(urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes danldo at gmail.com
Sun Dec 20 11:48:29 PST 2009


On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:13 PM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

>> [The deuterocanon]
>
> Ah! Well, they didn't "toss" the deuterocanon because there was some
> theology in them they didn't like ("suit them"). They tossed them because
> they considered their origins questionable in the extreme and not included
> in the Hebrew canon.

That was the excuse given, yes.

The fact is that the (modern) Jewish canon was not set until _after_
the rise of Christianity.

The fact is that the early Church fathers, including Paul, freely quoted
from the "deuterocanon." If the "Reformation" was a return to the form
of the early Church, they ought to have taken that into account.

The fact is that the deuterocanon - particularly Maccabees and
Tobit - contained theological statements that were inconvenient for
Luther, Zwingli, et alia. Luther even wished he could deform the
New Testament by removing the Epistle of James, "an epistle of
straw" with "nothing of the Gospel in it." (Why? He doesn't state
this clearly but I suspect it was because James' epistle militates
rather strongly against a pure "Sola Fide" approach: "What good
is faith without deeds" and all that.)

> You're entire denunciation of Luther and the "Deformers" is based on a
> presumption that that "the Church" is synonymous with the the Roman Church
> hierarchy:

Not the hierarchy, no; the massed body of believers that constitutes
the Mystical Body of Christ. Luther et al. chose to dismember that
Body.

Incidentally, along with the Roman church, I _do_ believe that Protestants
are members of that Body. Just to be clear on that.


> Therefore, it is *they* (a group that includes the church
> leadership 1500 years later and even at its most corrupted) and not the
> Apostles who wrote the New Testament.

No. It is the Mystical Body of Christ, long before the fifteenhundreds, who
_selected_ the "apostolic" texts that constitute canon. There is some
reasonable doubt as to the apostolic origin of some of those texts, and
there were other texts of seemingly apostolic origin which did not get
selected. The canon was selected by the Church - there was no
divinely-given Table of Contents.

> And the authority of those apostles
> (you seem to presume) is based on their membership within this group.

No. Rather, the authority of the church hierarchy derives from its
continuity with the Apostles.

> But
> one cannot view "them" (that group) as such an eternal entity. Otherwise,
> where was the Church during the *years* when the leadership was deeply
> divided about who was the Pope?

I don't know that part of history well enough to answer that question
adequately. I freely admit my ignorance.

> Was it the Roman Church who "wrote" the Bible or the Eastern Orthodox one?

That's an interesting question, and complicated by the fact that some of
the Eastern churches include in their canon additional texts that are not
a part of the Roman canon (not to mention a couple of other ancient
canons such as the Coptic). I don't have easy answers for all questions.


> If it was both, why can't the Lutheran Church make the same claim since they
> branched from the same root?

My claim is that the Lutheran church chose its canon for wrong
reasons, listed above.

Let me put it this way: if you take the attitude you are proposing here,
then the logical result is that you have no argument against the Book
of Mormon, or the "corrected" Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses.


> And if the Reformed Church (not to be confused
> with Reformed Catholics) were also that church which wrote the Bible, then
> why can't they reconsider the canon of the Old Testament?

Since I deny that the Reformed Church was at that time "also that
Church," I can't answer this question meaningfully.

> After all, we're
> not talking about vital doctrine to either Christians or Jews. The
> harumphing over "tossing out bits of Scripture" seems to have more to do
> annoyance at the Reformer's ephrontery rather than concern that the
> Scripture was actually losing something vital.

Disagree strongly. There are theological points in the "deuterocanon"
that are indeed vital. One of the interesting effects of the Lutheran
rejection is that the Protestant Bible manages to contain a book with
not one mention of God - the only references to God in Esther are
in the parts that the Protestants threw out.

Second Maccabees provides the scriptural basis for the practice of
praying for the souls of the dead, something that many Protestant
churches regard as next to necromancy.

> Having lived for a time in Rome himself and having seen concupiscence and
> venality as rule among the leadership there, Luther had already dispensed
> with the idea that "the Church" could be closely identified with those men.

That's because the hierarchy isn't the Church. Never was, though the
hierarchy made that mistake for some centuries.

>>> Look, Dan'l, the scandal of Indulgences was not just a bad "practice".
>>
>> That's _exactly_ what it was.
>
> I repeat:
>>>
>>> Luther's point was that it struck to the heart of the doctrine of
>>> Salvation.
>
> Either the Pope was (and could be) wrong about the doctrine of Salvation and
> made existential promises (From The Chair) that he certainly could not
> deliver on  -- or he was a pretender: not the *real* head of the "True
> Church" (as my Reformed Catholic friends believe is the case now). Luther
> believed the first when he nailed he theses to the door, and probably
> believed the latter as well by he was debating Transubstantiation with
> Zwingli.

But Indulgences have *NOTHING* to do with salvation. A soul "in
Purgatory" *is* a saved soul; it is on the way to Heaven. The
*practice* of selling indulgences was about the purely speculative
nature of Purgatory. No Pope or Council, even in the darkest of
times, provided a definition of Purgatory that would actually
support the practice of selling indulgences.

Incidentally, indulgences are still present in the Catholic faith.
It's just that you can't _buy_ them.


>> Actually, the concept of papal infallibility didn't even exist at the
>> time.
>> It was not defined until the first Vatican Council in the 1800s.
>
> The concept was not created at the Vatican Council.

I didn't say it was. I said it wasn't defined (i.e., made a part of
actual Catholic ecclesiastical theology) until then. The concept
did exist as early as the seventeens, and maybe a little earlier.

> I'd say they sped it along. I think the RCC made some pretty significant and
> good internal reforms due to Reformation. It was also vital to the RCC
> making accommodations with Rationalism.

Yes. The RCC has the ability to do this. A number of Protestant
churches still don't, which is why we have people who believe that
the fossil record is a lie.


> The Reformation was largely a
> creature of Rationalism and the printing press.

I would add "the rise of the bourgeois class."

> Sola Scriptura would have
> been a meaningless platitude without the ability of the masses to easily
> obtain Bible's in their own tongue. Perhaps the Church leaders recognized
> that, and so kept such a brutal thumb on those who attempted to duplicate
> St. Jerome's great feat.

Interestingly, it isn't that the Church forbade translations into then-
modern languages; it is that the Church forbade doing so without
the guidance of the Church. Consider the Douay-Rheims translation,
which dates from the fifteens.


> When most Protestants speak of "orthodox", they are referring to something
> akin to Augustinian theology. Luther, Calvin, and 95% of educated
> Protestants accept Augustine or near-Augustine as the "orthodox" coin of the
> realm. And he's a RC saint.

Not merely a saint, but a Doctor of the Church - his theology is
considered to be baseline for Catholics. But then, Augustine (i.e.,
the City of God) clearly supports the idea that the Church has a
natural hierarchy.

> I realize Catholic priests mean something more
> extensive by the term and Eastern Orthodox mean something wholly different.
> But Augustine is a nice broad tent that even has room for Reformed Catholics
> (who in my opinion, are merely doing what you think Luther ought to have
> done).

No; I think they're doing what Luther _did_, i.e., breaking from the central
Church because they can no longer accept the authority of the hierarchy.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes



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