves this, just like they did against Arius
I've done all of those things except for visit a monastery and I walked away unconvinced. There is no standard to test the claims of the Eastern Orthodox Church then? It is up to our feelings?
Which tradition? This is only going back to our original question: do you believe that what the Apostles wrote in the 1st century had an objective meaning or should it be read in the light of traditions that developed centuries later?
You've brought up the Arian Controversy before. Arianism took over the church even after it was anathematized. The only one who opposed it was Athanasius who defended the divinity of Christ with Scripture. This is how he earned the title Athanasius Contra Mundum (against the world).