re: Christians who somehow thought it wasn’t Christianlike to vote for Trump

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Jesus Christ founded His Church and that Church and its Holy Tradition determined what is and isn’t Holy Scripture - not the other away around.

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Jesus definitely founded His Church, but no the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church do not decide what His Church is.

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You’re intellectually disingenuous on purpose.

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I am not.

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You keep saying to argue based on Scripture and when anyone provides Holy Scripture, YOU provide your own interpretation against.

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I’m providing an argument for why the Scriptures teach what I believe they teach.

Regardless of what you think about church authority, the New Testament was written in common Greek for the common people to hear it. The Bible is not some mystical codex that requires a cypher that only certain people in the Church have. Therefore, we can use standard interpretation principles (like using context) guided by the theological foundations of the Bible being God’s revealed word, which is perfect and inerrant. We can therefore read it and make some sense of it without the Church making infallible interpretations for us.

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That is the issue. Neither you nor I get to interpret Holy Scriptures as we see fit.

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I agree. “As we see fit” being the key issue. We are to interpret it with God’s revelation in mind, in that He has a message for us to understand, not for us to create ourselves.

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Furthermore, the Church interprets Holy Scriptures and not the Holy Scriptures that interpret the Church.

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God is the one who revealed the truth. The church is to receive it, not create it.

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Jesus Christ founded His Church and that Church and its Holy Tradition determined what is and isn’t Holy Scripture - not the other away around.

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That is the concept of sola ecclesia. I don’t subscribe to that. The Bible the ultimate authority, not the Church.

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…how do you know you have the right Bible?

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We know we have the right Bible because the New Testament books, written in the 1st century by apostles or their companions, were recognized from the start as Scripture across the churches, preserved by God, not picked by men.

Oh Foomanchoo, you do what you do.

Serious question, how much Holy Scripture did your church read through this past Sunday? I’m sure your pastor spoke on a specific passage.

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Foo, I'm asking how you know the canon is the protestant canon you have in your Bible and your answer is "I believe it because it says so." You can't appeal to the thing in question. That's a logical fallacy.

So I'll ask again. By what means do you know that your canon is correct?

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Ironically, a common argument against sola scriptura is that the canon isn’t found in the Bible. It misses the meaning of the doctrine, but I find that interesting all the same.

I’m saying that the Bible’s promise that it will be preserved is the authoritative basis for its preservation, and tradition of the Church preserving the text is the mechanism for its transmission and preservation. We can then look at the texts that were preserved to judge what of them are Scripture vs non-Scripture.

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The same church that you already admitted got all sorts of things wrong and fell away since before the death of the apostles until the reformation?

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Yes. The Church doesn’t need to be infallible to bear witness to the infallible truth, just as John the Baptist didn’t need to be an infallible witness to be a real and true witness to Christ as the perfect God-man Messiah.

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Serious question, how much Holy Scripture did your church read through this past Sunday? I’m sure your pastor spoke on a specific passage.

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Do you know where I am going with this? I think this is the “aha”.

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Through what means?

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God kept the apostles’ writings safe and faithfully passed down, copied across many communities so no single source could corrupt them.

You could say “the Church,” but it wasn’t some centralized leadership holding the only copies for centuries. The Bible was preserved precisely because its transmission was decentralized, spread across many churches and communities, which made it resilient to corruption.

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The Bible was preserved precisely because its transmission was decentralized, spread across many churches and communities, which made it resilient to corruption.

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Are you aware that the Church of the first millennium was (and still is today) a decentralized organization?

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This is a circular argument, Foo. "The authoritative basis for the Bible is that the Bible says it will be preserved."

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All ultimates are just that, and there is no higher authority to appeal to. It is why God swears by His own name, after all.

It may be circular but it isn’t viciously circular.

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And you're begging the question. Who gets to determine what is and isn't scripture and by what authority do they have to do so?

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God determines it. The Church receives it. The Holy Spirit confirms it.

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All ultimates are just that, and there is no higher authority to appeal to. It is why God swears by His own name, after all.

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Do you maybe want to reword this?

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God determines it. The Church receives it. The Holy Spirit confirms it.

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Finally! The Holy Spirit confirms the canon. Does He confirm it to each individual or to the Church as a whole?