The best I've heard Catholics on here come up with is the verse that talks about following "The tradition we passed on to you." The problem is, I can't really see how anything is said that the tradition that Paul passed down is the same tradition that the Catholics follow today. Of course there's the "You are Peter and on this rock I shall build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it." Catholics see this as saying that the Catholic Church will never be in doctrinal error. I simply see it as a declaration that Satan will not prevail against the Christian Church as a whole, its work will continue until the end of time. I see no reason particular theological truths could not be lost or in error but the gates of hell still not be prevailing, unless said errors prevented the church from following the Great Commission.
I'd be more inclined to see 2 Peter 1:20 as relevant to this:
First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation...
- which would seem to imply that just reading the Bible by oneself isn't enough.
Hi,
I have two questions I have been thinking about:
1. What do you think was Jesus' worst suffering?
Was it:
1. The physical pain on the cross.
2. That God did not save him.
3. That his disciples didn't get his true message.
I would say that we don't know enough about Jesus or his real motivations to be able to guess at his psychological state, especially at such an extreme point in his life.
2. Why did God let Job suffer, even tough Job was his most devoted worshipper?
The book of Job itself says that God let Job suffer in order to win a bet with Satan (Job 1:8-12). Rather unfairly, when Job complains about his treatment, God refuses to explain this to him, instead insisting that as God he can pretty much do as he likes and not have to explain himself to anyone (Job 38-41), even though it's been explained quite clearly to the reader. It often surprises me that this story is frequently held up as a profound answer to the problem of evil.
And do you think any man today would still believe in God if they would suffer as much as Job did?
I don't see why not. Plenty of people have suffered worse than that and not lost their belief in God. Think of the stories of devotion in Nazi death camps, for example.
What is the theological implications of Abraham continually reducing the number of righteous men needed? Was Abraham haggling with God, according to the views of most theologians? And was this problamatic, according to most theologians, or morally OK? If Abraham had bargained down to one man, would the city have been spared for Lot, or not?
I really don't know. Hypotheticals about Old Testament stories are very much not my area.
As a (I'm presuming) non-religious person yourself, what do you think of this?
http://atheism.about.com/od/atheismhistory/a/PrimitiveAtheismSkepticism.htm
"
As Durant explains, certain Pygmy tribes found in Africa were observed to have no identifiable cults or rites. There were no totems, no gods, no spirits. Their dead were buried without special ceremonies or accompanying items and received no further attention. They even appeared to lack simple superstitions, according to travelers' reports.
I don't know about these specific examples, but I do know that the question whether religion is "natural" to human beings is much investigated at the moment. In fact there's currently a large research project going on in China to examine how "natural" religious beliefs are in an officially secular and atheist society, which should be interesting. This is on the basis of the apparent fact that religious beliefs are quite natural in children from western societies - the question is whether that's a feature of western societies or something more universal.
Personally I don't know whether religious beliefs are natural or not, but my guess would be that religious beliefs and practices arise from mental tendencies which really are hard-wired into us, such as the tendency to see patterns in things and impose value upon the world. These mental tendencies typically result in beliefs and behaviour that we call religious, but they needn't necessarily do so, which is why the existence - if they do exist - of societies without religion wouldn't disprove the notion that religion is the result of universal human tendencies and thought structures.
I'm thinking of starting a new religion. Is there any law against it?
What does anyone think about it?
What do you think it should, or must, have to qualify for a religion?
When I was working in TV I came up with the idea of a reality show where contestants had to start their own religion, and the winner would be the person with the most converts at the end of the series. Inexplicably this never got very far.
Plenty of people start new religions, although as has been pointed out, they tend to be modifications of existing religions rather than brand new ones. I suppose Mormonism would be a good example of a more dramatically different religion which was nevertheless based on an existing one. Perhaps the best example of a really new religion started pretty much by a single person is Wicca, founded by Gerald Gardner in the middle of the twentieth century. That wasn't wholly original, since Gardner used elements of older pagan religions and practices (and indeed claimed, quite spuriously, that the whole thing really was an ancient religion that he'd rediscovered), but much of it was completely original.
Presumably Joseph Smith and Gerald Gardner were sincere in their religious claims (if not all of their historical ones), but an interesting example of a religion that was apparently founded completely spuriously is the cult of the snake god Glycon, which according to Lucian was founded in the second century CE by Alexander of Abonutichus, who used a real snake with a mask and also a glove puppet to convince worshippers that the god was present at the altar. This religion apparently enjoyed some popularity and survived for a while. Some modern pagans have resuscitated it, notably Alan Moore.
1. I understand that Matthew and Luke are generally believed to come from non-eyewitnesses since they draw so much from Mark and Q. What's the line of reasoning for thinking that Mark comes from a non-eyewitness as well?
Basically because form criticism and other analytic techniques indicate that the material in Mark already had a fairly long oral history before it was written down. Each story has been passed down as an independent tradition in the Christian community, and been shaped by the telling, and the author of the Gospel has collected them, written them down, and done a bit of editing. That indicates that he didn't just write it all from memory. In fact it's even more complicated than that, as there's also good reason to think that some of the stories were written down as shorter "proto-Gospels" before the author of Mark ever got his hands on them. E.g. Mark 2:1-3:6, a cycle of stories about Jesus' conflicts with scribes and Pharisees, may have been a short written text that existed before the Gospel did, which the author incorporated into his work. The same thing is true of the Passion narrative, the section of the Gospel which forms the longest integrated story.
Finally, it's pretty clear from the text that the author was unfamiliar with Palestinian geography. In Mark 11:1 he gets the order of the two villages the wrong way round. And Mark 7:31 is geographical gibberish. To go from Tyre to Galilee via Sidon and the Decapolis is ridiculous, as you can see from this map:
2. How common are views other than Markan Priority among scholars?
Very rare, I think. The major rival to Markan Priority is the Griesbach Hypothesis, according to which Matthew was written first, and Mark is a sort of epitome of Matthew. But that view is so full of holes that I don't think many people defend it today. The biggest problem with it is that if you make an epitome of a longer work, you normally include all the important bits but cut down on the details. Whereas if Mark is an epitome of Matthew, he did the opposite - he left out lots of stories, and lengthened the ones he did include.
That's not to say that there are no problems with Markan Priority too - in particular the many passages where Matthew and Luke agree with each other disagree with Mark, which is odd if Matthew and Luke are independently basing their work on Mark. Two plausible solutions to this are to suppose that Matthew used Mark and then Luke used Matthew and Mark (i.e. to abandon the two-source hypothesis and Q, but retain Markan priority) or to retain Q but suppose that the version of Mark that Matthew and Luke both used was slightly different from the one we've got. Either way there's no real doubt about Markan priority, just over the details.
3. If Jesus hadn't been killed would He have died a natural death?
Presumably so.
Nonsense. Martin Luther just restored a religion that had been dormant for over 1000 years
I hope you don't really think that!
Serious question: Which books did Luther remove from the canon, and were those books universally regarded as in the canon before him, and why did he remove them?
Jehoshua already answered this regarding the New Testament books, which Luther removed because he disagree with their teaching, not because of any serious historical issues. Some of these books were marginal in the early church - not many churches in the first couple of centuries used the book of Revelation, for example, and not many used Hebrews. After the fourth century, though, the lists were standardised.
Regarding the Old Testament books, the "deuterocanonical" texts are those found in the Septuagint but not in the canon specified by the Jewish scholars at Jamnia in the late first century CE. Jews came to use the Jamnia canon, while Christians universally used the Septuagint canon, which was larger. Christians in antiquity were aware of this discrepancy and tended to view the extra books as scriptural but somewhat less important than the others, hence "deuterocanonical". This continued to be the view into the Middle Ages. The Reformers removed the deuterocanonical books entirely, on the basis that the Christian Old Testament ought to be the same as the Jewish canon - although the Jewish canon was based on the canon of Jamnia, which postdated Christianity.
To add to that, can you explain what exactly apostolic succession is and the theological reasons why one should and shouldn't believe in it (What arguments have been made)?
The Catholic notion of apostolic succession is simply the idea that the apostles ordained successors for themselves to lead the churches, and these successors later ordained their own successors, and so on all the way down to the present day. And it is this line of unbroken succession from the apostles to today's church leaders that gives them their authority and ensures that they teach true and authentic Christianity. Some churches (in the sense of local churches) have direct apostolic succession - e.g. the church in Rome can trace its bishops back to St Peter, while that in Alexandria can trace it back to St Mark. Some churches do not have this direct succession - e.g. any church in America - but they enjoy apostolic succession nevertheless by being in communion with churches that do. So, for example, a Catholic church in America is reliable because it is part of the same church organisation as the one in Rome.
Churches that can't trace their history back to the apostles and which aren't in communion with churches that do lack apostolic succession and therefore lack the stamp of authenticity. They've basically been founded by dubious later characters with no authoritative claim to be the apostles' successors, and therefore they are not part of the true church that Christ founded and entrusted to the apostles. From a Catholic viewpoint, this means all Protestant churches.
The Orthodox churches, including the non-Chalcedonian ones, also claim apostolic succession, which I think Catholics would not deny. Anglicans, through a rather tortuous logic that I don't understand, also claim apostolic succession, which Catholics do deny. Some Protestants, particularly some Lutheran churches, claim apostolic succession, but of course Protestants are typically less bothered about such issues, arguing that the truth and validity of a church's teaching depends on whether it's true to the Bible, not on its historical roots.
The main theological reason for thinking that apostolic succession is important is a strong ecclesiology, that is, theology of the church. If you think that the church structure and organisation itself has spiritual significance then you will think that it matters which church organisation you belong to. If, furthermore, you think that Christ deliberately founded a church organisation, you will think that that's the correct one. In which case apostolic succession becomes very important, because it's the criterion that shows whether you belong to that same historical organisation or not.
The notion of apostolic succession originally developed more as a means of distinguishing between orthodoxy and heresy. Its main advocates, Irenaeus and Tertullian, were very concerned about how to tell true from false doctrine, and they thought that one of the main ways of telling was whether a church was teaching the same things that the apostles taught, since the apostles were taught directly by Christ and were therefore reliable. And the main way to tell whether a church was doing this was by seeing whether it (a) had received its teaching from the apostles originally, (b) agreed with other churches that had received their teaching from the apostles originally, (c) agreed with the writings of the apostles, i.e. the New Testament. For the church fathers, the Bible and church tradition were part of a seamless whole, not rival authorities as they would become after the Reformation.
You can see Tertullian's original presentation of the argument
here and in the subsequent chapters.
Tertullian said:
From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed; for “no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” Nor does the Son seem to have revealed Him to any other than the apostles, whom He sent forth to preach—that, of course, which He revealed to them. Now, what that was which they preached—in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them—can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves, both vivâ voce, as the phrase is, and subsequently by their epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is in the same degree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches—those moulds and original sources of the faith must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the (said) churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God. Whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savours of contrariety to the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God.
