paxchristi

It’s not a graven image, it’s literally a representation (in stone or whatever material) of the human body Christ himself had. Graven image is something where one tries to represent God or Gods under some other (false) image such as a golden calf etc and worship it (the image) But we know God became a man and died on a cross, so we know we’re not falsely representing God himself when we make crucifixes, they are a perfect reminder of the perfect sacrifice by the perfect man. We are showing once again his judgment seat, his throne, and his victory. We are showing the other religions what separates us from them. You mentioned that “give Muslims and Jews reasons to condemn Christians as idolaters, and to reject Christianity as false.” On the contrary we’re giving them exact reason (showing forth) why Christianity is true; God became man, died on a cross and rose again. The cross IS Christianity. If they break a cross, they condemn themselves. Finally, if we got rid of crosses, icons, Churches, by your logic, you’re very person aught to be “smashed” because you yourself are the new temple of the God who created heaven and earth, and you worship him in spirit and truth there, that in fact is an even greater idolatry, and scandal than any statue, which aught to condemn Christianity as both false, and utterly absurd. Thankfully we’re in the business of “absurdity”. Glory be to God.

Iconoclasts have been and have gone. They “lost”. A church with icons, and statues is more beautiful than those without. God is beauty itself, beautiful things especially those that signify our Lord and his church, are “windows” to himself ie initiators of contemplation and prayer. No one is worshipping the image itself, they are drawn upwards to worship and contemplating, Himself, by images and statues. The Roman Empire left crucifixes strewn about the place as a sign to not mess with Pax Romana. We deliberately leave crucifixes “strewn” about the place, to “Let the whole house of Israel (the world) know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1280px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg

It’s not a bad question. But the more difficult questions is, what impediments are in my own person, psychology, history and upbringing, in my current life situation, that cause me to waste time? The question “how much time are you wasting”, isn’t a question that’s going to charge much about the situation, it may, but unlikely.. most people waste a whole lot of time, they know it well, and that there’s something they’d prefer to do (craft hobby whatever), than waste time. But they don’t, why? There is as it were an invisible yet very concrete wall, between them and their potential, it takes an enormous amount of patience and gentleness (of the spirit, not wishy washy) continual suffering and striving and probably most importantly hope that the wall will fall, that time will open up for you, that the weight of not doing what you’re potentially called to, will fall away… but maybe if all that’s happening, even if on the surface you’re “wasting time”, you’re not, go easy on yourself, and hope in the present. We don’t have an iron will, some are more fortuitous to have had the blessings and grace, to do that thing in the present which, after the fact they can look back and say, today’s time was well spent. Others must suffer the pain of struggling, and desiring that kind of state. They don’t realise the suffering is a blessed state itself. And no, I’m not taking about those people who don’t even have an awareness that they are wasting time, and I’m not making an excuse for people who are “time wasters” (which are related to the former), I’m talking about those people who don’t know there’s an invisible wall and it’s not because they are lazy (which only reinforces the wall with guilt). Anyways.

Alleluia! Glory be to God. Resurrection and eternal life for all who come to Me, the Resurrection and the Life. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Francesco_Buoneri%2C_called_Cecco_del_Caravaggio_-_The_Resurrection_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

He loved you man, he loved you how blessed you were to have that moment with him before he left you. I force my hugs on my father every now and again 😅

Help me understand this one, genuinely: The universal Church is "invisible", consists of the whole number of the elect ... "gathered into one". So it's invisible, but the elect (being physical persons) are gathered "into one", where? Let's just assume, East/West apostolic Churches are Protestant Churches for this exercise, and that some of the people in them are "the elect", and then some of the other persons in all the remaining Protestant churches are also among the elect, where are they/would they be "gathered into one"? If they all hold some variations on their understanding of Christ and salvation, most of the core ideas being mutually exclusive, where's the unity? Thanks.

Jesus: Hebrew name Joshua (Yehoshua’), meaning “Yahweh saves.” It was a popular name among first-century Jews. Even greater than Joshua, who led Israel into the Promised Land (Sir 46:1), Jesus leads God’s people into the eternal land of heaven (25:34; cf. Heb 4:1–11). Greater also than David (2 Sam 3:18), Jesus will save his people from their sins, not from their national enemies (i.e., the Romans) (CCC 430–32, 2666).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

What you meant to say was: Gregory I (AD 540-604), Bishop of Rome, on the title "universal bishop" in a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople. That IS the Pope that’s writing cautioning against what it would mean to have a “universal bishop” i.e. One bishop and no others! That btw is not what the Pope is. He is one bishop, co-equal to the others, with a charism of unity, a Petrine ministry to settle disputes (as in Acts), preserve the faith, and be the final court of appeal. Every other bishop holds real authority in his own right, not as a delegate of Rome. The Patriarch of Constantinople still holds the title Gregory condemned, though in fairness, the Orthodox would say ‘ecumenical’ means first among equals, not universal jurisdiction. But in practice, Constantinople recently did exactly what Gregory warned against: unilaterally overriding the canonical territory of another church in Ukraine, fracturing Orthodox communion with no mechanism to resolve it. Which is precisely why the Petrine office exists. (I understand Orthodox don’t see it as that way, and it’s not something I ever think about tbh) You’ve got this woefully wrong. That caption is a misattribution of intent. Gregory wasn’t writing against papal supremacy. He was writing as the Pope, to the Patriarch of Constantinople, telling him to drop a title. That’s not a critique of the papacy. That’s the papacy in action.

I spent a few days on this. There's been silence from the Reformers to my Sola Scriptura questions; I can't understand why. Anyways, I hope they receive this in good faith and that I hear back from them (in their defense of their sole authority) I urge the reader, to read the whole thing, but if you must, read at least the introduction, and the conclusion - then the historical evidence if you want (it's long-ish): nostr:npub1ak5kewf6anwkrt0qc8ua907ljkn7wm83e2ycyrpcumjvaf2upszs8r0gwg spread it to your Reformed brothers, relay it to nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpz9mhxue69uhnzdps9enrw73wd9hj7qgcwaehxw309ahx7um5wghxcmmswqh8xmmrd9skctcqyq6ksa0l6u5mqmhtfswh5u9p7agqghgxwa6dy8q04lly4u4lj63wsrvsx0z since I'm muted for some reason (I DM'd an earlier addition, but this is the final version). nostr:nprofile1qyvhwumn8ghj7urjv4kkjatd9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wshsz9nhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxjar5duh8qatz9uq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uqzq2guwhvn0fzlv6sjp8uw5es3ma6y33vmx5n9yrrxegkde5mlr0a7pjwes2 nostr:npub1w4w9apn7yjd3atqzu3f4umctxpx2u3tcq3uadj2zgxndwavpd49smxj8ar Essay in its full is below, but can also be read (more easily) here: https://cozzyland.net/canon-question/ The Canon Question ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Argument Sola Scriptura rests on a collection of books that it cannot account for. This is not a rhetorical attack but a structural observation. Scripture carries divine authority. But Sola Scriptura claims more than this: it claims Scripture is the sole authority, the foundation on which every doctrine is tested, every tradition rejected, every council evaluated. A foundation must be identifiable before it can bear weight. Premise 1. Scripture must therefore have defined content: particular books. The content is not incidental; it is constitutive. Remove the Gospel of John and there is no Logos theology. Remove Romans and soteriology changes beyond recognition. The books are the faith in its written form. This defined content is what we call the canon. Premise 2. The canon is nowhere found within Scripture. No biblical book names the table of contents. Now observe the order of operations. For Scripture to function as the sole rule of faith, three things must be established, and they must be established in this sequence: 1. Which books are Scripture. (The identification question.) 2. That this particular list is the right one. (The warrant question.) 3. That the resulting collection is the sole authority. (The Sola Scriptura claim itself.) Each step depends on the one before it. You cannot declare the collection the sole authority until you can show it is the right collection. You cannot show it is the right collection until you have a method for identifying its contents. And you cannot identify its contents by consulting it, because its authority to tell you anything depends on the very identification you have not yet made. This is the priority problem: the canon must be established before any verse within it can be cited as authoritative. Scripture contains no method for identifying a closed canon. Verses like John 10:27 ("My sheep hear my voice") and 1 John 4:1 ("Test the spirits") are invoked in support of self-authentication, but citing them is circular: their authority to justify a method of canon identification depends on their already being canonical, which is the very question at issue. And the stakes of this question are higher than they first appear. If Scripture alone is the rule of faith, then God Himself must have provided a means by which His people could identify that rule's contents. These are not academic theories about literary reception. They are claims about divine action, competing accounts of what God did to communicate the boundaries of His written word. If God actually did something specific, there should be one answer, not six. The fact that Protestant theology has produced at least half a dozen mutually exclusive proposals, from Calvin's inner witness to Warfield's historical evidentialism to Kline's covenant-treaty theory, is itself significant. Either God's provision was so unclear that the brightest Reformed minds cannot agree on what it was, or no such provision was made. For clarity, the proposals reduce to three categories: Answer A1: Inherent self-authentication. The books identify themselves through inherent divine qualities, and the individual believer, guided by the Holy Spirit, recognises them. This theory was devised by Calvin in the sixteenth century; no Church Father ever proposed it. Test it against the priority problem: the method says "pick up a book and check it for marks of inspiration." But which books? The sixty-six-book Bible did not assemble itself on the shelf. Someone curated the options before the Spirit could testify about them, and that someone was the Church: bishops deciding which texts were read in liturgy, scribes deciding which were worth copying, councils formalising what was already in communal practice. The method presupposes the list it claims to produce. And even granting the presupposed list, the method failed: its own architects (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Karlstadt) arrived at different canons. If this is how God chose to communicate, He chose a method that failed the men He raised up to recover it. Answer A2: Corporate recognition. The early Church corporately recognised the canonical books over time. This is Kruger's refinement: the canon was not identified by individuals but by the collective reception of the faithful. Grant the premise entirely. The question is then simply: what did the early Church corporately receive? At every point where the question was formally addressed (Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397 and 419, Florence in 1442), the answer was seventy-three books. One cannot appeal to the early Church's reception as the method and then reject the result. Either corporate reception is reliable, in which case it points to seventy-three books, not sixty-six, or it is unreliable, in which case it cannot serve as a criterion at all. Answer B: Sproul's concession. The canon is "a fallible collection of infallible books." This concedes the priority problem rather than solving it: yes, the identification was a human act, and yes, it may be wrong. But if the collection is fallible, then the "sole infallible rule of faith" rests on a foundation its own defenders admit is not infallible. A rule of faith that might be pointing to the wrong books is not a rule at all. The warrant problem. Even if one of these methods could get off the ground at step one, a second failure awaits at step two. How does the Protestant know that the sixty-six-book canon, this particular list, is the right finished product? Not Luther's shorter list. Not Karlstadt's three-tier hierarchy. Not the seventy-three books every council affirmed. No single Protestant theory, applied consistently, produces exactly sixty-six books. Self-authentication produced different canons in the hands of different Reformers, with no principled criterion to adjudicate between them. Corporate reception produced seventy-three. Luther's christological test ("Does it convey Christ?") produced a canon that not even the Lutheran churches use today; they quietly restored the very books their founder demoted, abandoning the output of his method while keeping his name. The sixty-six-book canon is the output of no method. It is what Protestantism eventually settled on: shaped by Luther's rearrangement in 1522, formalised by the Westminster Confession in 1646, sealed by the British and Foreign Bible Society's exclusion of the deuterocanonicals in 1826. It is the product of a tradition. And no criterion within Sola Scriptura can distinguish this tradition from the competing Protestant traditions it displaced, let alone from the seventy-three-book tradition it replaced. The conclusion. The priority problem remains unsolved at both steps. Every proposed method fails at step one (identifying the books without circularity), and fails independently at step two (warranting this particular list over the competing lists the same methods produced). It therefore cannot reach step three (establishing Sola Scriptura). Not one claims to be divinely revealed, which, if Sola Scriptura is true, is precisely what it would need to be; all are the theories of men. They contradict each other, meaning they cannot all be right, and the argument of this essay is that none of them are. The method of canon identification is not divinely revealed but humanly devised, which means the foundation of Sola Scriptura is itself a tradition of men. The principle that claims to stand above all human tradition cannot get off the ground without one. And if the foundation fails, everything built on it fails with it: every doctrine judged by Scripture alone, every tradition rejected by Scripture alone, every council evaluated by Scripture alone, loses its warrant. The Protestant is not left with a different authority. He is left with none. Sola Scriptura is not a rival answer to the question of authority. It is the absence of one. That is the argument in its logical form. What follows is the historical evidence. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I. What the Apostles Actually Read It is sometimes assumed that the apostles worked from something like the modern Protestant Old Testament: thirty-nine books, neatly bounded. The evidence runs sharply the other way. The New Testament writers overwhelmingly quoted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that included the deuterocanonical books without any distinction from the rest. Protestant scholars Gleason Archer and Gregory Chirichigno, in their Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament (Moody Press, 1983), examined 340 Old Testament quotations in the New Testament and found that 307 aligned with the Septuagint, while only 33 could be shown to follow the Hebrew Masoretic Text against it. The apostles were not occasionally glancing at the Septuagint when the Hebrew was unavailable. They were immersed in it. The Septuagint contained Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel, interspersed throughout, with no separation from the rest. When Paul quoted Scripture, he was quoting from a collection that treated these books as part of the furniture. The standard Protestant rejoinder, offered by Reformed scholar Roger Nicole, is that no deuterocanonical book is explicitly quoted with an introductory formula like "it is written." This is true, but it is equally true of Judges, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. If the test of explicit citation is applied consistently, it does not vindicate the Protestant canon. It shrinks it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ II. The Patristic Witness It is a mark of things truly settled that nobody argues for them. No one in the first century wrote a treatise proving that Wisdom belonged in the Bible, for the same reason no one writes a treatise proving that fire is hot. They simply used it. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96 AD, within living memory of the apostles, echoed Wisdom 2:24 in his discussion of envy and narrated the story of Judith and Holofernes as sacred history, placing Judith beside Esther as an exemplar of courage. Polycarp, a disciple of John himself, quoted Tobit. The Didache paralleled Sirach. The Epistle of Barnabas introduced a quotation from Wisdom 2:12 with the formula "the prophet speaks." Protestant patristics scholar J.N.D. Kelly surveyed the evidence in Early Christian Doctrines and concluded that the use of the deuterocanonical books by Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian, and Clement of Alexandria was "too frequent for detailed references to be necessary." One does not say that about a disputed practice. One says it about a universal one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ III. The Conciliar Record When the question of which books belong in the Bible was formally addressed, not as a matter of casual usage but as a matter of authoritative declaration, it was addressed by councils. Every council that produced a list arrived at the same answer. The Council of Hippo in 393, attended by Augustine, listed a canon corresponding to the modern Catholic seventy-three books. The Third Council of Carthage in 397 ratified the same list, recording that these books were received a patribus, "from our fathers." This was not an innovation but a recognition of what had been handed down. The Council of Carthage in 419 reaffirmed it before 217 bishops. The Council of Florence in 1442 named all seven deuterocanonical books explicitly. The Council of Trent in 1546 solemnly defined the same canon that had been in continuous use since at least the fourth century. Protestant church historian Philip Schaff, who was not a Catholic apologist but a Reformed Protestant of considerable reputation, admitted the point plainly in his History of the Christian Church: the councils of Hippo and Carthage "fixed the catholic canon of the Holy Scriptures, including the Apocrypha of the Old Testament," and "this canon remained undisturbed till the sixteenth century." Undisturbed. For over a thousand years. No identifiable Christian community at any point before the Reformation used a sixty-six-book Bible. The warrant problem posed in the Argument is not merely logical. It is historical: the list Protestantism settled on has no precedent before the sixteenth century. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IV. The Reformers Disagreed with Each Other If the books of Scripture are self-evidently identifiable, if, as Calvin claimed, the distinction is as obvious as telling "white from black, sweet from bitter," then the Reformers should have converged on the same list. They did not. They scattered. Martin Luther placed Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation in an unnumbered appendix to his 1522 New Testament, writing that "the four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation." He maintained this arrangement through every edition published during his lifetime, dying in February 1546 without reversing it. Andreas Karlstadt published a three-tier hierarchy of the New Testament in 1520, placing Paul's epistles below the Gospels on the principle that servants must obey their masters. Huldrych Zwingli declared in 1531 that "with the Apocalypse, we have no concern, for it is not a biblical book." Calvin never wrote a commentary on 2 John, 3 John, or Revelation, and expressed reservations about 2 Peter. Martin Chemnitz maintained a formal two-tier distinction in the New Testament as late as the 1570s. By 1596, a Hamburg Bible labelled Luther's four demoted books as "Apocrypha" within the New Testament. Bruce Metzger documented similar editions at Goslar in 1614 and Stockholm in 1618. The Reformation did not produce a single canon. It produced several. And the one Protestantism eventually settled on matches none of its founders' individual lists. The men who said the Bible was obvious could not agree on what was in it. The men who said the Church was unnecessary could not do without it. They rejected the authority that had settled the canon, then spent a century failing to settle it themselves. This is the warrant problem made visible: the sixty-six-book canon is the output of no single Reformer's method, because no single Reformer's method produced it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ V. Leipzig In 1518, Martin Luther freely quoted Sirach and Tobit as authoritative Scripture. His Lectures on Hebrews cited Wisdom as "Scripture." There was no dispute. Then came the Leipzig Disputation in July 1519. Johann Eck cited 2 Maccabees 12:42-45 in support of purgatory. Luther did not deny that 2 Maccabees teaches prayers for the dead; he admitted it does. What he denied was the book's canonicity: "The book of Maccabees, not being in the Canon, is of weight with the faithful, but avails nothing with the obstinate." Reformation scholar Bernhard Lohse confirmed that "it was at the Leipzig Disputation that Luther first clearly distinguished the canonical writings in the authentic sense from the Apocrypha." This is the founding moment of the sixty-six-book Bible. It did not arise from a careful historical inquiry. It arose from a debate in which a man was confronted with a text that contradicted his theology, and responded by removing the text from the canon. The theology came first. The canon was trimmed to fit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VI. Self-Attestation Faced with the problem of identifying the canon without admitting the Church's authority, the Reformers and their successors proposed a theory: self-attestation. The books of Scripture authenticate themselves, either through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit or through internal qualities that mark them as divine. No Church Father ever proposed this method. Not one. Some Fathers spoke of Scripture's inherent authority, but always regarding books already recognised. When they addressed the question of which books belong, they used external criteria: apostolic origin, liturgical use, reception by the churches, consistency with the rule of faith. The doctrine of autopistia (self-authentication) is a sixteenth-century invention, codified by Calvin and formalised in the Westminster Confession of 1646. Having invented the method, the Protestant tradition then failed to agree on how it works. Calvin said the individual believer recognises inspired books through the Holy Spirit's inner witness, as easily as telling white from black. But the Reformers themselves could not agree, which means the method failed its own architects before it could be tested on anyone else. Kruger proposed three criteria: divine qualities, apostolic origins, and corporate reception. But "divine qualities" is the same claim the Mormon makes about the Book of Mormon and the Muslim about the Quran; the criterion cannot distinguish between them. And corporate reception, applied honestly, points to seventy-three books, not sixty-six, making Kruger's own pillar a witness against his conclusion. Luther tested books by christological content and produced a two-tier canon nobody uses today; even the Lutheran churches that bear his name quietly restored Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to full standing, abandoning the output of their founder's method. Nor are these the only attempts. Warfield grounded canonicity in recoverable historical evidence of apostolic origin, Geisler proposed a five-fold criteria test, Kline argued the canon is inherent in the covenant-treaty form of Scripture itself, and Ridderbos located it in the structure of redemptive history. Each was offered because its predecessors were found wanting, and they contradict one another at the epistemological level: Warfield's evidentialism does exactly what Kruger's self-authentication model forbids, and Ridderbos explicitly rejected both the Catholic view and Luther's christological criterion. But the deepest problem with self-attestation is not that it produced contradictions, though it did. It is that it answers the wrong question entirely. Nobody is asking whether Scripture is authoritative. The question is which books are Scripture. Self-attestation says, in effect: "Pick them up; the inspired ones will shine." But you must know which books to pick up before you can check them for shine. The method presupposes the list it claims to produce. And the modern Protestant who opens his Bible is not sorting through a table of eighty early Christian texts. He is opening a bound sixty-six-book volume that was already assembled for him, by publishers following a tradition that traces back through the British and Foreign Bible Society's decision of 1826, through the Westminster Confession of 1648, through Luther's rearrangement in 1522. The curation has already happened. The Spirit is being asked to testify about a pre-selected lineup. And that lineup was selected by the Church: in the early centuries, by bishops deciding which texts were read in liturgy, by scribes deciding which texts were worth copying, and by councils formalising what was already in communal practice. The books that survived to be "picked up" were the ones the Church preserved, circulated, and read aloud in worship. Self-attestation, followed to its root, rests on the Church's prior authority just as surely as corporate recognition does. It simply hides it better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VII. Jerome Jerome is the Church Father most frequently cited in defence of the shorter canon, and it is true that he preferred the Hebrew canon. But what Jerome did matters rather more than what he said. Jerome translated Tobit and Judith and included them in the Vulgate. In his Prologue to Judith, he wrote that "because this book is found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request." In his Apology Against Rufinus, he asked: "What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches?" Jerome held a minority opinion and submitted to the Church's judgment rather than break communion, which is not the behaviour of a man who believed conscience alone was sufficient but of one who believed the Church had authority. And Jerome believed things that no Protestant believes. In his Letter to Heliodorus, he wrote of clergy who "in succession from the Apostles, confect by their sacred word the Body of Christ," affirming apostolic succession and the Real Presence in a single sentence. In Adversus Helvidium, he defended the perpetual virginity of Mary at book length. To follow Jerome on the canon while discarding everything else he believed is not to follow Jerome. It is to use him. And citing a man's authority as the basis for your canon is itself an appeal to human authority, which is precisely what Sola Scriptura claims to transcend. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VIII. The Remnant That Never Was Protestants sometimes claim that pre-Reformation groups (the Waldensians, Hussites, and Lollards) preserved the "true" shorter canon through the centuries. The claim does not survive contact with the evidence. Philip Jenkins of Baylor University has documented that the Waldensians "not only accepted and read these books, but treated them as among their favourite sections of the Bible. They loved stories like Maccabees and Tobit." Their surviving manuscripts are Vulgate translations, deuterocanonicals included. They adopted a Protestant canon only after being absorbed into Protestantism at the Synod of Chanforan in 1532. The Lollards translated the entire Vulgate into English, including every deuterocanonical book. Margaret Deanesly's The Lollard Bible (1920) records that "the translators began at the beginning of Genesis and worked their way through the whole Bible, which to them, of course, included the Apocrypha." Over 250 Wycliffite manuscripts survive, all including these books. The Hussites used Vulgate translations and never contested the canon. Their disputes were about communion, poverty, and preaching, not about which books were Scripture. The "remnant" did not preserve the sixty-six-book canon, because the sixty-six-book canon did not exist. You cannot guard a treasure that has not yet been minted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IX. Protestant Bibles Included the Deuterocanonicals for Centuries Two contradictory narratives circulate in Protestantism about the deuterocanonical books. The first: "We restored the original Hebrew canon": the books should never have been there. The second: "Catholics added these books at Trent": they were not there until 1546. These cannot both be true. And the second is demolished by the publication history of Protestant Bibles themselves. Luther's complete German Bible of 1534 included the deuterocanonical books, labelled: "Apocrypha: that is, books which are not held to be equal to Holy Scripture, but are useful and good to read." The Gutenberg Bible of 1455 included them without separation. The King James Version of 1611 included them between the testaments; all KJV Bibles published before 1666 contained them, and Archbishop Abbot forbade publication without them under threat of imprisonment. The deuterocanonical books were not removed from mainstream Protestant Bibles until 1826, when the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved to exclude them and, with a zeal that sits oddly with the phrase "useful and good to read," destroyed every copy in its possession, sending them, as The Christian Observer recorded, "to a paper mill to be ground to pulp." The American Bible Society followed in 1828. Between the Reformation and 1826, Protestant Bibles included these books for nearly three hundred years. One does not include books for three centuries by accident. The removal was not a restoration. It was an amputation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ X. The Submerging Problem From the apostolic era to the Reformation, roughly fifteen hundred years, the Protestant must explain how the "true" sixty-six-book canon went missing. Every answer makes the problem worse. "The Church was wrong from the start." But Clement of Rome was using Wisdom and Judith as Scripture in 96 AD. If the Spirit failed to guide the Church on the Old Testament canon within the first generation, why trust the same Church's identification of the New Testament? The councils that affirmed Tobit and Wisdom also affirmed the four Gospels and Paul's epistles. You cannot saw off the branch while sitting on it. "The Holy Spirit permitted the error for fifteen centuries." This means God allowed His entire Church to use the wrong Bible while Augustine, Aquinas, and Bernard of Clairvaux built their theology on it. It is a staggering claim about divine providence: that the Holy Spirit, who Christ promised would guide the Church into all truth, instead guided it into the wrong library. "Jerome was right all along." Jerome was one man, in the minority, who submitted to the Church in practice and affirmed the Eucharist, apostolic succession, and the perpetual virginity of Mary. He is a peculiar foundation for Protestantism. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XI. The Verdict The argument stated at the opening was this: Scripture is divinely authoritative. Sola Scriptura claims it is the sole authority for the Church. But for Scripture to function as the sole authority, three things must be established in sequence: which books are Scripture, that this particular list is the right one, and that the resulting collection is the sole authority. Each step depends on the one before it. You cannot declare the collection the sole authority until you can show it is the right collection. You cannot show it is the right collection until you have a method for identifying its contents. And you cannot identify its contents by consulting it, because its authority to tell you anything depends on the very identification you have not yet made. This is the priority problem, and every Protestant answer has been tested against it. Step one: identification. The response is that Scripture is self-authenticating. But self-attestation presupposes the very thing it claims to produce: you must know which books to pick up before you can check them for marks of inspiration. Who assembled the first list upon which the method could be applied? The Church. And the circularity runs deeper still. When verses like John 10:27 or 1 John 4:1 are cited to justify the method, the citation is itself circular: the authority of those verses to justify anything depends on their already being canonical, which is the very question at issue. The canon must be established before any verse within it can be cited as authoritative, and it is this prior act of establishment that Sola Scriptura cannot account for. Regardless, the testimony must be received by someone, and that someone is a fallible human being making a judgment. If the receiver is fallible, the identification is fallible, and this is not a weakness in one particular version of the argument but the reason Sproul's concession, "a fallible collection of infallible books," is not merely honest but inevitable. But Sproul's concession does not save the principle; it buries it. If the collection is fallible, then the wrong books may be in it or the right books may be missing, which means that doctrines derived from potentially misidentified books rest on uncertain ground, and the "sole rule of faith" may be incomplete. A fallible collection cannot serve as an infallible authority. To accept Sproul's concession is to accept that Sola Scriptura cannot deliver the certainty it promises, and a rule of faith that might be pointing to the wrong books is not a rule at all. It is a guess dressed in the language of conviction. Step two: warrant. Suppose, for argument's sake, that step one could be resolved. A second failure awaits. How does the Protestant know that the sixty-six-book canon, this particular list, is the right finished product? Not Luther's two-tier New Testament, with Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation demoted to an unnumbered appendix. Not Karlstadt's three-level hierarchy. Not Zwingli's canon without the Apocalypse. Not the seventy-three books that every council which ruled on the question affirmed. No single Protestant theory, applied consistently, produces exactly sixty-six books. Self-authentication produced different canons in the hands of different Reformers, with no principled criterion to adjudicate between them. Corporate reception produced seventy-three. Luther's christological test, "Was Christum treibet," produced a two-tier canon that not even the Lutheran churches use today; they quietly restored the very books their founder demoted, abandoning the output of his method while keeping his name. The sixty-six-book canon is the output of no method. It is what Protestantism eventually settled on: shaped by Luther's rearrangement in 1522, hardened by the Westminster Confession in 1646, sealed by the British and Foreign Bible Society's exclusion of the deuterocanonicals in 1826. It is the product of a tradition. And no criterion within Sola Scriptura can distinguish this tradition from the competing Protestant traditions it displaced, let alone from the seventy-three-book tradition it replaced. Step three is therefore unreachable. If the principle cannot identify its contents without circularity at step one, and cannot warrant this particular list over the competing lists at step two, it cannot arrive at the claim that the resulting collection is the sole authority. The foundation is not cracked at one point. It is absent. And here the deepest question must be stated plainly, because it is the one that Protestant theology has not faced. These competing theories, Calvin's inner witness, Kruger's corporate reception, Warfield's evidentialism, Kline's covenant-treaty theory, Ridderbos's redemptive-historical model, Luther's christological test, are not academic proposals about literary reception. They are claims about what God did. If Scripture alone is the rule of faith, then God Himself must have provided a means, a specific, identifiable means, by which His people could know which books constitute that rule. Each of these theories is an assertion about how the Creator of the universe intended His Church to recognise the very foundation of its faith. They contradict each other at the epistemological level: Warfield's evidentialism does precisely what Kruger's self-authentication model forbids; Ridderbos explicitly rejected both the Catholic position and Luther's christological criterion. If God actually did something, if He actually provided a means, then there is one answer, not six. The proliferation of mutually exclusive theories is itself evidence that no such means was provided, or if it was, that it left no discernible trace. Henri Blocher, a Protestant theologian writing in Themelios, called the canon question "the Achilles' heel of the Protestant system" and "an acute, and maybe poisonous, form of the starting-point embarrassment." When a tradition's own scholars describe the problem in those terms, the multiplying of competing solutions is not a sign of intellectual richness. It is a sign that the question has not been answered. The historical evidence has confirmed, not created, this problem. The apostles used a Bible that contained the deuterocanonical books. The Fathers quoted them as Scripture without qualification. Every council that ruled on the question affirmed seventy-three books. The Reformers, applying their new methods, produced contradictory canons. The methods themselves were shown to be circular. Every pre-Reformation "remnant" group used the seventy-three-book Bible. Protestant Bibles included the disputed books for three centuries. And the sixty-six-book canon cannot account for the fifteen centuries in which it did not exist without making claims about divine providence that undermine confidence in the New Testament canon as well. The sixty-six-book Bible is not a product of Scripture's authority. It is a product of Protestant tradition: the decisions of fallible men, using methods they invented in the sixteenth century, that contradicted one another, that no Christian community had ever employed, and that their own inventors could not apply consistently. Sola Scriptura does not stand above tradition. It is a tradition, one that has not yet come to terms with what it is. Catholics do not dispute that Scripture carries divine authority. We affirm it with the full conviction of twenty centuries. But we also recognise what the evidence makes inescapable: the canon was identified, preserved, and ratified by a living authority, the Body of Christ guided by the Holy Spirit, that preceded the written text and cannot be reduced to it. The question was never whether God is behind the canon. The question was what He did to communicate it. And the answer is that He entrusted it to His Church, which identified it, preserved it, and has never wavered on it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Select Bibliography Archer, Gleason L., and Gregory Chirichigno. Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey. Chicago: Moody Press, 1983. Blocher, Henri. "Canonicity: A Theologian's Observations." Themelios 46, no. 3 (2021): 505-526. Bruce, F.F. The Canon of Scripture. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Cameron, Euan. The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldensians of the Alps, 1480-1580. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Chemnitz, Martin. Examination of the Council of Trent. Trans. Fred Kramer. St. Louis: Concordia, 1971-86. Deanesly, Margaret. The Lollard Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Gallagher, Edmon L., and John D. Meade. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Geisler, Norman L., and William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible. Rev. ed. Chicago: Moody Press, 1986. Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A&C Black, 1977. Kline, Meredith G. The Structure of Biblical Authority. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972. Kruger, Michael J. Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. Luther, Martin. Luther's Works. Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I. Ed. E. Theodore Bachmann. Philadelphia: Concordia, 1963. McDonald, Lee Martin. The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority. 3rd ed. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007. Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Michuta, Gary. Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger: The Untold Story of the Lost Books of the Protestant Bible. 2nd ed. San Diego: Catholic Answers Press, 2017. Nicole, Roger. "New Testament Use of the Old Testament." In Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958, 137-151. Ridderbos, Herman N. Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures. Trans. H. De Jongste. Rev. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1988. Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church. Vol. III: Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity. New York: Scribner's, 1910. Sproul, R.C. Essential Truths of the Christian Faith. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1992. Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Warfield, Benjamin B. "The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament." In The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. Ed. Samuel G. Craig. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948, 411-416. Ziegler, Roland F. "The Leipzig Debate and Theological Method." Concordia Theological Quarterly 83 (2019): 213-228.

"Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing." Are you saying, when you (God willing) receive your crown, you will be "outside" the Trinity, in Heaven?

“Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.” ― Saint Maximilian Kolbe (Martyr of Auschwitz)

Have you seen Chris Bledsoe interview on Sean Ryan? Pretty remarkable story (if true) but a great story nonetheless, very captivating. I come down on the side of demonic activity (that sounds obviously ridiculous from an atheistic/agnostic pov) But prior to my return to the Catholic faith, I was neck deep in drugs and psychedelics, around the time I had decided to get loose from those (making efforts in that direction), I had an intense experience with a UFO, and some subsequent bizarre experiences (non drugs), which had me spinning in many different directions, until I made my way back to Christ, to which the most plausible explanation dawned on me that it was in all likely non friendly incorporeal beings. With that being said, I’d be very suspect of what Chris is relating to and about how he speaks of these beings. With all that said, he also believes and expects something to happen, Easter of this year (April 5th) or around then. I fully expect… nothing to happen, but .. maybe! 3i/atlas this year was pretty fascinating also.

On your question of authority, if we hold these two premises true: First, Scripture alone is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice, the supreme authority by which we judge all doctrines, councils, and traditions. I don't dispute that if God has spoken, His Word carries supreme authority. But this isn't just a theoretical claim; we actively employ it. We judge doctrines by it, reject traditions by it, and evaluate councils by it. Which means we need to know what "it" is before we can use it. Second, for that to work, the Bible must have defined content. Specific books. "Scripture alone" is an empty principle if we don't know what Scripture is. The canon isn't a side issue; it's what makes Sola Scriptura possible in the first place. Before Scripture can judge any doctrine, council, or tradition, we need to know which books constitute Scripture: no settled canon, no standard to judge anything by. Someone had to identify which books carry God's inherent divine authority. On this point, you cite that you personally find Jerome's canon better. But Jerome held a minority position and later translated and included all the deuterocanonical books in the Vulgate. And no apostolic or post-apostolic Church Father ever proposed "self-attestation" as a way of identifying canonical books. Some Fathers spoke of Scripture's inherent divine authority, but always in reference to books already recognised as canonical. When they tackled the question of which books actually belong, they used apostolic origin, reception by the churches, liturgical usage, and consistency with the rule of faith. Scripture needs a canon. The canon needs an authority. That authority can't be Scripture, and it can't be a single man's. With this in mind, what, in your belief, is that authority?

Thank you, I really appreciate the response. Just so I can understand you better, and not assume incorrectly, can you tell me what you mean by “self-attesting”? Thanks again.

Didn’t realise it had bolt 12 actually thanks for that! Presumably if the server is behind a VPN that helps right? They know x is paying y (non bolt 12 receiver) but they don’t know who y is if they’re they are running phoenix behind VPN?

Hey nostr:npub1ak5kewf6anwkrt0qc8ua907ljkn7wm83e2ycyrpcumjvaf2upszs8r0gwg since nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpz9mhxue69uhnzdps9enrw73wd9hj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcqyq6ksa0l6u5mqmhtfswh5u9p7agqghgxwa6dy8q04lly4u4lj63wsxchat2 doesn't feel like answering this one, do you think you could take a stab at it? If you find in uncharitable, please forgive me. I do think it's a reasonable question to ask someone who believes sola scriptura. Thanks!

I recently had an agent configure phoenix server for lighting payments for itself, then had to setup two LNmail addresses for itself, it did everything including making payments for the addresses all by itself, and it was relatively painless. It was a very pleasing experience.

Try 'Rome sweet home' by Scott Hahn (Doctorate in Biblical Theology) ... '...Scott Hahn was a Presbyterian minister, the top student in his seminary class, a brilliant Scripture scholar, and militantly anti-Catholic' a man who loves his Bible an awful lot.

What was uncharitable about my question, I said it was a genuine one, and also, Catholic or not, why would that matter, say I was, wouldn't you want to clarify your position, in the hope of conversion from agnosticism, or any other position? The fact, that you clearly can't answer a question for yourself, and merely post pictures of books - which by the way, you should also be prepared to defend (obviously), means you quite literally, are unable to answer my questions, not that you just don't want to (if so why not?), but that you don't have a good answer (because if you did, you'd just give it - wouldn't you?, and if not, why not?. Or is it that I'm unworthy to partake in whatever understanding you've collected so far? You specifically called out Orthodox/Catholics, and said 'The true authority of the church is Scripture.', so I started asking scripture questions - so now, you don't read replies, deflect questions, and then call people 'uncharitable' for entering debate with you on scripture, which you should be defending utterly and completely... that's wild.

nostr:nprofile1qy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnjdd6hxtnnv5hsz9nhwden5te0v4jx2m3wdehhxarj9ekxzmny9uq3zamnwvaz7te3xsczue3h0ghxjme0qqsr26r4lltjnvrwadxp67ns58m4qpzaqemhf5sup7hlujhjh7t296qv5k22a you still haven't answered the question, I asked how do you know the Bible you have in your home are the correct books? Since you posted Kruger's book (again), I'm going to presume this was somehow the answer to my question (it's not) and find his approach the most reasonable way of finding canon. HOWEVER: The Church corporately did not agree on a 66-book Bible. The Church corporately agreed on a 73-book Bible. Virtually every western Christian used the Latin Vulgate, and it had 73 books. Kruger argues that the core canon was settled early and peripheral disputes were resolved by the late third and early fourth centuries. But when those disputes were resolved, they were resolved in favour of 73 books at Hippo and Carthage. Kruger wants credit for, early consensus, while ignoring what the final consensus actually was. You cannot say "the Holy Spirit is leading the Church collectively into the truth" and also say "the Church collectively got the canon wrong and it needed reformation." Either the corporate leading of the Holy Spirit is reliable, in which case the answer is 73 books, or it isn't reliable, in which case Kruger's entire framework collapses and you're back to the individual, where Calvin's version already failed because the Reformers all arrived at different answers. (See point 1 above) So if you're a fan of Kruger, answer my question (if you can) did you arrive at your Bible based on "the Holy Spirit is leading the Church collectively into the truth" (Kruger), if so, why not 73 books? Try and answer the questions, actually answer them directly. Not some hand-wavy "...every christian must do this" (Which begs the question, why does everyone not just go back as far as the 300s, and pick and choose amongst all the contested books/letters etc of the time?

nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyghwumn8ghj7vf5xqhxvdm69e5k7tcqyq6ksa0l6u5mqmhtfswh5u9p7agqghgxwa6dy8q04lly4u4lj63wsawtm48 Genuine question: How do you personally know that the Bible in your home has the correct number of books? Keep the following in mind when you answer. 1. The Reformers themselves couldn't agree on the canon. Luther demoted Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to unnumbered appendix status, identical to how he treated the Apocrypha, and kept it that way in every edition he supervised until his death in 1545. Calvin called Baruch "the Prophet" in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 10 and argued Paul borrowed from Baruch 4:7, a book every Protestant Bible today rejects. Karlstadt (Luther's senior colleague who helped launch the Reformation) ranked Paul's epistles as subordinate to the Gospels and stripped them of equal authority with Christ's words. Zwingli doubted the canonicity of Revelation, and the early Zurich Bibles (1524–1529) copied Luther's demotion of the same four NT books. Chemnitz (the most important Lutheran theologian after Luther) still maintained a two-tier New Testament in the 1570s: 20 undisputed books and 7 that shouldn't be used to prove doctrine. Calvin also had reservations about 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation, meaning he and Luther disagreed on which NT books were questionable. By 1596, a Hamburg Bible explicitly labelled Luther's four demoted books as "Apocrypha," within Lutheranism itself. 2. For over a thousand years, the body of Christ received 73 books. The Councils of Hippo (393), Carthage (397), and Florence (1442) all affirmed the same list. Augustine laid out the method in On Christian Doctrine: follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches, giving special weight to those founded by apostles. When he applied that method, he arrived at the exact 73-book Catholic canon. The first generation of Christians to disagree were the Reformers, and as point 1 shows, they couldn't even agree among themselves. 3. The method used to justify the change isn't biblical. Calvin argued we can know which books are Scripture through an inward feeling, "a divine energy living and breathing in it." He claimed this was as easy as telling black from white. But Scripture itself never tells us to determine the canon this way. Strikingly, this is the exact method the Book of Mormon uses (Moroni 10:4-5, pray about it and you'll feel the truth) and the Quran uses (Surah 17, its beauty and doctrine prove its divine origin). Meanwhile, Jeremiah 17:9 warns us that "the heart is deceitful above all things." So what distinguishes the Protestant's internal feeling about 66 books from a Mormon's internal feeling about the Book of Mormon? Kruger (whose book you referenced previously) tries to rescue this by shifting from the individual to the corporate: Christ's sheep hear His voice (John 10:27), and the Holy Spirit leads His people collectively to recognise the canon. Calvin said you don't need the Church because each believer is inwardly led by the Spirit. Kruger says actually, it's the corporate body of believers that the Spirit leads. These are opposite claims. Calvin's version fails because the individuals (as point 1 shows) couldn't agree. Kruger's version fails because the corporate Church's answer for over a millennium was 73 books (point 2). They've switched arguments precisely because neither one works, and the two arguments contradict each other. If the Spirit leads individuals, why did the Reformers get different answers? If the Spirit leads the corporate body, why did Protestants break from that body's unanimous canon? So, how do YOU personally know the Bible in your home has the correct number of books? nostr:npub1svenddzulzhhs4nfujj8k6wx3zp56tjvd9djjlqt88qcdfv9pneqjrpt05 nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcpr9mhxue69uhhqun9d45h2mfwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uq32amnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdeek2cewv9c8qtcqyq53cawex7j97e4pyz0cafnprhm5frzekdfx2gxxdj3vmnfh7xlmu80cwna nostr:nprofile1qqsr3qd74m4d9n8ymu0875n7nt0q54epujn0vyhlntyz4fkf9vq559c3x2qdj