Scripture & tradition

The debate continues apace over at the Crowhill discussion board, with Prejean in the lead for the Catholic cause:

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I appeal exactly to the traditional interpretation and its persuasiveness in history. The philosophical arguments for the papacy are numerous (see, e.g., Congar, von Balthasar, Blondel), but they are far less powerful than the unified witness of history and philosophy to an objective Church subsisting in the apostolic succession. And I have no qualms about someone being Catholic or Orthodox; that's a tough decision. But regardless, it wasn't free-church Evangelicalism. Such an ecclesiology has *never* been held in human history.

No, it simply proves that the notion of imputed justification, at least as Reformed Baptists advocate it, is entirely untenable. That's the entire point: the Church Fathers taught a philosophical basis for their Christological conclusions.

And conversely, the problem that later history poses to the likelihood of your interpretation isn't resolved by appealing to your own personal judgment of what commentator is most convincing to you. There are probabilistic difficulties associated with large numbers of people reading a book and contradicting obvious points in the text, particularly if, as you allege, the texts can be multiplied. It's illogical for you to claim both that the meaning is obvious and that everybody afterward missed it.

Again, it's consistency, but you don't have "positive evidence." You have Biblical evidence that is uncorroborated by positive historical evidence. This is the way that you slime in evidence that doesn't qualify under your standards, but I don't buy it.

But that contradicts your standard of using only what you can historically verify! You can't appeal to Matthew's "authority" on historical grounds, so you're simply inconsistent.

http://p090.ezboard.com/fgregsdiscussionboardgodtalk.showMessage?topicID=4029.topic


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Once again we need to clear up some fatal equivocations:

1.Prejean seems to be equating the historical method with the witness of church history, and then charging the Protestant with hypocrisy because he is prepared to disregard the witness of church history.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Catholic church (or the Orthodox church) has historical theology on its side, that is still trading on a basic equivocation of terms, for the Protestant scholar doesn’t define the historical method as inclusive of church history, and never did.

The whole point of the historical method is to bracket post-canonical tradition, and interpret the Bible in light of its own cultural assumptions.

One element in the historical method is original intent. You don’t interpret a text from the past contrary to historical intent--contrary to the writer’s historical horizon. To do so would commit a blatant anachronism.

To interpret a text of Scripture in the light of church history, where the setting of church history is allowed to usurp the original setting, is an exercise in historical revisionism.

2.Now, because the Bible is an inspired book with a promissory structure, there is, in addition to the inceptive context the telic context or context of fulfillment to consider as well.

So the true interpretation often involves a relation between promise and fulfillment. And that relation is given in Scripture itself—most evidently in the relation between the OT and the NT.

So, for example, an OT prophet will predict what is going to happen, but not how or when or by whom. The historical contingencies are not supplied by the original oracle. Rather, that is supplied by the actual outcome, from which we can then retrace the process of fulfillment.

3.Again, Prejean is confounding evidence for the truth of Scripture itself with the evidence for the truth of any given interpretation of Scripture. Even if the former admits corroborative evidence, that has precious little to do with the latter.

4.Did free-church ecclesiology exist before the Reformation?

i) To begin with, Catholic scholars like Brown and Rahner readily admit that the monarchical episcopate was a later development—a concession it would be hard to extract from the likes of Stapleton and Bellarmine. The NT church, consisting of informal house-churches, was a whole lot freer than the church came to be.

ii) To the extent that you didn’t have a free-church ecclesiology before the Reformation, that was for the same reason that you didn’t have democracy before the Reformation. We’re talking about a highly stratified, authoritarian culture.

iii) And for that self-same reason, the appeal to uniformity is viciously circular. Since dissenters were persecuted and prosecuted in times past, you naturally had precious little dissent. So Prejean is appealing to a result of his high-church ecclesiology to justify his high-church ecclesiology. You might as well invoke the absence of freedom under Stalinism to justify the absence of freedom under Stalinism.

5.The same sleight-of-hand undermines his appeal to the absence of the Protestant soli prior to the Reformation. To the extent that most folks were illiterate, and even those who could read could not afford to own a private library, sola Scriptura and the right of private judgment were simply not live options.

It is tautologous to contend that most Christians were unable to find sola fide in the Bible when most Christians didn’t have a Bible in which to find sola fide.

But sola Scriptura was a live option in Second Temple Judaism, where the synagogue system did drill a knowledge of the Scriptures into the laity. Cf.

G. Blackburn, Aims of Education in Ancient Israel.

N. Drazin, History of Jewish Education from 515 BCE to 220 CE.

E. Ebner & S. Eliezer, Elementary Education in Ancient Israel During the Tannaitic Period (10-220 CE).

N. Morris, the Jewish School: An introduction of the History of Jewish Education.

F. Swift, Education in Ancient Israel: From Earliest Times to 70 AD.

6.A Calvinist doesn’t deny that justification is in some measure grounded in the person as well as the work of Christ. But Prejean is confusing the ontology of justification with the epistemology of justification.

i) As a point of sound theological method, we do not begin with Christology, and then infer soteriology, or some aspect thereof, from Christology. Rather, we begin with those books and passages of Scripture that directly address the doctrine in detail.

So, for example, we go to Romans and Galatians for the doctrine of justification for the simple and natural enough reason that this is where we happen to find a major discussion of justification.

ii) And even if, for the sake of argument, we were to begin with Christology, it would not be with Nicene Christology—fine as that may be--but with NT Christology.

7. I don't see a big difference anymore between the way Catholics and Protestants do exegesis. Contemporary Catholic Bible scholars have adopted the same methods as modern Protestant exegetes, which often generates the same results. For example, Fitzmyer does find sole fide in his commentary on Romans.

So Prejean is trying to set up a contrast where none any longer exists.

Where there is still a difference is the way in which Catholics do theology. At the same time that the gap between Catholic and Protestant exegesis has narrowed, the gap between Catholic exegesis and Catholic theology has widened.