Immortal Awakened said:
then perhaps your belief system is not actually christian; what specifically do you believe?
I can't possibly answer this in such a short time. Could you? If you really are interested, why not read up on our beliefs from Orthodox Church sources? There are plenty of good websites I'll be happy to point you to.
how do you know that your church originates with the incarnate christ? dont all churches claim this? how are you defining 'your Church'?; the church broke into many schisms before the apostles even died out; how can you know that any of them are even true?; i personally have no reason to believe that any of them are anything but false
My Church is the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church. I know that She originates in the Incarnate Christ because we have direct lines of succession from the Apostles. She, whilst still in communion with Rome and the Non-Chalcedonians, is the Church that wrote and collected the New Testament and canonised it, along with the entire Septuagint OT as the Bible. No churches other than the three mentioned can claim to have done this. And you can't break into schisms, a schism
is a break. Please show me any evidence for any major schisms prior to the Council of Chalcedon. Heretical groups like the Ebionites or Gnostics don't count as they were never in the Church to begin with.
i never said that it was; rather i stated that the bible is the basis for the church's belief system; the church and the church's belief system are two different things; i believe that youre simply confusing the two with each other
Obviously the Church's beliefs and the Church are different, but as part of the beliefs of the Church, ecclesiology, is precisely about who and what the Church is you simply cannot pull them apart in the way you wish to.
this is not true of the old testament; perhaps youre just referring to the new testament
No, I'm referring to the Bible. The OT is part of the Bible, not the whole. Without the NT there is no Bible. And, actually, the Church did cannonise the OT also, the Septuagint version of it, which is why none of the churches I previously mentioned use the Masoretic Text like many Protestants. How can the Church's beliefs, then, be based on an infallible Bible if Protestants are willing to remove great sections of it?
do you believe that the texts themselves are infallible?
No
if so, did they become infallible only upon canonization or were they infallible well prior to canonization, when they were originally written?
Not applicable
and if you dont believe that they are infallible, then what makes you think that your church is a true reflection of the incarnate christ in the first place?;
Why shouldn't She be? Please show me somewhere in the Bible (as that is all you can base your beliefs on) where is says the Bible is infallible. I'd be particularly interested to see if you can find such a reference to the NT.
how do you even know what the incarnate christ looks like?; you werent even living back then;
Why is this relevant? Do you think we need to see Christ's face to understand His teachings? The time at which I was born is completely irrelevant and those of us who believe despite not having seen are more greatly blessed than those who saw, or isn't that in your Bible?
the early church was very schismed according to various different belief systems; which early schism was true and which early schism was false?
No, the Church was a remarkably homogeneous body considering the difficulties of geography and persecutions. Please try to learn the difference between a schism and a heresy.
this isnt quite true; although there was not formal canonization at that early point, the early schismed church groups still possessed the texts themselves; in fact, they had more than what has been canonized today; its not like they didnt have bible texts; and its not like they didnt believe them to be inerrantly inspired, the way that they believed that the old testament was inerrantly inspired
Some local churches had some texts, some had others. They argued for centuries about books like Revelation, Hebrews, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache. If they didn't have all of (and often had other texts beside) your inerrant Bible then they didn't have your inerrant Bible at all. And you've yet to show a single jot of evidence that the texts were considered to be infallible. There's a big difference between inspiration and infallibility.
again, totally untrue; they based their faith on a combination of uncanonized new testament texts, which they believed to be inerrantly inspired, coupled with unverifiable oral traditions which changed from time to time; just because the new testament texts were not yet canonized didnt mean that they didnt have the early new testament texts in their possession; nor did it mean that they didnt believe in the infallibility of those texts as they already had believed in the infallibility of the old testament.
I've answered most of this above. By your own admission they didn't have the same collection of texts you have in your Bible and you've shown no evidence at all that they believed in textual infallibility, not even of the OT (And as you're neither Orthodox nor Oriental Orthodox the chances of your OT corresponding to that of the early Church is effectively nil.) I'm also interested in some evidence that oral Holy Tradition changed over time. Unless you can provide evidence to support your claims you really should be a bit more careful about stating them as fact.
comments such as what youve written simply communicate nothing more than your own ignorance of the existence of many ancient canons and many ancient churches; perhaps your pretextually-based historical distortions have led you to believe that there was only one canon of scripture; or one church for that matter; but i have to assume that you are moreso referring to the last and final canonization of scripture, politically inspired as it was; prior to this last and final scripture canonization, there were multiple schismed church groups which each authorized different canons
This is a laugh. Anybody here who has come across my posts on this subject before will be only too well aware that I'm constantly using the argument of there being no one canon of Scripture against sola scripturalists like yourself. There are, in fact, four separate canons still in use today. Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox (including most Oriental Orthodox) and Ethiopian. Historically there was a fifth Syriac canon that used the Pe****ta rather than the four Gospels. There has never been and will never be one single, infallible canon of Scripture, which fact supports my position, not yours.
the church did not create the bible; the existence of the old testament predates the formation of the early church by several hundreds of years; now thats just ignorant; further, the canonization of the new testament texts do not constitute the creation of the new testament as you may assert; canonization and creation of the original manuscripts are two entirely different things; youre not concisely delineating
I'm afraid that it is your paragraph above that is ignorant. I was talking of the Bible which is a collection of books, not the individual texts within it. You're quite right that the texts are earlier, but until they were canonised in the 5th century there was no collection agreed on by the whole Church and hence no Bible.
the texts began as oral traditions which were later written down;
And whichj you think changed over time, making your texts less than infallible, surely?
these oral traditions were written by the apostles themselves, as were directly reflective of either the words of jesus or the beliefs of the original apostles;
How do you know this? It's not in the Bible (no, not even the names of the books are contemporary with the texts). I know who wrote them (and most of the authors weren't Apostles) but that's because I accept the Holy Tradition kept by the Church which you reject because it 'changed from time to time.' This is the problem with sola scriptura - even sola scripturalists can't stick to it.
these texts were thereafter circulated with the common belief that they were inerrant, well prior to their last and final canonization; inerrancy and canonization are two entirely different things
Inerrancy and canonisation are indeed two different things, but you have yet to provide one piece of evidence that the early Church believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. Find me anyone who believed in anything like sola scriptura prior to the Reformation and I'll be incredibly surprised. Go on, see if you can do what no other sola scripturalist here or anywhere else has ever managed to do and convince me that your doctrine is older than 16th century.
James