Bible Bill, an enthusiastic Protestant, goes after Art rather triumphantly on the issues of “Christ alone” and “Scripture alone”. As you will soon read, that was a bad idea. Bible Bill’s comments are in purple. Art responds in blue.
I read where a Catholic can't believe in Christ alone but (is required by the doctrines of his own Church to believe) in Christ plus baptism and the sacraments and other helps given by the Church.
The protestant is constantly trying to over-simplify the full nature of the Christian faith. Christianity is NOT believing in Christ alone. You must believe in the revelation to the Jews in the OT. You must believe in the God who revealed these things to the Jews. Christ himself must be believed to be the promised Messiah from the OT so you have to believe in those prophecies. While Jesus is the focus of our faith, we cannot believe in Him alone without having to believe a number of things about him which derive from the OT. Jesus and his disciple taught a number of things that we also must believe including the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation (John 3:5), the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (1Cor 10:14ff), and the authority of his disciples to govern the Church (Matt 16:16-20, 18:18). If you do not believe what Jesus taught, you do not believe in Jesus. Otherwise, Jesus becomes a mere religious talisman or idol and not our teacher (Matthew 23:8f). When we ignore what Jesus taught, we make him into a religious object subservient to our own opinions and interpretations. This is the worst form of idolatry.
Paul cursed the Judaizers who taught that in addition to faith in Christ's finished work one also must keep the Jewish law. That destroys the gospel.
This is totally muddled. St Paul objected to the Judaizers because they taught that the Gentiles had to be circumcized and keep the whole Mosaic law. There is nothing about "Christ's finished work" in the Pauline corpus. That is a Calvinist theological term and is not biblical. St Paul himself was an observant Jew until the end of his life (Acts 21:24) as was Jesus. The problem St Paul had with the Judaizers was that they were being more "Jewish" than the Pharisees. Even the Pharisees did not require Gentiles to be circumcized in order to be considered righteous. There were a large number of "God fearers" or "temple followers" among the Gentiles. Some estimates were that as many as 10% of the population of the Roman empire were Gentiles of this type. That was ~ 5 million people! For the Judaizers to now require circumcision was ludicrous and un-Jewish let alone un-Christian! The relationship between Christians and the law of Moses is complex. The Mosaic Law has not been abolished. The Ten Commandments, the bans on homosexuality, incest & bestiality, the sanctity of human life made in God's image, and other moral principles from the Torah are still upheld today by the Christians of all stripes. Both Jesus and his disciples upheld these among the nascent Christian movement. Some elements of the Mosaic Law are no longer relevant (e.g., the sacrificial system of the Temple and the dietary laws) but some still are. It would be grossly inaccurate though to act as if Jesus abolished the importance of the Jewish Law in total. It is not that simple.
How, then, can one believe in the gospel of Christ plus baptism for salvation and the mass as a propitiatory sacrifice and the other "sacraments of the New Law" which Trent and Vatican II say are essential for salvation, the necessity of the church and its priesthood, the intercession of Mary, purgatory, indulgences etc..?
Whoa! What is the Gospel of Christ? The answer this person gives will most certainly be a mere rehashing of protestant systematic theology. But that is NOT the Gospel! The gospel is contained in the Gospels and not in the works of Luther, Calvin or their minions. This is where we must also deal with what Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman called "the development of doctrine." Over time and under the superintendance of the Holy Spirit, the Church's understanding of the teachings of Christ has deepened and so new doctrines have been defined which are logical extensions of more fundamental principles from Scripture and Tradition. These are not additions to the faith but rather they represent a more mature understanding of it. Since they are derived by logical necessity from previous beliefs and under the superintendance of the Holy Spirit in the Magisterium of the Church, they are as binding on the believer as those things taught more explicitly in Scripture and Tradition. Failure to believe them is a failure to believe God's revelation. The Protestants themselves admit that they have no teaching authority at all except for secular scholarship. As such they have NO authority to determine for certain what the truth of the faith are. They merely have their own fallible human opinions. In such a system, they have no right to judge anyone to be wrong because by their own admission they lack any authority. As such, in the Protestant system we Catholics ought to be as entitled to our religious opinions as they are.
You must believe one gospel or the other; you can't believe two contradictory gospels at the same time.
No argument there. Either you believe in the gospel that Christ gave to his Church or you believe the apostate innovations of the 16th Century Protestant Reformers.
Whoever believes in Christ alone, is saved. Whoever believes in Christ plus anything else for salvation, is lost.
Oh really? Provide Scripture references for these EXACT words, please. No extrapolations or derivations will be accepted. After all, if the faith is truly "sola scriptura" and cannot accept any development over time then somewhere in the Bible these EXACT words must be found. Where might that be? Answer: NOWHERE!
He has rejected the gospel of Christ which alone saves those who believe it (Romans 1:16). And, indeed, those who preach this "other gospel" come under Paul's anathema (Gal. 1:6-8)!
You bet! Protestantism has abandoned the historic Christian faith which has been preserved by the Holy Spirit for almost 2000 years and replaced it with a series of discontinuous cultic expressions of alleged "Christian faith" which vary their doctrines according to contemporary secular norms every 20 years or so. These cults have abandoned the ban placed by Jesus on divorce and remarriage with no embarrassment. They have defended heresy, apostasy, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, homosexuality, fornication, and various other unspeakable vices in direct contradiction to the teachings they received from both Scripture and Tradition.
What do you think about this? Tell me something, I heard about the seven books that were taken out of the Bible. Now were they taken out of the Bible? If so, where is the proof that they were in the Bible? In Rev. 22:18-19 it says, "I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book."
The comments from the book of Revelation refer TO the book of Revelation itself and not to the Bible itself so they are irrelevant in this discussion. I have already written extensively on the origins of the Canon and the fraudulent prot objections to it.(See OT Canon) There is no need to reiterate that here. Suffice it to say that the Canon of SCRIPTURE (OT & NT) was determined by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church at the same time at the Council of Hippo and reaffirmed by the Pope at that time and by several subsequent councils (Cathage III and IV, Rome [405AD], Florence, Trent, and Vatican I & II). Any time a Protestant argues from the NT he is explicitly accepting the authority of the Catholic with regard to the Canon of Scripture. When he denies the full OT, the Protestant is being logically inconsistent.
Moses gave a similar warning in Deut. 4:1-4.
Let's see what that verse actually says:
Deu 4:14 "And the LORD commanded me {Moses} at that time to teach you statutes and ordinances, that you might do them in the land which you are going over to possess. "
Nothing here about not adding anything to Scripture or the limits of the canon. This quote is irrelevant to the matter under discussion.
No human explanation or interpretation of God's Word should be elevated to the same authority as the text itself.
Whoa! If no human explanation or interpretation is at the same level of "authority" as the autographs, then any vernacular translation of Scripture is in and of itself an act of defiance against God! No one should ever read anything but the original language text. Even more, no one should ever read anything but the AUTOGRAPH text! All copies should be dispensed with. But we don't have the autographs. That would mean that we don't have the Bible and thus the whole prot religion tumbles like a house of cards. But wait, if no one could explain or interpret the original autographs (even if we had them) then no one knows what the Bible really means. So even if we had the autographs we couldn't put them into practice. But doesn't this contradict precisely what Moses said in Deut 4:14? Moses was commanded to teach the Hebrews what the Scriptures meant. Our Lord even acknowledged that such teaching authority had continued to his own day (Matt 23:2). The denial of such authority is UN-BIBLICAL! If the OT had such authority, how much more so the NT? A text which cannot be interpreted authoritatively has no authority at all!
So if there were 7 books that were taken out of the Holy Bible, someone is in for a hurt.
Yes.
But those 7 books are not once mentioned anywhere in the Bible. So whose word do we go by that they were?? I will believe God's own words before I believe a human who says the Bible, the one I hold in my hands, is not correct.
There are NO lists of the Canon of Scripture in Scripture itself. There are no lists of either the NT or OT books. This is why the concept of "sola scriptura" is so ridiculous. Before you can discern any teaching from Scripture, you must determine what the content of Scripture itself is. That is an extra-biblical decision. The Bible that you hold in your hand is a castrated form of the Christian Bible. Protestant heresiarchs did not want to accept the teaching in certain books in the OT and so they deleted them. As such you don't have God's word in your hand but the 16th Century equivalent of the Reader's Digest condensed version of the Bible. What it teaches is true, but it is not the whole truth.
If someone says that there are 7 books missing, and Joseph Smith (The Mormons) says he is a prophet and God gave him tablets that have now turned into a separate book in addition to the Bible and who knows else has said that the Bible isn't finished.
This is irrelevant. The books that Protestants have removed from the Bible were known in the time of Christ and were alluded to and quoted from in the NT. Compare Wisdom 13 & 14 to Romans 1 & 2.(See ) Compare the material in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew) and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke) to Tobit, Sirach, and Wisdom. (See the books "Jesus the Sage" by Ben Witherington and "The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha" by R. H. Charles for details.) There is more that you an find in any good commentary on the deuterocanonical material.
Jesus never wanted His Church to be under laws that made being a Christian a burden. Do you agree?
Huh? I thought Jesus said that we had to take up our cross every day and follow him? Didn't he warn us that we would be persecuted because of him? Isn't that a burden? What about his ban on divorce and remarriage? Isn't that a burden too? The Apostles thought so. (Matt 19:10). I am sorry, but this is more unbiblical nonsense. We are called to accept the burdens that Christ gives us despite how difficult it may be.
Art Sippo
The Catholic Legate
April 29, 2004