As a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which thanks be to God stayed out of the many intrigues that have plagued the Greco-Roman churches concerning this stuff (so it's amusing to me, but also ultimately irrelevant, as I don't think any of these ideas about scripture being the sole or highest authority were around when we were all one Church, prior to the sad events of 451 and its aftermath), I do have to wonder why the sola scriptura people don't generally have more regard for our holy father HH Pope St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the twentieth bishop of Alexandria, who first promulgated the now standard 27-book NT that is used by all churches (some have more, but none have less). It was first given in his 39th Festal letter of 367 AD, later to be confirmed in Roman synods at Carthage (in 382, if I remember correctly), and elsewhere. Because of this, we can say without any sense of egoism that the Holy Bible itself is another of the fundamental contributions of Alexandrian Christianity to the entire world, together with the world's first catechetical school, the birth of Christian monasticism with our fathers Abba Paul, Abba Anthony, Abba Pachomius, Abba Shenouda and the others, the origin and popularization of the allegorical tradition of Biblical interpretation, and so on.
Given all of this, doesn't it seem a little odd to any of you that those who hold the Bible in such esteem dismiss everything else coming out of the same
tradition as somehow being contrary to what the fathers themselves gave us? It's almost as if they're saying "Thanks for the Bible -- now go away." That's not very nice. I think either you should listen to what those same people have to say about the Bible and the faith, or do the consistent thing and give the Bible back to those who gave it to you, since it's certainly not proper to set up the Bible against the Church or the Church against the Bible. But probably some people in this thread won't like reading that, since from what I can figure the idea that the scriptures have any kind of historical reality to them and didn't just fall out of the sky pre-formed, indexed, and paginated is heresy of the highest order. "God gave it to everyone to guide them!" No.
HH Pope St. Athanasius the Apostolic gave it to everyone
for the use of the Church and its faithful, and then others adopted it from him in their churches, too. The sola scripturaist, as we have seen in this thread, would rather continue to believe that this kind of historical argument is the providence of the Roman Catholic, and is argued in order to give Rome some kind of power over other churches that it doesn't have. Well, I hate to burst anyone's ahistorical bubble, but we in the Church of Egypt were hating on Rome long before either you or the Eastern Orthodox thought it was cool (see: HH St. Dioscorus' fight with Leo of Rome, which culminated in both of them removing the others' name from their respective church's diptych...this was before Chalcedon, too), so it's never been about that for us. That's mistaking the Western church's history for Christian history in toto, but that has never been accurate. Case in point: as regards the canon in particular, while it was set so many centuries beforehand, the Roman Catholic Church only formally closed its canon at Trent in the 16th century (as this was a response to Protestant tampering with it). The East has never formally done so, hence the Copts and the Ethiopians, for example, do not have the same canon, despite the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church being the daughter of the Coptic Orthodox Church (with its first bishops being sent in the wake of the conversion of King Ezana c. 330 by HH St. Pope Athanasius...man, HH did a lot). This is not a problem, as we share the same
faith anyway.
This might go a ways towards explaining why SS, in any of its definitions, doesn't work: For those churches that
don't subscribe to it (OO, EO, RC, I suppose perhaps traditional Anglicans, if what I've read about them is true), it is thoroughly unnecessary and actually gets in the way of a healthy, balanced view of the scriptures and Christian history, while for those that
do subscribe to it, it obliterates even the notion of such a balance, as it places the canonized Bible -- itself taken from that same history that it denies -- above the undoubtedly earlier received traditions of the Church and the faithful, leaving it with very little context by which it might be understood. And then these contextless understandings, each particular to a given necessarily
much later tradition (while of course claiming not to be), or, failing that, a particular individual (which may, if successful, develop into a particular tradition), are touted as "what the Bible says". What are the odds that the same Bible given to your fathers centuries before you were ever around would mean something diametrically opposed to what your fathers taught, just because you happen to be alive now whereas they were alive then? And yet in a world where every man becomes his own Biblical eisegette, that is what you're left with.
All in an effort to get away from the 'traditions of men' or whatever. Huh. Seems like you create more Popes this way than you ever had to deal with back in Luther's day, you just call them something else while claiming that everyone else is doing what you are in fact doing.
Not to mention (last thing, I swear!) that you run into a problematic situation in that you reach a point where you can't go back any further than a particular point in time. SS is not 'backwards compatible', so to speak. As I have posed to my Roman Catholic friends regarding their stance on their Popes (since they have a similar "without the Pope, there can be no true Church/Christianity" view that some SS-ers have about the Holy Bible), is it even possible for you to imagine a Christianity without your central idea of how to be Christian in place, or does the whole thing just fall apart? In other words, since the standard 27-book NT did not exist until 367 at the earliest (it was not the first Christian Biblical canon ever -- that award goes to the detestable heretic Marcion -- but it was the first one that we'd recognize today as containing "our Bible"), what would you imagine yourselves to be doing beforehand? How would you be Christian? For the non-SS churches, this is certainly not a problem, since they have something older than the Biblical canon to fall back on, but I don't know how Sola Scriptura people would do it. Maybe they imagine that we'd all be proto-Roman Catholics, even though Roman Catholicism didn't exist as it own separate church until some 687 years after HH St. Athanasius' 39th festal letter (more proof that tying historical claims about the canon to the authority claims of Roman Catholicism doesn't work at all).
I gotta say, for an approach to Christianity that is supposedly all about authority, it seems like Sola Scriptura creates one heck of an authority problem.
