Scripture is Tradition

Another clip from an email with my sister:

"The Bible calls the Church (not Scripture) the "pillar and ground of the truth". (http://bible.cc/1_timothy/3-15.htm) This is one of a handful of passages which seems to portray the Church as an institution which would faithfully carry the truth down through the ages unchanged in the face of outside pressure. Historically, it is interesting to see how this has played out.

But you can even look at the current state of things and see it: in a time when so many mainline denominations are caving on so many issues, we find that Catholicism has held firm. No female priests, homosexuality is a sin, abortion is murder, life is sacred (so contraception is out), etc. These are incredibly unpopular beliefs, and the Catholic church is the only non-modern church which hasn't budged on any of these. Sure, the PCA holds these truths, too, but they are 40 years old and came about as a protest against heretical changes in mainline Presbyterianism.

In Protestantism, this is a pattern: a mainline denomination strays into theological error, and a small sect breaks away, preserving the original purity of the doctrines held by the original denomination. Later, this sect grows and eventually strays, and another sect breaks away from it for the same reasons. Etc, etc.

What is interesting about Catholicism is that the opposite pattern holds there. Heresies form, but rather than the "true church" breaking away and forming a new, smaller, fledgling denomination which maintains true doctrine, it is the heretical sect which breaks away and languishes as schismatics while the Church herself continues in doctrinal soundness.

Regarding the Church fathers, both sides pick and choose what they believe, but Protestants have to be far more selective than Catholics, for none of the fathers much resemble modern day Protestants. They resemble early Catholics, which is what they were. For example, Augustine is one of the Protestant favorites, and yet I think he documented a lineage of popes right back to St. Peter, and he seems to have viewed them as authoritative in some sense.

When you consider that the earliest proper canon of Scripture wasn't official until roughly 360 or so, it becomes clear that Scripture is tradition (or more properly, Scripture is a subset of tradition). The Church was without an official canon for longer than America has been a nation. It was the Church fathers, or more specifically, the Holy Spirit working through the Church, who faithfully handed down this tradition. By 360, the Church Fathers were starting to look much more like Catholics than anything else. What we Protestants do is accept the Scriptures which they handed to us (except the deuterocanonical books), reject the Scriptures which they rejected, and also reject the men themselves, by and large. I think it is this last bit where we've gone wrong."