I remember my nearly shocked state when I really absorbed that the Church predated the Bible. It didnāt drop from the sky all ready to go, then birth the Church. The Church wrote the New Testament. The Church selected the canon. The Church, who clearly from the early fathers, was sacramental (real presence, maybe stated differently), bishops, deference to Rome. All there, first.
Discussion
My reaction too. It was a no-brainer, though. Of course someone had to write the books of the New Testament, and of course someone had to choose which ones went into the Canon. The Holy Spirit didn't dictate the Scriptures, nor the list of the Canon, but they reasoned, prayed, and allowed the Holy Spirit to work through them to do so.
The other thing to note is that the Jews didn't have a set Canon, despite what Protestants want to believe. The Sadducees only had the Pentateuch, the Pharisees had the Torah (which I think is smaller than our Canon), and IIRC the Essenes had a much larger Canon (possibly all that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls). The Church had to determine for Herself what was to go into the Church's Canon.
Interesting I didnāt know the Jewish part.
This all, for me, destroyed solo scriptura.
If the Church birthed the scriptures, then it canāt be solo scriptura. In fact the word is in some ways secondary. The Word became flesh. The very presence of God, now sacramental, is the fount of the Church. The Eucharist is the āsource and summitā as JP the Great stated.
So knowing the writers of the New Testament were either priests consecrating at mass or at least attending mass, it makes you look
at John 6, and all the other Eucharistic passages, in a much clearer light.
The Church is Christs continued presence on earth, the Incarnation continued in a way.
This is another reason I don't like calling Holy Scripture the 'Word of God' in that exact phraseology. Holy Scripture doesn't call itself the Word of God. Rather, it says the Son is the Word, and the Word became Flesh. The Holy Scriptures written by the Church are witness to the Author and Perfecter of the Faith, the Source and Summit of our Faith, the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ Himself.
We do worship the Word, which was with God, was God, and became flesh. We however do not worship Scripture, the witness of the Word.
Amen! We worship Christ, God the Son present physically, truly and sacramentally at the Mass. We are not a religion of āthe bookā. Christ and His Church come first. Scripture AND tradition. šš½
The Church didnāt birth the Scriptures.
Vatican I, one of your own ecumenical councils, explicitly rejects this idea.
Roman Catholics are so desperate that they slander their own religion just to lead more people to Satan ā ļø
It is interesting that bringing our cannon in line with the Jews much later canon was Lutherās excuse for dropping 7 books from the Old Testament which were problematic for him.
Of course he also wanted to heavily redact the New Testament too, which is rarely mentioned.
Yep. The protestants don't want to admit that's what happened. Martin Luther was a bad dude with daddy issues and a tendency to despair. Only way to cope was to remove the parts that made him feel bad and convince a third of Europe to apostatize with him.
I have compassion for him, scrupulosity is something I struggle with. But he fell into sin, trying to avoid the very thing he felt guilty of.
One of the best homilies Iāve ever heard described the original sin of Adam this way. If Adam and Eve didnāt know good and evil in a literal sense, they couldnāt have sinned. The sin was claiming the knowledge of right and wrong for themselves, instead of it belonging to God.
You people actually mention it at pretty much every opportunity, which is hilarious, because tons of Roman Catholics in Lutherās day agreed with everything he said on the canon issue, INCLUDING CARDINAL CAJETAN š¤£
How do Roman Catholics always fail at history this hard?
You embarrass yourselves EVERY TIME.
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Acts 17:10-11 And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews. 11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
The scriptures predated Paul's preaching in Berea
