Well, our problem here is that if we give even an inch we are put into an impossible situation. Even as it is, most Apostolics I converse with demand that full credit be given to the Church for the Bible itself. The mostly unspoken caveat is, of course, that if any credit belongs to the Apostolic Church, then we are also obligated to follow whatever the Apostolic Church says is true about its interpretation. After all, if the Church wrote it, then the Church should get the SOLE say as to what it means. Naturally, that doesn't work so well for us. :)
And in any event, we really do think that God determines what revelation is, just as you said. I would be fully willing to say that not every interpretation I agree with is ultimately going to be right. But of course, no one representing the Apostolic Church could possibly stick out such a hand in return on anything that matters. :)
It behooves the RCC to tell us we're splitting hairs because the RCC preaches synergy -- a melding of grace and good works. But Scripture clearly doesn't teach this. God alone saves the fallen sinner by His grace alone through faith alone in the sacrifice of His Son alone whose righteousness is imputed to us through the Holy Spirit alone.
Rome would have us believe we are too strict, "too extreme" in our reading of Scripture, when the truth is that Rome doesn't bother very much with Scripture and instead turns to its magisterium for guidance.
Monergism means exactly what the Bible says -- saved by grace through faith...alone.
Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." -- Ephesians 2:8-10"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Of course this perspective takes the power of salvation away from men and magisteriums and returns it to God alone, so I can understand why some would prefer to muddy the waters and paint God's world in shades of gray.
Those who say Scripture is a tradition miss the point entirely. Whenever Christ spoke of tradition, He almost always spoke in negative terms and denounced it. So, no. Scripture is not "tradition." Scripture is the mind of God made known to us by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Scripture is comprehensive and complete and universal and life-changing. When Paul tells us Scripture is "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works" we have to ask the RCC -- what more is there??? What do Rome's variable traditions and rites and relics and wooden statues and "other Christs" and "co-redeemers" provide that Scripture does not?
And then, there is plenty of room to argue and dicker over the best way to say something.
Why, if you're not afraid of Dominicans threateningly swinging their tactical ninja rosaries, you don't even have to like Aristotle to be a good Catholic. There are some Catholics around whom I wouldn't say that too loudly though .... At Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA they'll drag you out to the nearest avocado orchard and tie you to a tree for the coyotes to devour -- but then again, they're very, uh, zealous. (And if you knew enough Heidegger, others in the faculty would sneak out and turn you loose, if you promised to go away and never come back.)
I think the FULL CREDIT to the CHURCH for the Bible is a needlessly argumentative and imprecise way to put it. YEAH the Church was there first. Yeah, agreement on the canon kind of bubbled up, as so many things have done in the Church. Yeah, the canon seems to have arisen in response to somebody ELSE coming up with what was from our POV an "anti-canon". So, yeah, as seems to be the case with most big decisions, a number of opinions floated around, the more off-the-wall ones were rejected with prejudice, but some tension and irresolution was allowed to exist for quite a long while before it was deemed necessary to resolve the issue. So I don't think it's wrong to say that God acting through the Church formed the canon.
But it wasn't a "First this and then that" kind of process, any more than a good argument with one's spouse is. God acted in and through the Church to form the canon and God acted in and through the canon to form the Church. And now that the canon is, we think, fixed, there is still this dialectic.
A big part of the problem is perception and our place in history - after almost 2k years of the Church. A whole lot of stuff has been thought, said, and written. And in many areas of conversation the bubbling ferment of prayer, study, dialogue, and debate has left a solid precipitate of doctrine, much of which is not just solid but crystalline.
So when somebody asks what do you guys think the Church says about such and such, he's likely to get an answer which is a snapshot of the precipitate. Then if he even acknowledges the beauty of the crystal, he will still complain that it's all so lifeless, unyielding, and rigid.
Another and related analogy about dogma and the life of the Christian is that all the drawings in my Grey's Anatomy are lifeless and still. If I were to conclude from them that humans are also lifeless and still, I might swear off sex I might not be interested in an intimate and personal relationship, I might not even hope such a relationship was possible, with a human type individual.
The Dogma is not the Church and is not the Lord. Plenty of people with less speculative minds and less troubled by curiosity could have a fine and loving relationship with Jesus, enriched and strengthened, to be sure, by the Sacraments without having the least clue about Aristotle's use of of hypostasis as explicated by Aquinas.
Let me try it again: One can give an account of human sexual relations focussing almost entirely on hormones of all sorts and in all doses, from a drop of estradiol to a slug of estrogen and a surging tide of testosterone. If that were all there was to it, Romeo and Juliet, Paulo and Francesca, Tristan and Isolde, Bonnie and Clyde, Frankie and Johnny -- none of it would have been written, or at least none of it would commend itself to us as having some spark of eternal beauty in it. I bet a truly diabolical parent could give the birds and the bees talk in such a way as to scare the child into lifelong celibacy - or very nearly.
But in my anatomy book or the birds and the bees talk, or in dogma, we are almost doomed from the outset to fail in our mission. It might, for example, be better to say, "The Church is King and the Bible is Queen." (I'll have to think to see if I really want to defend that, this is just an attempt at an example.) That might be a better way to convey the give-and-take of the relationship. But sooner or later someone is going to insist that we reduce it to technically precise language, and when that happens so much very important stuff cannot be said, that a very wrong impression is inevitably given.
But at the end of all this blether, yeah we have our non-negotiables. About them all we can hope to accomplish is clarity and maybe a sense that we have sold the notion that a reasonable person of good will can believe this stuff.
/rant off