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To: LibertyGirl77
I like you all and I am a protestant minister. But there is no PROOF of catholicism's various doctrines of Mary. There are arguments for them, but they are hardly conclusive. The arguments against are just as (or more) valid.

They really are a matter of opinion.

I also oppose oppulence.
13 posted on 11/18/2002 10:52:57 AM PST by xzins
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To: xzins
I also oppose oppulence.

Who lives in oppulence?

16 posted on 11/18/2002 11:16:08 AM PST by Codie
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To: xzins
there is no PROOF

Whether there is proof or not depends a great deal upon STANDARDS of proof. I think that Catholics and Protestants do not have shared standards of proof, they do not share standards as to what counts as a scriptural proof. Even Protestants have various and diverging standards as to what counts as "proving" something from Scripture. But this raises many more problems for the "sola scriptura" people than it does for Catholics. And what counts as a "conclusive" argument? Usually, by "conclusive" people mean: it is impossible for it to be the case that A if evidence E is proposed" But that is an extremely high standard to apply. Is that what you mean?

Furthermore, I urge you to read some of the philosophers of science, such as Polanyi and Kuhn, who have made compelling arguments that in the sciences the capacity to follow proof or to grasp evidence is a function of having apprenticed oneself to an expert in a tradition of enquiry in which certain perceptual skills, habits of investigation, patterns of thought, vocabulary, and fundamental presuppositions are cultivated and imbibed. This is why non-experts in the sciences cannot follow the proofs the experts propose to each other. The same holds in scripture studies. Only those who are willing to apprentice themselves to an expert practitoner in a tradition of scriptural exegesis have the capacity to follow the proofs that are drawn up. The insight into the proofs is a good internal to the practices of the tradition of enquiry. These converts see the Church's proofs because they are converting, that is, they are abandoning a whole set of perceptual skills, habits of investigation, patterns of thought, vocabulary, and fundamental presuppositions, and they abandon it in favor of a catholic way of approaching the text, and they do so as motivated by deep and systemic failures in the Protestant approach to Scripture.

One of those failures is the naivete involved in the Protestant tradition. The Protestant tradition is one which requires its practitoner to hold "tradition is a bad thing, it interferes with thought, get back to the purity of the text without the mediation of human tradition" and then the practitioners of Protestant exegesis have gone on to develop a whole human tradition of exegesis, a tradition in which Protestant seminarians and theology students are apprenticed into for many years, and a tradition in which certain patterns of thought, perceptual skills, habits of investigation, etc, are cultivated and imbibed... It is all really rather self-contradictory it seems to me. Everyone has a tradition, just by virtue of being human. God knows this, so he set up a tradition for us, and by the ways of reading the texts internal to the sacred tradition of the Catholic Church, the proofs of the Marian dogmas are quite compelling indeed. What is lacking is not proof, but the capacity for following proof. Only tradition is a force for cultivating such a capacity.

St. Augustine discovered the same thing. In the Confessions he relates how he had for many years difficulites in dealing with Scripture. It seemed to him self-contradictory, obscure, and rather dry in comparison with Cicero. Only when he met Ambrose, and sat at the knee of Ambrose for some years, did he learn the right way of approaching Scriputre so as not to handle it in an intellectually clumsy way.

20 posted on 11/18/2002 11:41:04 AM PST by pseudo-justin
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To: xzins
Lol xzins. PROOF. You sound like Thomas. The irony of believing in a recent doctrine over an ancient one is not lost on me:-)

BTW, are degreed in theology?

228 posted on 11/20/2002 6:02:04 AM PST by WriteOn
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