When the total of letters represented by numbers perfectly divisible by 7 and other numbers. Perfect divisions throughout the bible that no man could possibly be smart enough to write like that. It's been confirm by Ivan panin. You denied that in your past post that didn't include boring repetitive post numbers from unrealible sources. The holy spirit lead the Protestants to know who wrote what and if its inspired by the spirit that lead them. It's only noticable to the regenerates. You won't see that.
If what you all say is true, then why are there thousands upon thousands of different Protestant denominations, each one with its own particular brand of "truth"? And many of these "truths" laughable at best?
If what you all say is true, then why are there thousands upon thousands of different Protestant denominations, each one with its own particular brand of "truth"? And many of these "truths" laughable at best?
God has always chosen to work in and through human agents and agencies, most particularly Christ's one historic Church, which he established as his instrument on earth. This can be seen on virtually every page of Scripture, as well as in the very existence of Scripture itself.
The God-breathed word of God is therefore self-authenticating...
Nice in theory, except that this notion absolutely and utterly collapses in practice, and is simply unworkable.
The Belief that Scripture is "Self-Authenticating" Does Not Hold Up under Examination
Lacking a satisfactory answer to the question of how the canon of the Bible was determined, Protestants often resort to the notion that Scripture is "self-authenticating," that is, the books of the Bible witness to themselves that they are inspired of God. The major problem with such an assertion is simply that even a cursory examination of ecclesial history will demonstrate it to be utterly untrue.
For example, several books from the New Testament – James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation – were disputed in terms of their canonical status for some time. In certain places they were accepted, while simultaneously in other s they were rejected. Even spiritual giants like St. Athanasius (297-373), St. Jerome (c. 342-420) and St. Augustine (354-430) had drawn up lists of New Testament books which witnessed to what was generally acknowledged as inspired in their times and places, but none of these lists corresponds exactly to the New Testament canon that was eventually identified by the Catholic Church at the end of the 4th century and which is identical to the canon that Catholics have today.
If Scripture were actually "self-authenticating," why was there so much disagreement and uncertainty over these various books? Why was there any disagreement at all? Why was the canon of the Bible not identified much earlier if the books were allegedly so readily discernible? The answer that one is compelled to accept in this regard is simply that the Bible is not self-authenticating at all.
Even more interesting is the fact that some books in the Bible do not identify their authors. The idea of self-authentication – if it were true – might be more plausible if each and every Biblical author identified himself, as we could more easily examine that author’s credentials, so to speak, or at least determine who it was that claimed to be speaking for God. But in this regard the Bible leaves us ignorant in a few instances.
Take St. Matthew’s Gospel as one example; nowhere does the text indicate that it was Matthew, one of the twelve Apostles, who authored it. We are therefore left with only two possibilities for determining its authorship: 1) what Tradition has to say, 2) Biblical scholarship. In either case, the source of determination is an extra-Biblical source and would therefore fall under condemnation by the doctrine of sola scriptura.
Now the Protestant may be saying at this point that it is unnecessary to know whether or not Matthew actually wrote this Gospel, as one’s salvation does not depend on knowing whether it was Matthew or someone else. But such a view presents quite a difficulty. What the Protestant is effectively saying is that while an authentic Gospel is God’s Word and is the means by which a person comes to a saving knowledge of Christ, the person has no way of knowing for certain in the case of Matthew’s Gospel whether it is Apostolic in origin and consequently has no way of knowing it if its genuine (i.e., God’s Word) or not. And if this Gospel’s authenticity is questionable, then why include it in the Bible? If its authenticity is certain, then how is this known in the absence of self-identification by Matthew? One can only conclude that the Bible is not self-authenticating.
The Protestant may wish to fall back on the Bible’s own assertion that it is inspired, citing a passage like 2 Timothy 3:16 – "All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable..." However, a claim to inspiration is not in and of itself a guarantee of inspiration. Consider the fact that the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science sect, claim to be inspired. The writings of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon sect, claim to be inspired. These are but two of many possible examples which demonstrate the that any particular writing can claim just about anything. Obviously, in order for us to know with certainty whether or not a writing is genuinely inspired, we need more than a mere claim by that writing that it is inspired. The guarantee of inspiration must come from outside that writing. In the case of the Bible, the guarantee must come from a non-Biblical source. But outside authentication is excluded by the doctrine of sola scriptura.
So, then, every Christian knows which books were inspired by God, right? How is it, then, that not all Christians agree which books are inspired and should be part of Scripture? So much for your (mis)application of Scripture above.
The Roman Churches grave errors of doctrines and practices were proved at the reformation beyond all reasonable doubt .
When the total of letters represented by numbers perfectly divisible by 7 and other numbers. Perfect divisions throughout the bible that no man could possibly be smart enough to write like that. It's been confirm by Ivan panin. You denied that in your past post that didn't include boring repetitive post numbers from unrealible sources. The holy spirit lead the Protestants to know who wrote what and if its inspired by the spirit that lead them. It's only noticable to the regenerates. You won't see that.
That infallible authority, the Catholic Church, declared Arius heretical. Had the Catholic Church not been both infallible and authoritative in its declaration, then believers would have had no reason whatsoever to reject Arius’ teachings, and the whole of Christianity today might have been comprised of modern-day Arians.
The thing is, we DO have a world of Arians, those who believe that Jesus was merely a man, and/or that He wasn't co-equal with the Father. Muslims believe this. But so do a lot of heretical Christians, the JWs for one-- So even when heresy is rooted out, it still lingers on and can grow. But then Jesus did say that few would find the Narrow Way. They don't find it because they don't look for it. They don't look for it because--many reasons, but one reason that comes to me is that they think they have already found as much of Jesus as they need. That's a good one-- :shocked:
A fair question, although asked in the usual context of the Romanist's rootless claim of being the repository of all truth and the one and only true church.
How do we reconcile our confession of faith in one holy and universal and scriptural faithful church with the churches we find advertised all around us?
We begin by understanding that nothing about Sola Scriptura promises that all believers (including Protestants) will be united in all their interpretations of everything in the Scripture. Nor does Sola Scriptura promise that there will be a general consensus on most things in the Scripture.
We also embrace the distinction between an invisible and a visible church. The invisible church consists of all the elect of all ages, whereas the visible church consists of all professing believers and their children. As for the visible church there are, as Augustine noted, "wolves within and sheep without." Accordingly, in heaven we will see some who were not members of a historic Christian local body and we will not see some of the church's most illustrious members, ministers, etc. Our confession of faith in the one, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church is not a confession in the many, partially holy, limited, irregularly-apostolic visible church in all of its worldliness, division, and seasonings with untruth.
Just as we are simultaneously justified in Christ and yet still sinners (the now-not yet distinction in Scripture), there is the same seemingly paradoxical situation with the invisible and visible church distinction. None of us can claim we have come into our full glory until the eschaton, despite the strainings of over-realized eschatologies by some. We are not yet sanctified perfectly, likewise the church is not yet sifted from the wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24-30), the fish to be separated (Matt. 13:47-49), and so on. The imperfect church militant is not yet the perfect invisible church.
We confess faith in there being one catholic (universal) church, despite divisions within the visible church, for the very same reason we confess by faith we are justified sinners. Why? Because God so promised we will be-are being perfected, fully realized when we come into our glory with the Lord. It is just that it is neither wholly unrealized nor perfectly realized now.
In the sense of the faithful (the one people of God), the church is one, despite contrary evidences, but not in the sense of being visibly united. In the definitive and progressive sense, the church is holy, but not empirically perfect. The church is apostolic, not because it is directly led by the Apostles themselves, rather because the church is guided, whenever and wherever it qualifies as "the church," by the apostolic proclamation and patterns from Scripture.
Unfortunately, the appeal to the invisible and visible distinctions of the church are often used to justify irresponsibility by the visible church. The parallel of the already justified and not yet sanctified is regularly used as a foundation for antinomianism where it is assumed no radical transformation of sinners takes place. Similarly, just as our duty to grow in knowledge and obedience in sanctification takes root in not a few, we can fall into the view that the visible church's state of existence is unimportant, since that, after all, we confess the invisible church's purity and universality.
Yet we take heart in knowing the universality of the church awaits us in glory, the invisible and the visible churches become one. This also means as the Reformers proclaimed, wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments are rightly administered, it is not to be doubted, there is a true church of God. It was the Reformation's call to return to the teachings of Scripture that made the gospel, notecclesiastical organization, the test of the true church. We can see in these two marks—gospel proclamation and observance of the sacraments—both the creation and the preservation of the church—the fountain of God’s truth and the vessel to contain and display it. Certainly no church is perfect. But, thanks be to God, many imperfect churches are healthy.
This should give those who would disavow regular assembly with a visible church pause for deeper thinking. Faithful preaching and right administration of the Sacraments are visible and obvious marks that objectively distinguish the true church from false churches. Therefore it is not up to individuals to decide for themselves simply that churches are "true" or "false". More specifically, they are not to do so on the basis of purely subjective standards concerning the condition of various churches. Why? Schism is regarded by Reformational churches as no less sinful than heresy.
No doubt on this point, the Romanist begins to wipe his hands in glee, ready to pounce with their usual charges of schism at the Protestant, claiming, well, after all, didn't the Reformation result from believing that separation from the Roman Catholic Church didn't matter as much as sound doctrine? Of course, given the Romanist's historical blindness from having swallowed the poison of Rome's own historical sauces, this view of the Reformation ignores the historical facts of the case.
Spoiler
Throughout the sixteenth century and on into the early seventeenth century, many conferences were held in order to reconcile the opposing factions. There can be no doubt that both the Reformers and their detractors (in particular, Romanists) valued the church's visible unity. That said, the Reformers believed that the apostolic faith—not the Roman Catholic presumption of an apostolic succession of bishops—was what constitutes true universality, true catholicity. Romanists believed the view of the Reformers as schismatic—arguing that to leave Rome's "truly Catholic church", grounded in the witness of the Apostles as found in the Scriptures—is to leave Christ Himself (see 1 John 2:19).
I fully agree with Scripture that we should not expect to have a personal relationship with Christ apart from incorporation into Christ's visible body (Acts 2:41-42; 1 John 1:3-7). But, and this is vitally important, no church is to be considered part of Our Lord's visible body if it does not, as I have stated earlier, faithfully preach the Word of God and rightly administer His Sacraments. To deviate significantly on these two marks of a true church constitutes heresy. Heresy must be avoided as much as schism.
Rome effectively anathematized itself, when at Trent it denied the forensic once and for all declaration by God of the justification of the believer by faith alone in Christ. Rome went even further in its heresy by conflating justification with sanctification, declaring justification as being an initial act upon faith and progressively ongoing during one's walk of faith, wherein the believer must mount Rome's sacramental treadmill.
For Rome, the believer is never declared righteous by the alien righteousness (that of another) of Our Lord's righteous works on our behalf. Rather the believer moves in and out of His salvific state, accruing merit via sacramentalism, never really assured that he or she will achieve the final glory promised by God.
Who of us can deny the reality of heresy and schism having plagued the church from the very beginning? We need only look to Scripture and see the evidences. Along with OT examples (ending in the divided kingdom), the NT churches were, on the whole, quite disappointing. Sigh. We read of the cesspool of immorality, selfishness, disorder, division, and error in the Corinthian church. Paul was nearing the anathematization of the Galatian church, where works-righteousness heresy and schism from excluding the Gentiles walked hand-in-hand. A nascent version of Jewish gnosticism (angel worship, extreme asceticism) threatened the church of Colossae. Then there are the churches of the Book of Revelation. Therein, Ephesus, being persecuted abandons her first love, Pergamum and Thyatira tolerate false teaching, coming under threat of judgment by the Lord, Sardis is dead, and Laodicea is wishy-washy, lukewarm.
All of which is to say that those who, while refusing to assemble with a visible church, claiming descent from the churches of the New Testament and mourning for the reestablishment of "apostolic churches" need to recall the actual, empirical character of these NT churches. So exactly how could any church today claim greater fidelity than the churches planted and supervised by the apostles themselves? Beloved, the church has never been the Good News. It was not then in the early days; and it is not now. At best, the church can only be the witness to the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ for sinners like us.
Romanists who superficially weigh the debate over the nature of the gospel will view the Reformation as schism. Those of us who understand that Rome officially denied the gospel at the Council of Trent will see in the Reformation an extraordinary example of God's mercy toward His church in saving a remnant to continue the church's truly catholic legacy.
Romanists like to raise the spectre of sectarianism against all others, ignoring that sectarianism is the splinter that is so easily detected in someone else's eye. Romanists call Protestantism sectarian, although Rome herself anathematized the East in the eleventh century and so on. But, in fairness, Rome is not alone here. Liberal Protestants regard their orthodox counterparts who have separated from the mainline denominations as schismatic for maintaining the very doctrines that the constitutions of those very mainline denominations historically insisted upon, e.g., the PC(USA). The ironies never seem to end, especially when independent, self-educated, and self-appointed charismatic personalities describe creedal and confessional churches as schismatic and sectarian. The charge of schismatic has become so commonplace that our church humor contains winsome truths:
"If you have one German, you have a philosopher; a Dutchman, a theologian; two Germans, an army; two Dutchmen, a church; three Germans, a war; three Dutchmen, a divided church." Sigh.
The plain facts are that the church consists of sinners and has no promise anywhere in Scripture of being so guided by the Spirit that it can ever claim infallibility. It is not the case, contrary to Romanist canards lobbed at Protestantism, that multiple churches claim infallibility. Rather it is that the church's fallible ordained servants are trying, as best they can, to come to grips with the main teaching of our only infallible rule of faith and practice—Scripture. The different confessions of our faith are all based on the Scriptures and are not really mutually exclusive. They share wide areas of convergence on matters of doctrine, and where the differences lie, they are mostly found within various traditions among their denominational distinctions. Unfortunately, we Protestants spend more time talking about where we disagree than on where we agree.
The Romanist reading this thinks how the apparent disunity of Protestantism is not suffered by their "one true faith". Rome's veneer of monolithic unity is but a thin veil covering the historical and often seething dissent within over matters related to the Mass, Trent I versus Trent II, celibacy, divorce, homosexuality, Rome popes, Avignon popes, Pisan popes, daughters of popes as poisoners, sons of popes as Cardinals, popes in battle gear and commanding armies, "old time" Catholics, liberal Catholics, Eastern mystical or New Age Catholicism, liberation theology Catholics, Charismatic Catholics, Evangelical Catholics, Cultural Catholics, Popular Folk Catholics, female priests, and so on. The church of Rome makes a solitude and calls it peace. There is quiet and stillness enough in the grave, but it is not the quiet of health, but of death.
Not "we" as a reference to Christ's one historic Church. The one historic Church founded by Jesus Christ himself---the Catholic Church---is Trinitarian and Incarnational in her formal doctrine. Anything else is, by definition, decidedly non-Christian.
Your linked item, from which is quoted above, is more or less a re-hash of typical Romanist apologist arguments about the Canon that they think Rome defined using the false premise of post-modernism. They love to trot out Martin Luther as evidence of disagreement and uncertainty, despite having been corrected numerous times. One wonders if Rome's apologists are just willfully blind or simply lacking in intellectual integrity.
For example, the author of this collection of incoherency whips out a quote supposedly from Luther:
"We are obliged to yield many things to the Papists--that with them is the Word of God, which we received from them; otherwise we should have known nothing at all about it."
As prima facie truth Roman apologists (I am being kind here with even giving them that title given their apologetic malpractices) are blind and have no intellectual integrity, see here and even here.
Would that Romanists inform themselves of the many misconceptions they labor under about the NT Canon:
When it comes to the question of Canon, the Scripture itself provides grounds for considering external data: the apostolicity of books, the testimony of the church, and so forth. In essence, to say that the Canon is self-authenticating is simply to recognize that one cannot authenticate the Canon without appealing to the canon. It sets the terms for its own validation and investigation. A self-authenticating Canon is not just a Canon that claims to have authority, nor is it simply a Canon that bears internal evidence of authority, but one that guides and determines how that authority is to be established.
Even though the Scripture does not directly tell us which books belong in the New Testament canon (i.e., there is no inspired “table of contents”), we can account for that knowledge if we apply Scripture to the question. When we do apply the Scripture to the question of which books belong in the Canon, we will see that it testifies to the fact that God has created the proper epistemic environment wherein belief in the New Testament canon can be reliably formed. This environment includes three components:
1. Providential exposure. In order for the church to be able to recognize the books of the canon, it must first be providentially exposed to these books. The church cannot recognize a book that it does not have.
2. Attributes of canonicity. These attributes are basically characteristics that distinguish canonical books from all other books. There are three attributes of canonicity: (1) divine qualities (canonical books bear the “marks” of divinity), (2) corporate reception (canonical books are recognized by the church as a whole), and (3) apostolic origins (canonical books are the result of the redemptive-historical activity of the apostles).
3. Internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. In order for believers to rightly recognize these attributes of canonicity, the Holy Spirit works to overcome the noetic effects of sin and produces belief that these books are from God.
The Canon was received by the church. When the Bible uses "scripture" it means that deposit of the faith so existing at the time. Our Lord had no problem quoting from what He expressly called "scripture" when he walked the earth. After the crucifixion, the Apostle's referred to one another's written works as "scripture".
Rome contends no such deposit existed until they declared it so well over a thousand years later (1546 AD). History and God disagrees with them. Are we to believe that the church had no Canon for over fifteen hundred years, until the Council of Trent? The history of the church makes it clear that the church did, in fact, have a functioning canon long before the Council of Trent (or even the fourth-century councils). For example, Origen (died in 254 AD), well before Athanasius (died in 373 AD), is the earliest extant source to advocate the twenty-seven-book New Testament canon. Yet, this in no way means the early church was not using books known to be Scripture.
The question of the Canon is about whether the Christian religion provides sufficient grounds for thinking that Christians can know which books belong in the Canon and which do not. History alone cannot answer the question of what the Canon finally is; theology alone can do that. We must not ground the New Testament canon in an external authority (Rome), but seek to ground the Canon in the only place it could be grounded, its own authority. After all, if the Canon bears the very authority of God, to what other standard could it appeal to justify itself? Even when God swore oaths, “he swore by himself” (Heb. 6:13). Thus, for the Canon to be the Canon, it must be self-authenticating. Rather than looking only to its reception (community determined), or only to its origins (historically determined), we must let the canon have a voice in its own authentication.
Beloved, rabid Romanists such as Cruciform show themselves time and again incapable of interacting substantively to answer the many cross-examinations put before them. Instead they merely tee up Rome's usual mythological tales of its history, rely upon anachronistic interpretations of the Early Church Fathers, and declare victory.
I look at the bookshelf, where a copy of the Catholic Bible is beside a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church; the ambiguous juxtaposed with the unambiguous.
The single isolated sentence you chose to quote aside, the fact remains that---as shown in Post #144 above---the content of the NT canon is, in fact, not "self-authenticating," and certainly not "by Scripture alone." Try again.
As for the rest of your post, the preferences taught to you by your favored Reformed Protestant tradition are noted, and dismissed on the basis of the utter lack of any legitimate binding authority on the part of that man-made tradition.
