Question 5 – Canon Comparison Turretin Fan

In your rebuttal, you take issue with canon of a Scripture, a bit of an aside, since this debate is actually over the issue of whether Scripture alone is the rule of faith, not the identification of Scripture. Furthermore, as already observed, given Scripture, the canon simply falls out as a table of contents.

On the other hand, the canon appears to pose some interesting problems for your counterplan of papist tradition. Although your rebuttal claims, “The universal Church guided by the Holy Spirit has determined the Canon as well as the full Revelation of God,” you must be aware of the fact that there are several glaring problems with you claim. After all, there is some kind of definition of the Canon provided by Trent, but Trent at the same time endorsed as “authentic” the “old Latin Vulgate” of the day – a version riddled with errors.

Furthermore, the “Canon” promulgated by Trent was fairly clearly aimed not at promulgating an authoritative canon of what was in Scripture, but at opposing the canon identified by the Reformers: specifically asserting that the so-called Deuterocanonicals and the various additions to several Old Testament books must be accepted. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any notable papist theologian that would assert that Trent locks you into an Old Latin Vulgate equivalent of the King James Version Only movement. The promulgation of the Nova Vulgata by John Paul II seems to confirm the fact that the Old Latin Vulgate, endorsed by Trent as authentic, was not actually as good as the Latin could get. Even the Nova Vulgata has problems that should be addressed, and the sorry tale of the Clementine Vulgate just demonstrates the great futility of Rome attempting to define the content of Scripture at any detailed level.

Of course, the Reformed answer is consistent: the Holy Spirit persuades believers as to the authenticity of the Word, and he uses means to that end including (contrary to your straw men) the churches as well as the study of history and archaeology, reason, and the like.

But even setting aside the issue of the detailed level of the canon (and – after all – the difference between the Tridentine canon and the Reformed canon is not very large), and further setting aside the issue of how on earth the New Testament church would have any kind of authority over the already-existing canon of the Old Testament, there is the problem of the canon of oral tradition (the previously discussed category of HMDT) and living authoritative interpretation (the previously discussed category of IAT).

If difficulty in identifying the canon is supposed to be a problem for those who follow Sola Scriptura as defined by the WCF, it would seem that if no canon of HMDT and IAT can be found then a doubly-large problem exists for your counterplan.

Indeed, that is the question I hereby pose to you: where is the counterplan’s canon, not simply the canon of Scripture, but the canons of the HMDT (which one would presume is a fixed quantity) and the IAT (to date, since, apparently in your view IAT can produce new content that is also the “Word of God”)?


Question 5 the Canon Comparison Answer by Matthew Bellisario

Fist of all Tradition does not produce any new content in regards to the Word of God. So there is no need to even entertain that part of your question. I don't know how you have determined that from my writings up to this point. The Church faithfully gives us the complete Word of God in the means and methods that God chose to use, which includes Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and the Church. As far as the Council of Trent goes, it merely represented the universal teaching of the Church on the Biblical Canon up to that point, but declaring it infallibly. You bring up the Latin translation which has nothing to do with Biblical Canon, so I do not understand your attempt to besmirch it here in your argument. Trent infallibly defined the Canon and agreed with the Church, her writings and her councils up to that point. The Councils of Hippo 393, and Carthage 397 and 419 for example justified and authorized the Deuterocanonicals for use as Sacred Scripture. Even the Protestant scholar Bruce Metzger admits that the early Christians regarded the Deuterocanonicals as being Scripture.

Metzger (2001) points out in his notes from the RSV the following:

“By the end of the first century of the Christian era, more and more Jews ceased using the Septuagint because the early Christians had adopted it as their own translation.”

"During the early Christian centuries most Greek and Latin Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus, Tertulian, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, and Cyprian (none of whom knew any Hebrew), quoted passages from the Apocrypha as "Scripture," "divine Scripture," "inspired," and the like. In this period only an occasional Father made an effort to learn the limits of the Palestinian Jewish canon (as Melito of Sardis), or to distinguish between the Hebrew text of Daniel and the addition of the story of Susanna in the Greek version (as Africanus)."


As far as the “Reformers” being consistent in their view of how they determine Sacred Scripture, I find that statement amusing. I find it amusing because you are in opposition to every Church in existence before the “Reformation.” In fact none of them agree with your faulty position. The churches from Egypt, Syria, Greece, Rome, Armenia, and the list goes on, all disagree with you. None of them have the same Biblical Canon as you do. All of these churches can prove they existed 1500 years before yours, and they all reject your position. In fact all of the ancient churches are unanimous with the acceptance of the Deuterocanonical books, which you haphazardly reject.


Metzger, Bruce M., and May, Herbert G., New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha Expanded Edition RSV. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.