Paultastic Musings

I recently posted on a Catholic's blog, located at http://www.humanae-vitae.com/. The blog's owner, Grant, followed the link to my homepage and found my short article on the canon here. He posted a response to the article on his blog, which can be found here. Okay, enough background? Good. :) Here we go...

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Paul:
God's canon was an artifact of inspiration--the act of inspiring the books in the Bible created the canon (which is infallible because it is God's canon).

Grant:
This is a very vague statement. The canon is an "artifact" of inspiration. What does this mean? God inspired men to write the various books and letters, and this "created" the canon. And the canon is infallible "because it is God's canon." This is true, but it completely misses the point. All the books in the canon are inspired; I agree. However, the books are not self-identifiable as canonical, so the way that we know that the books are inspired are because they are in the canon. His argument, at least as far as I can tell, is circular.

You are confusing God's canon with man's canon--which I clearly differentiate between. God's canon is infallible because it is God's canon. It's very nature requires it to be infallible. It's not circular to assert that God's canon is infallible.

Grant:
Here, and elsewhere, he seems to leave open the possibility that what we call the Bible is not necessarily what God wholly intended for us to have, that some other book may be added in the future, that the canon is not definite.

Because I, along with Gerstner, Sproul, and many other Protestants recognize that there was a historical selection process that the church used to determine which books were Scripture, and which books weren't. The Protestant limits infallibility to the Scriptures alone. Therefore Protestants do not extend infallibility to the church or to the individual believers themselves.

Grant:
I'm going to assume that he is paraphrasing these men, since I doubt they both said the exact same thing using the exact same words.

Pick up the book Sola Scriptura! The Protestant Position on the Bible, and read pages 66-67 where Sproul quotes directly from Gerstner and explains Gerstner's argument.

Paul:
Do I think Rome got the New Testament right? Yes. I recognize that when Rome wrote down what she thought the Canon was, she was fallible. It was a historical process, with different views among the men who took participated in the councils.

Grant:
So in safeguarding the Word of God for all future generations to have a pure and inerrant Gospel, there was no safeguard?

Good intentions (like trying to define the canon) does not make a mere man or group of men infallible. Simply having the desire to teach without error is not enough to insure infallibility. My pastor (a Reformed Baptist) stands in the pulpit every Sunday, earnestly wanting to preach a sermon that is truthful and without error. Does he have a safeguard to prevent him from error when preaching? He sincerely desires to preach the truth. How about the elders at my church? They desire truth, too. Are they infallible? So even as the church sincerely desired to safeguard the canon, it doesn't follow that they were infallible when they did so.

Grant:
The canon of Scripture was correctly identified by accident? I'll state up front: this denial of God's power to protect the Truth being limited to the individual books themselves, and not to the Church which recognized and promulgated those books is shown here to simply fall apart.

I'm not saying God couldn't "protect" anything. That's not the issue. The issue is whether or not the canon that we have is infallible or not. Your argument is, more or less:

1. The Catholic Church is infallible when acting on faith and morals
2. The Canon is a matter of faith and morals, and must be safeguarded
3. Therefore, the Canon is infallible

It boils down to your premise, which is begging the question (and circular). I reject your premise that Rome is infallible, so you can't build your argument upon this foundation.

Paul:
Now some may object that they find it scary that we don't have an infallible Canon. It didn't seem to scare Jesus in Matthew 22:23-32 where Jesus held the Sadducees accountable to the Scriptures. He says "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God...But about the resurrection of the dead--have you not read what God said to you...".

Grant:
Here's the odd thing, though. Scriptural exegesis can point out clearly that Jesus and His apostles frequently, when quoting Scriptures, quoted from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuigent, which contains books not contained in the Protestant canon.

No one knows for sure what the Septuagint in Jesus' day included in it, because the earliest extant manuscripts in our possesion today date back to the fourth Century, and are Christian, not Jewish, in origin.

But, assuming the Septuagint (LXX) of the Fourth Century was the same one used by the Jews in Jesus' day, Catholics have a problem, too. The LXX contained many books that aren't even in the Roman Catholic canon, for example, 3 and 4 Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon. Even more importantly, look at Josephus, who used the Septuagint, but his citation of the Hebrew canon does not include the Deuterocanonicals. Just because a book was included in the Septuagint doesn't mean the Jews felt they were inspired. This point is essential to understanding the canon debate.

Paul:
Jesus quotes Exodus 3:6 and holds the Sadducees accountable to it, who, I might add, did not have an infallible canon. How would the Jew in Jesus' day know the canon infallibly?

Grant:
The nail just went in the coffin. If the Jews did not have an infallible canon, why is it that Protestants follow the Jewish canon of the Old Testament rather than the traditional Christian canon?

I noticed that you didn't answer why Jesus could hold the Sadducees accountable to Scripture without an infallible canon, which you claim I must have. I hold that the Jews had a sufficient canon, which is what I have today.

Now why would I follow the Jewish canon of the Old Testament, as opposed to the Roman one? Well, there are many reasons, not the least being the inconsistency within the Deuterocanonicals. I'd like to know, though, how you would interpret Romans 3:1-2, which says:

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.
--Romans 3:1-2

Seems like Paul had a high view of Jews their prophets, and the canon. What are your thoughts on this Grant?

Paul:
It's also no scarier than what the Christian had always had up until 1546, when Rome "infallibly" defined the canon. Until then, there was no way to know the canon "infallibly."

Grant:
False. The canon was always what it was, and provincial councils confirmed this as early as the fourth century (Hippo, for instance)

.

First, there is some dispute on whether or not Hippo's and Carthage's canon was the same as Trent's, depending on what versions of Esdras were in the canons of Hippo and Carthage. Secondly, I'd like to know how one can obtain infallible knowledge from a fallible council.

No serious Catholic scholar claims that the canon was infallible before Trent. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia affirms this: " According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent." (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Canon)

Grant:
The Vulgate, the "official" translation of the Bible for the Church, contained the same the canon.

The writer of the Vulgate, Jerome, rejected the deuteros as inspired. It's also important to note that simply putting a book in the canon didn't mean that the book was considered inspired. Jerome allowed that the Deuteros were canonical, but that they should be read for edification only.

Grant:
It was "infallibly defined" at Trent for the same reason that any teaching becomes "infallibly defined:" it is called into question or needs clarification for the faithful.

I still have no idea how one can have infallible knowledge of something without an infallible declaration of it. How would the Christian in 1545 have an infallible canon, when there was no infallible pronouncement on the canon yet?

Grant:
It was always believed; it was officially confirmed at Trent for those who would dissent.

This is historically false. Jerome and Origen, arguably the two greatest language scholars of the early church, rejected the deuteros as inspired. Roman scholars followed their lead.

Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St. Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed among the Apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, as is plain from the Prologus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned canonical. For the words as well as of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clear through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage’
--Commentary on all the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament. Taken from his comments on the final chapter of Esther. Cited by William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture (Cambridge: University Press, 1849), p. 48).

Cardinal Cajetan was arguably the greatest Roman scholar at the time of Luther, in fact, he was the guy assigned to interview Luther and to attempt to bring him back to Rome.

One must also consider the Glossa Ordinaria, which is an important witness to the view of the Western Church on the deuteros during the middle ages.

...the Glossa Ordinaria may be regarded as a composite running commentary upon the text of the bible, characterized by its brevity, clarity and authoritativeness, drawing upon the chief sources of teh patristic period...So influential did this commentary become that, by the end of the twelfth centruy, much biblical commentary and exegesis was reduced to restating the comments of the gloss.
--Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 126 (emphasis mine)

The Preface to the gloss repeats the judgment of Jerome that the Church permits the reading of the Deuterocanoncials for devotion and instruction in manners only, but that they have no authority for settling controversies in faith matters. It tells us that there are twenty-two books of the Old Testament (identical to the Jewish and Protestant OT canon), and cites Origen, Jerome and Rufinus as support. When introducing the Deuterocanonicals, the Glossa Ordinaria would comment: "Here begins the book of Tobit which is not in the canon; here begins the book of Judith which is not in the canon" and so on and so forth. This was done for Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, and the Maccabees books also.

Paul:
But how can you say the Bible is infallible when you don't even know if the books in your Bible are correct? This is a little like saying "I can't use my computer since I don't know exhaustively how it works." Look, I don't need to know exhaustively how my computer works in order to claim to say that it works.

Grant:
I know that analogies are by nature imperfect, but this analogy is not even an analogy at all. This analogy assumes the original argument is "I can't use the Scritpure since I don't know exhaustively how it works." That is not the original argument. The only proper analogy would be "I can't trust that this computer will do what I believe it should do because I can't verify that it was well manufactured." It is like having a computer that "may or may not work" and then using it for all or your work.

I don't follow your reasoning. I think the parallel holds. You are making the claim that one without an infallible canon cannot rely on or use the Bible. Similarly, you could say that I cannot use my computer if I don't know 100% without error how all the pieces fit together in my computer.

This is why it's important for you to answer these questions:

How would the Jew 50 years before Christ know the canon infallibly?

Did Jesus hold the Jews accountable to Scripture?

How would the Christian in 1545 have an infallible canon?

Grant:
Jesus Christ, who built His Church on Peter an the Apostles around A.D. 30, with a continual succession of Bishops from that day until now, with One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church thriving for 2,000 years.

You still haven't told me how you can infallibly know this. The Eastern Orthodox claim that they have an infallible magisterium, too, and they can trace their bishops all the way to Peter, too. How do you infallibly know that they aren't the True Church?

Grant:
And how do I know that Christ's Church is infallible? Because the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and the Church is the pillar and bulwark of truth.

There are some leaps of logic here. First, the gates of hell will not prevail against the church because of Christ's faithfulness to the church, not because of some imagined infallibility. Are you saying that when the Church has made an error, then, that the gates of hell prevailed against it? It didn't take long for errors to creep into church teaching...look at the Aryan controversy of the 4th Century (among others). Using your reasoning, the gates of Hades have already prevailed against the church.

Secondly, you are misinterpreting what 1 Tim 3:15 is saying. Yes, the church is the pillar and foundation of truth. Evangelicals affirm this. However, it's important to ask ourselves: what does a pillar do? It holds something up...usually a roof. It's a mistake to confuse the pillar with the roof it holds.

So, the church is not the truth, just like a pillar is not the roof.

Grant:
What good is an "inerrant" (not infallible) book without an "infallible" interpretation?

According to the Webster's Dictionary, one can apply the word "infallible" to inanimate objects, so the term is properly used.

When you attack private interpretation, you are sawing off the very branch that is holding you up. Could you tell us how you came to decide that Rome was the "true" church without engaging in the very private judgment that you have already dismissed as illegitimate?

While you're at it, could you list every single verse that has been infallibly interpreted by Rome? You say that the Bible is useless without an infallible interpretation of it, so this question is an important one.

Paul:
Now herein lies the rub. A Roman Catholic has absolutely no problem accepting that the Pope is infallible when speaking on matters of faith and morals, yet when asked to show how they know this infallibly they respond with silence.

Grant:
You've been talking to the wrong Catholics, then!...Pick up a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Popes, or another such book. Lists all of the popes from Peter to John Paul II.

You've just proven my point. Your response to an inquiry for an infallible list of Popes is the "Oxford Dictionary of Popes." I wasn't aware that this was an infallible work. What Pope or Ecumenical Council promulgated this book? When was it declared to be infallible?

Paul