Comments on: Putting the Bible in Its Place http://christianity.blogoverflow.com/2012/08/08/putting-the-bible-in-its-place/ The Christianity Stack Exchange Blog Fri, 27 Jan 2017 11:19:30 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.6 By: bobthechef http://christianity.blogoverflow.com/2012/08/08/putting-the-bible-in-its-place/#comment-1192 Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:52:52 +0000 http://christianity.blogoverflow.com/?p=1065#comment-1192 I don’t think your understanding of tradition is quite right. G. K. Chesterton, given that he was a Catholic, would argue that sola scriptura is bit like having a book written in Chinese without knowing Chinese. It’s not a matter of how these teaching apply to one’s life, or a matter of what is permitted or not permitted (the Bible is not above all a handbook of divine commandment or divine prohibition but above all a source of revealed truth, after all). It’s a matter of how to interpret and understand what the text means, what God had intended for us to know through those authors who were inspired by Him. It didn’t fall from the sky, you know. Without tradition, you can read a great deal into a very complex text written in a wide range of style. Tradition is one of scholarship stemming from the days of Peter, 2,000 years of painstaking research into the languages of the original texts, the historical periods they were written in, who wrote them, what style they wrote them in, and so on.

The main criticism of Protestantism is that there are over 40,000 denominations, all rooted in disagreements about interpretation. Now, it doesn’t mean certain passages are not debated in the Catholic Church, but for the most part, there is a great deal of stability in the overall interpretation of biblical text. It should also be mentioned that the Catholic Church compiled the Bible in the first place, so it’s a bit bizarre to shrug off the very tradition that produced the biblical canon we see today, the Bible Protestants try to approach without the aid of tradition. Without tradition, we do not interpret scripture as it is, but as we are. The sheer number of denominations is proof of that.

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