- Nov 26, 2019
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The problem with your Nuda Scriptura concept, which is based on the idea of the sole sufficiency of Scripture, which is a different concept from the Sola Scriptura advocated by Luther, Cranmer, Calvin, Wesley, et al, is that in completely rejecting tradition, aside from disregarding the plain meaning of 1 Corinthians 11:2 and 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and Galatians 1:8-9, you also have no basis for saying what is and is not the inspired word of God, since that determination with regards to the New Testament was ultimately made by a fourth century bishop of Alexandria, a very pious and holy man who followed in the Apostolic tradition St. Paul was referring to, and even the identity of the four canonical Gospels was not established on an ecumenical basis for all orthodox Christians until the writings of St. Irenaeus slowly propagated through the persecuted Christian communities of the Roman Empire in the late second and early third century, so as late as the year 200 the Syriac Aramaic-speaking churches, which accounted for the majority of the geographic area of the church and most Christians of Jewish descent, were using an inadequate harmony of the four Gospels called the Diatessaron, compiled by a man named Tatian who later converted to Gnosticism and founded his own heretical sect (in the third century, the four Gospels were finally translated into Syriac, and then in the fourth century, the twenty two books that were the least controversial were translated, as mentioned before, but these lacked 2 John, 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation. So it was only over the course of the late fourth and fifth centuries that the entire church embraced the canon proposed by St. Athanasius, which was subsequently adopted by the churches in Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Antioch, and it took until the sixth century for this to be translated into Aramaic and other languages the church was serving.
Indeed, there was no Latin language translation of any of the Bible until the mid second century, and no definitive Coptic translation of the Bible and the liturgy until St. Cyril of Alexandria completed that project in the fifth century, in addition to preventing Nestorius and Pelagius from getting their novel and erroneous theology made official church doctrine, just as St. Athanasius of Alexandria had been instrumental in stopping Arius and Macedonius, who denied the Incarnation and Trinity, and the personhood of the Holy Spirit, respectively.
Which takes us to the most important point: from Galatians 1:8-9 it becomes clear that the Gospel was initially delivered orally until the canonical books were complete, and it continued to be preached to people for whom those books had not been translated, and this preaching included a specific canonical interpretation, a belief in doctrines such as Jesus Christ being God incarnate (from John 1:1-14) and part of the Holy Trinity, and having in His incarnation put on our humanity without change, confusion, separation or division (so ideas like that of Apollinarius, a fourth century heretic who taught that Christ had a human body but a divine mind and soul), or the Adoptionist idea that Jesus was a particularly righteous man who was made the Son of God by adoption at his baptism, were rejected, and these false Gospels, which St. Paul taught us to anathematize, were contrasted with the true Gospel, which informed the bishops of the early church and ultimately allowed St. Athanasius to define a canon the other bishops of the early church found acceptable, which is still used to this day by all Christian churches (and the validity of which was questioned only once, by Martin Luther, who effectively re-enacted in his writings and thought process the debates in the fourth century about some of the disputed books, and who considered omitting Jude and Revelation, which were absent from the Peshitta, along with James and Hebrews, the former never having been controversial in antiquity, but Hebrews was disputed because the authorship of it was not known with certainty - most attributed it to St. Paul, but it is written in a noticeably more elegant style and the author does not identify themselves, so indeed, even the belief that St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews is a tradition).
Ultimately Martin Luther decided to keep these books, and did not consider adding any new books which had previously been omitted (although to be fair, by the sixteenth century those books were exceedingly obscure, and most would be recovered either from long-forgotten manuscripts in Greek, Egyptian and Syrian monasteries or through archaeological expeditions in the 19th and 20th century. However, the incident underscored how the collection of the books themselves, and what they mean, is a tradition, since other religions also accept the Bible as scripture but interpret it in radically different ways. For example, the New Church (Swedenborigans), Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who have lately published their own “translation” which is deliberately mutilated in order to support their neo-Arian heresy and other strange beliefs, such as their belief that our Lord was not crucified but hung from a “torture stake”), and the Mormons, Unitarians, and several other groups. Many of them have added allegedly inspired books such as Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health: With Key to the Scripture” or the Book of Mormon, or modified Scripture in the case of the JWs or the Palmarians, but still others, such as the Unitarians, or the Shakers, or the Molokans and certain other apocalyptic sects from the Russian Empire like the Mutilators and Immolators and Hole-Worshippers did not change any texts at all, but rather managed to arrive at a spectacularly flawed theology from the same canonical scripture that we rely on.
Which returns us to tradition: it is tradition that gives us the Table of Contents for the New Testament that all Christians agree on (the contents of the Old Testament are disputed, with Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and most Oriental Orthodox including some deuterocanonical books, and the Ethiopians, additional books, that are firmly rejected based on a comparison with the Masoretic text by some predominantly Reformed and Baptist Protestant churches, while others, such as the Lutherans, have an open canon and regard the use of these books or their disuse as a matter of adiaphora), and it is Tradition that provides us with a common interpretation of these books that all authentically Christian churches share, even if they disagree over some of the contents of the Old Testament, this interpretation being expressed in the Nicene Creed and in other statements of faith such as the Apostles Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Lutheran Book of Concord, the various Calvinist Confessions (such as the Belgic, Heidelberg, Westminster and Dordt confessions), and also various ancient hymns that are of a creedal nature and which continue to be sung by all traditional churches, such as Te Deum Laudamus, Ho Monogenes and Haw Nurone (they have of course been translated into English and are sung in such, but are normally referred to by their Latin, Greek and Syriac names).
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