Post by hume on Feb 5, 2007 18:41:33 GMT -8
11/05:
Imagine reading the New Testament for the first time -- and without anyone "filling in" the background for you. Would you come away with a "trinitarian" understanding of God? I doubt it. It's possible you'd understand that, according to these writings, Jesus was in some sense God. That is, you might get the God as Father and God as Son distinction, since it's fairly clear in certain N.T. passages -- and incidentally, understanding that distinction, you might be able to sense cryptic hints of it when reading the Old Testament (though, in a similar way, just reading the O.T. would surely not give you a clear sense of Christ's nature). But just as the Second Person of the Trinity is only obscurely present in the Old Testament, the Third Person, while present in the New Testament, is referred to only briefly and rather mysteriously (blink, and you'll miss it).
A Catholic would probably say, this is an example of the importance of Tradition. If you tried to do away with it -- a literal "sola scriptura" -- you'd simply lose critical Christian doctrines, because they aren't worked out clearly in scripture (perhaps they're all there, but many of them don't exactly leap off the page at you). Of course, not even hard-core Protestants really follow "sola scriptura" literally.
Imagine reading the New Testament for the first time -- and without anyone "filling in" the background for you. Would you come away with a "trinitarian" understanding of God? I doubt it. It's possible you'd understand that, according to these writings, Jesus was in some sense God. That is, you might get the God as Father and God as Son distinction, since it's fairly clear in certain N.T. passages -- and incidentally, understanding that distinction, you might be able to sense cryptic hints of it when reading the Old Testament (though, in a similar way, just reading the O.T. would surely not give you a clear sense of Christ's nature). But just as the Second Person of the Trinity is only obscurely present in the Old Testament, the Third Person, while present in the New Testament, is referred to only briefly and rather mysteriously (blink, and you'll miss it).
A Catholic would probably say, this is an example of the importance of Tradition. If you tried to do away with it -- a literal "sola scriptura" -- you'd simply lose critical Christian doctrines, because they aren't worked out clearly in scripture (perhaps they're all there, but many of them don't exactly leap off the page at you). Of course, not even hard-core Protestants really follow "sola scriptura" literally.
