Doc Holliday said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Doc Holliday said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Sam Lowry said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Sam Lowry said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Sam Lowry said:
BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Sam Lowry said:
You assume that all evidence is either divinely inspired or utterly worthless. Convenient, but not realistic. The Church and its councils deal with reality in all its messy details.
Not at all. Nice straw man. It's amazing how much I have to repeat myself with you. I'm merely saying that your tradition is based on man's tradition, not God's word. Perhaps not worthless, but certainly not something you bind all believers' consciences to upon pain of anathema (separated from God). This is exactly how God's church and his true gospel has gotten corrupted.
Your beliefs are based on human tradition and interpretation of Scripture at least as much as mine are. The difference is that I recognize it and I tie my interpretation to a historical record.
No, my beliefs have no basis in any tradition that isn't based on Scripture. Maybe you can provide an example of what you're talking about.
And you can't tie your belief (e.g. perpetual virginity) to the historical record of the apostles and the early church. Because you're not tying them to Scripture, but rather to man's extra-Scriptural tradition. A tradition that has no evidence of it until the 4th century or so. That's the whole point, and one that has been clearly demonstrated.
Almost everything we've talked about is an example. Your beliefs about all of these things -- baptism, communion, works, faith, etc. -- are based on your interpretation of Scripture and the interpretation of whatever church you're a part of.
But they're all from Scripture, while the same can't be said for you. It's amazing how often you miss or stray from the point. You're either intellectually lacking or intellectually dishonest.
My beliefs on all of those matters are taken from Scripture as interpreted by human beings. Just like yours are.
It's been clearly shown in this and multiple other threads that they are not. It's precisely why your church must deny sola scriptura and draw from extra-biblical sources to support your man-made tradition, upon which you place equal authority with Scripture. You're now just trying to gaslight people into thinking that all those times you were silenced because you could not back your church's beliefs with Scripture actually never happened. It's quite amazing.
You can't separate hermeneutics from scripture or any text, including these very words. Its ever-present.
Coming to a conclusion about what you're reading has to take place and that conclusion varies greatly by individual. You can't escape this problem.
You've actually already violated allegiance to scripture alone. You claim allegiance to Scripture alone while submitting Scripture to a prior theological grid and discarding books that don't conform to it. By rejecting the deuterocanonical books, Protestants implicitly admit that Scripture alone is insufficient to determine the canon.
You rely on an extra-biblical authority, historical judgment, rabbinic Judaism, or Reformers like Luther to tell you what counts as scripture. Once that move is made, sola Scriptura collapses, because Scripture is no longer the sole infallible rule of faith.
If the Church could be trusted to identify the canon infallibly, then sola Scriptura is false.
If the Church could not be trusted to do so, then Protestants have no infallible Scripture to appeal to in the first place.
Hermeneutics has nothing to do with the principle of sola scriptura. Two people can have vastly different interpretations of the same biblical text - but they are both still adhering to sola scriptura if the bible is their only infallible source of authority. The issue here is that Roman Catholic (as well as Orthodox) beliefs are based also on non-scriptural sources, which they consider to be equal in authority to that of Scripture.
You're basically just reiterating the oft used argument against sola scriptura here - "scripture can't be the sole infallible authority, because scripture isn't being used to determine what is scripture to begin with". But note that adherents to sola scriptura don't believe that the process to determine the canon is always infallible, so sola scriptura isn't being violated here - Scripture is still the sole infallible authority. Adherents to sola scriptura fully recognize that church fathers, councils, Jewish rabbis, etc. are all fallible and therefore can indeed err when deciding on the canon. The recognition of the deuterocanon as canon scripture by Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy illustrates this.
This comes to the literal "crux" of the issue of deciding the canon - the cross. Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. It is upon this actual, historical event that the knowledge of the infallible canon is based, NOT on what church fathers, councils, rabbis, or the Reformers told us. Jesus' resurrection from the dead, witnessed by his apostles, proved that he was divine, and that everything he did and said was directly from God. And Jesus himself directly validated the Tanakh (the Law, Prophets, and Writings) as the direct word of God (Luke 24:44) and also declared that his apostles would remember everything he said and did (John 14:26) thereby canonizing their word as God's word. And everything that we have that we know came from the apostles is in Scripture (the New Testament) and nowhere else. Jesus himself validated what is canon Scripture. And Jesus never cited from or validated the books of the deuterocanon, and neither did any of his apostles.
So I guess that in a way, you are right - Scripture isn't the sole infallible rule of faith - Jesus is. His Holy Spirit is. Faith in them is the "prior theological grid" upon which recognizing canon Scripture is based. And the only record we have of what Jesus said and did and what the Holy Spirit inspired, came from the aposlles, whose words are ONLY in Scripture and nowhere else. Hence, sola scriptura.
Sola scriptura isn't merely a statement about authority, its a claim about epistemology: how one knows what God has infallibly revealed.
The issue isn't that people can interpret Scripture differently. The issue is how do you interpret which texts are Scripture in the first place? That decision logically precedes any appeal to Scripture as an authority. Therefore hermeneutics isn't optional, its foundational.
If the canon is fallibly known, then you can never know with certainty what counts as infallible Scripture.
That's sola probabilitas.
An infallible authority that cannot be infallibly identified is functionally useless as an infallible rule of faith.
Do you understand that the New Testament OVERWHELMINGLY quotes the Septuagint? The Septuagint includes the Deuterocanon. There was no universally closed Jewish canon in the 1st century. So when saying "Jesus validated the Tanakh" is already a later interpretive decision, not a self evident fact. Your claim that Jesus and the apostles never cited the Deuterocanon is false: The New Testament alludes to Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees. Hebrews 11 strongly echoes 2 Maccabes 7.
You claim that everything we have from the apostles is in Scripture and nowhere else...but Scripture contradicts this. John explicitly says not everything was written in John 21:25. Paul command adherence to oral tradition in 2 Thess 2:15. The Church existed, taught, baptized, and worshiped before the New Testament existed. So the claim that "only Scripture contains apostolic teaching is not derived from Scripture, its a theological assertion imposed onto Scripture.
This is the order:
Jesus ---> Apostles--->Church--->Canon--->Scripture
Sola Scriptura collapses into sola Christ +fallible Church mediation, which Protestants then selectively deny authority after receiving the canon from it. That's totally incoherent. The Canon is a Church judgment, period.
What would happen if leadership of a denomination concluded, on historical or theological grounds, that a particular biblical book wasn't genuinely inspired? Lets say Episcopalians concluded that certain books or passages condemning homosexual behavior were not genuinely inspired. If all ecclesial authority is acknowledged to be fallible, and the canon itself is only fallibly known, on what basis could such a decision be definitely rejected? You can't appeal to the rest of the Bible, because the dispute is about which books belong. You can't appeal to tradition or history.
This has SO MANY errors:
1) Paragraph 1: Sola scriptura is NOT an epistemological principle. This is just flatly false, and it demonstrates your lack of understanding of what sola scriptura is and means.
2) Paragraph 2: "Hermeneutics" has nothing to do with the deciding of the canon. You are mixing/confusing concepts.
3) Paragraph 3: the canon being "fallibly known" is just a reality. The Roman Catholic/Orthodox canon and the Protestant canon are not in agreement, right? So obviously, it's fallible because both can't be right. Even within Roman Catholicism, the canon wasn't agreed upon in their own history! Their councils endorsed different canons. Athansius had a different canon than what Roman Catholicism officially recognized at Trent. In fact, Athanasius would be anathematized by Rome for his canon!
Regardless, the concept you're not understanding is that sola scriptura does not say that the recognition of the canon will be infallible. It has nothing to do with the process of determining what is canon. That's a different question and concept. Sola scriptura a principle that exists only AFTER the canon is recognized, not before. Once you've decided on what is the divinely inspired word of God, then by definition anything outside of it is NOT the word of God and thus subject to fallibility. Knowing with "certainty" regarding the canon is not the issue. Absolute certainty, the real epistemological issue here, is only achievable by God. It is not by absolute certainty that we know the canon, but by
faith. And as I stated before, it starts with the faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus personally validated the Tanakh, and gave the endorsement to the word of his apostles. Those two factors determine the canon for us. And the deuterocanon was not part of it.
4) Paragraph 4: Again, the principle of sola scriptura exists AFTER the determination of canon. It is not a principle that is a "sole infallible rule of faith" regarding the recognition of what is canon to begin with. That's a circular reasoning. It's putting the cart in front of the horse. The principle is this: once you've decided what is canon, you've then decided all that is infallible. Anything outside of it, since it isn't God's word by your own definition, is subject to fallibility.
5) Paragraph 5: The Septuagint was not a single-bound volume of works. It was a collection of Greek translations of important Hebrew texts, which contained BOTH canonical and non-canonical writings. The Jews kept them separate. They did not store the deuterocanonical books in the Temple like they did the Tanakh. Jesus and/or his apostles quoting from the Greek translation contained in the Septuagint did not automatically canonize the non-canonical parts of the Septuagint. That'd be like arguing that if someone quoted the New Testament from the Trump Bible, that it meant that everything in that bible is canon scripture, including Trump's foreword. It's a very bad assumption.
It isn't "intepretation" that Jesus validated the Tanakh. He LITERALLY did so by naming the Law, Prophets, and Writings as being God's word in Luke 24:44. I'd say that's pretty self evident.
The New Testament does not directly cite the deuterocanon. Neither Jesus nor his apostles quote it. Hebrews 11 may be alluding to Maccabees, or it is simply alluding to a shared knowledge of Jewish history that the audience would recognize. Regardless, writers of the New Testament can refer to non-canonical writings in their letters to make their theological point. Doing so does NOT make what they referenced into canon. For example, the apostle Paul quoted from pagan philosophers in his letters. Jude references the book of Enoch. There is huge difference between these and what Jesus did for the Tanakh, saying essentially "this IS God's word", and what Jesus did for the word of his aposles, essentially saying, "your word is MY word". The Tanakh and the apostles were endorsed specifically by Jesus himself. That should pretty much determine the canon for any believer.
6) Paragraph 6: John saying that everything Jesus said and did was not all written down does NOT contradict the idea that everything we have that we know came from the apostles is in Scripture and nowhere else. Think about it. This is really sloppy logic.
Paul said to "obey tradition" - okay, WHAT tradition? Do we have it? How do you know it came from him and the apostles? If you know it did, then why didn't you include it in canon? The fact remains, that everything we have that we know came from the apostles is in Scripture and nowhere else. If you knew of anything else, it would be in your canon. You are not refuting this fact at all. If you think you are, then answer the question that everyone who makes your argument completely fails to answer: name or cite a teaching, oral or written, that we know came from Jesus and/or his apostles that
isn't in Scripture. You won't be able to. Hence, sola scriptura.
7) Paragraph 7: Yes, the canon is a "church" judgement, the "church" being the entire body of believers in Jesus, not just one institutional organization. God's people have the Holy Spirit, and they were guided by the Holy Spirit to recognize and receive the canon. It being a Holy Spirit-led church judgement does not invalidate sola scriptura at all, for all the reasons already argued above. The reason why Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy are wrong on the canon, is because they are not guided by the Holy Spirit to recognize it correctly. The many errors in their teachings, such as the blatantly heretical and idolatrous views on Mary, which they anathematize (rejected by God) for not believing, is proof of that.
8) Final paragraph: if a denomination rejects a book from Scripture that condemns homosexual behavior, or any sin for that matter, then they would be rejecting a book that was completely validated by Jesus himself and/or which was the word from the apostles, which Jesus also validated. It would be fairly easy to establish for the people of God, all who have and are led by the Holy Spirit, that their rejection is a rejection of Jesus, and therefore a rejection of Christianity itself. Your "what if" scenario just isn't a challenge to the concept of sola scriptura at all.
