From Athens to Antioch

Reading Scripture and History slowly. Understanding the faith as the Christians saw it in the Apostolic Church. BA History 2022, MA Religion 2026 UGA-Go Dawgs

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Aaronaeus Strange. My response was the exact opposite after I studied the early church.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@wcmclaa Still lying about Protestant beliefs I see.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@MikeWingerii Great perspective

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Emma506131772 True.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Xtopher_Uzo Both can be true

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Nick_The_Hat @bigger_bread I don’t respond to derailment. Still waiting on your response.

Do I need to reframe the question?

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Nick_The_Hat @bigger_bread Ball’s in your court. Has been the whole day. The whole X verse sees your fallacy. Look through your history. Hard to have substance in under 20 syllables.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

Lots of that I have already addressed or you mischaracterize. No need to go through it again.

On development vs material change. I clearly laid out why I think it’s material change in an earlier post. Did you miss it? You never addressed it.

Here is is again.

1. Rome
Tighter legal language is development. A different scope or kind of jurisdiction is a material change.

I call it a material change when the bishop of Rome moved from exercising a unique primacy within the universal episcopal Church to possessing a substantially different kind of authority: immediate jurisdiction, unilateral authority over other bishops, and an authority understood as necessary to the constitution of every local church.

2. Bishops
Greater organization, clearer territorial structures, and increased administrative responsibility are development. A different kind of power attached to the office is material change.

I call it a material change when bishops moved from primarily pastoral, teaching, sacramental, and disciplinary authority within the Church to exercising civil, judicial, political, or coercive authority backed by the state, especially when those powers became regular/normal features of the episcopal office (not just isolated incidents).

3. Rule of Faith
Clarifying language around an already-public belief is development. Making a genuinely new belief universally binding is material change.

I call it a material change when a doctrine or obligation becomes necessary for full communion even though it cannot be shown to have been part of the earlier public apostolic faith, and earlier Christians could have lived and died in good standing without knowing or affirming it.

4. Exercise of Church Authority
Using existing spiritual authority more formally is development. Expanding the kinds of authority the Church claims is material change.

I call it a material change when spiritual authority becomes coercive civil authority ; i.e. when the Church goes from teaching and disciplining believers to using the state to punish dissent and enforce belief.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@wcmclaa To uneducated to understand sola scripture. Spend 15 miln with google next time before you post.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Nick_The_Hat @wcmclaa 1 words, 1 acronym and 3 emojis. We are regressing.

Your thread stills waits for you Mr. Hat

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

Welcome back my friend. I think we’re done here.

I gave you my specific test for development vs. material change, identified exactly where I believe Rome crossed that line, and explicitly gave you the last word to tell me where that analysis was wrong. That thread is still wanting a response

Instead, you returned to arguments about the visible Church, continuing ministry, the canon, and “book plus readers” that I had already answered (and in several cases explicitly agreed with.)

We’re now going in circles.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Nick_The_Hat A double post - and still no substantive response. I am getting cold and lonely waiting on you to actually do something more than 5 words and 3 eojis.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@Nick_The_Hat @bigger_bread My position is still sitting there waiting for you to engage it. So far you’ve done a lot of chirping and very little arguing. At some point, use those few remaining brain cells and address the actual point.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

You gave me a well-written and what seems tobe on a quick read a fairly well-positioned response here, and I appreciate the effort you put into it. I suspect we may ultimately agree to disagree, but this is at least substantive theology and from someone who knows their position, I would expect nothing less.

Before I spend time responding point by point, I want to make sure I am representing your argument fairly and see if we can pick 1 or 2 (this is kind of a gishgallop).

I think I see 10 points you make:

1) My position assumes a Protestant ecclesiology

2) My position frames Rome’s authority too narrowly around institutional succession.

3) My standard puts the individual interpreter over the Church, whereas Scripture presents the Church as the continuing authority to teach, judge disputes, and preserve apostolic tradition.

4) Peter received a distinctive office and authority that continued in the Church of Rome.

5) Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, and early episcopal succession provide historical evidence for Rome’s unique position and continuing authority.

6) Corrupt or sinful popes do not invalidate the legitimacy of the papal office or the authority properly attached to it.

7) Catholic justification can be defended from Scripture, so I cannot simply assume a Protestant definition of justification and use it to declare Trent a departure from apostolic Christianity.

8) Doctrinal development is legitimate, so later formulations are not necessarily inventions simply because they do not appear verbatim in the apostolic writings.

9) The canon creates a problem for my position because Christians depend on the historical Church to identify the apostolic Scriptures while I deny that the same Church possesses divinely protected authority to adjudicate their meaning.

10) And finally your conclusion, as I understand it, is that the burden is on me to establish my own account of authority, show that the Petrine office did not continue in the way Rome claims, and demonstrate that later Catholic doctrines represent material changes rather than legitimate developments.

Is that a fair summary of your argument?

I want to make sure we agree on the what the postiions are before either of us spends more time responding to positions the other person does not actually hold.

If I’ve captured your arguments fairly (I think I have), are any of these more foundational or important to your case than the others? Ten parallel arguments is a lot to untangle at once. I’m happy to work through all of them, but I’d rather have a discussion on one or two of them first (starting with the points you think are strongest or most foundational) instead of trying to argue all 10 at once.

Fair?

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@bigger_bread Thanks. Finally someone with some with a brain, not just a mout. I look forward to digging into this.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@hdpayens I don’t think you understand sola scriptura if this is your understanding

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@UcheMaryOkoli

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@SoliDeoGloria_X

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

It took like 15 paragraphs to try prove this sentence is not the plain reading.

Matthew 13:55 “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?

Mark 6:3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph,[a] Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

How many paragraphs will antiquity require? Josephus, writing in the first century: ... " so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned (Josephus, Antiquities, 20.9.1)

Scripture calls James Jesus’ brother. Josephus calls James Jesus’ brother. At some point, the MOST plain reading is just the plain reading.

I understand that later Catholic tradition came to place significant weight on the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, but that seems to require an increasingly complicated reading of what these texts naturally say.

That looks more like a tradition problem than a Scripture problem.

[From Athens to Antioch @YHWH_echad]

@SoliDeoGloria_X So does contemporaneous non-scripture history.