The gingerbread house-part 4

Continuing my series on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018).

(Beaumont) what history reveals is that Protestantism simply did not exist for the first 1,400 years after Jesus started his Church. What follows is that Protestantism isn't the Church Jesus started (230). 

A variation on standard Catholic trope:

1. From a Protestant perspective, the Protestant faith is older than the Catholic faith. The Protestant faith existed in the 1C. It is represented by the Apostolic church. And Protestant theology existed in the Bible.  

2. Over time, the church of Rome increasingly deviated from NT Christianity. We might compare it to the director's cut. Oftentimes, the theatrical cut differs from the director's cut because studio execs pressure the director to make the film shorter. The only version of the film the general public or film critics are aware of is the theatrical cut. But sometimes the uncut reel is discovered and restored. 

Another example is The Diary of Anne Frank. Her father edited her diary for publication. When Anne Frank scholars got their hands on the original diary and made comparisons, they discovered the omissions. It was then republished unabridged. 

The fact that Roman Catholicism became the dominant theological paradigm in the West doesn't make it older or more authentic than the Protestant faith. 

3. What does Beaumont mean by not existing? Does he mean the complete package of Protestant doctrines didn't exist in the pre-Reformation church? If so, that either proves too much or too little inasmuch as the complete package of post-Vatican II theology didn't exist in the pre-Reformation church. So by his own yardstick, what follows is that Roman Catholicism isn't the Church Jesus started. 

4. Beaumont's claim also raises the question of what kind of church Jesus founded. What are the components of the church Jesus founded? From a Protestant perspective:

• The Biblical revelation as the norm for doctrine and ethics

• The Spirit gathering individuals into communities of faith through regeneration and sanctification

• Church office (elder, deacons). Charismatics include healers and prophets. 

• New covenant rites (baptism, communion, possibly footwashing)

5. There's a necessary distinction between norms and application. The church has always deviated from the norm or standard in varying degrees. We can see this in the several NT epistles, where some churches planted and overseen by apostles nevertheless deviate from the apostolic kerygma. Church history isn't a history of pure continuity or pure discontinuity. Rather, it ranges a long a spectrum of fidelity and infidelity. 

In the end, to trust the Bible is to trust the Church that compiled it. D. Beaumont, ed. Evangelical Exodus: Evangelical Seminarians and Their Paths to Rome (Ignatius 2016), 229.

Here I'm momentarily stepping outside the Mind, Heart, & Soul anthology to address another argument Beaumont proposes in a different book. This is a variation on another Catholic trope. 

A basic problem is the artificial way in which he frames the issue. "The Church" didn't compile the Bible. We need to recover a more organic understanding of the canon:

i) To begin with, the church inherited a canon from the Jews. The NT supplemented and completed the canon of Scripture.

ii) NT writers authored documents to and for nascent growing Christian communities. There was a built-in constituency for these documents. The NT writers were known to some of the original recipients while some of the original recipients were known to NT writers.

iii) But the documents were also written with a view to further converts and future Christians. 

iv) Christian scribes independently copied and disseminating these writings. That included growing collections of NT documents. Documents circulating in larger editions.

v) Around the mid-2C and beyond, apocryphal Gospels and other imitations of NT writings arose, but these are too late to be authentic. They aren't viable candidates for the NT canon. The attributed authors were long dead by then.