While they were living, they were infallible teachers and no written New Testament was essentially needed to come to faith. Once they were gone, no one took their office as infallible teachers and the written Scripture became the only infallible teacher.

I remember saying to my wife, when we were in the throes of deciding whether to become Catholics or not, that following our Evangelical friends, one must imagine God, at the death of the last Apostle, lowering down a nice leather-bound Zondervan Bible – with blank spaces for notes – to the Christians of the day, saying, “There! Now you’ve got all you need. Best of luck!”

Oh, and by the way, you’ll need to learn to read pretty quickly, too…

jj

It does seem to me possible to argue that we must use reasoning to conclude with moral certainty that the Catholic Church is God’s infallible guide and teacher on earth – and then obey it.

My Reformed teachers seemed to me to be arguing that, fundamentally, the (Protestant :-)) Bible takes the place of the Church in this formula. Using our human reason we see what good the Bible has done, we see that it speaks of Jesus in ways that elicit Lewis’s “liar-lunatic-Lord” trilemma, we read its contents and we see that we believe, with (only) moral certainty, that it is the word of God – but, if the word, then it must be infallible – so we must obey it.

I think that is how they would have argued – and then, of course, having made this act of faith, God gives us theological faith.

To me, of course, the argument seemed far, far stronger that it was the Church that was that teacher – in great part because sola Scriptura was, in fact, private interpretation – and utterly unworkable.

To further strengthen the case of the Church as teacher, place yourself in the position of an inhabitant of the Roman Empire between AD 30 (Jesus’ Passover) and AD 50, listening to any of St Peter, St John, St Paul or any other Apostle, when no text whatsoever of the New Testament had still been written.

Either you accepted the Apostles as God-inspired infallible teachers, or you were in for a very long wait before becoming Christian. Fifty years at least if you specifically required that St John’s Gospel were put in writing.

And the Apostles at that time were exactly the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. So, the Protestant position implies that a fundamental change occurred in the Church with the death of the Apostles. While they were living, they were infallible teachers and no written New Testament was essentially needed to come to faith. Once they were gone, no one took their office as infallible teachers and the written Scripture became the only infallible teacher.

You present an argument that leads you to this conclusion:

If we know it (the canon) merely by “reasonable criteria”, by definition, we cannot know it infallibly …

That is exactly what I am trying to say! The Reformer’s sola scriptura novelty is a primarily a doctrine that denies that any living man can speak with infallible authority under any conceivable circumstance. If I accept the Reformer’s sola scriptura novelty, it logically follows that I can never know with a certainty that is guaranteed by God what the canon of scriptures actually is. Which leads to me to your conclusion:

if we only know the canon by “reasonable criteria … we only have a reasonable rule of faith not a dogmatic rule of faith

Right. If, in principle, there is no way that I can ever know with a certainty that is guaranteed by God which books belong to the canon of the bible (if there are any), then I should not bother listening to any Christian that claims that he has a knowledge obtained from his study of the “scriptures”. Why listen to Calvin or Luther if they don’t claim that they have exercised the charism of infallibility when they try and teach me what constitutes the canon of scriptures? If no one can teach infallibly, then no one should listen to either Calvin or Luther when they pontificate upon the “scriptures”, since no one really knows what the scriptures actually are.

Brent writes: The early Counter Reformers were quick to note that Protestantism, in its incessant cry of Biblical perspicuity coupled with a throwing off of Magisterial Church authority, consequently grounded theological truth in pure reason.

I agree with that. The Calvinists then reacted to the Counter Reformation by abandoning rationalism and embracing fideism. From one extreme to the other.

mateo writes: If the Protestant bible is the only infallible source of revelation that a Christian has access to, then what possible reasonable criteria could exist that would give one an infallible knowledge of the books that belong in the canon?

John Thayer Jensen asks: I wish you could expound here a little on the tu quoque aspect of this.

JJ, I’ll give it my best shot. I see right away that in the sentence that I wrote above that I have used the word “infallible”, which was sloppy writing on my part (i.e. “… the Protestant bible is the only infallible source of revelation that a Christian has access to …”).

JJ, not for your sake, but for the sake of those trying to follow this conversation, I think I need to get a little technical in defining my terms.

Infallibility is a charism of the Holy Spirit that men can exercise when that gift is given to men by the Holy Spirit. When the charismatic gift of infallibility is exercised by men, what they say or write is known with certainty to be inerrant (without error). I say known with certainty, because the Holy Spirit is the one who is guaranteeing that the words are without error. A Catholic would say that a book that recorded all the de fide definita dogmas of the true church would be a book that is guaranteed by God to be without error.

Likewise, inspiration is a gift of the Holy Spirit that men can exercise, and when a man writes down words while exercising the charismatic gift of inspiration, what is written down is inspired (literally, God-breathed). God is the author of the words that are God-breathed, and Catholics say that only the scriptures are God-breathed.

Since the scriptures found in a Protestant bible are but a subset of the scriptures found in a Catholic bible, Catholics would necessarily acknowledge that the scriptures found in a Protestant bible have the quality of being inspired. Since God is the author of what is God-breathed, and because God cannot lie, a knowledgeable Catholic will readily grant that the scriptures found in a Protestant bible not only have the quality of being inspired, they also have the quality of being inerrant. (Of course, to be without error, the translation of the Protestant bible from the original sources must be free from translation errors.)

To sum up, only people can speak infallibly, but books, because they are not people, cannot speak infallibly. Technically, a book cannot be an infallible source of revelation, because a book is not a person.

What I should have written is something like this:

The novelty of sola scriptura is the Protestant doctrine that the only source of knowledge that is guaranteed by God to be inerrant are the words we find written down in the inspired books of the bible, and the only inspired books of the bible are those to be found between the covers of a Protestant bible with a sixty-six book canon.

Ironically, the sixty-six book canon is not what is contained in a first edition of the King James Bible nor the first edition of the Geneva Bible. Because most Protestant’s now insist upon a sixty-six book canon as being an essential element of sola scriptura doctrine, Catholics object to the doctrine of sola scriptura on those grounds. Which gives us the “canon problem”. The “canon problem” can be resolved, if one believes that there is, in principle, a way to know what belongs in the canon with a certainty that is guaranteed by God.

Since Protestant “bible churches” that are built upon the foundation of sola scriptura can have no living teaching authority that can offer anything more than learned opinions, not having a closed canon would throw everything into question. What if there are books that are missing from the Protestant bible? Maybe Protestants need to include the Gospel of Thomas in their canon, as some Protestant bible scholars maintain. Or maybe the letters of Paul aren’t inspired, as some Protestants maintain. Or, maybe, just maybe, Luther was right after all, and it was a mistake to claim that the Epistle of James belonged to the canon, along with the Book of Revelation, and all the other books that Luther didn’t see as being inspired by God. Aaron G has it exactly right when he says “I could not listen to a Pastor preach out of the “Word of God” when I knew that in principle that very book he was preaching from might, in fact, not be the Word of God after all.”

Catholics have other grounds for objecting to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura apart from the can of worms that this Protestant doctrine opens up in regard to the “canon problem”. The Catholic would also rightly object to claim that the scriptures found in a Protestant bible are only source of knowledge that is guaranteed by God to be inerrant. It is the “only” claim that Catholics object to. Catholics claim that some teachings of the true church that are not explicitly found in scriptures are guaranteed by Got to be inerrant without also having the quality of being inspired.

Catholics would say that the true church, at the Ecumenical Council of Trent, solemnly defined the canon of the bible. That is an example of a teaching of the true church that is known with certainty to be inerrant, since the Holy Spirit has protected that teaching from being in error. Catholics claim that the Holy Spirit always protects the true church from teaching error when she exercises the full authority of her teaching office.

So why doesn’t the tu toque argument work? That argument doesn’t work because Catholics make the distinction between what is inerrant without being inspired, and what is inerrant because it is inspired. The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura is not primarily a doctrine about the inspiration and inerrancy of scriptures, since no Catholic finds the claim that scriptures are God-breathed, and thus inerrant, to be the least bit controversial. Rather, at its core, sola scriptura is a Protestant novelty fabricated by the “Reformers” as a way to deny that any living man could exercise the charism of infallibility. Specifically, the original Reformers were rebelling against the authority of the bishops of the church that they belonged to when they claimed that their consciences could not be bound by any living man under any conceivable circumstance. The Reformers were making the absurd claim that only the Protestant bible could bind the conscience of a Christian. That is an absurd claim since there are no scriptures in a Protestant bible that define the canon of scriptures. It logically follows that if sola scriptura is true, there is no possibility that the canon of scriptures can ever be known with a certainty that is guaranteed by God. Which means that you might as well not believe anything other that what you know by the natural law, since nothing that you or I could propose to be accepted as part of the canon of inspired scriptures can ever be known with a certainty guaranteed by God that it actually belongs to the canon of inspired scriptures.

A sola scriptura confessing Protestant cannot claim that men within the true church have exercised the charism of infallibility to define the canon, because the sola scriptura novelty was a doctrine invented by the “Reformers” to deny that anyone could exercise the charism of infallibility! Any argument whatsoever that a sola scriptura confessing Protestant could comes up with to define a canon of scriptures that is guaranteed by God to be inerrant is a doomed exercise in futility. Which, as I see it, is really what Tom Brown’s article is about:

“By what criterion do we know which texts comprise the Bible?” …
I shall argue that, given the Reformed assumption, that whatever authoritatively testifies to the canonicity of Scripture must be more authoritative than Scripture …

John Thayer Jensen writes: It does seem to me possible to argue that we must use reasoning to conclude with moral certainty that the Catholic Church is God’s infallible guide and teacher on earth – and then obey it. To be sure, God then converts the water of moral certainty into the wine of supernatural faith – if I may use the image.

My Reformed teachers seemed to me to be arguing that, fundamentally, the (Protestant :-)) Bible takes the place of the Church in this formula. Using our human reason we see what good the Bible has done, we see that it speaks of Jesus in ways that elicit Lewis’s “liar-lunatic-Lord” trilemma, we read its contents and we see that we believe, with (only) moral certainty, that it is the word of God – but, if the word, then it must be infallible – so we must obey it.

I think that is how they would have argued – and then, of course, having made this act of faith, God gives us theological faith.

It seems to me that this is an argument that is claiming that by reason alone, one could come to be a convert that believes in the Gospel. And, that after one becomes a convert to the Christian faith, that God grants to the convert the supernatural gift of theological faith. That argument seems to me to be nothing more than the heresy of semi-Pelagianism. If find this surprising, since the error typically made by Calvinists is not that of embracing the heresy of semi-Pelagianism, but the error of embracing the heresy propounded by Luther.

Dr. Feingold makes it clear why Luther taught heresy in his lectures on grace that Bryan has linked in the CTC articles Lawrence Feingold on Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace, and Nature, Grace, and Man’s Supernatural End: Feingold, Kline, and Clark.

JJ, have you listened to those lectures by Dr. Lawrence? If you have, perhaps we could discuss further the heresy of Luther on one of the CTC threads that Bryan started. I don’t want to sidetrack this thread in to a discussion about actual grace, but do think that it would be necessary to discuss that topic to see why Luther taught heresy. The heresy that Luther taught about actual grace is germane, IMO, about why sola scriptura is false doctrine.

John Thayer Jensen writes: The reason I raised the issue was that I thought Mateo above, in #381, was arguing that one would have to have an infallible proof that the (Protestant) Scriptures were infallible – and thus was pushed into an infinite regress. This is, of course, related to the tu quoque problem. At some point you must start with reason. Reason must bring you the point of moral certainty – of the sort of certainty that you are convinced you have a moral duty to act on.

Catholics don’t start with reason alone when discussing every aspect of moral duty. Sure, some moral duties can be known through reason and the natural law. But when it comes to the obligations of moral duty that are known through supernatural revelation, Catholics start with reason aided by actual grace. It is a de fide definita teaching of the Catholic Church that before an adult could ever become a convert to the Christian faith, that God would have to give actual grace to that adult. The adult that needs to convert first needs actual grace in the form of operating grace. This grace is irresistible; it always is efficacious in giving to the adult enlightenment about supernatural matters that his reasoning, unaided by grace, could never obtain. But this enlightenment by operating grace is not enough to allow one to convert. To act on the supernatural enlightenment that one has been given, man needs actual grace in the form of cooperating grace. Cooperating grace is resistible, because man has free will. Man can be willfully obstinate if he chooses to be, and he can choose to not cooperate with God and refuse to go where his enlightened intellect is leading him. A man can also choose to not resist cooperating grace and become a convert to Christianity, but reason alone cannot bring you to the point that you could ever have the moral certainty that you need to convert and accept the Gospel of Christ.

The scriptures clearly teach that anyone that desires to be a follower of Christ must listen to what the church that Christ founded teaches or be excommunicated. I believe what the church that Christ has founded teaches when she solemnly declares what belongs to the canon of scriptures. I don’t believe that because of the exercise of my reasoning powers unaided by grace, I believe that because my intellect has been enlightened by grace.

Luther, in the sixteenth century, had as much authority to define the canon of scriptures for all Christians as did Marcion in the second century. Which is to say that neither Luther nor Marcion had any authority whatsoever to teach, in the name of Christ, what comprised the canon of scriptures. If I want to know with certainty what constitutes the canon of scriptures, I need to seek out the church founded by Christ and listen to what she teaches. Luther writes as if everyone should listen and submit to what he is teaching, while at the same time, he is brazenly declaring that no living man has any ability to teach infallibly about matters of the Christian faith! What Luther is asking me to believe is so absurd, that I could not follow him unless I rejected reason altogether.

You asked:

what possible reasonable criteria could exist that would give one an infallible knowledge of the books that belong in the canon?

I would want to slightly modify this. The question isn’t how I, personally, can have infallible knowledge, but how we can have a belief that is the by product of an infallible process. Once you make that distinction, it turns the first half of your question on its head. If the canon is not revealed by God to someone, then it is not an article of faith. However, the canon has not been revealed to me personally, and thus it is not of necessity known by me infallibly–nevertheless it is known as an infallibly revealed Truth because it was revealed to someone infallibly (we know that by faith). If we know it (the canon) merely by “reasonable criteria”, by definition, we cannot know it infallibly (none of us our fallible in our nature). Now, something can still be true despite our lack of infallibility. However, we have to ask our selves what kind of true statement it is. Is it a statement about sense experience, an act of the intellect or revealed religion. “Reasonable criteria” can provide enough warrant to believe something that falls under the first two domains, but not under the domain of revealed religion. Which, if I understand it correctly, is somewhat the point of Mike’s article.

That is why, without the Church, there can be no article of faith. We cannot believe a single thing unless there is a preacher, and there is no preacher without one being sent. In fact, when one puts their faith in the faith of the Church, either explicitly as a Catholic or implicitly in many various strands of Protestantism, that faith is grounded in the authority of Christ’s Church–which is His body and has His mind. The early Counter Reformers were quick to note that Protestantism, in its incessant cry of Biblical perspicuity coupled with a throwing off of Magisterial Church authority, consequently grounded theological truth in pure reason. It’s not so much that a Protestant cannot know what John 3:16 means, but that he or I do not claim to understand John 3:16 as it relates to the entire deposit of faith and thus in a very important way leave ourselves open to all kinds of heterodox deductions a part from the living mind of the Church. The canon is the perfect example because if we only know the canon by “reasonable criteria”–which I don’t think we do (even as merely an article of intellectual knowledge), we only have a reasonable rule of faith not a dogmatic rule of faith. This, of course, does not mean that reason and faith are apposed to each other, just demarcates the boundaries of reason as it relates to grace and the power of the Holy Spirit in leading Christ’s Church into all truth. Thus, it would be reasonable for anyone to reject the Christian canon on grounds that reason alone cannot close what reason alone did not compose.

The reason I raised the issue was that I thought Mateo above, in #381, was arguing that one would have to have an infallible proof that the (Protestant) Scriptures were infallible – and thus was pushed into an infinite regress. This is, of course, related to the tu quoque problem. At some point you must start with reason. Reason must bring you the point of moral certainty – of the sort of certainty that you are convinced you have a moral duty to act on.

I vigorously reject any suggestion that such reasoning – if logically followed – can lead to sola Scriptura. I reject it for just the reasons you have given, as well as for its unworkability. I am quite sure that Protestants who think they have reasoned in this way to the Scriptures are, in fact, unconsciously assuming the infallible authority of the Church – at least of the early Christians – to have been guided by God infallibly to choose certain books as themselves the inspired, infallibly Word of God. They then attempt to chop off the branch they are sitting on, leaving the Bible itself hanging in mid-air.

But what does seem to me clear is that at some point you must have used reason to come to your infallible source. If you needed an infallible guide to come to that infallible source, and then yet another to come to the previous … infinite regress time.

Ronald Knox’s “Belief of Catholics” freed me. He allowed me to use my reason, to come to believe in God, in Jesus, and finally in the Church – and through that in the Scriptures. I say ‘freed’ me because I had been trapped in a kind of Van Tillian fideism – we must presuppose the validity (and canon) of the (Protestant) Scriptures, indeed, of the existence and nature of God Himself. We are not allowed to use reason at any point to come to these conclusions.

Thank God for His mercy!

jj

Just an intitial thought. It seems to me that deciding that the 66 books are infallible because of what good the books have done, or because it presents Jesus of Nazareth as a religious figure who requires a decsion regarding his Divinity, does not really speak to the reasons why that particular collection of 66 books might be infallible. Both of those, ISTM, might still be true if the books are generally historically reliable without being infallible. By ignoring the historical origin and compilation of the books as part of the argument for biblical infalliblity (really it should be inerrancy), such an approach seems more akin to bosom burning on the infallibility side of the question. When the Catholic uses his reason and will to discover the Catholic Church, he discovers something in the public historical record with notes, or motives of credibility, which are open to all. In short, he can make a historical case. That does seem to me to constitute a significant difference from the approach you describe. Now I think folks like RC Sproul who end up affirming a fallible collection of infallible books, take an approach (however problematic) which more closely mirrors the Catholic approach. But then, an approach like Sproul’s is just the sort with which a Catholic can dialouge and point out its intrinsic problems (such as explaining how the fallibility of the collection can be known to avoid admission of fallible books, or else glossing the fact that Tradition was relied upon to know the apostolicity (or apostolic approval) of the books themselves, etc). And that kind of discussion can move in a Catholic direction quite quickly.

I would like to address option (2). If the Protestant bible is the only infallible source of revelation that a Christian has access to, then what possible reasonable criteria could exist that would give one an infallible knowledge of the books that belong in the canon?

Mateo, you know that I am a Catholic – and a convert – and that, indeed, the canon question was one of the reasons I became a Catholic.

Nevertheless… I wish you could expound here a little on the tu quoque aspect of this.

It does seem to me possible to argue that we must use reasoning to conclude with moral certainty that the Catholic Church is God’s infallible guide and teacher on earth – and then obey it. To be sure, God then converts the water of moral certainty into the wine of supernatural faith – if I may use the image.

My Reformed teachers seemed to me to be arguing that, fundamentally, the (Protestant :-)) Bible takes the place of the Church in this formula. Using our human reason we see what good the Bible has done, we see that it speaks of Jesus in ways that elicit Lewis’s “liar-lunatic-Lord” trilemma, we read its contents and we see that we believe, with (only) moral certainty, that it is the word of God – but, if the word, then it must be infallible – so we must obey it.

I think that is how they would have argued – and then, of course, having made this act of faith, God gives us theological faith.

To me, of course, the argument seemed far, far stronger that it was the Church that was that teacher – in great part because sola Scriptura was, in fact, private interpretation – and utterly unworkable.

But I would like to see why the two arguments aren’t parallel – if they are not.

jj

Brent writes:

(1) either the canon of Scripture is revealed by God and thus an article of faith

or

(2) the canon of Scripture is not revealed by God but is understood by reasonable criteria

I would like to address option (2). If the Protestant bible is the only infallible source of revelation that a Christian has access to, then what possible reasonable criteria could exist that would give one an infallible knowledge of the books that belong in the canon?

The Protestant bible does not contain within itself any scriptures that declare that the books within the Protestant bible, and only the books within the Protestant bible, are the sum total of the inspired revelation of God that has been written down for men. It is because the Protestant bible does not contain a Table of Contents in any of its scripture verses that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura is a self-refuting absurdity. It seems to me that Tom Brown makes that point in the main article:

“By what criterion do we know which texts comprise the Bible?” This is an essential question all Christians should be able to answer, but, in my experience in discussing this with other believers, it is to many a foreign subject matter. …

I shall argue that, given the Reformed assumption that whatever authoritatively testifies to the canonicity of Scripture must be more authoritative than Scripture, each of them necessarily places extra-biblical evidence above Scripture in its effort to objectively identify the canon. … for the Protestant, a theory that proves incompatible with sola scriptura cannot be salvaged merely by tying it together with a more defensible theory.

If the Protestant bible is the only infallible source of revelation available to a Christian, then any criteria that establishes the canonicity of the scriptures that is outside of scriptures cannot infallibly establish the canonicity of the scriptures without violating the doctrine that the Protestant bible is the only source of infallible knowledge! The canon question shows why sola scriptura is a self-refuting absurdity.

Tom Brown is correct, the Protestant that tries to infallibly establish the canon of the Protestant bible must abandon the doctrine of sola scriptura before he even begins.

The reason why the “Reformers” promulgated the novelty of sola scriptura was to justify their rebellion against existing church authority. Through the “Reformer’s” doctrinal novelties of the primacy of the individual conscience and sola scriptura the “Reformers” established their own personal “bible churches” along with a bogus claim that the bible was their sole authority. (Since neither the doctrine of the primacy of the individual conscience nor sola scriptura is taught in the scriptures, the “Reformers” claim that the bible is their only authority is bogus, since they need some authority to support the unscriptural doctrines that are the foundation of their personal “bible churches.”)

Shawn C. Madden claims that is through the authority of an unnamed “Christian church” that the canon was essentially discerned by the second century. But that unnamed Christian church existed for over a thousand years before “Reformers” started founding their own personal “bible churches”. It seems to me to that Shawn is undermining the novelty of sola scriptura by making this appeal to early church authority, since the novelty of sola scriptura was invented by the “Reformers” to justify rebellion against all pre-existing church authority! As Tom Brown says, “for the Protestant, a theory that proves incompatible with sola scriptura cannot be salvaged merely by tying it together with a more defensible theory.”

Aaron G writes:So as a Protestant I had to believe that the church ultimately got the Canon right, but I came to realize that outside of any divine protection from error for the church it is at least possible in principle that the church got it wrong, even if I didn’t happen to think so. R.C. Sproul at least admits as much because he sees that this is the only logical conclusion. For me this became untenable. I could not listen to a Pastor preach out of the “Word of God” when I knew that in principle that very book he was preaching from might, in fact, not be the Word of God after all.

Well said Aaron!

You guys really want ekklesia to be a Capital ‘C’hurch that you can readily apply ‘Roman Catholic’ to. You really don’t seem to want to recognize that others outside of Rome can fully and rightly claim the title ‘Christian’. You also seem to be returning to the old saw that you need Rome to tell you anything at all about the ways of God and, if it is not Rome, then it should be labeled ‘heresy’ and those who adhere to such things as ‘heretics.’

A friend of mine (FB and many e-mails, may be a mutual friend here), Leila, recently posted to FB an article for the Catholic Register, “Top 5 Heresies I Would’ve Believed Without the Authority of the Church” (http://www.ncregister.com/blog/top-5-heresies-i-wouldve-believed-without-the-authority-of-the-church#ixzz1ckc6z04D). You gentlemen are, no doubt, familiar with those ‘heresies.’ Yet, the article claims that the Roman Catholic Church, the church who through active teaching and support and tolerance for popular practice advocates the violation of the first two commandments is the one entity that can tell you what a heresy is. So while fretting over someone struggling with the concept of the Trinity without the benefit of centuries of discussion she relies on a church that actively teaches that there is someone other than God to place your trust and that, despite what the commandment clearly says, it is not only perfectly fine to make a statue, put it in a church, place kneelers and candles in front of it and encourage folks to pray in front of/to it but rather this is to be considered a very pious practice!

What it seems to boil down in my reading and experience is a church who tells you that you cannot rely upon your own reading of the Word of God and the Holy Spirit in your life because the one is too confusing and the other can’t really be trusted but rather you should rely on an institution whose documents and teaching are fairly inaccessible to the lay person, whose number also by necessity would fill any professors office, and which lend themselves to a much greater variety of interpretations than scripture. For an instance, notice how in recent history Vatican II has been subject to several interpretations and much confusion within your own ranks. Heck, note how a succession of popes has alternately labeled Padre Pio a heretic and a danger and a saint!

As far as ‘own personal churches’ have you guys even looked around to see all of the shrines and relics and pilgrimage sites, most of which, if they don’t have official sanction of Rome, then they have tacit permission to operate. And would you not assign the term ‘heresy’ to what they present?

A closer to home example. Mother Angelica. She has in essence formed her own church and joined to herself others who follow(ed) her teachings and admonitions. Scott Hahn of course being one of them (yes, I know, another former Reformed type like you guys). I had the honor of sitting next to Joseph Fitzmeyer in the last lunch of the last meeting between the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention. Across from him was a nun who was the Vatican representative. Following a suspicion on my part I asked Dr. Fitzmeyer and the nun what they thought about Mother Angelica and Scott Hahn. The two of them (and this is no exaggeration) threw their hands in the air and completely disavowed and separated themselves from Angelica and Hahn. Yet, both groups claim to be faithful representatives of Rome. Which would you enjoin a faithful Catholic to follow? Fitzmeyer or Angelica? So which ‘Church’ are you talking about? Or will you allow such divergences inside Rome but not outside?

I rather see an article that reports ‘Heresies I would have believed had I not read God’s Word.’ How did Jesus address the questions and problems brought to him? Did he point people to the High Priest and his teachings? The Pharisees? Sadducees? Essenes? Did they each not think that they were to true Qahal of YHWH? If questioned would they not have said as much? And yet, Jesus pointed them to Scripture didn’t he?

Any organization or individual who claims to be the ‘True Church’ has to be tested against God’s Word. Historical connection doesn’t matter. Notice Matthew 3.9—If God is able to raise up children of Abraham from stones, making the point that genealogy, historical lineage or apostolic succession doesn’t matter so much as adherence to God’s Word, then anyone who wants to require a connection to an organization hasn’t read that passage.

So round about to the canon question. Again, I have a broad net definition of ekklesia. Yes, it is loose and it is sloppy. And yes it may find in its members those who don’t have a deep or very firm grasp of the deep theological issues, and who may hold some views that you would call ‘heresy’, but it will be made up of those who ‘do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with their God’ and who ‘believe in the only begotten son of God’. And my definition recognizes the ekklesia as all members, not a hierarchical organization centered in one city to which everyone vows loyalty. My encounters with Catholics (even when I was one) always treated the ‘Church’ as the Pope, Cardinals and Bishops, and not the people who were subject to them. Even as I read your writings, ‘Church’ is Rome, not the laity. ‘Church’ is some authoritative entity to whom everyone owes allegiance and submissive loyalty and obedience. That is not my definition. And in that regard as we two use the word ‘church’ we are dealing with two definitons.

So, from my reading of Jesus in the NT and Sirach and Philo and Josephus and my noting that they pointed to neither council or person who said ‘this is Scripture’ but noted widespread, uniform recognition of what was the TNK, then I also see in early church history fairly quick agreement on what the NT books were by a large number of the members of the ekklesia (not your definition). I am confident in that judgment. As such I don’t have to look for an ‘authoritative’ pronouncement coming from a council or pope saying ‘this is it’. In reality you gentlemen do, but the only instance that fits all of the definitions you want with the requisite universal authority is Trent, leaving you to say that there really was no ‘canon’ until the 17th century.

In the name of my blessed Messiah!
שׁלום!
Shawn
majormadd@gmail.com