It is not that the Church and her Magisterium actually create the canon: even less do they endow Scripture with its authority, as mistakenly rather than intentionally certain Catholic apologists have sometimes maintained. With this dogma, as with the others, Church and Magisterium simply recognize the truth established by God's action, submit to it and, since they are responsible for it, proclaim it with authority, making it into a Church law. Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition (Ignatius 2004), 110.
It is amusing to note that per Catholicism, the Church is serves the scripture, but the church also exclusively interprets it. It is as if scripture, to be effective, is reliant on the church. But if that is so, how does the church serve it?
ReplyDelete(Hint: circular reasoning. That's how)
And to think of it, as a Catholic I actually believed this farce.
DeleteBy serve, I mean is in subordination to.
DeleteExcellent find. I'll share this one on my blog.
ReplyDeleteWhen you push, I think they'll just go with epistemology. "You can't know the canon without us."
ReplyDeleteNotice the nihilistic condition of the layman. The layman has no ability to know the canon. Only the Magisterium can recognize the canon. Does the Magisterium have any privileged information that the layman can not have?
ReplyDeleteHow does the layman acknowledge the authority of the magisterium without first having the bible as the frame of reference?