Comments on: Competition

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:35:09 +0000

pfff

By: John

John — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 20:40:12 +0000

Hans, you used Sola Scriptura. Prepare for Aaron’s wrath!

By: Deborah

Deborah — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 11:52:16 +0000

Sorry Matthew, I agree, I just thought that was sorta obvious. Whoops!

By: Hans

Hans — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 11:13:38 +0000

Yes, are totally open to deconstruction in fact. “Scholarship is now so good that we can speak better New Testament Greek than the authors of the Bible could write and we know more about ANE culture than the people who lived then” Tui ad.

By: ♣Matthew

♣Matthew — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 10:23:40 +0000

All your comments are interesting, cheers, but the point I was intending to make in my post was bit different than that addressed in your replies. I mean that historical/textual critics write their own books explaining 'how it really was', filtering out what they can't accept from the original canon, trying to 'get behind'/demythologise the scriptural stories to the shadowy events that lie behind them. The new canon I mentioned is the collection of the critics' works. And I'm saying their works are even more open to deconstruction than the original books. Does that make sense? Brian Walsh's article Regimes of Truth and the Rhetoric of Deceit: Colossians 2 in Postmodern Context is worthwhile reading in this context, an in my view answers my question.

By: Hans

Hans — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 10:14:20 +0000

Doug Wilson is very good on the canon and Sola Scriptura. In a book about hyperpreterism he makes some excellent points. First, that the church has authority, delegated by God. Second, that this authority is not predicated on infallibility. Third, that knowing that the church is fallible does not mean that she is always wrong. He notes that an admittedly fallible church has produced an infallible creed, the table of contents in the front of the Bible. This is a process that has been guided by the Holy Spirit down the ages. He makes the observation that we have a unity with the ancient jews and our protestant forbears in rejecting, for example, Bel and the Dragon. The Bible is not the “Book that fell from the sky” but God’s infallible word preserved by His Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth”

By: Deborah

Deborah — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 06:05:27 +0000

My axiom is: Internal witness of the Holy Spirit.

Most of the histories and criticism I have read asserts that the Apocryphal books were rejected by the early church as having dubious origin, uncertain authorship and the fact that most were written a great deal later than the books in the NT.

By: richface

richface — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 05:59:42 +0000

well if the issue boils down to the authenticity of the sources then fine. and i agree that many of the documents seem dubious.

a lot of what we do have in the nt is not written by apostles, however (eg: jude, luke, mark, [and maybe james?]). and also there is the nt apocrypha which are a bunch of writings which seem to be sort of ok and were accepted by the early church. not sure about the authors but i think some might be purported to be written by apostles. and i think one is by barnabas.

By: aaron

aaron — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 05:33:35 +0000

hmmm – richief I suggest that ‘supposed to be’ is the whole debate. The reason that Thomas, at least, is not canonical is that it’s not actually by Thomas. So issues of apostolic authority are at stake.

I don’t know about Peter.

It would be interesting to find a work known to be by an apostle but denied canonical status. I suggest such a thing doesn’t exist.

By: richief

richief — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 05:12:10 +0000

i was under the [perhaps mistaken] impression that the posited alternative canon mentioned by matt includes stuff that is supposed to be written by apostles. eg: the gospels of thomas and peter. so issues of apostolic authority aren’t really at stake. what is at stake is the veracity of the accounts/epistles/sources in question.

if i am wrong and matt isn’t actually talking about these kinds of sources, then sorry. but incidentally, regardless of what was intended by matt, his post highlights the issues associated with those sources.