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You might want to follow your own advice in 9108. I tend either to ignore or to attempt to nuke high school debating tactics and such. We're talking about important things here. I'm working on good humor or courtesy, myself. It's so easy for offense to be taken when none is meant.

I do not recall stating or implying or thinking that you said everything the Church teaches can be proven from scripture.I think the point about confusing persuading and proving is well taken. I guess I have been thinking about "proof" in a forensic, and possibly even an evangelical sense, not in the sense of getting to a point where me an my homes all growl, "Word," when I'm done talking, proof not to MY satisfaction, but to someone else's.

And it may be that I don't have an inferiority complex so much as that I am just plain inferior, at least in innerleckshual gifts. I know a lot of seemingly good and pious people who can read the Pauline corpus and James and, seemingly in good faith, construe it differently from the way I do.

Also, I'm a great believer in giving people enough rope. It would be delightful to have one of the Prots here say, "Well Dang! I'm converting tomorrow!" But I'm not staking money on that's happening. But as a result of this thread I have begun to develop what I'm thinking of as a Protestant gestalt, and looking for connections between, say, the idea of the "invisible church" and aversion to the idea of intercession of the saints. I'm beginning to see a suggestion that the IMHO admirable Calvinist emphasis on the Sovereignty of God is in some sense similar to the little I know about Islamic theology, and to wonder about that. Interesting that both strands are VERY anti-"image". I get this consistent perception of a binary kosmos with God over THERE and everything else over HERE and a great gulf fixed between. While I on the other hand think of God as dwelling with us and of "taking of the Manhood into God, as Athanasius saith, and of a great celestial dance of yielding and accepting, of giving and receiving, of thanking and praising forever, and of that dance frequently if not always leaking from eternity into the present, from God's "now" into ours.

Besides, what started this flurry between us was my saying:

I am now coming to question the possibility of proving anything from Scripture

to which you responded, "No, I disagree."

You mean I'm not questioning it? I made no assertion about proving this or that from Scripture. I declared that I was questioning.

Being told I have an inferiority complex and am confused about the difference between proof and persuasion will not stop me from questioning. And in my comment about their studying Scripture longer than we, I was being polite and taking them at their word, since they say so frequently and eagerly that we are ignorant of Scripture.

I don't know how to say this in a way that won't be misunderstood: Back off. Take it easy. Try a little circumspection. (I should take my own advice.) I think you misunderstood both what I was saying and why I was saying it, and were a tad abrupt in taking me to task for it.