No Greater Authority?
Surprising as it may seem, the New York Times Book Review is often wrong when it lists the number one nonfiction book of the week. In terms of sheer numbers, it’s not some political screed (whether from the right or the left) or a biography of the latest cultural icon (which after all will appear at the top of the list in a genuinely ersatz manner) that is actually number one in sales. Rather, it’s a book that’s been around for a very long time, was centuries in the making, has been translated into more languages than we have time to list here, and not surprisingly remains a smashing best seller. What book is that? It’s the Bible in one of its more popular versions (e.g., the NIV or the NAB), though this fact will hardly grace the pages of this weekly cultural barometer. Indeed, according to Guinness World Records, the Bible is clearly the champion here: “There is little doubt that the Bible is the world’s best-selling and most widely distributed book.”1 In fact, it weighs in at over five billion copies! Indeed, the Bible today is read all around the world by clergy and laity, men and women, young and old, white and black, rich and poor, conservatives and liberals. It appears on apps, iPads, and Kindles; it is listened to on the train, memorized in the classroom; studied in both the church and the academy; it is the center of attention globally in numerous Bible studies, north and south, east and west. Moreover, in the wake of Vatican II, its pages are marked up, tabs and bookmarks are inserted, by those layfolk, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, who have learned to estimate Scripture properly by cherishing its very words. But it was not always so.
Earlier Attitudes toward Bible Reading
During the time of the Reformation and the Council of Trent, the Vatican feared that Roman Catholics would not be able to read the Bible with proper understanding, in line with the magisterium,2 so it generally discouraged the practice of Scripture reading among the laity, often viewing it as the seedbed for many forms of individualism and error. That is, wary of the variety of interpretations of Scripture that could emerge beyond the public teaching of the church, the council in its fourth session declared in the Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures as follows: “Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, it [the council] decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall,—in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine,—wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church,—whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures, . . . hath held and doth hold.”3
This same fear was directed toward not only the laity in general but also scholars in particular, who were not permitted to “publish any work relating to the interpretation of Scripture, unless it had first been vetted by [their] superiors and declared that publication had been approved.”4 Due to these restrictions, which were not suffered by Protestants, “it would be centuries,” Alister McGrath reports, “before Roman Catholic scholarship recovered from this setback.”5 In fact, later Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) essentially condemned the scholarly, higher-critical approach to the Bible in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus, propounded in 1893. A cloud therefore hung over serious critical biblical scholarship in the Roman church until around 1943, when Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, recognized the helpful fruit that could indeed emerge even from a rigorously academic approach to the Bible (what Pope Leo before had considered to be “secular”); thus Pope Pius offered far more encouragement to Roman Catholic scholars than had his predecessor. What Rome had learned in the interim, well before the pronouncements of Vatican II (which took a more generous view of the use of Scripture), was that scholars and laity alike, though of course in different ways and in different degrees, invariably brought the major teachings of the hierarchy to the text as a basic orientation or presupposition. Roman Catholics, regardless of translation, in the end read Roman Catholic Bibles. They too, like everyone else in the broader ecumenical church, are a part of an interpretive tradition. Earlier fears now proved to have been groundless.
In light of this history, it therefore is not difficult to appreciate that in some sense Roman Catholics and Protestants embrace different Bibles due to the significant import of the distinct interpretive communities in which they participate. In other words, differing theological traditions naturally lead to dissimilar interpretations of the very same passages of the Bible. For example, when many Roman Catholics read Matthew 16:18, they may discern the wherewithal to make a claim for the papacy; for Protestants, however, this passage suggests nothing of the sort. Such salient interpretive differences that make up the respective traditions, at least in part, could be cited again and again. Yet there is another significant sense in which Roman Catholics and Protestants do, after all, read different Bibles: they literally read different Bibles, not only in terms of the various translations that correspond to each tradition (The Jerusalem Bible versus the New International Version, for instance), but also and more significantly in terms of the dissimilar content of the Scriptures read, specifically in terms of the composition of the OT canon itself.
The Old Testament Canon
The terminology of “Old” and “New” Testaments did not arise in the early church until the latter part of the second century in the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria.6 Moreover, that class of writings known as the OT Apocrypha, which marks the difference between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant OT canons, was made up of Jewish religious literature whose dates range from 300 BC to AD 70.7 All these apocryphal writings were composed in a Semitic tongue with the notable exceptions of the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees, which were written in Greek, most likely in Alexandria, Egypt.8 Though these writings were included in the Septuagint, a third- to second-century-BC Greek translation of the OT that was produced in Egypt for Jews who no longer knew Hebrew, a canonical status for the Apocrypha was ultimately rejected by the Jews (by Philo and Josephus, for instance) in a complicated process that some historians unduly simplify by pointing to the judgments of the Council of Jamnia in AD 90.9 Indeed, scholars have begun to cast doubt upon the historicity of this council.10 Of the larger issue of the competence of the Jews to recognize their canon, their own Bible, one Roman Catholic apologist writes as follows: “The Jews at Jamnia had rejected Christ as God, let us not forget. Those who had accepted Christ had already become Christians. The remainder certainly had no rightful authority to decide anything about divine truth.”11 This statement suggests that not only is Christian revelation essential to understanding the OT aright, but also the Jews themselves, oddly enough, are not even fit to recognize their own canon. Such a Roman Catholic apologetic foray is hardly required or even implied by affirming the authority of the NT revelation.
At any rate, many of the apocryphal writings, though not all,12 were taken up into the Roman Catholic OT canon most likely because of their appearance in the Septuagint (of which many first-century Christians were well aware) and because Jerome included them in the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, whose OT section was completed in 405. Though Jerome had incorporated the Apocrypha into his translation, nevertheless he specifically cautioned against receiving this literature as sacred Scripture. To illustrate, in his preface to the Vulgate, Jerome wrote as follows: “As, then, the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures, so let it read these two volumes for the edification of the people, not to give authority to doctrines of the Church.”13 For one thing, Jerome was likely well aware of some of the theological oddities of this literature. Take the book of Tobit, for example. Its observation found in 12:9, “For almsgiving saves from death, and purges all sin,”14 is no doubt theologically confused, for it not only contradicts the clear teaching of the apostolic testimony of Paul found in Romans 4–5, for example, but also detracts from the unique and glorious atoning work of the Son of God incarnate, Jesus Christ.
Not surprisingly, Jerome’s judgment regarding the Apocrypha was shared by a veritable litany of church fathers, by those before him such as Melito of Sardis (d. 180), Origen (182–254), Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), Athanasius (296–373), Hilary of Poitiers (300–368); Hilary’s contemporaries such as Epiphanius (310–403) and Rufinus (340–410); and those after him such as the venerable Cyril of Alexandria (378–444). Furthermore, as late as the eighth century, John Damascene embraced the Hebrew canon and thereby excluded such apocryphal books as Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) from the Bible.15 For their part, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century were well aware of the fruits of the groundbreaking scholarship of the Northern Renaissance, especially in terms of biblical studies and humane letters, and they therefore readily affirmed the appropriateness of the conclusion of Jerome. The Reformation motto Ad fontes (back to the sources), in terms of the OT, must surely mean going back to the Hebrew, not to the Greek.
Perhaps, then, one of the keys to Rome’s decision about the constitution of the OT canon can be found in the observation that “Augustine, . . . whose influence in the West was decisive, made no distinction between them [apocryphal books] and the rest of the Old Testament.”16 However, since we judge ongoing dialogue about the OT among Roman Catholics, Protestants, and even Jews to be a valuable project, it is best perhaps to begin the conversation in terms of what is common rather than what is different, working with the specific content of the Hebrew Bible, which after all is affirmed by Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. For that reason, this content, and not any other, should be the focus of ongoing attention and conversation.
Inspiration and Authority
The Roman Catholic Catechism clearly affirms the Bible to be nothing less than the Word of God in the following observation: “In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, ‘but as what it really is, the word of God’ [1 Thess. 2:13].”17 Recognizing that the Scriptures came into being under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Catechism carefully observes that “Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written.”18 However, in underscoring the preeminent role of the Holy Spirit in the generation of and reflection upon the Bible, Rome goes on to declare that the Word of God is “not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living,” and that the Christian faith, then, “is not a ‘religion of the book,’”19 a formulation that may give at least some pause to Protestants.
The deeper sense of this last observation is revealed by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus in their writings: they point out that “because the Catholic reading of Scripture is founded on event, it is close to Liturgy and is also, instinctively, a development of the understanding of the res [thing] and not merely the verba [word].”20 Sensitive to other views on this matter, these authors quickly added: “Admittedly this is disconcerting to Protestants.”21 Since “the Eucharist sacrifice,” in the words of Pope Paul VI in his Lumen Gentium, promulgated in 1964, “is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,”22 it is therefore at the heart of the interpretive context in which Scripture is properly read and understood. This liturgical orientation to the Word of God, in which the res of the sacrament is ever foremost, may in turn bring to the interpretive process of Scripture certain sacramental accretions that have emerged in the liturgy of the Mass over time, especially during the Middle Ages (more on this in chap. 9), and as a whole have issued in a sacerdotal understanding (highlighting the distinct role and authority of priests) of both the Eucharist and in turn, interestingly enough, now the Word of God itself. This is yet another way in which Roman Catholics and Protestants read different Bibles.
It may surprise some Protestants, especially evangelicals, that on the topic of the authority of Scripture Rome employs a vocabulary that is remarkably familiar, though in the end it remains distinct.23 Thus the Catechism declares, “We must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”24 Earlier, in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, Pope Pius XII affirmed: “For as the substantial Word of God became like to men in all things, ‘except sin’ [Heb. 4:15], so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect, except error.”25 Moreover, some of the language of this encyclical was employed later at Vatican II, but this council focused the issue on redemption itself: “It follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”26 Though some Protestants, especially Reformed evangelicals, may discern in these words the substance of their own understanding of the authority of Scripture, nevertheless the late Avery Dulles offered a word of caution: “In Roman Catholicism, many prominent theologians still assert inerrancy, but only in a very qualified manner.”27 In fact, as the late cardinal also pointed out, “The term ‘inerrancy,’ though present in the original 1962 schema [of Vatican II], was dropped in the final text of Dei Verbum.”28
In light of these observations of Dulles, it may be helpful for Rome to be more clear in its employment of the language of “without error” and “except error” in its documents by understanding the referent here specifically in terms of faith and practice. That is, henceforth it should prefer the language of Vatican II to that of the earlier pronouncements of Pius XII. In a more ecumenical vein Rome could even make common cause with the careful articulation of the Lausanne Movement on this very issue. In fact, Neuhaus and Colson cited this organization quite favorably in their own efforts to support the broader project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together: “In the words of the Lausanne Covenant (1974), . . . the Scriptures are ‘the only written word of God . . . and the only infallible rule of faith and practice.’”29
The larger problem of interpretation of sacred Scripture can be focused in two major questions: First, what does the Bible actually mean to current readers? Second, who or what authority determines and declares this meaning? These two questions, essential to the ongoing life of the church, are remarkably illuminated by what the Protestant Reformers meant by the language of sola Scriptura. Though this Protestant affirmation has often been misprized as celebrating a wanton individualism,30 it actually does nothing of the sort when it is carefully assessed. In essence the doctrine of sola Scriptura is made up of three subsidiary claims that get at the heart of our two principal interpretive questions: (1) the clarity of Scripture (in its basic affirmations), (2) the sufficiency of Scripture (doctrines not found or implied in its pages cannot be required for salvation), and (3) the normative power of Scripture as canon (it is the only unquestioned standard of faith and practice).31
In terms of the first claim of the clarity of Scripture, whose more technical name is the perspicuity of the Bible, Luther acknowledged that the Scriptures could be understood unto salvation by all, from common folk to scholars. In his treatise The Bondage of the Will, for example, he observed: “The notion that in Scripture some things are recondite and all is not plain was spread by the godless Sophists.”32 In fact, when the Reformer was translating the Greek text of the NT into German, he would sometimes go among the common folk to determine how a word should be rightly translated into the German of the day for broad understanding. However, the perspicuity of Scripture in this setting does not mean that the average person will not encounter difficult or perplexing passages. It’s simply an affirmation that the basic story of redemption, the good news of the gospel, can be comprehended by all in light of two basic conditions: first, that the meaning of passages must be assessed in the context of community, and in this case it’s the Lutheran interpretive tradition that will be attentive not only to the current setting (synchronic) but also to the flow of the history of the church that has preceded it (diachronic);33 second, that difficult passages are to be seen against the backdrop of clearer ones: “Scripture is the interpreter of Scripture (Scriptura Scripturae interpres).”34
The second subsidiary claim of sola Scriptura affirms the sufficiency of Scripture in the sense that only teachings found among its pages or grounded therein (such that they make explicit what is implicit in the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, for example) can be required of the faithful. Here, then, is not only a clear expression of Oberman’s Tradition I but also a reasonable critique of these various traditions, spawned throughout history, that in essence constitute not the Word of God or revelation, as is mistakenly supposed, but merely human teachings and contrivances. The historic Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican communion expresses this concern succinctly. To illustrate, article 6, “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation,” reads as follows: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”35
The last subsidiary claim fully acknowledges the normative power of Scripture in that the Bible constitutes nothing less than a canon, a rule or standard, as recognized in the ancient ecumenical church in the fourth century, by which the faithful community throughout history can rightly order its life, under the power and authority of the Holy Spirit. In this context, then, sola Scriptura does not mean nuda Scriptura;36 instead, this key phrase, championed during the Reformation and its aftermath, underscores that in its unquestioned normative role the Bible will rightly order, and thereby render capable of proper assessment, those elements such as church tradition, reason, and human experience that are also a part of any viable interpretive context.
Sola Scriptura then, properly understood, fully recognizes the watershed event in the history of the church, a genuine before and after, when the Holy Spirit, in the larger providence of God, helped the ancient ecumenical church to recognize a canon that was fixed in specific texts, so that the church would be equipped to go through time, facing its ongoing vicissitudes, while preserving the precious deposit of the faith. Observe, however, that we are not making some form of the “primitivism argument” here in our historiographical judgments. That is, we fully acknowledge the ongoing role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, especially in terms of guiding theological traditions (East and West) as well as interpretive communities. However, with the canon now in place, those subsequent traditions must not only be in harmony with sacred Scripture but also have clear biblical grounding.
The Roman Catholic Interpretive Difference
In terms of Protestantism, as we have just seen, the important work of understanding the Bible is a function of the entire community of the respective tradition, not merely of a single individual. To argue otherwise is the stuff of which caricatures are made. Consequently, if one offered an idiosyncratic reading of Scripture that contradicted the published doctrinal materials of the respective tradition (let’s say the Book of Concord for Lutherans, or the Book of Discipline for United Methodists), then that view would not likely become a part of that tradition. There are, after all, checks in this process, to be sure. More important for the task at hand, we must make comparisons appropriately and compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges, so to speak. Accordingly, the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church as propounded by the hierarchy should be seen in relation to the official, public doctrinal teachings of Protestants. Given such a judgment and for the sake of fairness, two situations should readily be avoided: first, comparing the official teachings of Roman Catholicism with the quotidian pronouncements of Protestants, both laity and scholars alike, some of which may not represent the official teaching of the Protestant church; second, comparing the official teachings of Protestantism with the quotidian pronouncements of flesh-and-blood Roman Catholics, both laity and scholars alike, some of which, again, may not represent the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
Clearly, Rome offers a number of official resources (Catechism, Vatican II documents, papal encyclicals, etc.) that help to address the two major interpretive questions before us: What does the Bible mean? And, who or what is the competent authority to declare such meaning? With respect to this second question, the Catechism, for example, declares: “The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living, teaching office of the Church alone.”37 The Catechism then goes on to explain that this office actually is “the Magisterium of the Church,”38 and more specifically that such teaching authority has been entrusted “to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome.”39
Though the proper interpretation of the Scriptures according to the Catechism has been limited to the Roman Catholic tradition apart from Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism40—another example of Rome alone as an unmatched authority—it nevertheless makes provision at least for Roman Catholics beyond the magisterium, even for laypeople, to be involved in this process. Thus Peter Williamson, in his Catholic Principles for Interpreting Scripture, affirms that “various special roles in interpretation belong to clergy, catechists, exegetes and others, . . . [though] the Magisterium exercises a role of final authority if occasion requires it.”41 In fact, according to Rome, the authority of the magisterium is so great, a truly awe-inspiring power, that not even Scripture can stand on its own two feet, so to speak, but it ever needs the support of this particular Roman authority. The Catechism elaborates: “It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others.”42
Though we do not for a moment make light of the interpretive community that constitutes the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church, that worldwide fellowship of bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome, nevertheless we must also recognize the structure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in general and more specifically the declaration of papal infallibility propounded at the First Vatican Council by Pope Pius IX in 1870. As Christopher M. Bellitto, a Roman Catholic scholar, puts it, “The pope could make infallible statements [when he speaks ex cathedra] on faith and morals on his own authority.”43 Again, Bellitto writes: “The pope had the final say, he could judge all things and all persons, but he himself could be judged by no one.”44 Thus if the pope, for whatever reason, corrects, adds to, or even dismisses the judgment of the magisterium, his voice and his alone in the end is decisive as to what Scripture actually means. The irony here is noteworthy: having started out with the claim that Protestants are roundly “individualistic” in their reading of the Bible, Roman Catholic apologists now must confront, in an evenhanded way, the embedded individualism that is part and parcel of the ascending powers of the hierarchy itself. In fact, the divisions of competing interests at Vatican I were so great that when the bishops proposed that it was “the papal magisterium, not the person of the pope, that was infallible,”45 Pius IX angrily shot back: “I am the church! I am the tradition.”46 It’s hard to get more individualistic (or self-centered) than that.47 In fact, this dogma was so disruptive to the peace and good order of the church (especially in the eyes of Eastern Orthodoxy) that Rome, once again, spawned yet another new theological tradition at the time, a new schism, known simply as the Old Catholic Church.
The Rise of Tradition III
Oberman noticed the rise of so many new doctrines in the Roman Catholic Church that are not grounded in Scripture, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the immaculate conception and papal infallibility among them), as pointed out in chapter 3; he reasoned that with respect to the sources of revelation the magisterium must now be viewed as an “active tradition.”48 “The weakness of proofs from Scripture and tradition,” he wrote, “gave the teaching office of the Church as the regula proxima fidei, a primary position which had of course its repercussion on the concept of dogma as such.”49 In other words, the doctrinal germinating power of Tradition II over the course of the centuries eventually enabled the Roman hierarchy to view itself as a living tradition (now in the sense of Tradition III): its authority extended not only to the interpretation of Scripture but also to all prior tradition, especially when that tradition (such as the Council of Trent) proved to be problematic in a contemporary setting. Oberman explains: “Nevertheless, so long as the Roman Catholic Church was committed to Tradition II, it stood under the authority of its past decisions among which the Council of Trent formed a major barrier in the ecumenical dialogue. The Tradition III concept gives the Church a new and a large measure of freedom, not only over against Holy Scripture but also over against its own doctrinal past.”50
This line of reasoning, no doubt, informed the observation of Michael Horton, a leading Reformed theologian, who argued to the effect that at the end of the day, given the considerable power of the hierarchy, what is evident in the Roman Catholic Church is not the primacy of Scripture or even tradition for that matter, but the primacy of the magisterium itself, of which the pope is ever the head, a veritable solum magisterium.51 Eduardo J. Echeverria, a Roman Catholic apologist, tried to counter this argument and brought forth some of those same thoughtless stereotypes of the past by claiming that contemporary Protestant theology, lacking magisterial authority,52 is “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14),53 separating Protestants once again not only from their historic documents and creeds but also from their interpretive communities.
The more positive and substantive side of Echeverria’s argument consisted in maintaining that Horton had failed to distinguish “the magisterial authority of the Word of God from the ministerial authority of the Church’s teaching office,”54 the ground of faith from “the means through which [one assents] to divine truth.”55 Apparently Echeverria thought that the mere mention of this distinction would carry the day; unfortunately for his sake it did not. Indeed, what this Roman apologist had failed to take into account in a straightforward way is precisely what Horton, as a gifted Reformed theologian, was already well aware of: the context in which such a distinction must be properly understood. Though the Roman hierarchy should simply play a ministerial rather than a magisterial role in terms of the Word of God, for example, the magisterium with a pontifex maximus as its head has been invested with such considerable power that it is a virtual leviathan in the eyes of the laity. Even Peter Kreeft, a Roman Catholic apologist, took note of these issues of power early in his career and thereby raised the matter of sola Roma once again in the form of authority: “Most Catholics believe such things as purgatory, the immaculate conception, and the seven sacraments not because they have thought through each issue separately and have come to the Catholic position by theological reasoning, but because the church teaches them and they accept all the teachings of Christ simply because they accept the Church’s authority.”56
Moreover, Echeverria failed to observe that Rome has taken great efforts to inculcate docility among the laity at almost every turn, from affirming the custom of addressing a priest as “father” to declaring that certain topics (such as the ordination of women) are no longer even to be discussed.57 Offering what proper attitudes should be instilled among the laity, the Catechism today declares: “Mindful of Christ’s words to his apostles: ‘He who hears you, hears me’ [Luke 10:16], the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.”58 Or as the Catechism of the Council of Trent puts it: “This knowledge, however, is nothing else than faith, by which we yield our unhesitating assent to whatever the authority of our Holy Mother the Church teaches us to have been revealed by God.”59 So, if Horton is correct, if the postulation of Tradition III by Oberman is accurate, then the question of Scripture and tradition for Rome may in the end turn out to be not a question of revelation per se but a question of ecclesiology: What is the proper place and authority of “Holy Mother Church”?
1. “Best-Selling Book of Non-fiction,” Guinness World Records, accessed December 1, 2016, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction.
2. Readers will see a difference in capitalization with respect to the word “magisterium” throughout this book. Since the Roman Catholic Church understands the word “magisterium” as a reference to its own teaching authority for the universal church, the word is often, though not always, capitalized in Roman Catholic materials. But since Protestants (and the Eastern Orthodox) deny that the Roman magisterium speaks for the universal church, we lowercase the term outside of quotations.
3. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2, The Greek and Latin Creeds, with Translations (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 83.
4. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 156.
5. Ibid.
6. Walter A. Elwell and Barry J. Beitzel, Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 300–301.
7. James H. Charlesworth, “Apocrypha: Old Testament Apocrypha,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 292.
8. Ibid.
9. Jack P. Lewis, “Jamnia, Council of,” in Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, 634.
10. E.g., Michael W. Holmes argues that “the consensus supporting this view (still defended in various forms) has largely collapsed, undermined primarily by (a) the recognition that the idea of an authoritative ‘council’ dealing with matters of canon at Jamnia is largely a myth.” Holmes, “The Biblical Canon,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 409.
11. Devin Rose, If Protestantism Is True (n.p.: Unitatis Books, 2011), 72.
12. Though 13 writings make up the Apocrypha found in the Septuagint, The Catechism of the Catholic Church (as well as The Catholic Study Bible) embraces only a part of this collection. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994), par. 120.
13. Jerome, “Prefaces to the Books of the Vulgate Version of the Old Testament,” in St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W. G. Martley, NPNF2 6:492.
14. Donald Senior, John J. Collins, and Mary Ann Getty, eds., The Catholic Study Bible: The New American Bible, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 592.
15. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1960), 55.
16. Ibid., 55–56.
17. Catechism, par. 104.
18. Ibid., par. 111.
19. Ibid., par. 108.
20. Colson and Neuhaus, eds., Your Word Is Truth: A Project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 167.
21. Ibid.
22. Pope Paul VI, Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, sec. 11, the Holy See, 1964, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html.
23. Indeed, David F. Wells has pointed out instances of ambiguity on the topic of inerrancy as found in Vatican II documents. He wrote: “The frustrating element for the interpreter of the Vatican II documents is that the new approach to inerrancy can apparently be justified or denied from the same statement.” Revolution in Rome (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1972), 33.
24. Catechism, par. 107.
25. Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, par. 37, the Holy See, 1943, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_30091943_divino-afflante-spiritu_en.html.
26. Pope Paul VI, Dei Verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, sec. 11, in The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, vol. 1 of Vatican II, ed. Austin Flannery (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2011), 757; see also the Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html.
27. Dulles, “Scripture: Recent Protestant and Catholic Views,” Theology Today 37, no. 1 (1980): 20.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Colson and Neuhaus, Your Word Is Truth, 11.
30. Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), Kindle edition, location 517.
31. We have added to McGrath’s two points and have reversed his order for the sake of the flow of the argument. See Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—a History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 203.
32. John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1958), 172.
33. McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 210.
34. Robert Newton Flew, The Catholicity of Protestantism (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1950), 120.
35. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3:489 (emphasis original).
36. Colson and Neuhaus, Your Word Is Truth, 4.
37. Catechism, par. 85.
38. Ibid., par. 100.
39. Ibid., par. 85.
40. One author offers a critique of this Roman Catholic practice in light of the perspective of the Old Catholic Church. See Petrus Johannes Maan, “The Meaning and Significance of Tradition: According to the Old Catholic Conception,” Ecumenical Review 1, no. 4 (Summer 1949): 393–98. Maan writes: “The reason for the disavowal of tradition by reforming groups was the development which the Roman conception of tradition had brought about. Tradition, that is to say, which should have been linked beyond question to the Church, was linked to one branch of the church” (394).
41. Williamson, Catholic Principles for Interpreting Scripture: A Study of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” Subsidia Biblica 22 (Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2001), 109.
42. Catechism, par. 95.
43. Bellitto, The General Councils: A History of the Twenty-One Church Councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002), 119.
44. Ibid.
45. John W. O’Malley, “The Beatification of Pope Pius IX,” America: The National Catholic Review, August 26, 2000, http://americamagazine.org/issue/378/article/beatification-pope-pius-ix.
46. Ibid.
47. For a work that suggests a larger role for bishops in relation to the pope in the outworking of the magisterium, see Michael J. Buckley, Papal Primacy and the Episcopate (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
48. Heiko A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 290.
49. Ibid., 292.
50. Ibid., 295.
51. Michael Horton, Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 189, cited in Eduardo J. Echeverria, “Revelation, Faith and Tradition: Catholic Ecumenical Dialogue,” Calvin Theological Journal 49, no. 1 (April 2014): 27.
52. Translation: Protestantism does not have the structure or polity of the Roman Catholic Church.
53. Echeverria, “Revelation,” 46.
54. Ibid., 33.
55. Ibid., 32.
56. Kreeft, “Toward Uniting the Church: Is Reunion without Compromise Possible?,” Reformed Journal 29, no. 1 (1979): 10–11.
57. B. A. Robinson, “Roman Catholicism and Female Ordination: Recent History of the Debate,” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, last updated July 10, 2005, http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg10.htm.
58. Catechism, par. 87 (emphasis added).
59. Theodore Alois Buckley, The Catechism of the Council of Trent (London: Aeterna, 2014), Kindle edition, locations 173–74 (emphasis added). See also Echeverria, “Revelation,” 31.