Peter Kreeft is writing a series of posts to defend Roman Catholicism against fundamentalism. I am not sure why fundamentalism is a threat but I am still getting up to speed on things Romish.
In his post on the Bible, he has this line:
It is a fault, of course, to ignore Mother Church. But it is a virtue to love Baby Bible, a virtue we should respect and imitate.
This is apparently a clever way of saying that the church gave birth to the canon of Scripture, a common point that Roman Catholics make against Protestants. But does this line implicitly and unintentionally contain an element of anti-Semitism?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was well in place well before Peter allegedly became bishop of Rome or before Constantine started to convene ecumenical councils (without consulting the bishop of Rome, I might add). Peter himself, Paul, Christ, and all the authors of the New Testament recognized the Old Testament sacred books.
(And one other wrinkle, parenthetically, is why would high papalists back the idea that the early church councils gave us Scripture and then deny the councils authority later when they decree that popes need regularly to convene councils?)
So why write the priests and rabbis out of the formation of the canon? Or why show disrespect to the Hebrew Scriptures, as if they were not authoritative until the Council of Hippo? (Answer: it doesn’t fit the RC paradigm which may turn out to be as authoritative as the pontiff of Rome.) And why not recognize how much longer and agenda setting the Old Testament is for what happens with Jesus and the church? If we are going to play the genealogy game, as Kreeft wants, then lets include the Hebrew saints. Does that mean King Saul is a forerunner of the papacy?
Old Life 
If Rome birthed the Bible, then Pat Boone may legitimately be the father of heavy metal:
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Watching “Life of Pi”. The hyena in the lifeboat reminds me of Tom Van Dyke during his sojourn here.
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Erik, I almost passed coffee through my nose on that one…
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Kent,
Glad I could oblige, buddy.
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“Dr. Kreeft is a convert to the Catholic Church from reformed Protestantism -”
My Balt. Catechism, Benedictine trained older brother and I had a two hour discussion over the labor day weekend about the prot-catholic; he doesn’t recognize them either. We now have culturally appraised(“dinner table conversations”, “you catch more than you learn”) pre and post Vat II testimony that the prot-catholic is making it up.
Just to make sure, we called Francis’ ecumenical hotline for lapsed RC’s and got Ratzinger’s personal secretary, who said he was unfamiliar with a CIP that neither explained the relevant data set nor posited a principled distinction that, in fact, is never exercised. He laughed and assured us that Ratzinger had no use for ‘principled distinctions’ that rendered his emeritus status impotent. He then wished us a good day “In the merit of papal charism alive and well in the abbey, Ratz.”
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That’s weird, I was under the crazy assumption that the Word created the church…and everything else. What’s all this talks about babies and their mamas?
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Historians and Philosophers ought to test their hypotheses.
First, assume for a moment that this particular Roman Catholic view, that apart from an infallible interpreter we are doomed to interpretive chaos and cannot even identify which books of the Bible are Scripture. What would we expect to find when the Son of God incarnate comes on the scene? Wouldn’t we expect to see Jesus showing great compassion for those who held all sorts of theological errors with Jesus either clearly explaining which books were in the Bible or telling everyone how much better things were going to be in nineteen centuries when Vatican I was going to define papal infallibility (or at least now that He was going to create a magisterium which would infallibly define the canon of Scripture)?
What do we actually find? Jesus routinely refers to the Scriptures as a body of inspired writings which everyone was responsible to believe.
Second, one could reasonably ask if the Roman Catholic teaching magisterium has actually prevented interpretative chaos in the Roman Catholic Church. Even if we limited our search to the U.S. we would see that the Franciscan University of Steubenville seems radically removed from Notre Dame and Georgetown.
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Word up
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Kent, that gives a whole new meaning to “spit take.” (Go to 2:50)
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Jed, makes you want to reach for a contraceptive.
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Regarding Rome can we say, ‘house of cards’? Seriously, does Rome require that one must contort themselves into unmentionable positions in order to keep the party-line? Apparently so! A house of cards ultimately can’t stand…
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Thanks DG, I’m barely old enough to remember DT and his noted abilities at that comic effect.
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DGH:
I was hoping that I would see your name on this list.
ISAE Conference: The Worlds of Billy Graham
Sept. 26-28, 2013
Wheaton College/Wheaton, IL
The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College (IL) will be hosting a conference in Wheaton on Sept. 26-28 that will bring together a number of scholars and former Graham associates to examine and discuss the career, ministry, and legacy of Billy Graham-the premier evangelist of the 20th-century, American icon, and lynchpin of the modern evangelical movement.
Participants will include John Akers (former BGEA executive), Darren Dochuk (author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism), Curtis Evans (University of Chicago Divinity School), Andrew Finstuen (author of Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety), Leighton Ford (former associate evangelist and Graham brother-in-law), Martin Marty, Stephen P. Miller (author of Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South), Grant Wacker (Duke Divinity School), Anne Blue Wills (at work on a biography of Ruth Graham), Ken Woodward (former religion editor of Newsweek), and more.
For information on the full conference program go to http://www.wheaton.edu/ISAE/Projects/The-Worlds-of-Billy-Graham/Project-Participants, or to register, go to http://isaebillygraham2013.eventbrite.com/#. Email the Institute at isae@wheaton.edu or call 630-752-5937 for further information.
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Meanwhile, on the Roman Church providing a principled distinction that Protestantism lacks because of Rome’s ecclesiastical infallibility…
I’ve been going back and forth with a guy by the name of Jonathan over at Jason’s blog on various issues, including ecclesiastical infallibility. Dr. Hart has done some of that as well with the same guy. This is what Jonathan actually told me:
I am flat out telling you that the popes are not always infallible even when they might think they are infallible.
So there you go. And this is a “principled distinction” that Protestantism lacks how? If today’s pope can wrongly think he’s infallible, how does this not boil down to what Rome says is fixed infallible orthodoxy actually being ever in a state of flux and determined by the CURRENT pope, which can then be overturned by a FUTURE pope and Magisterium?
Or, as the tag on these posts is right to ask: Are the CTCers paying attention?
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@DGH
Well I’ll take that as an invitation to correct. The Jewish canon was agreed to in the mid 3rd century and the first list we have that exactly matches the Jewish canon in terms of books comes from the later 2nd century (both dates from memory I can check). Indications from 1st century authors are that the canon was somewhat different. During the early 1st century the classification system the Jews would use for their canon was in place and the list of books within those sections are similar to what would become the final list.
Most importantly though Jews than and now have a hierarchy of books rather than a sharp dividing line between canonical and non-canonical. Canon, in the way Christians mean it, is really IMHO a Christian concept. Moreover, I think it is more likely that the Jews picked up the notion of canon, to the extent that Judaism has a similar concept, from the Christians not the other way around.
I’m not following why you would consider it anti-semetic to claim that Catholics created the Catholic canon. There unquestionably were a variants of canons in the Septuagints at the time, while the lists had general agreement Jerome had to absolutely make some choices in which books were in and which were out.
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@Robert —
The CtCers have a tough situation.
a) They believe the church can never be wrong on matters of faith and morals.
b) Anyone studying history knows the church has obviously been wrong on matters of faith and morals.
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CD,
I think the point is that while there was some disagreement as to the fringes of the canon (i.e., such as debates about Esther), 1st century Judaism had by and large settled on what is the canon accepted both by modern Jews and Protestants (regarding the OT). Part of the issue, however, is that in the first century, there was not one Jewish group. You had the Pharisees who differed in some regards with the Sadducees (though the idea that the Sadducees did not accept the prophets is a bit overblown) who differed from the Essenes who differed from the earliest Christians. And even that is oversimplifying things to a degree.
Beckwith’s The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church has the most thorough argument that first century Judaism accepted as Scripture only those books that now make up the Protestant Old Testament and the Tanakh.
Perhaps the more salient point is that Jesus certainly expected the Jews to see the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings as canonical Scripture even though no infallible body existed to tell him or any other first century Jew that such was the case.
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CD,
Indeed, the CTC position is odd, though it does reflect official Roman dogma about infallibility to a large degree, although you don’t really see the Magisterium or the average lay RC performing awesome feats of mental gymnastics to get around the obvious changes in the Roman system over time.
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@Robert
Absolutely! And you are forgetting the Hellenistic Jews from which Christianity mostly evolved. One of the big arguments was whether books which existed only in Greek and had never been in Hebrew or Aramaic could be part of the canon. We know those debates couldn’t have happened as early as Beckwith would like them to have happened.
Take Tobit for example. Tobit gets included in the canon by just about all Catholic sects, because it was so uniformly in Septuagints. It gets excluded from the Jewish canon because it is only available in Greek. But we know Hebrew/Aramaic versions of Tobit were in circulation in the 1st century BCE. So if the debate had concluded when Beckwith would like it to have concluded there would have been certainty about Tobit’s status. Either it would have been out of the canon and thus not part of the LXXs the Christians were using, or it would have been in the canon and the Hebrew/Aramaic preserved. I don’t see how you can make sense of the documentary record we have and have something like a fixed canon.
Now I will certainly agree that 1st century Jews had the classification system: Teachings (Torah), Prophets ( Nevi’im ), and the Writings (Ketuvim) that would later define the structure of Tanakh. I’m just disagreeing they had the full on Tanakh. But much more importantly, they still don’t have a theology of canon that makes the particular list of books in the Tanakh have an importance that is totally above and beyond other works. We know that 1st century Jews put the Nev’im way about the Ketuvim in religious importance, and not on the same level like a Protestant would. I imagine if I asked most Jews today they would unquestionably put the 6 Mishnah books: Seeds, Festivals, Women, Damages, Holies, Purities above the Ketuvim in authority and importance. Heck its unclear to me even within books whether those chapters in Haftorah, the parts of the Tanakh read during their equivalent of the liturgy, wouldn’t be elevated above the other chapters. Jews to this day don’t really have a full on theology of canon in the Protestant sense. And there is no evidence that they ever did. They had a hierarchy of more and less important.
Yes, absolutely there are hints of the 1st century of what would eventually become the Jewish canon. BTW I’m not saying anything the Jews themselves don’t agree to. The outside evidence we have agrees with the dating for these debates in the Mishnah. So when it says the sifrei ha-minim (books of the sectarians, Greek language stuff), happening during the later 2nd century I believe them. Way out until the early 3rd century there are Jews that still want to accept avon gillayon (a sort of sarcastic way of talking about gospels), I’m surprised but I don’t know why they would lie. We know in the 2nd century there were Jews that wanted sifrei kosemin (books on how to do various forms of magic, now mostly lost) in the “canon” (again with the understanding the Mishnah mostly has no idea what a canon is, so we are to some extent putting words in their mouth).
Given a plausible story with a timeline that is consistent with the documentary record, and external evidence (i.e. the Catholic debates) I see no reason not to believe the Jews are telling the truth about how their canon formed.
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Neoz, I don’t think you want too many Calvinists at this shindig.
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Robert, and I’m flat out telling you that water is only wet in some spots but not others and on certain days but not others. Why is this so hard?
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CD-H, to claim the Hebrew books as Christian without acknowledging the vetting process of the OT saints seems at least ungrateful.
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Robert, take some solace in that the CIP has gone from being valued for it’s explanatory value of the relevant data set to; “at least we have a principled distinction”. It went from being dianabol to now sominex. I’ll settle for cognac
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@Sean
Excellent point. Now I only wish that you all would keep pounding on the issue of the early church. Because again the dataset we have regarding church history contradicts their claims. At best all they have is a principled distinction for how they choose what early Christian they choose to consider Church Fathers and what early Christians they choose to consider early heretics.
And from there the whole “what the church always believed” starts to fall apart on most issues.
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CD, I agree. But, if the EO don’t shake their claims I’m not sure what will.
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Robert,
I am flat out telling you that the popes are not always infallible even when they might think they are infallible.
Then where does this leave the faithful if/when the Pope exerts authority in a manner that may seer their conscience? What a conundrum – do they take a blind leap hoping that he hasn’t attained infallibility on that particular matter?
What if Trent was fallible?
What if Vat I & II were fallible?
Anyone who operates under the assumption that they are infallible are also completely irreformable. And that’s Rome in a nutshell.
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I don’t know nothing about birthing no Bibles!
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Neoz – DGH: I was hoping that I would see your name on this list.
Erik – Hart hiring on with the catering crew and peeing in the punchbowl would have roughly the same effect as him giving a lecture.
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Jed,
Bingo.
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More from a RC on Ecclesiastical Infallibility:
Infallibility does not apply generally to anything that has to do with faith and morals.
As with many concepts, the Church had to work out the parameters by experience.
This is just ludicrous and absurd. The RC Church either preserves the apostolic deposit of faith and teaches only what the church has always taught or it doesn’t. This talking out of both sides of its mouth is frustrating and makes the modern Roman Church no better than any elected leader who gets all huffy when we’ve taken them at their word.
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