shadmans Musings  

As I start part 28 of my Sola Scriptura series, I am going to document some of the conflicting views on the interpretation of Scripture that we see before and during the Middle Ages to further drive home the point that there was no unanimous consent among the Church fathers concerning how Scripture was to be interpreted. In the previous blog we looked at a few of these conflicting interpretations but my goal in this blog will be to demonstrate that this was not an isolated case, which was William Webster’s point in this section of his book, Holy Scripture, Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, Vol II. We will start off this blog with the scriptural rule used for biblical interpretation in the Middle Ages. It's important to understand what the Church fathers believed the rules for interpreting Scripture were so a proper foundation for this evaluation of their methodologies can be made. After that, I will discuss what ‘patristic contenas’ were and what part they played in the process of Sc...

(13) When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, (14) having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. (2:13-14) Paul continues in verse 13 and 14 where he left off in verses 11 and 12. Where he emphasized salvation in the two preceding verses, he now emphasizes our forgiveness completely apart from any human work. [1] These two verses should always remind us of the immense love, grace and mercy that Jesus showed mankind by sacrificing Himself on the Cross. It was and will always be the ultimate act of forgiveness. God sent His own Son to die on a Cross for us long before any of us were even born, to cancel the debt of sin for all mankind. This act of forgiveness highlights the mercy and compassion of Christ, as well as the depth of His love for us. It...

As I start this topic, it still surprises me that I’ve written 26 blogs on different aspects of Sola Scriptura when most Protestant websites on the Internet barely give the topic a paragraph. But hopefully, as you have followed me on this journey, you are seeing that there is quite a lot to look at and evaluate, and I’m nowhere near completing this subject. I’m focusing this blog on “unanimous consent” because it is what Catholic apologists say over and over about the unity of the Church fathers on tradition and their outright denial of Sola Scriptura in their quest to prove that Scripture is not sufficient in and of itself to lead a believer to Christ. Nor is Scripture able to teach the believer how to live a Godly life, since the Catholic Church teaches that the believer needs the addition of tradition and the Church’s teachings to be complete. One of their favorite examples for why Sola Scriptura cannot be true is the supposed 30,000 Protestant denominations (which I will not be ...