At this point we’ve gotten quite far from Joshua’s piece. We’re taking a break from the tangents that have developed. Please only comment on Joshua’s piece from here on out on this thread.

If you want to talk about papal primacy or something unreleated to the topic at hand, I suggest looking into our archive and finding a related thread.

We’re now turning this thread back to a discussion of Joshua’s article.

The foundational question at issue between us at CTC and Protestants of your sort is: “How to determine which IP is rationally preferable”? In other words, which way of giving theological significance to the raw data is best suited to distinguishing divine revelation from human opinion?

What’s really “foundational”? Some things are, or ought to be, just simply self-evident. And it’s not at all self evident that “the foundational issue” is “how to determine which IP is rationally preferable”.

Consider these New Testament accounts:

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God … This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.

We are not telling you to believe things that you do not see as a “formal proximate object of faith”. We are confirming things to you that you already know.

Then Paul stretched out his hand and made his defense … “I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking true and rational words. For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly. For I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner.

What’s necessary to be known isn’t hidden, “implicit” in the Scriptures, waiting for some as-yet-unneeded “development”. True and rational words, things that don’t really “escape notice”.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life,

It’s all clear as a bell to us. We proclaim this eternal life to you, and our testimony is true.

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.

And you have certainty simply through this orderly account, and there is no hint at all that anything else is required.

* * *

You said:

instead of proceeding as if your IP were the only one, we insist that you stop begging the question and instead approach the issues at the level I’ve been talking about. To object that IPs are “unfalsifiable” is simply irrelevant.

I’m not proceeding as if [my] IP were the only one. I’ve cited probably dozens of scholars on topics where they are the specialists, proceeding on an “IP” which they expect, if not completely perfect, will be seriously challenged, and their livelihoods depend on it.

In the same vein, Bryan said this of the “burden of proof”:

When a party goes out from the Catholic Church, as Protestants did in the sixteenth century on the basis of their own interpretation of Scripture, and that party seeks to justify its actions by making a case against the Catholic Church, that party has the burden of proof, just by the fact that they are the ones who went out from the Church.

Where, precisely, is it just precisely this “self evident” that the Roman Catholic Church is somehow “The Church” that it says it is? Your own “begging the question” is prior in time to my supposed “begging the question”. You beg the question that “the Roman Catholic Church” is what it says it is.

You’ll no doubt say that Matthew 16:18 is some kind of “self-evident” proof that Christ founded a visible church, Peter was the first pope, etc.

But show me where some of these individual steps are quite so “self-evident”:

a) The promise of Mt 16:18 has reference to “Peter.”
b) The promise of Mt 16:18 has “exclusive” reference to Peter.
c) The promise of Mt 16:18 has reference to a Petrine “office.”
d) This office is “perpetual”
e) Peter resided in “Rome”
f) Peter was the “bishop” of Rome
g) Peter was the “first” bishop of Rome
h) There was only “one” bishop at a time
i) Peter was not a bishop “anywhere else.”
j) Peter “ordained” a successor
k) This ceremony “transferred” his official prerogatives to a successor.
l) The succession has remained “unbroken” up to the present day.

Not one of these little mini-steps is self-evident. In fact, I’ve published a tremendous amount of information that contests (not to being an outright logical proof, but history does not function that way) the Roman Catholic accounting of each of these steps. The cumulative effect of these things is an alternative history which, in the words of Carl Trueman just this month, is “what historians take for granted: the rise, consolidation and definition of papal power is an historically very complex issue; and, indeed, as scholarship advances, the story becomes more, not less, convoluted and subversive of papal claims.”

The phrase is used here, “through the eyes of the fathers”, as if somehow this “language” too, is self-evident, and that it self-evidently accepts the Roman Catholic story about itself. But Archbishop Roland Minnerath has admitted as much: “The East never shared the Petrine theology as elaborated in the West. It never accepted that the protos in the universal church could claim to be the unique successor or vicar of Peter.

So, if “the East” never even felt as if they were “going out” from the Roman Catholic Church, where, precisely, is “the burden of proof”?

You all here just simply “assume” the papacy; you take Newman at his [“incoherent”] word that “it’s not a violent assumption” to hold that this papal authority was somehow in authority from the beginning. I’m saying, (and others are saying), At the very least, “the East” considered it to be a violent assumption.

Consider the words of John Meier, a Roman Catholic biblical scholar whom you all dismiss, but who the Vatican permits to speak for Roman Catholicism in high-level ecumenical meetings, the papacy does not provide “a credible historical account of its own origins…” (“Petrine Ministry in the New Testament and in the Early Patristic Traditions,” in James F. Puglisi, ed., How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Uity of the Universal Church?” Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William Be. Eerdmans Publishing Co., © 2010). Meier is one of those who believes in “God’s providential guidance of the church, leading by a series of steps to the emergence of the bishop of Rome,” but this is a far, far cry from the “divine institution” of the papacy – directly conferring it on Peter who directly conferred it, in “full power” directly to an unbroken chain of “successors.”

Up above you chided me for only giving Old Testament prophecies. Here I am with some pretty “foundational” New Testament “hermeneutics”.

The apostles are saying, “you can believe these things” first of all, because “you yourselves are eyewitnesses to some of these things”, and secondly, “our testimony is true”.

That, in itself, seems pretty foundational to me. Salvation does not depend on some “formally identified” “proximate object of faith” with very sharply-defined edges, defined by someone who us just “assumed” to be in authority.

The events that the writers of the New Testament were talking about are just as clear and self-evident to them as the noses on their faces.

In what way are these not “foundational issues”?

Where is the burden of proof in an environment where “as scholarship advances, the story becomes more, not less, convoluted and subversive of papal claims.”

Especially given some of the other context that we’ve seen.

How is this not a straw man on your part? I’m sure you have a good, well-thought-out reason for attributing something to me that’s just not there.

I don’t know if you are aware of this, but do you realize that 6115 priests were accused of sexual abuse. These are the ones reported by the Bishops. The accusations were made by 16,324 different victims. Fewer than 2% of the accusations were found not to be credible. By and large, these individuals who should be prosecuted and in jail, got off scott-free, thanks largely to bishops hiding them and resisting giving out information on a very broad scale, and just absolutely going to the mat to save “their own”, and huge numbers of the stories are still hidden, abusers are God-knows-where, Cardinal Law is living out a comfortable retirement in Rome, and I’m accused of not giving the “most charitable” reading of these events.

Someone here said that I write things for “cheerleaders” over at Triablogue. I’ve just responded to a commenter who called me a “sociopath”.

Some of you have some misplaced priorities.

Again, as a Sola Scriptura adherent, I definitely did not view the Bible as my *only* ecclesial authority. It was, however, my only *infallible* ecclesial authority. I would assume that, as a Reformed Protestant, this is your current position. Please do correct me if I am wrong.

Words get bandied around, and often they lose their meaning. Scripture is so much more than an “authority” or an “infallible authority”. Scripture is God’s chosen form of communication, and for you to say that we somehow need an “interpreter” is to say, not just “effectively” but “in reality” that God Almighty is not capable of writing words that his people will understand.

I hear your anger about the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Without going into details, which would not help here, I can tell you that, along with many millions of other people (in America and around the world), my own life has been personally touched by the pain of sexual abuse. I freely acknowledge, with sorrow and anger, that in many cases, the norms of canon law which already existed on the books, so as to prevent potential predators from ever even *becoming* priests, and so as to protect children in other ways in the Church– these norms were simply not applied by more than a few men who were in the position to apply them in the Church. The Pope speaks to this awful reality in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

At no point in the letter did I see him saying, in effect, “Poor, poor bishops.” I saw him saying many things but not that. I agree with Sean, above, that there is no use to argue at with your take on the letter.

I will say that the Pope does care about the pain of sexual abuse victims. He has met, listened to, and prayed with, victims around the world. After one such meeting, I saw one of the men with whom the Pope personally met on television. The reaction of this victim, who had been abused by a priest, was to say that, in his opinion, the current Pope is “a Saint” (in the Catholic understanding of “Saint,” of course, which also does acknowledge, in the Catechism, that Biblically speaking, all believers are called “saints”).

This person was abused by a priest, and he also presumably has access to the same data on sexual abuse in the Church which you do, and yet, he views the Pope, and his actions and words, far differently than you do. As I wrote above, I do hear your anger about the scandals and, in many ways, I share it. The abuses have scarred so many people and their families. I know these scars, myself, although again, I will not go into detail here about how and why that is so.

Again, I’m glad that you’re here. I hope that, as you are able, you will engage with the other, much more lengthy part of my first comment (#570) to you, concerning Sola Scriptura and how it has (or has not, in your view) truly been engaged at CTC, at present, and in previous times/articles. (Perhaps you already have written another reply, and it is still in moderation.) God bless.

You wrote:

Keep in mind both he and TDNT have produced very thorough documentary evidence on the sources of meanings of the word “grace”, both in the Greek culture and in the Bible. And Torrance’s comparison with Clement, finds far more affinities with the cultural usage than the Biblical usage.

I have already explained (in #528, #535, and #537) that the method by which Torrance attempts to determine the meaning of the word ‘grace’ in the Bible is a question-begging method if treated as something more than a conditional exercise, rather than a theologically normative determination of the meaning of biblical terms.

I have no intention to be insulting, but it is descriptive of what has happened. The three sentences of mine say everything about what I perceive to be your inability to engage the material.

Which material have I not engaged?

I know now that you reject these definitions in advance, not because of any flaw in their analyses of the literature, but because of presuppositions you hold.

And you accept them because of presuppositions you hold. So, to resolve the disagreement, we have to step back and examine those presuppositions. But, for the reason I explained in #340, you have the burden of proof. So, if you want to make your case, it is up to you to demonstrate that my presuppositions are false, that already by St. Clement the Church had fallen away from orthodoxy, and incorporated pagan conceptions of soteriology.

But if, when looking for the definition of grace in Scripture, the only thing that one finds, to borrow from Atychi (547), is monergisim, then the synergism that Clement teaches comes from some other source. In that case, the source you want is that somehow, somewhere, the Apostles taught this synergism outside of things they taught in the Scriptures. That doesn’t follow though.

Since you have the burden of proof, you have to prove that St. Clement’s doctrine didn’t come from the Apostles. And you have not yet done that. What you have done is attempt to show similarities between pagan conceptions of ‘grace’ and St. Clement’s, while attempting to show dissimilar conceptions of ‘grace’ between St. Clement and Scripture. But so far, none of your alleged instances of St. Clement deviating from Scripture with respect to his conception of grace has stood up to scrutiny; in each alleged case I have shown that what St. Clement says is fully compatible with Scripture.

You guys are so quick to pull the trigger on “question-begging”, that you just simply fail to consider important information about sources for your own “Tradition”, for “[your] family’s internally developed cliches and allusions”.

That statement is just a personal attack. More of this, and your comments won’t get past the moderator. Personal attacks do not show what is right or wrong with your interlocutor’s arguments and positions. They leave your interlocutor’s arguments and positions untouched and unrefuted.

Aren’t you interested in knowing where these concepts may or may not come from?

Of course. But you have not provided any evidence showing that St. Clement’s conception of grace came from pagans, rather than from the Apostles.

Just simply calling a thing “question-begging” is not helpful. There is no authoritative “dictionary of question-begging things”. This too is a fallible judgment on your part.

Of course my judgment is fallible. So is yours. That gets us nowhere. In “The Tradition and the Lexicon” I provided an argument showing how the lexical method is question-begging with respect to the Catholic paradigm. If you think that the lexical method is not question-begging with respect to the Catholic paradigm, then please show how the lexical method does not beg the question against the Catholic paradigm. (I recommend moving that effort to the “The Tradition and the Lexicon” thread, to keep the discussion as on-topic as possible.)

So when you say that Torrance is “question-begging” here, what you are saying is, “Torrance really didn’t look at all the different usages of grace in his analysis. There are other usages he didn’t consider.”

When I say that the lexical method begs the question, I’m pointing out that the method itself depends on theologically loaded (i.e. not neutral) presuppositions, as I explained in #528, #535, #537 above, and in “The Tradition and the Lexicon.” If you disagree, then you’ll need to refute the argument I provide in “The Tradition and the Lexicon.”

And specifically, you are saying, “I don’t accept Torrance’s definitions here because they are not my definitions.

That’s not at all what I’m saying.

But really, I’m sure you would agree, words do “have meaning”, and these meanings can be identified. And what you are accusing Torrance of is (a) purposely not being complete in his finding of these usages, or (b) being inept.

No, it is has nothing to with the goodness of his intentions, or his skill as researcher. It has to do with the theological presuppositions intrinsic to the methodology.

Such is the perspicuity for you. Scripture may be perspicuous for me when you need it to be. Maybe you can show me someone else who looks at the passage from Titus that way. I have addressed this in a previous comment.

No, because you have the burden of proof, all I have to do is show a way of harmonizing Titus and 1 Clement. It is up to you to show that there is no way to harmonize them.

You say Torrance is “question-begging”, so you simply dismiss what he says.

I don’t “dismiss” it. I recognize it to be an exercise conducted according to certain presuppositions, and therefore I treat its conclusions under that qualification. That is, if one subtracts the authority of Tradition from the picture, and engages in research as if “solo scriptura” and ecclesial deism were true, Torrance’s conclusion is a conclusion one could reach.

In the peace of Christ,

- Bryan

You wrote:

And yet, look at the order of things in this introductory passage:

Chapter one is a litany of things that the Corinthians were – “you did everything without partiality, and you lived in accordance with the laws of God, submitting yourselves …. [2.1] Moreover, you were all humble and free from arrogance, submitting rather than demanding submission, more glad to give than to receive, and content with the provisions that God supplies. And giving heed to his words, you stored them up diligently in your hearts, and kept his sufferings before your eyes. [2.2]Thus a profound and rich peace was given to all, together with an insatiable desire to do good, and an abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit fell upon everyone as well …

As Torrance has noted, in Titus, it is God’s initiative. Here, for Clement, the “outpouring of the Holy Spirit” was almost an afterthought.

You seem to be assuming that because the outpouring of the Spirit is mentioned last in that paragraph, therefore it was an “afterthought” for St. Clement. But that conclusion does not follow, and is not only entirely speculative, but contrary to what St. Clement says elsewhere (see #517 above) about God’s primary in the order of salvation. St. Clement is speaking here to Corinthian believers, and referring to a period of time after their baptism, and thus after they were already endowed with the Spirit. So, again, there is no Pelagianism here or Pelagian conception of grace. The outpouring of the Spirit to which St. Clement refers was not the initial receiving of the Spirit by these Corinthian believers at their baptism, but rather a subsequent increase in the presence and operation of the Spirit.

There is a similarity here, in certain respects, to the way the believers were “filled with the Holy Spirit” in Acts 4:31 after they had already received the Spirit at Pentecost. The first two chapters of 1 Clement are not Pelagian, for the same reason that Acts 4:31 is not Pelagian. The movement or outpouring of the Spirit in response to a graced-activity by believers (in this case prayer — Acts 4:24-31) is perfectly biblical and orthodox. Your criticism of St. Clement’s first two chapters would apply no less to Acts 4:31, and would thus condemn St. Luke of holding a conception of grace “not in complete alignment with Scripture.” The only problem with that accusation, however, is that Acts is Scripture.

Not only that, but the English translation you are using (“an abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit fell upon everyone”) may not be the most accurate way of translating “καὶ πλήρης πνεύματος ἁγίου ἔκχυσις ἐπὶ πάντας ἐγίνετο” (1 Clement 2.2). ἐγίνετο is an imperfect, and might very well be translated as “was falling” or “was happening” or “was occurring.” So this activity by the Corinthian believers, described by St. Clement in 1 Clement 1-2 may have been simultaneous with a continuous outpouring of the Spirit, not necessarily even something prior to the outpouring of the Spirit described in 1 Clement 2.2.

In sum, if the outpouring of the Spirit followed the graced activity of the Corinthian believers, then this is not Pelagian for the same reason Acts 4:31 is not Pelagian. But if the outpouring of the Spirit was simultaneous with the graced-activity of the Corinthian believers, then there is no basis for claiming even that the outpouring was a result of or reward for their graced-activity, and instead of the outpouring of the Spirit being “an afterthought,” it may very well have been that by which and in which they did all these good deeds.

In the peace of Christ,

- Bryan