It would help if you guys got your attacks coordinated. Are you saying the Church was started at the Council of Nicea or some other time? (I'll duck the "RC Edifice" v. "Church" issue for now.)
But I already addressed this. It's not empirically verifiable one way or the other, according to the exact nature of our claim. Put simply, we see the Church developing in response to the crisis of becoming legal. We still see the Church developing. You guys see a discontinuity. We see a change of one thing moving into a new "phase".
2. Further, we are asked to swallow the preposterousness that the RC edifice has been a homogenous body of unchanging dogma from the beginning when that’s historically the furthest thing from the historically accurate truth.
"Cardinal Newman. Development." Response to controversy (Think about that, we're saying there were disagreements that were settled, at least a little. Chalcedon sure didn't put the whole thing to rest, but it moved it along.) "Unpacking" "working out the implications" E.g.: We don't say that Peter believed in Transubstantiation. (I can just hear him, "Trans- say what?") We DO say that he believed in what we call "the real presence" (I know that's debatable, but that's not the point right this minute.) We would say that the debate leading to Thomas's articulation and the council's declaration are the development, the unfolding, in response to controversy of the quod semper, ubique et ab omnibus belief in "Real Presence" There IS a change, an acknowledged change. To us it looks like the change from an acorn to an oak tree, and is the "same" sort of in the way the acorn is the "same" as an oak.
(3)is to vague for me to address. Frankly, I think that without Tradition one cannot easily go from Scripture to The Assumption. I don't have a problem with that. I think Scripture testifies to the value and validity of tradition. I think the Protestants often try to force us into a relationship with Scripture that is like theirs and then complain when we don't fit in that mold.
(4) is even vaguer. Give us the proposition you think would do it, and maybe we can try to address them. (it would be a lot of work, though.)
You write often about mangled history and now you say you've studied a lot of it. I never see any actual instance of mangling. I see the kind of conclusion that I describe above, which, to me, comes down to a tautology surrounded by straw men. That is, IF the Church is the Church, then what happened in the 4th or 5th Century or whenever was just the earthen vessels dealing badly with being legal and "established". IF there was an apostasy at that time, then, well, yeah there was an apostasy.
And a lot of the things you say we say are themselves mangled versions of what we do in fact say. To me it seems that a lot of these arguments take one piece of what we say, dress it up in the most outlandish attire, lop off a few identifying features, and then say that we are using a rubber dictionary when we don't recognize it as part of what we said.
You say "Same doctrine." We say "Newman, development, response to conflict -- NOT same in every respect." You say, "pure all the way." We say "infallible, but most certainly NOT impeccable, Catherine yelling at the Pope to grow up, the Borgias, etc."
I close with the message of Pope Adrian VI, made publicly through his Legate, to the Nuremberg Reichstag in 1523:
We freely acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially because of the sins of priests and prelates[emphasis added]... We know well that for many years much that must be regarded with horror has come to pass in this Holy See: abuses in spiritual matters, transgressions against the Commandments; indeed, that everything has been gravely perverted.(he goes on to say, "... we will take all pains to reform, in the first place, the court of Rome, from which perhaps all these evils take their origin.")
page 75, Adam, Roots of the Reformation, C H Resources, Zanesville, 2000 (translated by Cecily Hastings and published originally in 1956)
I am quite relieved to see that your perspective is a lot more rational . . . at least to you . . . than I’d thought it remotely COULD be. Thank you very much. I much appreciate that. It puts me much more at ease about this particular Bro than I’d been able to feel for some time.
I think I’ll have to ponder some of your statements though that may not produce any useful response either.
BTW, I never kept the specifics very straight and certainly not with dates. I sort of registered such things as—oh, hmmm, that sort of thing happened way, way, way back or way way back or way back and was xyz level of preposterous, to me. And, it kind of lodged in my mind that the RC edifice as it has come to operate; insist on being called and construed etc. more or less 400 years after Christ.
I don’t think I can help on the edifice thing. I have a very deeply ingrained bias that the Roman insistance that the RC edifice is the ONLY UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF CHRIST is wholesale in error . . . arrogant . . . UNBiblical etc. I haven’t come up with a more accurate and less troublesome label. It is merely, akin, to me, to RC’s insistance on calling themselves the CATHOLIC Church.