Another round on the same God controversy

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/01/same-god-more-from-francis-beckwith.html

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/01/edward-feser-on-christians-muslims-and-the-reference-of-god.html

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/01/a-searle-y-objection-to-the-causal-theory-of-names.html

Anthony, don't pray for me

I'm somewhat hesitant to comment on this post:

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/05/21/st-anthony-pray-for-us/

It's a sensitive, personal issue. However, Beckwith put it out there for public consumption. And it contains an implicit Catholic apologetic (i.e. a Catholic miracle confirms Roman Catholic theology). Moreover, I've waited three months.

So what are we to make of this?

i) On one interpretation, this is a minor miracle. Too timely and unlikely to be sheer coincidence. And, by implication, this validates the Catholic cult of the saints. 

ii) I have reservations about explaining this naturalistically. That might seem like special pleading. Would I do the same in case of Protestant answered prayer?

iii) That said, there's nothing inherently wrong with evaluating a theological claim by theological criteria. 

iv) And even if we consider this miraculous, does it support Catholic dogma? To begin with, there's a certain irony: Beckwith prays to the patron saint of cancer patients on behalf of a cancer patient, who nevertheless dies shortly thereafter. How does that validate St. Anthony's reputation as a long-distance healer? If the patient was cured, that would be impressive. But since the patient succumbed, that hardly furnishes supporting evidence for Anthony's reputation. 

It's like "evidence" for global warming. If there's a warming trend, that's evidence for global warming–but if there's a cooling trend, that's consistent with global warming. Whether it's wetter or drier, that's evidence for global warming. 

If either outcome is consistent with St. Anthony's reputation, then does anything really count as evidence for or against his reputation? Or is it just random? 

v) Assuming (ex hypothesi) that it's a miracle, what kind of miracle would it be? Not like turning water into wine or the multiplication of food. Rather, this would be a coincidence miracle. A result of God's extraordinary providence.

That, however, is very predestinarian. That assumes God prearranged ordinary circumstances to converge on this opportune and naturally improbable outcome. If so, that's inconsistent with the libertarian strand of Catholic theology (e.g. Jesuit theologians). 

vi) Assuming (ex hypothesi) that it's a miracle, does it validate the cult of the saints? Not unless you think the only function of a miracle is to attest doctrine. Moreover, that's offset by Protestant miracles.

vii) Assuming (ex hypothesi) that it's a miracle, it could be a case of God's merciful condescension. Giving consolation to the grief-stricken. I don't reject that out of hand. 

viii) But is a naturalistic explanation special pleading in this case? How extraordinary in this incident? 

On the one hand, Anthony of Padua is a very popular saint in Catholic piety. There's nothing unusual about Catholics having medallions of St. Anthony. Odds are, that's pretty common.

If, moreover, a Catholic has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, that ups the odds that he will turn to St. Anthony–and do so more often. 

On the other hand, the fact that Francis Beckwith singled out St. Anthony requires no special explanation under the circumstances:

When my father first told us that he had cancer, I made it a point to pray for him each morning and each evening from that day forward. Although I wanted to do so by asking for the assistance of one of the great saints of the Church, who that saint would be was not obvious. After a little research, I discovered that St. Anthony of Padua was the patron saint of cancer victims.

There's nothing improbable about that. The only thing that's unusual in this case is the conjunction of these two individuals praying to the same saint. And even in that case, it's not the conjunction of independent causal chains, for the action of Francis was dependent on the condition of patient. 

The combination is unlikely, but not uncanny, or even all that remarkable. It's striking enough to grab your attention, and it invites the possibility that this was miraculous. But it's not naturally inexplicable or even extraordinary. 

Francis Beckwith's canonical confusions

Francis Beckwith says:

It’s my understanding that the Palestinian Jews rejected the New Testament as well.

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2012/12/why-do-i-reject-the-apocrypha/#comment-82735

Francis Beckwith is fond of these cute little quips. But they’re intellectually shallow.

i) There’s nothing inconsistent about regarding Palestinian Jews as more reliable witnesses to the OT canon than the NT canon. God revealed the OT to the Jews. For centuries, the Jews copied and recopied the OT. A chain-of-custody. That’s hardly comparable to the NT.

ii) In addition, it’s reasonable to distinguish between Palestinian Jews and Diaspora Jews. Jews who relied on a Greek edition of the OT were further removed from the source.

iii) Keep in mind, too, that some NT writers were Palestinian Jews. So not all Palestinians Jews rejected the NT. Consider Jewish followers of Jesus who belonged to the 1C church of Jerusalem.

It is not clear how a divided Church tradition helps the Protestant case, since by employing this argumentative strategy you seem to concede the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures.

Divided tradition applies to “the Church” as well as the canon. There are divergent traditions regarding the primacy of Rome.

That is, if the Church, until the Council of Trent’s definitive declaration, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the OT canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.

i) No. At best that would mean sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of Roman Catholicism.

ii) But this isn’t really a question of sola scriptura, although Beckwith would like to recast it in those terms. If the church of Rome can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the canon of Scripture, that means the church of Rome can live with ambiguity about when or whether God has spoken. Ambiguity about true and false prophecy. Ambiguity about people speaking in God’s name without God’s authorization.

If that ambiguity applies to the canon, why not church councils and papal encyclicals?

 After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an unsettled canon for Christianity’s first 15 centuries, as you do, seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a 16th century invention, and thus not an essential Christian doctrine.

i) Needless to say, Protestants don’t think Trent settled the canon. At best, Trent settled the canon for the church of Rome. And even then, Trent settled on the wrong canon.

ii) Beckwith fails to draw an elementary distinction regarding the canon:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/04/oracles-of-god.html

iii) Beckwith’s argument is circular. As long as the church of Rome had a monopoly on western Christendom, then, by definition, sola scriptura wasn’t fully operative. If a drug cartel controls a city, things can’t return to normal until the power of the cartel is broken. 

iv) Trent didn’t confine itself to the OT canon. Trent settled a number of other Catholic dogmas. So, by Beckwith’s logic, Tridentine dogmas were never essential Christian doctrines. Tridentine dogmas were never fundamental to authentic Christianity.

Miscarriage

Objection 3: Because so many pregnancies result in miscarriages or spontaneous abortions, it is difficult to believe the unborn are complete human beings during their entire gestation.

Not every conception results in the birth of a child. In fact, some have estimated that between 20% and 50% of all concepti die before birth. And some have claimed that up to 30% die before implantation. Thomas Shannon and Allan Wolter maintain that only 45% of sperm-egg unions result in live births, with the remaining ending in miscarriage, which leads them to hold that the individual human being does not come to be at conception. That is, because of the apparently vast number of unborn entities that perish prior to birth (and usually very early in pregnancy), some people find it difficult to believe that the newly conceived unborn entity is fully human. But this is clearly an invalid argument, for it does not logically follow from the number of unborn entities who die that these entities are by nature not human beings who have begun their existence. To cite an example, it does not follow from the fact that under-developed countries have a high infant mortality rate that their babies are not as human as those born in countries with low infant mortality rates. After all, what if it were discovered that the numbers cited above are mistaken, that in fact 90% of all conceptions come to term? Would it now be the case that the early embryo is an individual human being that began her existence at conception? Again, why would the number of entities who perish make a difference as to whether these entities were human beings who had begun their existence at conception? After all, all human beings who are conceived die, whether they die as a result of a miscarriage at three months gestation or as an adult in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of 42. Are we to infer from this 100% mortality rate that none of these beings are human beings who have begun their existence?

It should be noted, as Patrick Lee points out, that “the percentages mentioned by proponents” of the spontaneous abortion “argument are disputable. For one thing...[as we saw earlier], in many cases the fertilization process is in effect incomplete, so that what is growing is not a complete human being. Many of the products of fertilization which fail to implant are no doubt the results of incomplete fertilizations and so are not human persons [or human beings].”

But suppose someone were to respond to this analysis by arguing that if we really believe that every conception is a human being, are we not obligated to prevent all spontaneous abortions even though it may lead to overpopulation and an appropriation of medical and other resources that may have catastrophic results?

First, this response does not show that the newly conceived entity is not a human being who began her existence at conception; rather, it is an attack upon the intellectual consistency of those who offer arguments to support their belief that the newly conceived entity is a human being whose existence began at conception. It is those arguments, and not the people who offer them, that are the proper object of analysis.

Second, in this chapter I am not arguing that all human beings are full-fledged members of the moral community (i.e., persons). Rather, I am making the argument that a human being begins her existence at conception. Whether that human being while in her mother’s womb should be a subject of moral concern from conception on par with typical adult human beings is another question and the focus of Chapter 6. So, in reply to the response, I could simply say that a human being dies as a result of a spontaneous abortion, but whether that human being is a subject of moral concern on par with a typical adult human being is another question altogether.

Third, assuming that the unborn from conception is a subject of moral concern (i.e., a person), this response is flawed in another way: it confuses our obvious prima facie moral obligation not to commit homicide (that is, to intentionally kill an innocent human person) with the questionable moral obligation to interfere with natural death of a human person in every instance. Clearly the former does not entail the latter. “Protecting life is a moral obligation, but resisting natural death is not necessarily a moral duty....There is no inconsistency between preserving natural life, opposing artificial abortion and allowing natural death by spontaneous abortion.” Consider an illustration outside of the context of abortion: a healthy 82-year-old man is clearly a human person as would be his twin. Imagine that the twin is in the last stages of cancer and no known remedy can save him. Suppose, however, he could prolong his life for a little bit more but only if he undergoes painful chemotherapy that will result in several months of misery. Our prima facie duty not to kill the healthy twin does not entail that we have a duty to require that the dying twin undergo the chemotherapy, even though both are human persons. Consequently, just as difficult questions about withholding and withdrawing treatment from dying patients do not count against our prohibition against killing innocent healthy adults, the question of how we should ethically respond to spontaneous abortions does not count against the pro-life position that it is morally wrong to directly and intentionally kill the healthy and normally developing unborn.

-- Francis Beckwith, Defending Life, pages 75-77

Be sure "Journeys of Faith" aren't traveling in the wrong direction

Steve posted a link to a chapter in a book entitled "Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism".

I participated in some of the comments in the original thread, but I wanted to follow up with a thought or two.

Francis Beckwith, whose "journey" was recounted in the book, seemed straightaway to hijack the comments, complaining that "I don’t think it’s right to refer to the primary chapters as “defenses", as Justin Taylor had done in his introduction. Beckwith went on to say,

There is an overuse in the Evangelical world of the language of military combat and adversarial jurisprudence to describe every theological disagreement. So, we don’t “dialogue over the nature of biblical inspiration.” We “battle for the Bible.” We don’t present reasons why we believe the way we do. We offer “evidence that demands a verdict.” We don’t engage contrary religious traditions. We rebut “the Kingdom of the Cults.” Enough already.

But several of the commenters noted that such language was Biblical, and if anything is worth being adversarial over, it is the true nature of "the one true faith".

I would say further, this whole concept of "Journeys of faith" is a questionable concept. While I have a great deal of respect for "those who traveled from Christian tradition to another" -- the assumption being that these are individuals who want to follow Christ more closely -- we certainly have to admit that, given the "theological disagreements" of the last 500, or 1000 years, that someone is -- many someones are -- clearly taking their "journeys of faith" in the wrong direction. It is very wrong-headed to attribute some sort of moral equivalence to these journeys. There are clearly moral and theological differences. One would hope at some point that these actual differences would be discussed, thoroughly and honestly.

What is always lacking in these "ecumenical" discussions is that the recently-found Roman concept of "separated brethren" is really a combination of the concept that Protestants are "invincible" in their "ignorance" (hardly a concept upon which to build "brotherhood") along with a wholesale adoption by Rome of 19th century liberal concepts. Neither of these is acceptable to evangelicals, nor should they be. But the smiley-face pasted on these dual concepts gives Rome the opportunity to appear to be magnanimous, offering an ersatz "fullness" which some of the other branches of Christianity purportedly don't have. Thus, Rome insults Protestants, and they frequently don't even realize the doctrinal condescension and the rot that lies behind the smiles.

All along, genuine historical scholarship that I'm reading is showing two things. It is (a) shoring up historical justification for Jesus, and (b) clearly exposing the sham of any historical "justification" behind the papacy, which is the heart and soul of the Roman system. Hence, in recent years, Rome has retreated behind behind the imagery of a "Petrine" ministry, in which Peter has some vaguely defined "headship" among the "college" of Apostles (and not the "primacy of jurisdiction" pronounced in a more cocksure era of Vatican I).

Rather than "explore" "personal journeys", it is a far better thing to spend our time re-examining Christian history as it was lived and breathed in generation after generation. We would see that every branch of Christianity has its problems, but no one has done more violence to Christianity than has Roman Catholicism.

Much better in my opinion to give up the fuzzy, back-stabbing ecumenism and really analyze what divides us in honest terms, using honest exegesis from Scripture, and honest historical investigation.

The papacy and the presidency

Nearly twenty-eight years later, Gingrich is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States. Much, of course, has happened since he published that book in 1984, and over the years we have learned many things about Gingrich. His many achievements include his leadership role in the 1994 Republican take-over of Congress and his subsequent ascendancy to the office of Speaker of the House. His many foibles include a significant House ethics violation and personal moral failures that resulted in two broken marriages.

 

In 2009, Gingrich was received into the Catholic Church, the faith of his third wife, Callista Bisek. Because Catholic conversion requires the sacrament of confession, Gingrich has been absolved of his sins. This, of course, suggests to many, including me, that one cannot evaluate Gingrich’s candidacy and character without taking his conversion seriously. It is a mistake for Christians to emulate the world and treat a man’s conversion as if it were the metaphysical equivalent of a change in hobby.

 

On the other hand, Rod Dreher raises an important point in suggesting that Christian conservatives take care in their choice of standard-bearer. Relying on insights by New York Times writer Ross Douthat, Dreher argues that Christian conservatives, in the toxic atmosphere of the culture wars, cannot afford to have as a public face a figure who for most of his adult life has shunned the virtues and ways of life that Christian conservatives want to advance in the public square.

 

This is not to diminish or call into question Gingrich’s conversion. Quite the opposite. For, as the Catholic Catechism teaches, absolution of sins does not eradicate all the effects and consequences of those sins on the shaping of one’s character. This requires ongoing conversion, including detaching oneself from those things that may provide an occasion for sin.

 

It seems to me that a man whose sins arose as a consequence of the pursuit of political power and the unwise use of it after he became Speaker of the House should not be seeking the most powerful office in the world.

 

Newt Gingrich, to be sure, changed my life, and I am grateful for that. But it is far more important that Gingrich’s new life change his soul, and for this reason, I will not support him in the Republican primary.

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/newt-gingrich-redemption-and-the-presidency.html

This raises the intriguing question of whether Beckwith holds the US President to higher moral standards than the Pope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Sexually_active_after_receiving_Holy_Orders

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Sexually_active_during_their_pontificate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Suspected_to_have_had_male_lovers_during_pontificate

Of course, one has to use Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but just as a matter of principle, if we assume this is historically accurate for the sake of argument, should sexual immortality disqualify a man from being the US President even though it shouldn’t disqualify a man from being the Vicar of Christ?

The God-Haunted Atheism of Christopher Hitchens

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/the-god-haunted-atheism-of-christopher-hitchens.html

"Abortion"

http://homepage.mac.com/francis.beckwith/Abortion.pdf

Beckwith misstates Catholic theology

Francis Beckwith says:

December 2, 2011 at 9:11 am

There’s an interesting question percolating beneath this controversy: what if Mike Licona cannot change his mind because he remains unconvinced by his critics’ arguments? Our beliefs are not formed like we form arguments, the latter of which are deliberate with a certain end in mind. People, of course, do change their beliefs, but they rarely if ever change them because of one or two arguments. Why? Because beliefs come in clusters, and those clusters are part of a complex mosaic of interlocking and mutually dependent other beliefs.

 

So, when Geisler et al demand that Licona recant, they are literally asking him to publicly violate his own conscience (if in fact they have not provided him sufficient reason to abandon his belief). The only way that Geisler et al can trump Licona’s conscience is if they have authority; that is, unless Geisler et al constitute am ecclesial magisterium that Mike is obligated to obey, their call for recantation is unwarranted.

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2011/12/mike-licona-norman-geisler-albert-mohler-and-the-evangelical-circus/

Beckwith is suggesting that if a man can't change his mind because he's unconvinced, the Magisterium has the authority trump his doubt or disbelief. But this runs contrary to Catholic theology, according to which the Magisterium lacks the authority of bind a man's conscience in violation of his conscience.

It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man's response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will.(8) This doctrine is contained in the word of God and it was constantly proclaimed by the Fathers of the Church.(7) The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. Man, redeemed by Christ the Savior and through Christ Jesus called to be God's adopted son,(9) cannot give his adherence to God revealing Himself unless, under the drawing of the Father,(10) he offers to God the reasonable and free submission of faith. It is therefore completely in accord with the nature of faith that in matters religious every manner of coercion on the part of men should be excluded. In consequence, the principle of religious freedom makes no small contribution to the creation of an environment in which men can without hindrance be invited to the Christian faith, embrace it of their own free will, and profess it effectively in their whole manner of life.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html

Francis Beckwith's magic carpet ecclesiology

Francis J. Beckwith says:

You have this great gift, the Bible, because of scribes–all of whom resided in Catholic monastaries for nearly a millenium–who carefully, cautiously and devoutly copied the manuscripts of Scripture. These copies were preserved and protected for generations. The Church’s first complete Bible, the Latin Vulgate, was translated by St. Jerome, a Catholic priest.

http://pastortimrogers.com/?p=2674#comment-4691

i) Why does Beckwith imagine that’s inconsistent with Protestant theology? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Protestantism is true. The true God is the God of Protestant theism.

Is there some reason to think the Protestant God wouldn’t use medieval monks to copy the Bible?

ii) Medieval monks weren’t transcribing the Hebrew OT or the Greek NT. They didn’t know Greek or Hebrew. They could only transcribe the Vulgate. That’s better than nothing, but that’s not what Protestants rely on.

iii) Of course, Jerome espoused the Jewish canon, so that’s a double-edged sword.

iv) You can’t retroactively validate modern Catholicism by appealing to a 5C church father. Jerome knew nothing of the Medieval papacy, or the Renaissance papacy, or Trent, or Vatican I, or Vatican II, and so on and so forth.

v) The Vulgate also canonizes some passages (e.g. the Pericope Adulterae; the Long Ending of Mark) which even modern Catholic Bible scholars regard as inauthentic.

vi) Apropos (v), has the Magisterium instructed the faithful on which Bible MSS we should use when translating the Bible? What’s the authoritative text of Scripture? What edition of the Greek and Hebrew Bible does the Vatican currently endorse? Does the Roman curia have a magisterial office devoted to that task?

What misled Beckwith back to Rome

I’m going to comment on some recent claims by Francis Beckwith.

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/reformation-day-and-what-led-me-to-back-to-catholicism.html

My reasoning, however, was extra-biblical. For it appealed to an authoritative leadership that has the power to recognize and certify books as canonical that were subsequently recognized as such by certain Fathers embedded in a tradition that, as a Protestant, I thought more authoritative than the tradition that certified what has come to be known as the Catholic canon. This latter tradition, rejected by Protestants, includes St. Augustine as well as the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), the Third Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), the Fourth Council of Carthage (A.D. 419), and the Council of Florence (A.D. 1441).

 

But if, according to my Protestant self, a Jewish council and a few Church Fathers are the grounds on which I am justified in saying what is the proper scope of the Old Testament canon, then what of New Testament canonicity? So, ironically, given my Protestant understanding of ecclesiology, the sort of authority and tradition that apparently provided me warrant to exclude the deuterocanonical books from Scripture – binding magisterial authority with historical continuity – is missing from the Church during the development of New Testament canonicity.

 

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains that this magisterial authority was in fact present in the early Church and thus gave its leadership the power to recognize and fix the New Testament canon. So, ironically, the Protestant case for a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon depends on Catholic intuitions about a tradition of magisterial authority.

 

I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.

 

After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.

i) If the church is logically prior to the Bible, where does that leave Intertestamental Jews?

ii) It’s quite possible to have a correct understanding of something without having that formalized in some official statement. For instance, if you grow up in a particular culture, you pick up many unwritten rules by process of osmosis. You don’t need to read an official rulebook to know what the rules are. Rather, that’s an unspoken cultural assumption which you share in common with fellow members of the same culture. Something you learn through observation and imitation.

For instance, ancient Jews who attended the synagogue every Saturday, or went to Jerusalem on annual feast days, would acquire an informal knowledge of Jewish belief and practice.

At the same time, the Scriptures set a standard against which to measure this acculturated understanding of the faith.

iii) In Catholicism, until Trent, you had two competing traditions of the canon which coexisted–the Augustinian and the Hieronymian. What this means is that God enabled some Catholics to have a correct understanding of the canon while he also allowed other Catholics to fall into error concerning the canon. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition, as if everyone has to get it right for anyone to get it right. The true canon was always available to pre-Tridentine Catholics. It’s not as if books were missing.

iv) Beckwith defaults to ecclesiastical recognition of the canon, but that only pushes the issue back a step, for recognition of the magisterium is also a historical process. Moreover, many parties did not or do not recognize the claims of Rome. Therefore, if Beckwith needs the magisterium to back up the Bible, he also needs something to back up the magisterium.

v) It’s also funny to see how oblivious he is to the parallel implications of his own position. Where was the church before Trent? If believers could get along all those years without the church defining the canon, then on that issue (among others) they were doing without the guidance of the church for 1500 years.

Keep in mind, too, that the Tridentine canon is just a historical accident. An afterthought. If it hadn’t been for the Reformation, there’s no reason to think that even now the Roman church would have a formal canon of Scripture. So who needs the magisterium? The timing is so haphazard and belated.

Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge.

I’ve dealt with that objection (among others) here:

http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/godscanon.html

Francis Beckwith was misled, now he misleads

Francis Beckwith has used the occasion of “Reformation Day” to put out his own account of the “canon” argument, entitled Reformation Day – and What Led Me To Back to Catholicism. But rather, we should think, he’s been misled, and now he’s trying to mislead others.

One commenter chided him for having trotted out “the same tired old arguments” which “(if you studied this stuff in any detail) you would have to know better than to make these baldly partisan and misleading statements.” But the blind lead the blind, and some of them like it that way.

Beckwith: if, according to my Protestant self, a Jewish council and a few Church Fathers are the grounds on which I am justified in saying what is the proper scope of the Old Testament canon …

He is wrong about this. The “council of Jamnia” was not when the canon was fixed. Jamnia was not even a council. It was a group of Rabbinical scholars.

On the other hand, the Canon of the Old Testament was widely known and attested in the first century. Jesus in Luke 24:44 named “the law, the prophets and the writings”. This was Jesus citing a fixed canon of the Old Testament. These were precisely the 39 books of the Old Testament that we have today. And Josephus wrote in Contra Apionem of a fixed canon in his own day, which was not disputed. What you have here is a Canon of the Old Testament that was recognized in precisely the same way that Protestants say the New Testament was recognized.

the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures.

This is very clearly a false statement, based on the fact that the Old Testament Scriptures were already widely attested.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains that this magisterial authority was in fact present in the early Church and thus gave its leadership the power to recognize and fix the New Testament canon. So, ironically, the Protestant case for a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon depends on Catholic intuitions about a tradition of magisterial authority.

Jesus recognized “a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon” (Luke 24:44). There was no “magisterial authority” in the early church. That much is clear from the fact that an emperor had to call the first general council (Nicea), and an emperor, in fact, called each of the first seven councils.

And aside from that, he is here equivocating on the word “church”. It is a gross assumption on his part to anachronistically read back today’s Roman “leadership” into the early church.

In fact, the way that the Old Testament canon became “recognized” based on the authority of the prophets, or the lack thereof, is precisely the same way the New Testament writings were “recognized” and “received” as Scripture.

There is very good evidence that Paul’s letters were collected and distributed during his own lifetime. Note that Peter recognized the collected writings of Paul as “Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:14-16).

The “church” of the day had no “power to recognize and fix” the New Testament canon. The “church” “leadership” in the early centuries held in their hands a body of writings that came from the Apostles, and the only thing they could do was to recognize them as “authoritative”. Any questions about documents had more to do with “whether the Apostles wrote or authorized this or that document” rather than anything to do with saying “this is a fixed canon”.

to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.

On the contrary, the Scriptures are the God-breathed Word of God, always recognized as such – there is nothing more essential than the Scriptures. The Jews recognized a prophet – or not – and the New Testament Christians, beginning with Jesus (Luke 24:44) recognized the Old Testament, and Peter (2 Peter 3:14-16) knew of “all of [Paul’s] letters” and recognized them as Scriptures. Nobody sat down and said, “we recognize a canon of 39 books”. They had a stack of books that were recognized as authoritative from a prophet, and when they added them all up, they came up with the number 39. It was the same thing with the New Testament.

Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge.

Also not true. Each book was “recognized” individually, and the “canon” is an artifact of, a result of that process.

But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts.

Not true. “66-ness” is not a property of the Scriptures, it is an artifact.

HT: David H.

"Analogies and the Death of Bin Laden"

Francis Beckwith responds to N.T. Wright's argument on the allegedly "unjust" killing of Osama bin Laden.

Just, justified, or both?

http://www.patheos.com/community/returntorome/2011/05/03/al-mohler-killing-of-bin-laden-was-just-but-not-an-act-of-justice-is-this-possible/

Certainly this tells us something

Here are a couple of product reviews from Amazon’s product page for the Avery Cardinal Dulles work Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith:




Steve Hays has commented on this work:

The Magisterial cat-and-mouse game

“The Magisterium in the New Testament”