Safe Haven

This is a defense of Sola Scriptura, I guess. Isn't this the mighty Leithart? Isn't he supposed to know more than us? Mother Church cowers in fear! After all, we didn't know the Spirit speaks to the Church! Why didn't you say so? If I have to believe in Sola Scriptura in order to really understand Scripture, I'll just put off that reading of Amos I was going to do. I mean, I'll just clutter it up, deferring to the bishops in Council, or those morons Augustine and Aquinas. I don't know what's so hard to understand about the problem. Tell you what, Leithart, riddle me this one: Jack Collins and Gerhard Forde in a room, explaining their respective theologies to a class of eager and receptive students. Lots of agreement. Lots of appeals to the Fathers, and to Scripture. But if Scripture is the final rule, who's right in the matters where they disagree? Do they not represent separate ecclesial bodies because those people believe this to be a much more...

Well, the 73 books of the Holy Bible according to Mother Church and the first edition of the RSV from Ignatius Press (?) are these: (Of course I'm not looking; I'm gonna be tested on this eventually) 1. Genesis 2. Exodus 3. Leviticus 4. Numbers 5. Deuteronomy 6. Joshua 7. Judges 8. Ruth 9. 1 Samuel 10. 2 Samuel 11. 1 Kings 12. 2 Kings 13. 1 Chronicles 14. 2 Chronicles 15. Ezra 16. Nehemiah 17. Tobit 18. Judith 19. Esther 20. Job 21. Psalms 22. Proverbs 23. Ecclesiastes 24. Song of Songs 25. Wisdom 26. Sirach 27. Isaiah 28. Jeremiah 29. Lamentations 30. Baruch 31. Ezekiel 32. Daniel 33. Hosea 34. Joel 35. Amos 36. Obadiah 37. Jonah 38. Micah 39. Nahum 40. Habakkuk 41. Zephaniah 42. Haggai 43. Zechariah 44. Malachi 45. 1 Maccabees 46. 2 Maccabees (and of the New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ) 47. Matthew 48. Mark 49. Luke 50. John 51. Acts 52. Romans 53. 1 Corinthians 54. 2 Corinthians 55. Galatians 56. Ephesians 57....

I admit it; I've been pretty useless today. I started making a list of music for a friend who is entirely ignorant of popular music (How fun is that? Answer: a ton.) and it took me away to the far reaches. I realized that I had to 1) acclimate him to popular music (in a non-threatening, non-sinful way) of the last 30 years, and 2) keep it quality enough that he won't despise me. I knew he needed to hear "The Big Three"--Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Celine Dion--so I've made a list for each of the first two, and Celine's will come. I'm not a huge Celine fan, so I'll have to judge the importance of each song quite apart from what I think of it personally. Each of them has a legitimate argument for being the best female pop vocalist in my lifetime, or even currently (Celine, call your office!). The first two lists were easy--you can capture Whitney in fewer than 20 songs without missing a landmark--and Mariah has been so dominant on the charts that ...

In my last post, toward the end, I spoke of exclusion; I want to be very clear: I'm merely talking about distinguishing truth and falsehood, not making a party only a few are welcome to. Joshua Lim, a new friend, writes eloquently about the problem of radical depravity (in Calvinism, and perhaps a few other systems) and interpretive authority here. It seems very odd that people so deeply committed to the idea of their own inability would become--at a very convenient time--extremely optimistic about interpreting the Scriptures. If this inability and sinfulness were carried through to its logical end, skepticism is the result. It should be the result for dogmatic conclusions rendered from a(n) hermeneutical spiral that doesn't end, but most of you don't see the problem yet. On the one hand, the church is posited as the defender against the excesses of pietistic individualism, but it is a 'church' that lacks reality in a physical sense. And that was for the sake of ac...

What that dude said . Seriously, if I write like jazz, he writes like a symphony. Being the spiritual infant that I am, I'm going to keep asking, "Where does dogma come from?" of my putative debate partners on this site. When a Catholic says, "Your appeal to authority is unprincipled," he is saying that it is unclear how you arrive say, at Nicene Trinitarian faith by the means you have chosen (the Protestant canon of Scripture, and appeal to the Holy Spirit). It's just as easy to arrive at somewhere else entirely by the same means. Nicea and Chalcedon (and whatever one decides were "correct" appeals to Scripture) didn't come from thin air. Absent some principle (like, "An ecumenical council is always infallible by its nature") you can't accept one and reject others arbitrarily. You can see just by talking to people that if Tradition in the Catholic Church stands as a monument to...something, that each community formed at the Refor...

Have I mentioned that I find George Michael amazing? I listened to "Kissing A Fool" again, and realized I need no convincing on the point. I also recalled that Michael Buble did a version, but...I'm sorry, Michael, you are consigned to the Cave of No Memory. I can't control other people's radios, and I sure as heck wouldn't turn it off, but I have a rule that I at least try not to torture myself on purpose. [That Cave claimed James Taylor, too, didn't it?--ed.] Yeah. For now. But if he moves, he has a chance. I just couldn't do it in the case of "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)." Pol Pot could have said he liked it, and I'd still listen to it. I mean, honestly. How great is that song? But truly, that day in November was as much a Day The Music Died as any plane crash in the middle of nowhere in 1959. If anybody cares, I haven't written a poem since, either. I guess poets can write tragic poems, too. But poets sing with words; I'...

I'm not applying Catholic ecclesiology to Protestants and criticizing them for inconsistency; it's way deeper than that. I'm pointing out that dogma within a particular Protestant tradition can't be defended with ecclesial authority when the "Church" is fundamentally invisible. Add to that the fact that the individual has final authority over what the Church and catholicity means anyway. I don't care whether you use my Catholic ecclesiology; I'm charging you with being inconsistent with your own. Either catholicity does not require agreement on fundamental matters of doctrine (which is what open communion indicates) or it does. What I'm saying is that you can't stand apart from the Catholic Church on the ground of an issue or issues that you have said is not vital to full communion with respect to yourselves.