Would you agree/disagree that it was not until Constantine and the Council of Nicea that the canon was codified and that anything/everything else was then considered heresy? While it may have been in existence and believed by the majority prior to then, it was at that point that it was declared ‘the official’ - and many of the items were voted upon as to be accepted or not (Gospel of Thomas, etc).
For me, it started with the realization that Christianity and most other religions were profoundly misogynist. The more I looked into it, the more I came to realize that religions are about power and control, and use their self-assumed moral authority to spread fear and hate, so as to buttress their power and control. That’s when I gave up belief in god and gave up respect for religion.
Even the epistles ascribed to Paul get kind of a bad rap, because while there are passages that are misogynist to modern ears, there are remarkably progressive attitudes toward women there also. Paul commends many women by name in his letters and some of them even seem to have authority in the house churches of the time, and he famously asserts in his letter to the Galatians “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (emphasis added)
No question though, the church has not lived up to these pro-women ideals very well, although it is improving in many Christian churches. In my denomination (Episcopal Church), the leading clergy person and the leading lay person are both women.
The Council of Nicaea did not address the canon in any way. Constantine only asked one mainstream Christian to publish already accepted works. An “official” canon did not receive a stamp of approval by a council until the Council of Rome (382) or the Council of Carthage (397). (We’ve lost the handwritten notes of the participants, but later references to those councils indicate the same lists of books, in each case referring to them as having been accepted for a great length of time.)
While we have no complete list from the second or third century. We do have numerous letters commenting on overlapping shorter lists without ever including the Gnostic works (or, for the most part, even rejecting the Gnostic works). We do have letters that include or exclude the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, and a few other works, and we have letters explicitly rejecting other works, (Gospels of Judas and James), so we lack any evidence that references to other works were made to disappear. (Some of the works disappeared, but the discussions regarding them were not suppressed.)
So the notion of a late selection of a canon simply has no evidence to support it. (This, again, is separate from an observation that the works selected tended to be late first century works and not the efforts of eyewitnesses.)
Beyond that, only a very few works would have been considered heretical, (e.g., the aforementions Gospels of James and Judas). Most works were simply considered not sufficiently authoritative to be read at Mass, but literally hundreds of gospels and epistles attributed to all sorts of apostles and fathers of the church remained in circulation well into the sixth century or later.
The only thing I would question here is saying that “Constantine did not address the canon in any way” - by picking which version got published - or effecting the choices of what to include by having the current leaders choose - he did have an impact on what was ultimately chosen. In affect - his choice (as emperor looking to unify the religion/people/whatever) would certainly have an impact that would only serve to solidify the choices/ratification later.
I think Presbyterians do believe in predestination (although the Presbyterians I’ve known in the US are a pretty forgiving bunch, and I don’t think they, in their hearts, believe that God creates souls with the intention of consigning them to Hell, even if their church does, or did once, teach that).
Catholics do not. They believe in predestination in the sense that God knows all, and knows who will be saved and who will not, but they (we) believe that we have free will, and we are created to be saved, unless we choose otherwise.
I’ll have to rely on Web searches here, 'cause I’m not at home and don’t have any books handy.
From Gaudium et Spes (one of the documents of Vatican II):
The Catholic Church does not say that all are saved, but it does say that all may be saved. We cannot know. I have vague memories of reading something by Karl Rahner on the subject – I’ll poke around the bookshelves when I get home. Also, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich alluded to the possibility of universal salvation in her Revelations of Divine Love (“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”)
This would only be hypothetically true if there was no consensus regarding the books and if he chose one faction over others. There is no evidence of this happening. We have a lot of evidence of factions fighting it out within the church during that time, (that was why he called the Council at Nicaea), but none of those factions were holding out for any specific books to be included in or excluded from their use as liturgical readings. We have all sorts of evidence of conflicts over the Marcionite heresy, Gnosticism, Arianism, Montanism, and other disputes, but only a few letters discussing, in rather mild terms, the inclusion or exclusion of specific works. Had there been a faction that was promoting a separate canon, we should have a record of it, but we have such records only regarding the Marcionites with only a limited number of books that differ from the eventual canon.
Could Constantine’s opinions have carried weight? Probably, (although his own Arian leanings would have mitigated against that–the party he eventually favored lost out at the council he called), but there is simply no evidence that such a thing happened.