The root of Catholicism's error
Just been reading Luke 11v27-28. This along with 8v21 are Jesus prophetically speaking into where Catholicism will go wrong centuries later. A woman declares "blessed be the mother who gave birth to you" and look at Jesus' reaction. Rather than agree that Mary ought to be revered he says "blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!". This strikes right at the heart of where Roman Catholicism has gone wrong.
There are four centres of authority that different parts of Christianity base their views on. Bible, reason, institution and experience. Jesus clearly says here that is being Biblical that matters : hearing the word of God and keeping it.
Catholicism finds its doctrine from what the institution, the church, says. And where the Pope has differed from the word of God they have gone with what the Pope says. This has led them down the proverbial garden path into wrong doctrines such as salvation by works, praying to Mary and papal infallibility.
Equally liberals who base their views on reason and rationality rather than the Bible head off in the wrong direction and end up disbelieving what the Bible clearly says and creating their own doctrines. Charismatics are in danger of basing their views on experience rather than the Bible. Jesus is clearly given us a warning here to get our doctrines of from the Bible and nowhere else.
posted by David Anthony @ 11:49 AM
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18 Comments:
Thank you for pointing out this beautiful passage. Meister Eckhart, among others, pointed out that as disciples of Jesus, we must hear and keep the word of God. In this way, we will give birth to Jesus anew in our lives. I'm looking forward to your discussion of Luke 18, which presents a beautiful teaching on the value of repeated entreaty before God.
Trackback Pontifications
You could not be more wrong, Mr. Anthony.
The great tradition of Marian veneration is not only Biblical, but it begins with Jesus himself: Jesus himself honored his mother in Lk 11:27-28, read in conjunction with Lk 1-2 and other passages (as I'm sure everyone agrees is the proper way to interpret Scripture: to interpret Scripture with Scripture).
It is my understanding (I do not have Greek and welcome commentary from those who do) that the KJV and the Vulgate translations render the Greek for Lk 11:27-28, more accurately than some modern translations based on “better Greek MSS”: quippini or quinimmo or quippe enim means “yes, rather . . ,” not “no, rather.” In asserting that those are blessed who hear and keep the word of God Jesus is not contradicting the woman in the crowd who venerated his mother just because she was HIS mother but rather endorsing the woman’s veneration and explaining the basis for it. The NIV suppresses this and turns it into a contradiction by simply translating “rather.”
In Luke 11:27-28 the woman in the crowd calls out to venerate the woman whose womb carried Christ and whose breasts nursed him. When Jesus says, “Yes, rather blessed are those who keep my word,” if one recognizes with rhetorical criticism that the Gospels are seriously crafted rhetorical works, then interpreting this passage as Jesus’ ringing endorsement of veneration of his mother rises to the top of the plausible interpretations, given the striking emphasis in Lk 1-2 on Mary’s pondering, keeping of the words of the angel, the events of his birth, and above all the wordplay on Logos, the Word of God that she kept in her heart (keeping under the heart is an ancient metaphor for carrying a child in the womb).
It would be one thing if the verse I (and millennia of Christian exegesis of this verse, including Luther, all of which you seem to be blissfully unaware of) am linking to 11:27-28 were from Jude or even from Mark. But Lk. 1-2 is from the same author as 11:27-28. Surely the parallel is intentional.
Sorry, but Catholic and Orthodox veneration of Mary could not be more biblical and you could not be more mistaken in your exegesis of the verse. And it starts with not doing adequate philological homework. Did you check the Greek or were you depending on an English translation? That's rule number one of exegesis.
Where in the Bible does it say that the Bible is the word of God?
An isn't Christ the Word of God?
In reply to Kjetil Kringlebotten there are several main references. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2v13 commends this young church "that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers." Paul here speaks of his apostolic authority that what he says is "the word of God."
Peter then shows this does not just apply to verbal words but the written Scripture - in 2 Peter 1v20 "no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." So here we have a clear indication that the writing of Scripture was directed by God by his Spirit over the human authors. What is extremely striking is then how Peter ends the same letter in 2 Peter 3v15-16:
"And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do THE OTHER SCRIPTURES."
Peter here says that what Paul writes is Scripture. Tie this in with the other two quotes and you have a clear picture that what the Apostles said and wrote was the Word of God. 2 Timothy 3v16 is very succinct on the point "All Scripture is God-breathed".
Yes, you're right Jesus is described as the Word of God in John 1. God is unified so that what he says and does and wills is wholly united. So Jesus teaching and living out God's will perfectly is the perfect expression of God's word / communication to mankind. He is the Word personified.
(All quotes from the English Standard Version.)
In reply to the Pontificator:
As I'm the one who originally sparked off the debate I thought it would be good to clarify what I was saying more carefully and reply to some of your replies. First of all I never said that Jesus disrespected his Mother and I never disagreed that Mary had a blessed role in being the mother of Jesus. What I do have huge issue with however is that her role has been hugely inflated by various Vatican Councils and Popes and has caused spiritual damage leading people away from proportionate reverence.
The Pontificator clearly understood the heart of my argument and I appreciate his gracious reply. The key point of his reply that I would like to pick up on is this:
"But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully..."
This is where I as an evangelical distance myself from this viewpoint. The Bible IS the interpretation of God's working in history. It doesn't need interpretation. Yes, it needs careful study, but we do not need a vicar, priest or Pope to interpret it for us. Part of it's beauty is that it is for the ploughman and the scholar. I will give a few examples of where the Roman Catholic church has "interpreted" Scripture or laid down rules that contradict the plain reading of Scripture.
Firstly, that Mary is sinless and was immaculately conceived herself.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm
"In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary "in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin.""
This does not stand square with Luke 1v46-47 where Mary says "My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God MY SAVIOUR".
Mary is as much a sinner as anyone else and needed the forgiveness found at the cross through her Son's death as anyone.
2) Rather than Mary being in need of a saviour as clearly stated above, the RC church has fallen further and further down the slippery slope of church tradition to making Mary out to be co-redemptress with Christ. This is just plain blasphemous. 1Tim 2:5 "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Mary is not a co-mediator or redeemer as she is human only, she is not divine. Falling into the error of saying she was immaculately conceived was the trapdoor into getting into all this co-redemptress error. http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_le13is.htm quotes Pope Leo XIII as giving her this co-redemptress title. I would value correction if this is no longer RC doctrine. But you then get into a problem, was Pope Leo XIII infallible or not in describing her this way?
3) that Mary was a perpetual virgin. Given several of you have admitted above that Jesus' mother AND BROTHERS came to visit him it shows that Mary had had other children. There is nothing sinful about sex that Mary should have remained a virgin. It is a good God-given pleasure within the right context of marriage. Which brings me to my next point.
4) the RC church forbids priests to marry. They may think they have good intentions in freeing up the minister to focus on the flock but essentially they have forbidden marriage. The Apostle Paul uses extremely strong language saying in 1 Timothy 4v1-3 that "forbidding marriage" is a "doctrine of demons". In the same letter, Paul takes the opposite approach to the RC church and commends that the elders of churches, in 1 Tim 3v2 be "the husband of one wife". His thinking is that they can then model a godly household to their congregation. So far from forbidding marriage to church ministers he actively encourages it. Why does the RC church think they know better than the Apostle Paul?
All of these problems stem from the same root. A stronger passage than the original ones from Luke I mentioned that apply to these errors of elevating the traditions of men above Scripture is Matt 15:3 "Jesus answered them, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?""
Making the church or the priest the interpreter of Scripture was the root into this error of elevating traditions and church doctrines above Scripture even when Scripture condemns the practices proposed by those traditions and doctrines. Mr Warnock helpfully pointed out that we are all in danger of putting our traditions above Scripture and so we constantly need to submit our worldview and framework to the benchmark of Scripture. This is the case whether we are Catholic or Protestant.
I have added a response to your response, Mr. Anthony, at the Pontifications thread. I did not realize that you had posted the response here.
In response to Dennis Martin:
I have to say what does "yes, rather" mean? Please come up with any sentence in English where one says "yes, rather". I'm trying to think of a word for it - an oxymoron? You can try to get out of what Jesus is saying by trying to translate it "more than that", but the Greek "menoun" that Jesus begins the sentence with means "on the contrary" or "rather" not "yes, rather". I did do Greek at Bible college and I've checked this verse in greek lexicons and commentaries and with a friend who is better at Greek than I am. All of these and the most literal Bible translations such as the NASB and ESV all translate it "rather" or "on the contrary". Quoting a latin translation at me is not going to help. As you say, correct exegesis starts with going back to the original Greek. I don't disagree with you pointing out that Mary was blessed for having the Word of God dwell in her womb, but she has been given disproportionate reverence which is what Jesus is criticising.
"Yea, rather" is used in the King James Version. It means, Yes, indeed, Yes, all the more, Yes, that but also this. These meanings were given in one of the earlier postings on the Pontifications thread.
You know, seizing on this, professing that you do not understand, ignoring the rest of what I wrote (which made the meaning abundantly clear, as did other postings on that thread) indicate that you are not interested in serious conversation. Yea, rather, you seem to have deliberately chosen a small point in order to ignore the large points.
You do not wish to understand, only to reject. I wish you well in your soliloquy.
Dear Dennis
For Mary to have been "Holy" and "the Mother of God", would she not have to have been sinless?
God bless
Dave
To Dave Routledge:
"Would she not have had to have been sinless."
"Have to be" can be taken in two different ways. Absolutely necessary (absolutely had to have been), no. In theory, as best we can reason, which means we don't truly know for sure, God presumably could have chosen a mother afflicted by the original "sin" that all of us are born with because original "sin" is not transmitted merely by physical reproduction. (And original "sin" is not actual sin, is not freely chosen sin but rather a lack of the original righteousness that surrounded Adam and Eve but from which we are cut off because of their sin, Mary being, by God's grace, excepted.)
I make this speculation extremely cautiously. I wish to preserve all manner of sovereignty for God. However, I would think it extremely, extremely unlikely that God the Holy Spirit would espouse to Himself a sinner. It would be absolutely impossible for Mary to have been in a state of actual sin--God cannot be united with sin. But a repentant sinner is at least theoretically possible. So I would not say that it was "absolutely" necessary that Mary be sinless in order to carry out her mission.
But there is another kind of "necessity" or "had to have been"--"fitting necessity." It certainly is very fitting that God would choose to give Mary the original righteousness the rest of us are deprived of--and to do so in light of her mission in life, which was to be the Mother of God. That God surrounded her with this original righteousness is a totally free gift--he did not "owe" it to her, neither by the absolute necessity of her being sinless nor by any "right" she had as a human being, but purely by his loving grace in anticipation of Christ's work on the Cross.
So, we believe that God did in fact as an act of special grace to prepare her for her mission free her even from the lack of original righteousness that the rest of us suffered from before we were baptized and surround her with all sorts of special grace ("full of grace") throughout her life, for the sake of her mission. She could have, being a true human person, chosen to reject God's graces and sin, but she did not--we believe.
This is what we believe did happen, based on the "full of grace" greeting at the beginning and her incredible constancy in faith all the way to the bitter end at the Cross--all of which is congruent with her being the New Eve. That much we can say happened.
Whether God could have done it differently, well, that becomes speculation. When I say that in theory God might have done it otherwise, I do so based on (1) fitting necessity rather than absolute necessity and (2) the recognition that the Holy Spirit can come to sinner.
But I think this speculative possibliity (that God might have taken a repentant sinner "to wife" is very, very unlikely.
And in the end, it scarcely matters. God seems to have prepared from before the beginning of time (God's eternal predestination, which does not violate our free will) to carry out this stupendous task and to have fittingly kept her from sin (with her cooperation once she reached the age of reason) in order to be the Mother of God.
Mr. Anthony, I still need to respond to your rather confident but incorrect word study results.
Menoun of course can mean “rather” or “on the contrary”, but it simply also can and does mean also “indeed” or “much more.” Try Phil. 3:8. You selectively cited some translations that favor your viewpoint. Do a real survey and you'll discover, starting with Jerome and continuing beyond the KJV that my reading is perfectly philologically credible.
That means that the choice between the two is not as clearcut as you dismissively claim but you are interpreting it your way as much as I am interpreting it my way.
Quite apart from that, God himself honored Mary via the angel he sent. To interpret menoun here as meaning Jesus was rebuking the woman in the crowd, directly and flatly contradicting means the Second Person of the Trinity was contradicting the First and Second Persons of the Trinity when they honored Mary precisely for the fact that they had chosen her to be the Mother of the Redeemer. If Jesus was God Incarnate as he responded to the woman in the crowd, then to think that he was telling the woman that his mother, whom he, as the Second Person of the Trinity, had chosen to be his mother, was not worthy of honor makes very little sense.
Therefore, theologically, given that the two meanings of menoun are possible, choosing the "on the contrary" meaning here puts you in an very shaky position theologically.
Thus a careful, thoughtful exegesis favors the KJV and Jerome's choice to translate the word as "Yes, indeed, but more than that" or "Yea, rather."
David Anthony, sorry for my late reply:
In reply to Kjetil Kringlebotten there are several main references. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2v13 commends this young church "that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers." Paul here speaks of his apostolic authority that what he says is "the word of God."
Is this evidence that he speaks of the Bible (which wasn't even finished at that time)?
Peter then shows this does not just apply to verbal words but the written Scripture - in 2 Peter 1v20 "no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." So here we have a clear indication that the writing of Scripture was directed by God by his Spirit over the human authors.
This can only be the OT. The NT wasn't finished. The NT is in fact part of Chrurch Tradition.
2 Timothy 3v16 is very succinct on the point "All Scripture is God-breathed".
No it does not. The correct translation is: "every Scripture that is breathed by God..." It does no specify.
Best,
In reply to Kjetil:
I find it interesting that in quoting what I wrote, you completely skipped
over the chunk that is most relevant in replying to you. I said:
"What is extremely striking is then how Peter ends the same letter in 2
Peter 3v15-16:
"And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved
brother Paul also WROTE to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does
in all his LETTERS when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some
things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable
twist to their own destruction, as they do THE OTHER SCRIPTURES."
Peter here says that what Paul WRITES is Scripture. Tie this in with the
other two quotes and you have a clear picture that what the Apostles said
and wrote was the Word of God."
Hence Paul and the other Apostles' letters are not part of church tradition
but were at the very time regarded as Scripture. It was not 300 years later
that they were regarded as Scripture but already in AD60.
What angle are you coming from Kjetil? Are you an atheist or a Catholic? I'm
trying to understand your viewpoint.
Also where are you getting your translation of 2 Tim 3v16? I quoted from the
ESV which is a very literal translation. Even the King James renders it "All
scripture is given by inspiration of God".
Thanks in anticipation of your reply.
1) Peter talks of Paul's letters. These could be many more than the thirteen we have in the New Testament. And what about 2Thess 2:15-17?
"so, then, brethren, stand ye fast, and hold the deliverances that ye were taught, whether through word, whether through our letter; and may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and our God and Father, who did love us, and did give comfort age-during, and good hope in grace, comfort your hearts, and establish you in every good word and work." (YLT, my italics)
2) 2Tim 3:16 is -- in Wycliffe NT -- translated thus: "For all scripture inspired of God is profitable to teach, to reprove, to chastise, [for] to learn in rightwiseness..."
In ASV: "Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness."
3) I'm not catholic or atheist, by the way.
Best,
I too am David Anthony of Coleman Michigan, USA. Continue your good works Mr. Anthony and may God Bless you.
Understanding precedes Judgement.
It is obvious you know very, very, little about Catholicism. Until you know more, you should withhold your judgement.
The very center of this argument is in response to Mary possibly being sinless, does not the Holy Spirit enter those who are the elect 'before' they are conscious of their sin? Another interesting point, would be to look at the fact that sin enters the world through the seed of man, and so because Mary was conceived by the Holy Spirit (who of course is sinless), the Baby (Jesus) was sinless Himself in His human nature. Mary although being female would have received her sinful nature through her father and so on and so forth. Now the interesting point is, that because Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, it is now Jesus who is the new Adam, spiritually speaking. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is not part of the creation of the new family, being that headship comes through the male anyway (which is what happens because God the Father is now the Father of the new creation). But Mary would have been able to join the new family through trusting in her Son. Mary is not to be prayed to, for clearly she is a sinner like everyone else.
Hope that helps.
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