Does the Catholic Church Approve of the Timothy Test? Or Not? Answering a Point by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati!

1) Does the Catholic Church Approve of the Timothy Test? Or Not? Answering a Point by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati! · 2) What kind of Evangelical Was I?

What does the Catholic Church Really Teach?

Here is what CMI thinks (or thought) it teaches: someone who thinks "the Timothy test" can mislead is repeating its error that Scripture cannot be properly understood except by the Church.

First, what I am quoting three pieces from:

D. Russell Humphreys' Cosmology
and the 'Timothy Test' :
A Reply
JONATHAN D. SARFATI
CEN Tech. J.,vol. 11, no. 2, 1997
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j11_2/j11_2_195-198.pdf

• First, what is the Timothy test?
  
  

  As Russell Humphreys puts it, in what he calls the 'Timothy test':
  
  

  -'To make these points [of a plain meaning of Scripture] a little clearer, imagine a Jewish Christian of the first century who understands Greek, Hebrew and the Scriptures well.
  
  Let's call him "Timothy" since Paul's protege waslike that.
  
  But let's also imagine that this Timothy knows nothing of the advanced scientific knowledge of his day, such as Aristotle's works.
  
  All that Timothy knows is from either everyday experience or careful study of Scripture, which Paul says is sufficient for wisdom (2 Tim. 3:15). Now if Scripture really is straightforward and sufficient, then the meaning Timothy derives from the words is probably the meaning that God intended for everybody to get.

  
  
  
• Second, someone has (basically, in their view) disagreed with it:
  
  

  CAN THE 'TIMOTHY TEST' MISLEAD?
  
  Phillips' whole thrust is to answer 'yes' to this. ...

  
  
  
• Third, he compares this someone, Phillips, to the Roman Catholic Church:
  
  

  ... However, he is repeating the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. This church teaches that ordinary people cannot understand Scripture without the guidance of the 'infallible' Church of Rome led by the Pope. Phillips says that ordinary people cannot understand Scripture without the insight of modern interpretations of chronology from biased and fallible scientists.

There are a few things one could say about this Timothy test.

One would ask oneself why there is this contrast between everyday experience and Aristotelic philosophy. After all, Aristotelic philosophy takes great care to model its conclusions as long as possible on ... everyday experience.

Or Scriptures and Aristotle, since Aristotle took note of Homer ... which is also a corpus of Scripture other than his philosophising.

One could ask why one takes a hypothetic Timothy thought to have no knowledge of Aristotle rather than the historic Timothy, who was a learned Jew, which we know from St Paul's words - this NOT just an ordinary man.

One can ask whether the Timothy test (as stated) would lead to Geocentrism, I think it does. The non-heliocentrics on CMI being about as disingenious as Phillips on literal six days.

One can ask if either Timothy test (probable historic Timothy, or Timothy test of Russell Humphreys) would lead to Flat Earth. Probably a really unlearned man in any secular learning apart from everyday experience (such as Alexander identifying further shore of Ganges as Gibraltar or Eratosthenes measuring sun shadow at Assuan and Alexandria - in one case by procuration of a slave is NOT) might have taken certain ambiguous texts in the more obvious flat earth sense - though they admit both senses.

But one thing we need NOT just ask, we can TELL: the third point about Catholic Church teaching that "ordinary people cannot understand Scripture without the guidance of the 'infallible' Church of Rome led by the Pope" is in fact wrong.

Here is the passage which comes closest to it, in Trent:

Furthermore, to check unbridled spirits, it decrees that no one relying on his own judgment shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions,[5] presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation,[6] has held and holds, or even contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, even though such interpretations should never at any time be published.

From THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
Session IV - Celebrated on the eighth day of April, 1546 under Pope Paul III
http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/TRENT4.htm#2

Trent is NOT describing an ordinary man. Trent is describing a man with unusual confidence in his own original perception of things and - which is the point - one applying this to Scripture.

Trent is not saying Papacy with bishops is a a corps of experts and everyone below that corps is just lost about understanding the Bible. Trent is saying that Church (where a tradition transmitted bt Pope and other bishops is a doctrinal backbone), including all faithful simple Catholics loyal to the Church, is right, and that dissenters from the Church are wrong.

Not because they are too ordinary. But because they are not ordinary enough.

An ordinary man who sees a sentence he doesn't understand doesn't just ponder for himself about it, he checks and doublechecks with other literature and with the men who are supposed to know the matter. An ordinary Christian would never have imagined, as people like Luther did, that they were basically the first Christians for centuries (with few exceptions like Hussites, of whom Luther approved, or Waldensians who were kosherised by Calvinists in return for accepting their theology) who understood this or that passage correctly (like Luther with Romans' Road passage) all the while they knew that the Church had been reading this passage .... wait, the Romans Road is not even a passage.

The first verse on the Romans Road to salvation is Romans 3:23, Romans 3:10-18 gives a detailed picture of what sin looks like in our lives.

The second Scripture on the Romans Road to salvation, Romans 6:23, ...

The third verse on the Romans Road to salvation picks up where Romans 6:23 left off ... Romans 5:8 declares ...

The fourth stop on the Romans Road to salvation is Romans 10:9 ... Romans 10:13 says it again ...

The final aspect of the Romans Road to salvation is the results of salvation. Romans 5:1 has this wonderful message ... . Romans 8:1 teaches us ... Finally, we have this precious promise of God from Romans 8:38-39 ...

From: GotQuestions : What is the Romans Road to salvation?
http://www.gotquestions.org/Romans-road-salvation.html

3:23, back to 3:10-18, on to 6:23, back to 5:8, on to 10:9, skip a few verses to 10:13, back to 8:1, on to 8:38-39. NOT how an ordinary reader would read Romans! Unless told, by someone he looks up to.

Actually, the outline as such is not wrong. It is just that the isolated verses may overdo the extent to which non-regenerate are a "massa damnationis". Which they are, but that is not all that there is to them. And of course, a reader who cuts and pastes these verses together is not really the "ordinary reader". It is instead some kind of "intermediate" between God and soul. If not an ordained priest, who is ordained by a consecrated bishop (both ordination and episcopal consecration are cheirotonia in the NT, but they were distinct from start) in communion with other such and with the Pope, then a protestant pastor with no real claim of his ordination going back to the Apostles. So, the Romans Road would perhaps not pass the Timothy test.

But, if early Church continued Jewish tradition where not explicitly differing from Pharisees or adding by the last and final Revelation in Christ, it stands to reason that the Timothy test as formulated leaves out the factor of tradition. But add tradition to it, and the Trentine Council is FOR it.

On an anniversary of Galileo trial (the one in 1616, by St Robert Bellarmine, concerning only the first book, not the person), a Jesuit at Vatican observatory complained that St Robert's attitude came too close to the Timothy test!

Well, obviously St Robert knew that canon of Trent better than that Jesuit!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
St Patrick's Day
17.III.2016

PS, I suspect the Harp on the Irish coat of arms inspired Lita Cosner's reflection on Psalm 104 (meaning of course 103!). But she missed that the Psalm also clearly teaches angelic movers at about every level of creation, not just heavenly bodies.

Update next day:

I, an exemple of why Protestant Reformers were NOT plain, ordinary readers

The Trindentine proposition of faith is not unlike that required of Berengarius a half millennium before. “The holy council teaches,” declared Trent, “and openly and straightforwardly professes that in the Blessed Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly, really and substantially contained under the perceptible species of bread and wine.” But then Trent added, with characteristic vigor, that this is the plain meaning of Christ’s words when at the Last Supper He said, “This is My body. This is the chalice of My blood.” Consequently the faithful were told “it is an infamy that contentious evil men should distort these words into fanciful, imaginary figures of speech that deny the truth about the body and blood of Christ, contrary to the universal understanding of the Church.”

The Reality of Christ in the Eucharist therefore is no figure of speech. It is no fanciful rhetoric. It is, in the clearest words that can be expressed, the Incarnation extended into space and time. It is literally the Emmanuel made flesh – the God-man who is here and now living in our midst.

From : The Guardian Angel: In the Eucharist is present the Totus Christus, and why we adore.
Posted by Donald Hartley - March 17th, 2016 - on Deeper Truth blog
http://www.deepertruthblog.com/blogsite/the-guardian-angel-in-the-eucharist-is-present-the-totus-christus-and-why-we-adore/

Warning against appreciative style of antipopes "Paul VI" and "John Paul II", alias Montini and Wojtyla.

And here is "Father" Paul Gabor "SJ" (too young for older rite of ordination), expressing his disgust for exegesis of St Robert Bellarmine and Melchior Cano (along with a false history of Quadriga Cassiani as if it had meant "allegorical sense ONLY" or sth):

I suspect that Cano and Bellarmine reflected some of their era's spirit when they desired clear-cut reading of Scripture. In fact, they would have expected God to make sure that Scripture could be read with no recourse to metaphor. As we have said before, throughout the history of the Church, the norm was to interpret Scripture using a very sophisticated art focused on intertextual references. Luther did not like it, and Cano and Bellarmine also found it unappealing and unconvincing. I believe it was an effect of the early modern esprit which was suffusing the air of the time.

From: The Catholic Astronomer : Heliocentrism Condemned: 400 Years Ago this Sunday
February 28, 2016 Fr. Paul Gabor
http://www.vofoundation.org/blog/heliocentrism-condemned-400-years-ago-this-sunday/

When I omit or forget to give reference, as yesterday due to time dearth, I try to make up for it later./HGL