[Mad Dawg]

This is like a kabuki fight. I know ritually raise my ancient dialectical sword and respond, in dramatic tones:
Imprimis: The word heresy which has notions of "choose" or even "abstract" (in the sense of "draw from") would be our guide here. If one chunk of the larger whole is taken out, we have a mess. And, even more formally,
Secundo: Neither the Church nor her Tradition (in our view)is a humanly constructed uh, whatever you said ...

It's the same problem as the one I mentioned earlier, the question of continuity between the Church before Constantine and the Church after him. If you think the CC is humanly constructed, the Council of Nicea is as good a date as any and better than some for the construction date. If yhou don't, then you think legalization of Xtry was a problem which the Church wrestled with then and still wrestles with now. Things were so much clearer when it was against the law.

Having swung my blade in the formal manner, I now bow and stolidly await your riposte.

O-enat-sama, Arigato Gozaimasu

[enat]

I think you read me wrong here. I am not addressing the Church. I’m just looking at a method of interpretation.

Why isn’t the organizing and hermeneutic....tradition of the Berean assembly, simply “a readiness of mind...searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so”, enough for us today? The results of the effort seemed to be successful; many believed. Are we so different than the Jews and Greeks of Paul’s time that we need more interpretive aids than they did?