The Quote That Originally Rattled My Cage...

Every once in a while I come back to this quote from Philip Blosser, professor of Philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. I remember the first time I read this back in early 2005, and how it challenged my pre-conceived ideas about the Catholic Church and the history of the Bible. I was pondering it again this week and thought I would post it up. I'm writing a major exam for the Ministry of Transportation tomorrow morning and if all goes well, then I'll be back here blogging again! :-)

"The honest Protestant Bible student has little ground for easily presuming that his private interpretation of the issues that divide the Protestant denominations is necessarily the right one, or that the 2000 year-old consensus of millions of Catholics on every inhabited continent is necessarily wrong. It would be untoward ignorance to assume that he is the first person in history to have carefully examined Scripture; and presumptuous arrogance to assume that he is the first to have understood it. Where was the Holy Spirit for these two thousand years? What about the centuries upon centuries through which the Christian faith was preserved, passed down from generation to generation, and carried by missionary monks to our barbarian ancestors in Europe? What about the millenia of godly champions of the faith, such as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Pope Leo, Pope Gregory, St. Benedict, St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis Xavier (the first missionary to Japan), and John Henry Newman, for starters? What about the early bishops who personally knew the apostles, like Ignatius of Antioch (the third successive bishop of that city), and who claimed to have had passed on to them the delegated authority of the apostles to stand in their place as divinely commissioned guardians and interpreters of the apostolic faith, and passed on this conviction (together with this claim of authority) from generation to generation through the laying on of hands? What about the popes and bishops who settled the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the early Ecumenical Councils, who declared "This is orthodox" and "That is heterodox," "This is canonical" and "That is not," and preserved and passed down the Bible and the the meaning of its message to us? Were they all mistaken in their "Romish" beliefs? Were these all partially confused, partially misinformed, partially benighted unfortunates who lost their way under the bondage of Rome, until, at last, with the advent of the modern Protestant Bible student, with his NIV Study Bible and Zondervan Concordance and CD-ROM Bible Dictionary, the light of truth has finally dawned?"

Philip Blosser, Ph.D