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With respect, you're missing the point, Protestant. We're not after the essence of God in our hermeneutical process. Certainty need not be absolute, for anyone. But the point is, if you can't prove to other Protestants that you're obviously right in the particularities of your confession, (and neither can he) how are any of you gonna answer the charge of schism from Rome or Constantinople? I can't hold a particular doctrine to be true unless there's good reason to believe it's true. And the Fathers are utterly unanimous: don't believe anything that didn't come from a successor to the Apostles. Even then, if he goes against Tradition, he's wrong.

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Timothy R. Butler said…
I think we need to distinguish between being able to prove and being able to convince. Those aren't the same, you know. I tend to think the Reformed can do the former (that's how I became Reformed, after all), but not so much the latter (people don't make decisions on purely logical terms). Anyway -- maybe Rome and Constantinople can start by showing how one of them can prove with tradition why the other is wrong to the extent that the other would be convinced and come around.

If Rome can't convince anyone else that it is right, then it can hardly condemn the Protestants when they can't either.
12:53 AM
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