5 Inconvenient Dangerous Thoughts I Had During A Hermeneutics/Scripture Discussion
5. "Maybe Scripture isn't perspicuous."
4. "What is the 'gospel'"?
3. "That hermeneutical spiral thing you keep mentioning is a load of crap, and too much a concession to the postmodernists anyway."
2. "Maybe there's so many denominations because our final authority was not intended to be used for that purpose."
1. "Maybe there's so many denominations because we are angry malcontents and schism-artists." [So are you ready to submit to the infalliable Roman Catholic Church, and the successor to St. Peter?--ed.] No. But I salute them for provoking the question, and for providing a semi-palatable, alluring answer, even if it is highly convenient. Sola Ecclesia is better than No Ecclesia. Which is really what you've left us with, "Uncle Marty." That's another thing--James White, are you listening?--You're darn skippy I'll believe something just because the church says so. How else do we know anything? I'm super-gratified that the Trinity can be found in Scripture, but I didn't see it until someone, sometime, pointed it out. Furthermore, since someone added that firm law at some point that believing that God is a Trinity is a necessary condition of our fellowship as Christians, every one of us will see it when we read Scripture, or the ignorant will be instructed. But don't vainly tell me it's plainly in there, like we're not implicitly standing on the shoulders of giants (the ones who taught us to believe it!) when we affirm it. There was a time when that wasn't obvious, wasn't clear, wasn't "plainly in the Scriptures." We say Sola Scriptura isn't "Scripture only," and that is wise, right, and noble. But what we fail to answer is, "Where does the tradition we are explicitly or implicitly using come from?" The corollary question is nearly as interesting: "What is the consistent standard we use to reject practices we find unscriptural?" I'd say the denomination question (aside from a sinful inability to love and get along) is because we are individually relying on different streams of tradition to augment our interpretations of Scripture--which in themselves are different enough to make things interesting, BTW--and so it goes. The great Timothy Butler says essentially that the Catholic notions of authority and submission, encapsulated in an infalliable Magisterium and Church, don't solve the hermeneutical wars, but rather move their locality from the exclusive realm of Scripture to the interpretation of Scripture and Tradition, or (if we shall grant our Romish bretheren's insistence that there is one source of revelation) Sacred Tradition. If we factor out all those Catholics willfully defying a dogma or moral teaching of the Church as those needing to repent, (though we won't always know) if we should find observable variance of opinion among them AND historical evidence of standards inconsistently applied, or completely unknown even in seed form, Protestants can legitimately lay the charge of ecclesial deism right back at the feet of the Catholic, because he is idealizing a form that has no real-time referrent, and no plausible explanation of organic development. Mathison, in "The Shape of Sola Scriptura," is making this claim, the opposite of Newman's famous word on history, that history requires a denial of certain Catholic dogmas as ahistorical. For my part, that question is open. But at the moment, church history looks more than a bit Catholic. There may well be ad hoc justifications of strange doctrines, contradictions, and other problems, but I am only beginning to ask seemingly important questions, and my theology to this point answers other questions. [Wow, point #1 turned into a tome--ed.] I never claimed I was economical with words!
5. "Maybe Scripture isn't perspicuous."
4. "What is the 'gospel'"?
3. "That hermeneutical spiral thing you keep mentioning is a load of crap, and too much a concession to the postmodernists anyway."
2. "Maybe there's so many denominations because our final authority was not intended to be used for that purpose."
1. "Maybe there's so many denominations because we are angry malcontents and schism-artists." [So are you ready to submit to the infalliable Roman Catholic Church, and the successor to St. Peter?--ed.] No. But I salute them for provoking the question, and for providing a semi-palatable, alluring answer, even if it is highly convenient. Sola Ecclesia is better than No Ecclesia. Which is really what you've left us with, "Uncle Marty." That's another thing--James White, are you listening?--You're darn skippy I'll believe something just because the church says so. How else do we know anything? I'm super-gratified that the Trinity can be found in Scripture, but I didn't see it until someone, sometime, pointed it out. Furthermore, since someone added that firm law at some point that believing that God is a Trinity is a necessary condition of our fellowship as Christians, every one of us will see it when we read Scripture, or the ignorant will be instructed. But don't vainly tell me it's plainly in there, like we're not implicitly standing on the shoulders of giants (the ones who taught us to believe it!) when we affirm it. There was a time when that wasn't obvious, wasn't clear, wasn't "plainly in the Scriptures." We say Sola Scriptura isn't "Scripture only," and that is wise, right, and noble. But what we fail to answer is, "Where does the tradition we are explicitly or implicitly using come from?" The corollary question is nearly as interesting: "What is the consistent standard we use to reject practices we find unscriptural?" I'd say the denomination question (aside from a sinful inability to love and get along) is because we are individually relying on different streams of tradition to augment our interpretations of Scripture--which in themselves are different enough to make things interesting, BTW--and so it goes. The great Timothy Butler says essentially that the Catholic notions of authority and submission, encapsulated in an infalliable Magisterium and Church, don't solve the hermeneutical wars, but rather move their locality from the exclusive realm of Scripture to the interpretation of Scripture and Tradition, or (if we shall grant our Romish bretheren's insistence that there is one source of revelation) Sacred Tradition. If we factor out all those Catholics willfully defying a dogma or moral teaching of the Church as those needing to repent, (though we won't always know) if we should find observable variance of opinion among them AND historical evidence of standards inconsistently applied, or completely unknown even in seed form, Protestants can legitimately lay the charge of ecclesial deism right back at the feet of the Catholic, because he is idealizing a form that has no real-time referrent, and no plausible explanation of organic development. Mathison, in "The Shape of Sola Scriptura," is making this claim, the opposite of Newman's famous word on history, that history requires a denial of certain Catholic dogmas as ahistorical. For my part, that question is open. But at the moment, church history looks more than a bit Catholic. There may well be ad hoc justifications of strange doctrines, contradictions, and other problems, but I am only beginning to ask seemingly important questions, and my theology to this point answers other questions. [Wow, point #1 turned into a tome--ed.] I never claimed I was economical with words!
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