FK: "The point is that for every example you can come up with, we can come up with A LOT more. Don't forget, we say the Bible speaks for itself. You say the Bible is indecipherable without the Church's interpretation. I agree with you. There is NO WAY the literal taking of the Bible comes anywhere close to Roman Catholic theology. Except in very limited circumstances, you have no case to make that Roman Catholicism has any regard for the literal words of scripture. Why else would your hierarchy have sheltered your laity away from those words for so many hundreds of years? If your hierarchy simply reflected those literal words, there would be nothing to be afraid of. Yet, their actions betray the opposite truth.
Q:INDEED.
--Biblically correct.
--Historically correct.
--Currently true.
--Logically true.
--Repeatedly demonstrably true historically and currently.
Thanks. Well put."
Q, assuming arguendo the validity of FK's post, how do you account for the theology and ecclesiology and praxis of Orthodoxy which never kept the scriptures from the laity, a laity which ultimately holds the final say (in terms of time and as a practical matter) on what is dogma and what isn't?
Have never felt particularly compelled to explain the vagaries of Orthodoxy at all.
But since pressed . . .
I think the indiosyncracies of individuals and social groups are more than sufficient to explain the vagaries of Orthodoxy.
When simple plain Scriptures can have so many wildly different interpretations by so many seemingly balanced and sane people . . . such differences as you allude to are common place examples of such diversity.
A laity and many clergy btw who often times have worked against the 'meddling bishops' to preserve the faith...
Because they were afraid that without guidance the laity would end up being as the Protestants are, scattered all over with a hunded different doctrines which they all claim we would see if we just read the Scriptures a little longer or more sincerely or if we, lacking the time to do all that study, just paid attention to their professors instead of our own? In other words because what you seem to think is a good outcome we think is a bad outcome?
The confluence in so many matters between the heirarchy-ridden RCs who were dealing with European barbarians and our Eastern Brothers who still had a noble, though decadent, civilization behind them is remarkable.
But, I know. You start out assuming we're wrong and conclude that the evidence shows we're wrong. I just looked around me at the endlessly fissiparating Protestants and took refuge in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, as it seems to me, but clearly not to you.
There's no commonly agreed upon epistemology to settle this dispute. Works won't do it, coherence or sense of doctrine won't do it. You treat Scriptures like cannon, and claim to outgun us, or say we have not studied it long enough and hard enough, as though agreement with you were the standard. And the most amusing style of combat in answer to James' "man is not saved by faith alone," is to line up a bunch of other texts which say, "He is too!", so that "Sola Scriptura seems to become "Sola the majority of texts in Scriptura".
Since today I remember a brace of martyrs, Patrick O'Loughran and Conor O'Devany, drawn and quartered in 1612 by Protestants (the amount of whose time spent in Bible study is unknown, but presumably it wasn't quite enough), we just pray a little harder, knowing that we too have shed blood very wrongly indeed.
It is not clear to me that letting just anyone read the Bible has had a good outcome. I'm not saying it isn't right, I'm just saying the data aren't conclusive to those who haven't made up their minds ahead of time.