[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
[quote]Mr. Chen wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:
The problem with the line of castigation you and Mr. Chen are following, Tirib, is that it is the same one that the atheists use in denigrating the authority of Christianity or religion as a whole, oh yes it is, to borrow your line.
You will always be able to find something to point to and say “See, there it is! [point point jump up and down] Proof positive that the Romish Church is indeed the tool of Satan himself. Just looky there at all the bad stuff those varmints have been up to over the past 2000 years.”
Yet, if we point to similar acts, say, a certain instance of gleeful murder by one John Calvin, there’s always a way of weaseling out of responsibility because there is ultimately no one to answer for the misdeeds of your own Church. There are plenty, plenty of evils committed by men and women in Protestant churches, yes, even Calvinistic ones. Point to any one of those and the easy escape is always the same. Well, he’s not a REAL Christian. Yeah.
How is it not all just one big subjective mess? [/quote]
That’s why I prefer to stick with a plain reading of what the bible says. I don’t need to resort to any other authority. I don’t claim Til or any confession, or protestantism in general, just chapter and verse.[/quote]
“Plain readings of what the bible says” are very dangerous sorts of readings. They have been used to justify horrors ranging from slavery and the oppression of women to genocide. “Plain readings” are highly subjective - what is plain to one person is a form of exegetical gymnastics to another. Regardless of how vehemently you claim to respect only “chapter and verse” as authoritative, the reality is that the lens you bring to the interpretation of Scripture has been shaped by your forebears. In other words, you see in the text what others have told you is there. Just because you can find a pattern of words within the bounds of the canon that can reflect the meaning you read into them doesn’t mean that the Scriptures are actually supporting your beliefs.
I am a Protestant myself, but Brother Christopher brings up a fundamental issue that every single Protestant has to deal with, and that is the nature of the canon’s authority. On what basis do we recognize only these sixty-six books as authoritative for Christian life and practice? By what authority do we allow the the anonymous Letter to the Hebrews to guide our beliefs about the atonement while omitting 1 Enoch, which is actually cited in Jude? If Protestants are going to exclude from the canon certain books which Catholics deem authoritative (1-2 Macc., SIrach, etc.), on what basis do we accept the rest of the Catholic canon?
Resort to claims of “the inner witness of the Holy Spirit” are fundamentally useless, because it implies that we are somehow at a more advantageous position with regard to the Spirit than those who originally argued for the canon’s formation. Whether we like it or not, the same people responsible for the canon’s formation are those responsible for formulating dearly held Protestant beliefs about the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. The reality is that we affirm the Trinity not because it is a biblical teaching, but because our Catholic brethren attempted to make sense of the biblical witness with the aid of the best philosophical and theological categories available to them in their day.
For example, if we resorted to the Bible alone, our understanding of the relationship within the Godhead would be fundamentally different. The fact is that even a careful reading of Scripture ALONE would not yield the doctrine of three co-equal, co-eternal members of the Trinity. Instead, Scripture only affirms that (1) there is only one God, (2) God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are all included in the identity of God (though evidence for the Holy Spirit’s inclusion is weak at best), and (3) Jesus is subservient to God the Father, and the Spirit is subservient to them both. To get to our conception of the Trinity, you have to admit that the concerns that Catholic Fathers raised about intra-Trinitarian relationships were significant. You have to admit that, under the leading of the Spirit, they got God’s nature fundamentally right. But if Protestants agree with the views Catholics have supplied about the Trinity, why disagree with their views on the canon?[/quote]
You should stick around on this forum because I think you can contribute significantly with what you know. I think this clip may contribute to what you are trying to say.
Edit: Before any misunderstandings happen I don’t agree with everything written here but I do think he brought up several crucial points that Christians shouldn’t dwell in ignorance on and we should know why we believe what we do.
For example I do believe what the Athanasian Creed says about the trinity and believe that it does ultimately does derive from the scriptures themselves. However would I expect the early Christians to have the same nuanced understanding of the trinity as presented in the creed when it took the first few centuries to hammer it out although the truths it presents has been believed since the beginning?[/quote]Don’t ask me how, but I didn’t see this until just now. A month later =[ I must have been distracted by the arrival of KingKai25. My beautiful Jesus does so love to throw me curveballs. I am so grateful that he has given me a really big catcher’s mitt.