So Who Gave You That Book?
Posted by: tony on 08/08/2007 11:07 PM
Updated by: tony on 08/08/2007 11:07 PM
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Expires: 09/08/2007 12:00 AM
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One of my absolute favorite blogs to read is Eternity Road. The proprietor, Fran Poretto, always makes you think. In this particular case he got me thinking...
Imagine along with me, if you will. Brace yourself well, for the premise will be unpleasant.
Imagine that some calamity has wiped out the whole of the Christian clergy, down to the last man. Every priest, bishop, or minister of the Cross has been felled, perhaps by some exotic disease, but whatever the cause, it's spared everyone else on Earth. No one is left with any claim to the authority to celebrate Mass or administer the Sacraments. No one alive possesses a bishop's apostolic power to ordain a priest.
Years pass. All the world's confirmed Christians die off. No one alive retains any connection to an ordained priest of Christ, or a bishop empowered to confirm a new soul in the Christian faith.
Could there still be Christians after such a calamity?
My answer is yes, of course. For the Sacraments don't make a man a Christian. Christianity isn't the result of an external process, but an internal one. A man becomes a Christian by embracing the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and accepting the Gospels as an adequately faithful record of His teachings. If it were otherwise, the authority of some external power would be able to unmake a Christian. That would contradict much of what Christ said when He walked the Earth.
Though I usually agree with Fran the vast majority of times with regard to his writings on faith, especially the Catholic faith, I have to part ways with him on this one.
When one claims to be faithful to the Gospels, one has to ask a few very hard questions:
1. Who decided what was Gospel?
2. Do you trust the people who decided what was Gospel?
3. Why do you trust those people?
This is the conundrum that vexes Bible-only Christians. Since I haven't seen Matthew, Mark, Luke or John at a "Bible signing" at Barnes and Noble, I have to go by others' word that what they wrote is a true reflection of what Jesus said. Who are those others?
In my case, it's the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Those are the men who gave me the Canon of the Bible. And even though they don't want to admit it, it's those same men who gave the Canon of the Bible to the Protestant churches (well, minus those pesky 7 books that Martin Luther struck on his own authority). These are also the same men who carried Holy Tradition down through the ages. It is also these men who speak to me authoratatively with regards to faith and morals.
So when Protestants tell you that they "follow God's word, not man's", ask them where they got their Canon. What actually happened is they traded one set of man-made doctrines for another.
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