The Catholic church provides a framework or parameter to understand Scripture
“I again reiterate that the idea in Catholicism is not to run to the Church to understand every individual Bible verse (this is the Protestant caricature of our position in this regard). Rather, the Church provides an orthodox framework or parameter beyond which one may not go. For example, if one were to interpret John 14:28 (“… the father is greater than I”) in terms of Jesus being a mere creation and not God (as Jehovah’s Witnesses and historic Arians habitually do and did), then the Church would say that this is impermissible since Jesus is God (hundreds of biblical indications), and that this referred to his lowering and humbling of Himself to become a man (cross-reference: Phil 2:5-8), while retaining His Divine Nature (Godhood or divinity or deity) all the while.”
Scripture has to be interpreted with all of Scripture in mind, and also historic interpretation. Protestantism moves away from this state of affairs by taking away an infallible Church, and by emphasizing far too highly, individual “prooftexts” ……
Dave Armstrong
”. The Church is not “looking over the shoulder” of every Bible reader, like a wet nurse, as if no one had a brain in their head, or cannot learn anything from Bible-reading. It gives the limits and solves doctrinal disputes. Otherwise, there is chaos. Protestants can do this in a denomination(after all, they have creeds and confessions to go by) but then it breaks down at some point, since there are competing denominations and views, and no way to resolve the division by Protestant principles.”
comment 13 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/12/justification-catholic-church-and-the-judaizers/
Assuming that simply going by ‘the most natural way’ of reading the Bible correctly guides you to the proper understanding of the Apostolic deposit of faith is your underlying hermeneutical mistake. To understand the Bible, we need to read it in and with the persons to whom it was entrusted. In the history of the Church, we see that in many cases, the heretic’s most natural way of interpreting Scripture is to see his own heresy in it...................
The Scriptures were entrusted by the Apostles to the Church, and in particular to those whom they had ordained. And that is why it belongs to the Church to interpret them. Heretics and schismatics have no right to interpret Scripture, or to tell the Church what Scripture means. Scripture does not belong to them
and
St. Vincent of Lerins (AD 434) writes:
But here some one perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church’s—because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation. (Commonitorium, chapter 2, para. 5)
and
You wrote:
The Old Testament scriptures were entrusted to the Jewish people, yet mainstream Jewish views of Old Testament Messianic prophecy, for example, were often wrong. Jesus had to correct a lot of misconceptions.
Your implicit argument presupposes your Ebionitic notion of continuity of the New Covenant with the Old Covenant. Christ is the Son of God. He instituted a new and better Covenant with His own infinitely precious blood. So from some weakness in the Old Covenant, it does not follow that the New Covenant suffers from this same weakness.
and
You wrote:
How do we even know that we should believe in Christianity, that Jesus established a church, what that church is, etc. if we don’t first interpret documents like those in the New Testament in the same manner in which we’d interpret other historical documents?
Those documents testify that Christ founded a Church, and that the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. Once we know that, then to understand Scripture rightly, we must submit to the Church’s interpretation of Scripture.
also
from comment 146 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/05/the-witness-of-the-lost-christianities/#comment-118456
In reply to my making a distinction between the Apostolic Teaching and the Content of the New Testament, you say: “…we (Protestants) say the only way we know what the apostles taught is by the 27 NT books.”
…and, you continue,
“[By making the distinction], you are implying there are other oral teachings that the apostles taught that were not written down, but were passed down to the next generation.”
Well…yes and no.
I don’t hold to the sort of “partim-partim” idea, in which there are some teachings utterly absent from Scripture and only passed down via oral tradition.
But, I do hold that there are many things mentioned only vaguely or in passing in Scripture…mentioned in a fashion which allows for lots of plausible misinterpretations even by well-educated godfearing-and-spirit-led scholars. And I hold that, oddly, it is often the most basic things which are treated in this fashion, because the author is writing to a Christian audience who (a.) already ought to know all the basics, (b.) who can go and ask their local clergy if they need a refresher on the basics, and (c.) who have as-yet encountered no disputes or misunderstandings about certain basic topics, such that it does not yet occur to the inspired author to reiterate them.
But this means that, for all its inspiration and inerrancy, there is one thing which the New Testament definitely is NOT: It is not a Time Capsule Catechism. It is not a document written with the purpose of explicitly and comprehensively mentioning and explaining the doctrines of the faith with the intent of ensuring that not-yet-catechized persons in a distant land many centuries later could reconstruct it without error.
I hold, therefore, that the New Testament canon, by itself, is not sufficient in practice to reconstruct all the doctrines and practices of the apostolic faith. If the Holy Spirit had intended Scripture to be used that way, He would have inspired someone to write it that way. But we know by the best empirical evidence (500 years of attempting to achieve doctrinal unity through sola scriptura) that He did not, in fact, do so.
That’s not what we have.
What we have, instead, is a text where, if you already know the doctrines (at least as well as the leaders of the early Christian churches knew them), you can see them referenced at various points (sometimes pretty explicitly, sometimes vaguely or in offhanded and easily-misunderstood ways). But if you don’t already know the doctrines, and attempt a reconstruction from the text alone, your reconstruction will naturally differ from everyone else’s…and none of you will know which reconstruction is correct.
That’s my view. (And I think it’s pretty well supported by the last 500 years of history.)
So, Ken, when you say, “Can you dogmatically and uniquivacally [sic] demonstrate any of them- that is, did Ignatius or Clement or Polycarp or Papias or Tertullian or Justin Martyr or Irenaeus actually quote or teach any other non-Scriptural oral tradition that Jesus or the apostles said?” …my answer is: Yes and No.
What I mean is: You might see one of their teachings as “non-Scriptural” because, lacking the correct starting assumptions for understanding the text, you don’t detect that teaching anywhere in the text. But they would not call it “non-Scriptural.” Such a designation would be anachronistic, for them. These guys, themselves, were NOT “reconstructors.” They knew the faith, whether they happened to have a copy of any of the Apostolic Era writings or not.
Every time these guys said, “Hey, here is the faith we practice; here is what Christians believe,” they were, in their own view, teaching an oral tradition. Being literate (unlike many Christians of that era) and having access to copies of most of the Apostolic Era writings, they would naturally quote Matthew or Paul or John or the author of Hebrews when they could, if it would help illustrate a point they were making. But if they couldn’t think of a quote, they would have made the point anyway, because it was part of the faith they’d learned. They were not sitting there attempting to learn the doctrines of an ancient faith by examining old texts in a foreign language. Instead, they were reporting what they’d been taught by an apostle, or by a guy who’d heard it from an apostle.
It would usually not have occurred to these guys to NOTICE whether a doctrine was referenced explicitly in an Apostolic Era writing or not. Why should they? They knew the faith; they knew they’d received it through a reliable path of witnesses. So when Paul quotes the Old Testament saying, “There is no-one who is righteous, no not one,” they would not have seen this and said, “Waitaminute! I always thought that Christianity considered Jesus and Mary not to have sinned, but this verse means they must have!” No, they’d have said, “Well, I know that neither Jesus nor His mother are supposed to have sinned; I know this from Polycarp who received it from John…who certainly ought to know! So, I suppose that’s not the correct way to interpret this verse, and I should look for another.”
In a sense, then, the Apostolic Fathers did not (by modern standards) do “exegesis”; they did “eisegesis.” Knowing the faith from the apostles themselves, they “read these assumptions into the text.” But for them, it was safe and right to do this: They were not reconstructors detached from a tradition, but the recipients of the Apostolic Faith who also happened to have texts written by the previous generation of recipients. They were able to properly understand these texts when they read them, because they already knew the assumptions underlying them.
So: I distinguish between Apostolic Tradition (the faith received from the apostles by those of their immediate successors whom the apostles thought worthy of being elevated to positions of leadership in the Early Church) and “Scripture” not because I think there is a teaching which was part of their faith but which cannot be found anywhere at all in the New Testament writings, even as an unstated assumption or a vague allusion.
Rather, I make the distinction because…
(a.) to attempt to reconstruct the faith from Scripture alone is anachronistic and utterly absent from the mindset of the early Christians; and,
(b.) the only plausible way to know whether a teaching is “in Scripture” — given the possibility of being tripped up by unstated assumptions or vague allusions which we moderns might miss — is to come to the text already knowing the basics of Christianity as learned by those who first received it from the Apostles. (Just like the intended audience!)
And the only way for us moderns to reconstruct THAT, if we don’t yet accept the doctrine that the Catholic Magisterium teaches infallibly, is to prefer the Apostolic Fathers’ interpretations and assumptions over our own: To learn what we can of the “Apostolic Tradition” first.
And that, by the way, is one reason I can no longer (as I once did, for I was raised in Baptist churches) endorse something you said: “…we (Protestants) say the only way we know what the apostles taught is by the 27 NT books.”
I once would have agreed with that. But now, reflecting on history, I am unable to avoid concluding that this is not, after all, a way that one can “know what the apostles taught.” It is only a way that one can make a very iffy kind of guess about what the apostles taught…and that’s why every man who attempts this methodology seems to come up with a different result. Any time the sacred authors thought a topic was already sufficiently well-known by their audience that they needn’t explain it fully, those of us who aren’t first-century Jewish or Godfearing-Gentile converts (taught the faith by an apostle or one of the apostles’ protégés) will likely err when we try to reconstruct the early Christians’ beliefs about that topic. The last 500 years’ history of ever-multiplying divisions (on what ought to be fundamental doctrines!) proves this problem is very real.
Make sense?
from comment 147 with his correction from a later comment at the same post:
from comment 147 with his correction from a later comment at the same post:
Since I finally have time, I am now returning to the meat of your earlier reply (#113, which was originally in reply to my #103). But please first see my most recent reply (#146) since some of it overlaps with what follows:
You say, “There seems to me to be a clear change in emphasis right from the time of the ending of the Canonical texts into the non-canonical texts. That should be expected from God-breathed documents compared to merely human writings.”
I can easily believe that there seems to you to be a “clear change.”
The first-century Christians, however, seem not to have detected such a clear difference: Some of them read Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians, and occasionally The Didache orThe Shepherd, in the liturgy, alongside the writings we now hold canonical. And even when these were eventually excluded from the canon they were widely lauded as orthodox and “suitable for private devotional reading,” even though they had been thought not-quite-worthy of the highest place of honor; namely, being read in the liturgy. And a sharp distinction existed between these “orthodox, but suited for devotional use” books and the gnostic pretender-gospels (e.g. Marcion’s remix of Luke) which arose later, to which the Fathers typically reacted with either a sniff of disdain or furious indignation.
This is evidence that when the earliest recipients of the New Testament books read the words of Paul or Matthew or John, the meaning they derived from those texts was not at odds with these particular writings. Yet these earliest recipients are, after all, the intended audience of the New Testament books. Who is the more reliable interpreter? The intended audience, or a crowd of Europeans and Americans more than 1500 years later, separated from the original audience by vast cultural and technological changes?
What we each “take away” from the New Testament is surely colored by our familiarity with the passages and how we’ve heard them interpreted and commented-upon. It is difficult for us not to see them through the “colored lenses” of the traditions in which we first encountered them, be they Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist or Seventh-Day Adventist…or Catholic. Catholics open up the Bible and feel that they are reading a deeply and obviously Catholic book. Presumably Seventh-Day Adventists feel similarly. I know that Baptists feel this way because I used to be one. Whatever our theology, our soteriology, our ecclesiology, we feel like the Bible is our “home turf.”
Oh, sure, we each can identify a handful of “blip verses”: Things like Paul referring to “baptism for the dead,” or stating that he completes in his body what is “lacking” in the afflictions of Christ (!!!). We aren’t overly concerned with these, though: Normally we shrug and assume that, in Heaven, we’ll finally figure out “what that was all about.” Sometimes a preacher will offer an interpretation which sounds plausible, and we’ll dutifully write these down in the margins of our Bibles.
Yet, notice: We’re able to feel that way, despite disagreeing with one another. That should be unsettling: We can’t all be right, but we all feel right. We all feel comfortable that we’re right, but we can’t all be right because our notions are mutually-exclusive.
Our feelings offer no sure guidance, then.
How, then, shall we objectively sort out plausible interpretations from implausible ones?
For example, how may we respond objectively — not relying on our own favorite exegesis, on what feels plausible to us, but on some criterion outside ourselves — to the folks who hold that David and Jonathan were gay lovers and that the Bible is okay with this? (And, correspondingly, that Paul is opposed to ephebophilia but is unfamiliar with the idea of long-term faithful gay relationships and would not oppose these…or even that John’s self-labeling as “the disciple Jesus loved” has sexual connotations?)
We can sift lexicons and strain at usages as much as we like, but the heterodox will always find a new spin to offer on these and other passages, supporting their own notions. We will be going in circles, until and unless we step outside the text and ask, “Okay. Supposing their interpretation was true, what would we expect to find in the historical record? What controversies would have arisen? What opposing views? What defenses would have been levied against the opposing views, and by whom? Does this interpretation have historicity on its side?”
Now those are questions which can be answered objectively. And as soon as you begin to ask them, the whole argument of the pro-same-sex-mutual-masturbation crowd is shown to be demonstrably silly.
That’s good news: We can, it seems, use historicity and the interpretative opinions of the early fathers as a first-line-of-defense for orthodoxy.
But, Ken, that is what you seem determined not to do: You have your comfortable notions about what the New Testament “really means” — no fault in that, we all do! — but when the earliest Christian authorities say things which are incompatible with your own interpretation, what do you do?
It looks as if you state that, wherever these earlier Christian authorities differ from you, theyhave drifted into error, but you are interpreting the text as the author intended.
Is that really probable?
Remember who “they” are: Men trained in Christianity by the Apostles, or by disciples of the Apostles. Men of the same century as the sacred authors, in the same community as the sacred authors, speaking the language of the sacred authors in the same era as the sacred authors. Often the apostles or their successors actually selected these folks (e.g. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch) for leadership positions in the Messianic community…something they presumably would not have done had these persons been of dubious orthodoxy!
And, remember who you (and I!) are: We are men of the twenty-first century, continents away in geography, but much further in language and culture and the shape of our thoughts. Our view of creation is desacralized, family and children are of radically diminished importance. We are “WEIRD”: That wonderful acronym which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. We are experientially and philosophically cut off from most of the lives of all our ancestors.
“To remind yourself that, after all, the writings of the Early Church Fathers are not guaranteed to be error-free in the same way as the writings of St. Paul is really not sufficient. For we are not measuring the writing of Church Father XYZ against Scripture, but the assumptions Church Father XYZ received in his Christian upbringing against the assumptions we received in our own.”
Clement of Rome’s writing is not inspired-inerrant. Let us stipulate that Clement of Rome believed, in error, that the reports he’d heard about a dying-and-rising bird in a distant land called “phoenix” were true. He made an error regarding the animal kingdom. We can see that we (through our superior technology) are in a position to know better than he, on that score.
But is there any reason to think that we know better than he, on matters of ecclesiology? Especially given who he was pals with? Or Ignatius of Antioch, given who he hung around with? Or Polycarp and his disciple Irenaeus, given who Polycarp knew?
What, really, are the odds that the community of first-century Christians were mistaken about what the Apostles meant, but we, after all this time, have discovered it?
I think that, broadly, is my response to your comments on how you feel the early Christian authors went astray regarding baptism, or the authority of the Stewards of the Messianic King, et cetera. (I am carefully not saying “mono-episcopate” because, while there are certain ideas like Apostolic Succession which the Church affirms as part of the Church from the beginning, there are matters of parish administration which need not have been, but are lumped together under the same term.)
Given the separation between your own view and that of the Apostolic Fathers, you obviously must either abandon your view or offer a plausible narrative which might explain how they came to hold a wrong view. And that is, I admit, what I asked you to do: To offer a narrative, to answer, “How could it be that…?”
But please remember that there are two options. You can either offer a narrative…or you can consider whether they might be right after all. To me, it seemed more plausible that the Apostolic Fathers knew better than Luther, or Calvin, or Dallas Theological Seminary. And as soon as I had concluded that I knew that, whatever I eventually became, I could no longer remain “Protestant.” It just didn’t bear up under close scrutiny any more.
One more thing: I notice, in what you say about the Eucharist (as understood by Catholics), that you seem to think Christ is being (in the Catholic view) re-sacrificed, repeatedly. That is not so.
The Lamb was slain “before the foundation of the earth” …and, also, and not incompatibly, the Lamb was slain in 30-ish AD. And the Lamb who is on the throne looks, right now and forever, as if He has been slain. All of these statements are true: It is not either/or, but both/and. When God dies, it is an act of eternal love intended and in a sense enacted from before there was time — hence “before the foundation of the earth” — but it is only one event, even though for God, “all times are now” and thus that deed mysteriously “touches” every moment of history, past, present, and future.
It was that single event which I personally attended last week at Mass, and the week before, and the week before that. It is a little bit like being a Time Traveller who hops into his time capsule again and again, returning to Calvary to re-witness the most important moments in the history of the universe.
If a strange fancy can help you grasp what it is like, you can imagine that it is not only by the kind graciousness of God that I do not have to detect that what I swallow is blood and flesh, but it is also by the kind graciousness of God that I do not stumble on the rock of Golgotha while going forward to receive…or bump into earlier versions of myself who made the time-journey earlier!
But if that sounds too sci-fi for you, you may skip over it. My main point is to correct your misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine: The sacrifice of the Mass is not Christ being sacrificed again, as if He could be grabbed and tied down again. It is the sacrifice of Christ, in which He is both the offering and the priest who offers. This is, consequently, the only sacrifice in history that can be called a “pure offering,” without qualification.
And thus Malachi’s prophetic word is fulfilled in the Mass, which happens all over the world, among the Gentiles, all day, from East to West, from the sun’s rising to its setting. This was doubtless one of the primary apologetics which led to the conversion of those Jews who were converted: That through Jesus, finally, the Messianic prophecy was fulfilled that not only had the Gentiles finally abandoned paganism in favor of worshiping the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, but they were actually offering (!) a pure (!!) sacrifice (!!!) daily, all around the world.
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