Brother Vinny
Active member
Is it really all that hard?
All I really want from the detracting Protestant is an answer to a simple question. It's a question that can be asked in different ways, but most recently I phrased it like this:
A dear friend of mine at this site, Adambassador (formerly truthman), said something a while back about the truth can be lost in one generation. He was saying this in reference to what he believes to be the truth (mid-Acts dispensationalism) having been lost in the generation immediately following that of the New Testament authors. I shall call this, for the sake of brevity, Adam's Rule.
With this in mind, I posit the following syllogism:
If, 1) The books of the New Testament were written within the generation of Christ's coming to Earth,
And, 2) according to Adam's Rule, the truth of the gospel was lost within one generation
Then, 3) since there was no solid agreement among Christians on the content of the canon for nearly 400 years, and since Christianity had by then lost the truth, there is no reason to believe that the canon of the New Testament contains what it is meant by God to contain, or even that there should be a New Testament at all.
This is unacceptable to me, as I hope it is to Constant Reader.
The Christians responsible for the inclusion and exclusion of certain letters and books of the New Testament had beliefs that were now recognized as distinctive to Catholicism. If the letters of Paul were so antithetical to Catholic views of justification, one would think they would have been counted as spurious as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, or 3 Corinthians.
On the other hand, if the early Christians kept these books in and had no problem harmonizing the writings of Paul with a Sacramental faith, but you do, may I suggest the problem lies not in their interpretation, but in yours?
All I really want from the detracting Protestant is an answer to a simple question. It's a question that can be asked in different ways, but most recently I phrased it like this:
A dear friend of mine at this site, Adambassador (formerly truthman), said something a while back about the truth can be lost in one generation. He was saying this in reference to what he believes to be the truth (mid-Acts dispensationalism) having been lost in the generation immediately following that of the New Testament authors. I shall call this, for the sake of brevity, Adam's Rule.
With this in mind, I posit the following syllogism:
If, 1) The books of the New Testament were written within the generation of Christ's coming to Earth,
And, 2) according to Adam's Rule, the truth of the gospel was lost within one generation
Then, 3) since there was no solid agreement among Christians on the content of the canon for nearly 400 years, and since Christianity had by then lost the truth, there is no reason to believe that the canon of the New Testament contains what it is meant by God to contain, or even that there should be a New Testament at all.
This is unacceptable to me, as I hope it is to Constant Reader.
The Christians responsible for the inclusion and exclusion of certain letters and books of the New Testament had beliefs that were now recognized as distinctive to Catholicism. If the letters of Paul were so antithetical to Catholic views of justification, one would think they would have been counted as spurious as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, or 3 Corinthians.
On the other hand, if the early Christians kept these books in and had no problem harmonizing the writings of Paul with a Sacramental faith, but you do, may I suggest the problem lies not in their interpretation, but in yours?