“At the end of the day absent Petrine authority, so well explained by the author, we descend into a chaos where every Tom, Dick, and Harry and their grandmother and your local Foursquare Church pastor cracks open the pages of the Bible and purports to offer his/her cockamamie “definitive” interpretation of scripture which is starkly at odds with that of the early Church fathers (some of whom were contemporaries of the Evangelist John) charged with assembling the canonical texts.”
As matter of curiosity, why do you suppose that there was a Protestant Revolution, as the nuns of my youth used to call it, in the Church in the West where there was/is Petrine Authority and no such thing in the Church in the East where there isn’t and never was any Petrine authority, at least not as it is being defined here?
“As matter of curiosity, why do you suppose that there was a Protestant Revolution, as the nuns of my youth used to call it, in the Church in the West where there was/is Petrine Authority and no such thing in the Church in the East where there isn’t and never was any Petrine authority, at least not as it is being defined here?”
The base problem is that while there are vast superficial differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, at the core they subscribe to the same authority principal. This is why it is sometimes observed by the more polemical Orthodox that Protestants and Catholics are really two sides of the same coin. All Protestants are crypto-Papists and the Roman Catholic Church was the first Protestant denomination. They all believe in the authority of an individual person to interpret scripture and doctrine infallibly. The only real difference being in the number of Popes they have. Protestants have millions, with wholly predictable results. While Catholics only have one, though they have at times had long and bitter disputes over who that one is/was.
That approach to authority is antithetical to Orthodoxy where it is the Church as a whole that decides important doctrinal issues with the sensus fidelium guided by Scripture, the Creed, the Fathers and Holy Tradition, often, though not always, expressed in the decrees of the OEcumenical Synods.