One: But the Apostles DID write down what Our Lord did and said for the reason that "we would know that Jesus is the Son of God and that by this knowledge we would be saved."- John 20:31
A claim regarding texts which only exists because both it and they were handed down through
a tradition. Incidentally, a tradition that used these texts in a liturgical context of sacraments. I'll never get over how Protestants manage to keep a straight face when talking about their take on the reason for treasuring a list of books that just
happens to agree with the very one decided upon by none other than post-Constantinian bishops of ye old pagan Whore of Babylon churches of the Roman and Orthodox lineage.
Two: You're assuming that the other Apostles who didn't write anything down either preached other doctrine that we cannot know except that the Church teaches it
I'm not assuming anything. I'm going by the actual practice of the churches actually founded by the Apostles, kept from the earliest textual and archaeological record down to this day: practices like the Eucharistic sacrifice, sacramentalism, altars in churches, an ordained priesthood, veneration of Mary and the Saints, infant baptism, not to mention the Apostolic doctrine of justification.
St. Ignatius Of Antioch, disciple of St. John the Apostle, ca. 110 A.D.
Keep yourselves from those evil plants which Jesus Christ does not tend, because they are not the planting of the Father. Not that I have found any division among you, but exceeding purity. For as many as are of God and of Jesus Christ are also with the bishop. And as many as shall, in the exercise of repentance, return into the unity of the Church, these, too, shall belong to God, that they may live according to Jesus Christ. Do not err, my brethren. If any man follows him that makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If any one walks according to a strange opinion, he agrees not with the passion of Christ. ...
...
Take ye heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to show forth the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever ye do, ye may do it according to the will of God. or that what the the Gospel writers, Sts. Paul, Peter, Jude, John somehow did not provide everything we needed to know.
Matthew 23:2-3:
The scribes and the Pharisees are seated in the chair of Moses. Therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them. They didn't. The universal practices of the Apostolic churches from Rome to the far reaches of India, which can no more be reconstructed from the Bible alone than can Judaism, demonstrate this to be fact. You're Bibliolaters.
Three: What is the Gospel? Is it not found in the Word of God written? You're assuming that Apostolic Tradition is somehow not synonymous with or is found outside of the Scripture.
Scripture is obviously, by logical necessity, a
part of a tradition that transcends it. You're not even putting the cart before the horse: you're conveniently letting the horse pull the cart while pretending it doesn't exist.
Of course this necessitates an infallible church authority to fill in the gaps since what we have written isn't sufficient.
"What we have written" is
a priori not sufficient without an authority to vouch for its Apostolicity and inerrancy in the first place.
So how do we then test that which we hear from the Church? Do we not refer to Scripture? Your entire New Testament basis for the papacy is Matthew 16:18. You refer to the Scripture as your proof that Scripture is insufficient.
I test it based on my living faith and the fulfillment of the promises it makes. The sacraments work. Get over it. 30 years of "faith alone" and Protestantism couldn't get me for one moment into the state of grace like the Church through her sacraments did in one instant. You would know it if you were in it.
Four: How do we know what this nebulous "everything" is? Did Christ teach the disciples the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception? Papal Infallibility? The Assumption? Purgatory? If you answer 'yes', how do you know? Because Rome tells you so.
Nope. Try again. Try harder.
Let's read on one more verse: but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. This speaks to the sufficiency of not only St. John's Gospel but also to all of Scripture.
Err ... no, it doesn't. The verse is emphatically referring to its own text, the Gospel of John, and you have no way of ascertaining the veracity of this text by its own authority, divorced from the context of the living, teaching Church. You, moreover, contradict your own self by the very acceptance of the canon of scripture, which is not contained within it. And you contradict it again every time you apply a "hemeneutic" to interpret it.
Five: See above. To take the last verses of St. John as proof that an extra Biblical source of Revelation is needed for salvation is terrible exegesis.
It's not a proof of any kind, and that you would stretch it beyond all logic to see it as one leads me to believe any further discussion with you may be utterly without point.
Six: More assumptions that the written tradition and this oral tradition somehow represent different strains of tradition. We have no reason to accept Rome's claims based on reading your interpretation back into the text.
And we have even less reason to accept YOURS.
Seven: You assume that what was preached before the canonization of Scripture was somehow contradictory or was not found in the Scripture when it was finally written. You have no justification for reading Rome's claims into the "oral tradition", especially since so many of Rome's later claims about Herself are absent from the written record.
Irony's a bitch.
What you Protestants teach today, namely the Satanic doctrine of forensic justification by means of imputed righteousness through faith alone, by means of the legal loophole of penal substitution to vengeful deity, is nowhere to be found in the annals of Christianity before the Reoformation. Yes, it would have been utterly incomprehensible to pre-Biblical Christians, and your iconoclasm, shunning of invocation of saitns and angels, your aversion to the Mother of God, your disdain for all the "pagan" smells and bells, not to mention "sola scriptura" would even have been .
