A Friend I Once Had, And The Dogmatic Principle

This is that. Maybe people retreat to numbers, and drums, and feelings because they don't have anything else left. "Church" is what you make it if she doesn't have you. I can appreciate the confessionalists, and their zealous quest for the truth, but if the individual retains final interpretive authority over what the Scriptures say, then every ecclesial mechanism of authority imposed externally is only provisional, insofar as that community agrees its authority is not finally binding. In other words, if they embrace Sola Scriptura, they're finished. Done. Down a pit of irrecoverable subjectivism. More than that, divine truth and your ecclesiology collapse down the same hole. On the other hand, merely claiming your community has a charism of infallibility is much different than having it. But let's just say for sure we can rule out the Reformation-produced communities. I only know two left, (not having fundamentally changed the way truth is discerned or found without an historically compelling reason, or a workable method) and having both suitably destroyed the rival claimants with the same argument--the lack of a physical, sacramental succession of ordination from the Apostles--the discussion turns to the dispute between them. A visible Church with no visible principium unitatis is not one, obviously. And if one had been granted to be him previously, no amount of malfeasance on his part would change that. To put it in the common tongue, Papa is still Papa, even if he leaves the toilet seat up. If father and son have a quibble about how he is father, fair enough. But Papa is still Papa.