That
ASSUMES
That Almighty God had no capacity, interest or will
to insure through such a messy process
that
HE
ended up with, essentially, what HE WANTED.
such a messy process
Exactly.
Now I'm going to do this as though I hadn't been repeatedly hit in the face with charges of Idolatry and with mockery of my Church and her institutions.
Over here with have the Books, tas graphas, biblia. They come presented to us as a union of several writings; the writings, the little books, become THE Book, most emphatically singular. Their origin and history are messy and unsatisfactorily unclear. Sometimes there appear to be contradictions. A few hundred years ago verses which are now deemed by inaccessible "authorities" to be spurious were presented as the infallible word of God.
And yet we believe that somehow God can insure through such a messy process that what He wills about his self-disclosure is accomplished.The Bible speaks of God's promises to lead the Apostles into truth and records a prototypical ecclesiastical council, held, as some maintain, even before there was a vague notion of Church.
The Church speaks of the Scriptures even before the notion of "The Bible" as one entity, not to mention which scriptures are in and which not, is established.
Both have indeterminate histories, each testifies (as some read and hear them) to the other.
Some firmly hold that God can handle the scribes, editors, scholars, clerics and people in such a way that His self-disclosure in Scripture is uncompromised. They suggest that to question God's reliable self-disclosure in Scripture is to suggest that God is weak or doesn't care.
But the idea that God would (or could?) work through a bunch of venal clerics to provide us with His reliable, fruitful, and efficacious self-disclosure, which does not return to Him empty but accomplishes that for which He sent (as in apostello) it, is risible to some of the same people. He has the power and the will to work through the Bible, which by itself has been used to excuse schism after schism, but in the estimation of some, cannot redeem the work of Bishops.
So who has the "smaller" God, those who think he stuck with a book and abandoned sinful men as too hard to direct, or those who trust Him and his promises even in the face of a Borgia or a Medici or two.
Or, with less passion: why trust Him in the Book, but not in the Church?