Paul Yohannan
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- Mar 24, 2016
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Factcheck--this is true. The Reformation began with a protest against the teaching of Purgatory (which was at the time less than a hundred years old) and the sale of Indulgences.
Factcheck--largely true. Ecumenical councils are considered to be infallible, rightly or wrongly. However, the councils that canonized the Scriptures were not Ecumenical councils. Still, church councils have occasionally been rejected because the people would not accept them. That these two councils which canonized the Bible aren't in that category owes mainly to the fact that there wasn't much to oppose, considering that all the books that were put into the canon were already in use in the churches.
And this in turn amounts to Holy Tradition, and was inserted by St. Athanasius.
I believe the ecumenical answer here is simply to concede to the Anglican trifecta of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. A through analysis of Orthodox tradition suggests to me that it is prima scriptura, because the Fathers continually quote Scripture and use it to express theological concepts. What tradition and reason do is provide us with the means with which to define what is Scripture and how that Scripture is received by the entire Church.
For example, the entire Church for many centuries celebrated Pascha on Easter Sunday because this formed a component of the First Council of Nicea, and it was not until the Radical Reformation that people began experimenting with removing these aspects.
But really, as Trinitarian Christians, we are all ultimately followers of St. Athanasius as much as we are followers of St. Paul, St. James, St. John, St. Peter, St. Jude, and the other three Evangelists, and whoever wrote Hebrew, because it was St. Athanasius who compiled the current canon of the New Testament, and this canon, which became official in the Church of Alexandria immediately, rapidly spread to other churches.
In that era the Roman church tended to be very slow moving, the most conservative of the five ancient Patriarchates, liturgically and in other respects (which is why it was able to avoid several heresies that engulfed Constantinople and Antioch, for instance), but by 493, Patriarch Gelasius I of Rome issued the famed Decretum Gelasianum which made the Athanasian Canon definitive in the West, and anathematized all of the Gnostic psuedepigraphical works like Gospel of Mary, the Acts of Thomas, and so on.
This one singular action by Pope Gelasius, which made the Athanasian Canon definitive in the west, enabled Sola Scriptura-type discussions to occur. But we cannot lose sight of how Scripture was defined or what the beliefs were of those who defined it.
Now Pope Gelasius, who was merely restating what St. Athanasius had earlier proposed, is less relevant, but a complete and exhaustive study of St. Athanasius must be a prerequisite to any attempt to use his New Testament canon: one must read his two classics, On the Incarnation and The Life of St. Anthony, in order to understand his Theology, Christology, Triadology, Mystagogy and Daimonology, and one must understand also in detail the doctrines of Arius, who he was fighting against, the verses of scripture they agreed and disagreed on, and related details.
Now, one interesting aspect of the Athanasian canon is that it is not partisan to the Nicene-Arian debate; St. Athanasius did not presume to delete the Epistle of St. Paul which calls our Lord "The Firstborn of all creation" in order to get a tactical advantage against the Arians by denying them one of their proof texts.
As Sola Scriptura reformers go, I greatly prefer Luther to Calvin, but alas, Luther did actually do that, both by modifying Romans and attempting to discard utterly St. James and other books; Calvin, rather than ignoring or rejecting Luther's antilegomenna, created a logical theory using reason whereby someone whose faith does not exhibit the good works mentioned by St. James does indeed have a dead faith and is foreordained to damnation (and Luther for his part was closer to Calvin than to Arminius in terms of Soteriology; both of them frankly spent too much time reading St. Augustine and not enough at the source - St. Athanasius, for which there is no excuse; their neglect of the Greek fathers and their failure to incorporate their teaching more extensively into Protestant theology is the main reason why the Protestant churches did not reconnect with the Orthodox who had been excommunicated by Rome in the tenth century, and it is also gross negligence, because Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Melancthon, Cranmer et al had knowledge of Greek letters, could translate proficiently from Greek, and had access to all of the most important works of the Greek church from the first six centuries, and could have, through correspondance with the persecuted Greek church in the Ottoman Empire, obtained substantial information about, and access to, the rest).
So thus we have a needless schism that self-perpetuates over nothing, because all of these people love the Bible but don't understand where it actually came from or what the people who compiled it believed. So as a result there is this endless proliferation of novel and divergent theologies, which started with the Radical Reformation, and continued with the Restorationist, Pentecostal and other movements, most recently, the unpleasant Subordinationism / Federal Vision theology in Calvinism, which seemed to take us frightfully close to Arianism.
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