Oldbear83 said:
We have the Holy Spirit, and we have Scripture. Between the two that is sufficient to establish God's commands for us.
Ok, so the book. That's fine, there are a lot of people who believe that.
There have been a wildly varying number of protestant denominations cited by different people depending on what their point of view was, so lets go with something objective:
The 1999 Encyclopedia of Christianity has this to say: "In 1985 David Barrett could count 22,150 distinct denominations worldwide."
Surely the Holy Spirit didn't give 22,150 different denominational founders different messages? "For God is not the author of confusion." (1st Corinthians 14:33). So what's really happening is these denominational founders picked up the Book, and unmoored from patristic teaching they read it through the lens of their own opinions and started their own churches. That does not sound like a good method through which divine revelation operates.
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Humans sometimes mean well but are flawed. And not all humans mean well. As a result we must not depend on human command and authority, but seek God's Word. And by God's Grace, we have that Word through Scripture.
Of course...and amen to that. But we've already seen that it doesn't exist in a vacuum, which is the problem with an appeal to the authority of the Book. It invariably includes the authority of modern men, and simply cannot be divorced from it. Even within the reference frame of the reformation alone, let alone what descended from it, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin disagreed vehemently on all sorts of primary doctrines. This isn't a defense of Roman Catholicism, by the way. The Latin Church was renovating the faith for 500 years before Luther showed up.
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There are some books which claim a right to Canon, which are disputed, but there are sixty-six books which no one seriously disputes. Those books were established long ago by simple rules which - again - I have not seen anyone credibly dispute:
Authorship by a known apostle
Consistency internally and with other Canon
Widespread use by the first century Church
Let's set aside the New Testament for a moment, for there is essentially universal agreement among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox as to what makes up that canon. Fair enough? That also puts to rest the question of authorship by a known apostle because the entire OT predates the apostles.
The issue comes in when it comes to the Old Testament, and what makes up that canon. You stated "widespread use by the first century Church." But what is in 99% of modern English Bibles is not that Old Testament. What it is, is an English translation of the Masoretic text...a Jewish text assembled and edited by unbeliving Rabbis almost 1000 years after Christ. Hardly a reliable source for OT source material. In fact, the editorializing of these Rabbis trim almost 2,000 years off the Biblical age of the earth in Genesis in an effort to push the timing of the arrival of the messiah from Jesus' time to our modern day. Does that sound like an honest scholastic effort? Or an attempt by those who rejected Christ to discredit him and advance the arrival of the messiah to closer to the time of the antichrist?
The universal OT for the Christian church for its first millenium was the Septuagint in the east, and for the first 500 years in the west (till Jerome published the Vulgate in Latin). Neither one of those texts, plus the NT, equaled 66 books...and as we see in the previous paragraph, the issue runs deeper and is more serious than the number of books.
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Sadly, there seem to be those who are not satisfied with God's Word, and feel that a Christian cannot serve God unless he first gets approval from some human authority.
It isn't that you have to get approval from a human authority to serve God. It's that if you don't view your attempts to serve God in the light of the saints who have gone before you can end up in Cain's shoes. If you pick up the BIble and start reading it in English in 2026 A.D. with no reference to what the early Christians thought and said about what you are reading, you can end up in left field. Far out in left field, like Paula White, Joel Osteen, John Hagee, the list goes on.
Even as an Orthodox Christian, I hold confessional Lutheranism in high regard because it began as an attempt to restore the faith. Zwingli and Calvin were trying to HGTV it.
