Cruciform
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In defense of Cruciform; Traditions of Men
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Cruciform
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Post #98
The proofs say which books makes complete.
Cruciform's call for proof is a ploy he uses to avoid in meaningful conversation. There is no proof that you can post that he will accept if it doesn't come from his church. Were the Pope to offer an ex cathreda teaching that Luther wad right, Cruciform would reject it and denounce the Pope. Cruciform will not accept scripture as sufficient or complete so showing him scripture is s waste of time. Cruciform didn't want proof, he just doesn't want to engage in discussion.
Post #137
Post #137
Ask Mr. Religion
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Yes.
Of course, per Vatican I, we Protestants were all schismatics and heretics, but strangely by the time of Vatican II, we were merely "separated brethren". Yet another counter-example of claimed Roman monolithicity. Rome just cannot make up its "infallible" mind.
If there are separated brethren, that is members of the true church, then Rome's claims to being that true church are odd.
AMR
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glassjester
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How do you know that 2nd Timothy is inspired Scripture, authoritative, and infallibly true?
brewmama
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Yes. And where do you get that Scripture is ALL you need? It doesn't say that. AND it is referring to the Old Testament, since at the time there was no New Testament, so you should only be using the OT if your only guide is that one verse.
glassjester
Well-known member
Just kicking the can down the road. Who defines "All Scripture"? Scripture itself surely does not.
I wish to note, first, that I find your initial question, as stated, strange. Ex hypothesi (based on the assumption(s) at hand), you are bound to deny that I understand the scriptures, just as I am bound to deny that you understand them. I wish to note further that there's a whole bunch of scriptural texts. You think you understand every single line perfectly? I make no such claims, especially given the fact that I haven't read it all.
But perhaps you wish to ask a more general question: how do we come to understand the proper meaning of texts in general? The answer to this, Lon, is very much contrary to protestant practice/belief.
Pick up Aristotle's Physics and just start reading it. Don't use secondary literature, consult commentaries or consult a teacher of Aristotle...and above all, most certainly don't use your own reason and ask yourself the question: "But what is most coherent with right reason?"
Come back to me afterwards and tell me how well you've understood the work. Even granted that you've read commentaries, the quality of that commentary is going to differ based on how thoroughly steeped in the authentic Aristotelian tradition it is. Jonathan Barnes (a modern British analytic philosopher) and Alexander of Aphrodisias (an ancient Greek commentator on Aristotle) are not equal commentators on Aristotle.
The best way to understand a text, so far as I can see, is already to have a pre-determined hermeneutic/interpretational lens whereby to understand and interpret that text. That holds true of the ancient philosophers; that holds true of the sacred scriptures.
The question then arises: but what hermeneutic should we use? That, of course, is the tricky question. But I will say that Alexander of Aphrodisias was a peripatetic, i.e., part of the Aristotelian tradition. Jonathan Barnes is not.
Note, of course, that you don't disagree with me. All protestants already do this, as is evident in their choice of proof-texts. You have a pre-determined hermeneutic that colors your reading of the scripture. The question, of course, that I'll ask is: "But why should I read the scriptures through those lenses?" And ultimately, Lon, you'll come up short, and I won't.
Because my answer is: "Because my hermeneutic (interpretational apparatus) is based on a living tradition started by Jesus and passed on to the Apostles and their successors, the bishops of the Church."
You can, of course, deny the fact...but you cannot deny that, if the fact is true, then my way of reading the scriptures is far more likely to attain to the correct interpretation(s).
You further cannot deny, Lon, that regardless of what you say about my hermeneutic, there is absolutely nothing that you can offer me which grants me an objective warrant to subscribe to your hermeneutic. Why in the bloody blazes should I care about how John Calvin interpreted the scriptures? Who is John Calvin to me? :rolleye:
1. I grant the possibility that the Holy Spirit very well might inspire a person in the state of grace with some special insights into the scriptures that he or she is reading. I have no reason to rule this out a priori.
That said, Lon, even granted that He did, you must understand that "Because the Holy Ghost thus inspired me" makes for a bloody poor justification for why I should accept your interpretation.
[Thus does the Church lay special emphasis on public, not private, revelation.]
Furthermore, Lon, such a claim begs the question. I fully grant that whatever the Holy Ghost says is true. I deny that your interpretation is true. Therefore, I must conclude, the Holy Ghost has not inspired such an interpretation. By asserting the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, you have presupposed the very thing of which I have asked to be persuaded.
2. The insistence on personal inspiration by the Holy Spirit is a protestant reaction to the Catholic claim that the Holy Ghost inspires the public teachings of the Catholic Church. I'll let you work out the middle terms for yourself...at any rate, I'm sure that you can understand how, once more, by appealing to private inspiration, you once more have begged the question, i.e., have presupposed the very thing in dispute.
Look up St. Thomas Aquinas' teachings on charity. The Holy Spirit is Divine Love Itself; the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the believer in a state of grace is a participation in Divine love Itself. It transforms such a person inwardly in order that he might become progressively more and more deiform.
If you refer back to the thread I wrote on my commentary on St. John's Gospel, you'll find more there.
I'll answer the rest later.
Ask Mr. Religion
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This is mythology and Greek Orthodox views that hold the LXX Greek even higher than the Hebrew.
If Greek was the language of the court and camp, and indeed must have been spoken by most in the land, the language of the people, spoken also by Christ and His Apostles, was a dialect of the ancient Hebrew, the Western or Palestinian Aramaic. It seem strange that this could ever have been doubted. A Jewish Messiah Who would urge His claim upon Israel in Greek, seems almost a contradiction in terms. We know, that the language of the Temple and the Synagogue was Hebrew, and that the addresses of the Rabbis had to be “targumed” into the vernacular Aramaen. Can we believe that, in a Hebrew service, the Messiah could have arisen to address the people in Greek, or that He could have argued with the Pharisees and Scribes in that tongue, especially remembering that its study was actually forbidden by the Rabbis? Src: The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Vol. 1, pp.129, 130; by Alfred Edersheim
(1) The letter of Aristeas [which purports to give a history of the LXX –SMR] is mere fabrication (Kahle called it propaganda), and there is no hard historical evidence that a group of scholars translated the O.T. into Greek between 285-150 B.C.
(2) The research of Paul Kahle shows that there was no pre-Christian LXX.
(3) No one has produced a Greek copy of the Old Testament written before 150 A.D.
(4) Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and Origen produced the first "Septuagints" – that none existed before their works.
(5) The Septuagint "quotes" from the New Testament and not vice versa, i.e. in the matter of N.T. - O.T. quotation, the later formulators of the Greek O.T. made it conform with the New Testament Text which they had before them as they forged their product.
(6) After 1900 years of searching, archaeology has failed to produce a single piece of papyrus written in Greek before c.150 A.D. that any writer of the New Testament used for a "quotation".
The nearest thing to an Old Testament Greek Bible found by anyone is the Ryland Papyrus (No. 458), which has a few portions of Deuteronomy 23-28 on it. This piece of papyrus is dated 150 B.C. (questionable date) which is fifty to one hundred years later than the writing of the so-called original Septuagint.
When Jesus said that not “a jot or tittle” would be removed from the Law He could only be referring to the Hebrew, for the "Jot" is the Hebrew word "Yodh", the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the smallest letter. Tittle refers to the little lines or projections by which the Hebrew letters differ from each other. Since the Greek OT (LXX) does not have jots and tittles He was not referring to this inferior translation which has a historical background and timetable that are very suspect.
Hence a false impression has been created, and the student is left deceived as though the extant LXX prepared for general use is something other than it is. Indeed, what real significance can rightly be attached to these few thousand references when one weighs them against the vast bulk of the c.430,000 words (Apocrypha excluded) contained in the Greek Old Testament? These two uncial MSS also contain Bel and the Dragon, Tobit, Judith etc. Thus, it must be recognized that the Septuagint which we actually utilize in practical outworking, the LXX which is cited almost 90 percent of the time, is actually the LXX that was written more than 250 years after the completion of the New Testament canon – and by a "Catholicized Jehovah's Witness" at that!
See also: http://standardbearers.net/uploads/...cal_Analysis_Dr_Floyd_Nolen_Jones_PhD_ThD.pdf
AMR
Cruciform
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Post #141
Cruciform
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Post #141
Cruciform
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Thus, CM makes it more than clear that he in fact HAS no proof that his favored recently-invented, man-made non-Catholic sect is that one historic Church founded by Jesus Christ himself in 33 A.D. Precisely my point.
Gaudium de veritate,
Cruciform
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Post #236
I have offered you proof. Remempost 518 that you were never able to refute? You have been provided the proof but, as I noted. Scripture is not sufficient for you.
It may be closer to 30 AD and the original Church was corrupted by the RCC
My response to Lon, part 2:
I believe that you misunderstand me. You have, Lon, two and precisely two alternatives. Either:
1. The language of Scripture is clear and easy to understand, and the language of scripture does not easily lend itself to misunderstanding
or
2. The language of the Scriptures is -not- clear and easy to understand, and it is possible that the language of scripture could lend itself to misunderstanding.
If 1 is the case, then there is no reason to think that there was any need for the protestants to re-interpret the scriptures. Since the scriptures are so clear and easy to understand, and do not easily lend themselves to misunderstanding, then we have no reason to think that the Catholic Church interpreted it incorrectly. On the contrary, we must suppose that the Catholic Church interpreted it correctly, and that any subsequent re-interpretations were quite unnecessary.
Conversely, if you reject the Catholic interpretation of the scriptures, then you must assert that 2 is the case, contrary to the opinion that you've previously expressed.
You cannot eat your cake and have it too, Lon.
Your point 2 was: "The language of scripture is clear." Point 3 was, in effect, "I can read." To my mind, points 2 and 3 add up to the same thing: "I can read, and the language is clear. It's not that hard, man."
Given the fact that there are many interpretations of the scriptures that you clearly reject, then you are just wrong, and obviously so. To my mind, this needs no further argument. It's plainly evident from observation.
Yes. That is the point I am making.
"Adept"? I wouldn't use that word. I would describe it in the following way: "Unless you have the appropriate interpretational lens whereby to understand what it's saying, you are bound to go wrong."
Case in point: If you read a dialogue of Plato, you are going to understand it in a completely different way than if I were to read the same dialogue...and not because I can read better than you. I'm going to read it differently because I'm going to read it through a Neoplatonic hermeneutic.
AS = Apostolic succession? You are confusing Apostolic succession with papal succession. Papal succession is the notion that there has been a continuous line of popes from St. Peter to the pope of the present day. Apostolic succession is the notion that the current bishops of the Church can be traced back all the way to the apostles, i.e., that the current bishops of the Church are the successors of the successors[, etc.] of the apostles.
And I don't base this belief on a scriptural verse. Yes, the scriptures do support the notion of apostolic succession, but precisely insofar as I've already accepted the doctrine and am able to read the scriptures in light of it.
Again, for me, the epistemological grounding of assent to the gospels, the scriptures, etc. is the authority of the bishops of the Catholic Church. Are they the successors of the apostles or not? It's difficult to prove that they aren't...I'll say that much.
For me, the teaching authority of the bishops, and their unbroken succession from the apostles, is the starting point and ground for assenting to and understanding all other Christian truth.
It would be circular reasoning if I started from the scriptures. I don't.
My initial question was how you know whether or not your interpretation matches the intention of the author. You listed "commentaries" as one of the ways in which you can verify your interpretation as matching the intention of the authority. Do you wish to retract your previous assertion?
Lon:
I asked you how you know that your interpretation is correct. You answered: "I check and recheck!" That only pushes the question back. You check against what? How do you know that the checking and rechecking that you are doing is correct? You cite AMR "correcting" you. How do you know that his interpretation is correct?
How do you know?
I don't. Naturally speaking, I don't have strict rational certainty that the Catholic Church is right. That's why it's called "faith." What I have is a certain degree of probability. Are the bishops of the Catholic Church the successors of the successors[, etc.] of the apostles? If they are, were the apostles credible?
The bishops make an empirical, historical claim: "The offices that we occupy go all the way back to the apostles; we were consecrated by their successors. They passed down a body of teaching to us, and this is what that body of teaching is."
It being probable that the bishops are the successors of the apostles, and it being probable that the apostles were credible and passed on a living religious tradition to their successors, I assent to the truths that the bishops propose for our belief.
If you wish to reject apostolic succession, then the way of disproving it is pretty simple: simply point to a period in history, after the apostles, in which there were no Catholic bishops who could trace their succession back to the apostles.
Except, we're not. My starting point is based on probable assent to an historical, empirical truth which is not in and of itself a matter of scriptural interpretation.
The Catholic mass is roughly 2000 years old. Ponder that.
I believe that you misunderstand me. You have, Lon, two and precisely two alternatives. Either:
1. The language of Scripture is clear and easy to understand, and the language of scripture does not easily lend itself to misunderstanding
or
2. The language of the Scriptures is -not- clear and easy to understand, and it is possible that the language of scripture could lend itself to misunderstanding.
If 1 is the case, then there is no reason to think that there was any need for the protestants to re-interpret the scriptures. Since the scriptures are so clear and easy to understand, and do not easily lend themselves to misunderstanding, then we have no reason to think that the Catholic Church interpreted it incorrectly. On the contrary, we must suppose that the Catholic Church interpreted it correctly, and that any subsequent re-interpretations were quite unnecessary.
Conversely, if you reject the Catholic interpretation of the scriptures, then you must assert that 2 is the case, contrary to the opinion that you've previously expressed.
You cannot eat your cake and have it too, Lon.
Your point 2 was: "The language of scripture is clear." Point 3 was, in effect, "I can read." To my mind, points 2 and 3 add up to the same thing: "I can read, and the language is clear. It's not that hard, man."
Given the fact that there are many interpretations of the scriptures that you clearly reject, then you are just wrong, and obviously so. To my mind, this needs no further argument. It's plainly evident from observation.
Yes. That is the point I am making.
"Adept"? I wouldn't use that word. I would describe it in the following way: "Unless you have the appropriate interpretational lens whereby to understand what it's saying, you are bound to go wrong."
Case in point: If you read a dialogue of Plato, you are going to understand it in a completely different way than if I were to read the same dialogue...and not because I can read better than you. I'm going to read it differently because I'm going to read it through a Neoplatonic hermeneutic.
AS = Apostolic succession? You are confusing Apostolic succession with papal succession. Papal succession is the notion that there has been a continuous line of popes from St. Peter to the pope of the present day. Apostolic succession is the notion that the current bishops of the Church can be traced back all the way to the apostles, i.e., that the current bishops of the Church are the successors of the successors[, etc.] of the apostles.
And I don't base this belief on a scriptural verse. Yes, the scriptures do support the notion of apostolic succession, but precisely insofar as I've already accepted the doctrine and am able to read the scriptures in light of it.
Again, for me, the epistemological grounding of assent to the gospels, the scriptures, etc. is the authority of the bishops of the Catholic Church. Are they the successors of the apostles or not? It's difficult to prove that they aren't...I'll say that much.
For me, the teaching authority of the bishops, and their unbroken succession from the apostles, is the starting point and ground for assenting to and understanding all other Christian truth.
It would be circular reasoning if I started from the scriptures. I don't.
My initial question was how you know whether or not your interpretation matches the intention of the author. You listed "commentaries" as one of the ways in which you can verify your interpretation as matching the intention of the authority. Do you wish to retract your previous assertion?
Lon:
I asked you how you know that your interpretation is correct. You answered: "I check and recheck!" That only pushes the question back. You check against what? How do you know that the checking and rechecking that you are doing is correct? You cite AMR "correcting" you. How do you know that his interpretation is correct?
How do you know?
I don't. Naturally speaking, I don't have strict rational certainty that the Catholic Church is right. That's why it's called "faith." What I have is a certain degree of probability. Are the bishops of the Catholic Church the successors of the successors[, etc.] of the apostles? If they are, were the apostles credible?
The bishops make an empirical, historical claim: "The offices that we occupy go all the way back to the apostles; we were consecrated by their successors. They passed down a body of teaching to us, and this is what that body of teaching is."
It being probable that the bishops are the successors of the apostles, and it being probable that the apostles were credible and passed on a living religious tradition to their successors, I assent to the truths that the bishops propose for our belief.
If you wish to reject apostolic succession, then the way of disproving it is pretty simple: simply point to a period in history, after the apostles, in which there were no Catholic bishops who could trace their succession back to the apostles.
Except, we're not. My starting point is based on probable assent to an historical, empirical truth which is not in and of itself a matter of scriptural interpretation.
"How do you know?" How does Traditio "KNOW" his church is right other than his suppositions, expectation, and agreement? I think we are in the same boat but only on this point, I had 6 as you remember
The Catholic mass is roughly 2000 years old. Ponder that.