Sorry to jump in the middle of the discussion. Just finished reading the thread.
But I kinda disagree with what you're saying here.
That's fine. You're free to disagree with me.
On the one hand, it is incredibly wonderful to have a well educated person in charge of the congregation that has studied the Bible most of their life and is willing to help or guide their community in its study.
But on the other hand I in no way feel that it's a necessity to have that. A person can come to Jesus several ways, from just reading the Bible, meeting a missionary, visiting a church. Nothing requires someone interpreting the Bible for you.
Is that a fantastic bonus? Yes, absolutely.
But you could leave some random person in a room with a Bible and end up with a perfectly valid conversion to Christianity if their open to it.
Well, here's the thing: I don't think the average Christian needs to have the nuts and bolts down because the average person shouldn't have to constantly question their beliefs, constantly study. Yes, the contemplative life is superior to the practical life, but most people just can't have a life of contemplation. They have to work to make a living! So there's going to be a division of labor. There will be some people who dedicate their life to this stuff, and they'll be the guys in charge of the institution of the church, and there will be followers who will be members of the congregation.
Now, we all agree as Christians that Scripture is materially sufficient for the Salvation of the human person (that is to say, we all believe that all of the doctrines of Christianity can be found, however remotely, in Scripture). However, there are three things that Scripture Alone cannot resolve by its very nature as a text: 1) Scripture alone cannot give us an idea of what counts as Scripture, 2) Scripture alone cannot interpret itself, and 3) Scripture alone cannot give proper application of its lessons in the modern day. These problems (what counts as canon, what counts as proper interpretation, and what counts as proper application) aren't unique to the Bible, but are involved in almost all forms of communication, especially the written word. This is what modern analytic philosophers call "semantic indeterminacy."
Now, we can talk about
Death of the Author and how any given human writer may not know the full implications of whatever they write (I certainly subscribe to the theory), but with the Bible, we want to know what the original author (The Holy Spirit working through the writers of the various books) meant by the text. Otherwise, how can we know if what we're worshiping is the one true God? This is the main problem I have with Protestants. They tend to regard only the text itself as infallible. But a text cannot read itself for the reasons I gave above, so the Protestants have to rely on fallible, extra-scriptural premises in order to interpret their works, and this inevitably leads to error. Hence, you have massive disagreements among believers of
Sola Scriptura on issues like the Trinity, the Incarnation, justification, transubstantiation, contraception, divorce and remarriage, Sunday observance, infant baptism, slavery, pacifism, the consistency of scripture with scientific claims, etc. If you disregard the need for an infallible interpreter, then you cannot have a binding doctrine on these issues, and there's no "orthodox" position.
Now, given this, how can one get beyond this veil of indeterminacy to arrive at objective truth? The way to do so is realizing that words have no meaning in themselves; rather, language is a tool used by people to communicate with one another. When you talk, you talk with persons, not words. Divine Revelation is a form of communication, one between God and His worshiper. So, if you have problems with understanding what God is saying, you would ask God (much like how you'd ask a human author for clarification for what he meant by some sentence he wrote). More often than not, the God of the Bible used human intermediaries (prophets) to communicate to us, so that's a pretty good place to start. Problem is, people die. They may write or speak, but once they're gone, all we have left are remembered or written words, and where those words are unclear, we're unable to ask for clarification. Now, God could miraculously extend the life of a prophet so that he could survive and and clarify what God meant indefinitely, but He hasn't done this. God could also send a series of prophets, each one succeeded by another, but He hasn't done that either. So, what's left?
The Scholastic philosophers have the answer. Their philosophy makes a distinction between natural persons (or "physical persons") and moral persons (or "juridical persons"). Natural persons are individual human beings - you, me, Scottty, and whoever else. A moral person is a society of human beings organized in such a way that they have a common end and some of the rights and duties that human beings have, like the United States Government. Much of Western philosophy is based on this very distinction. It's why states and corporations have certain rights that they can claim against individual human beings and against other moral persons, have duties to other persons whether natural or moral, can carry out policies which are said to express their will, and, most importantly for our purposes,
communicate.
And that's what we believe that Christ was doing on Earth. When He ascended into Heaven, He left behind a Church, not a Bible. Yes, a moral person can make mistakes just like a natural person can; just as Moses lost his temper at times or Peter sometimes lost his nerve, so too might the Church make mistakes of this sort. But as with a prophet or apostle, it will suffice if this moral person really is infallible
when it claims to be teaching infallibly, even if it is not infallible when it doesn’t claim to be teaching infallibly in the first place. And this is the Catholic position on the Church. This propaganda about how Catholics can't actually justify their own traditions through Scripture is just question-begging on the part of Protestants. The only logical way to oppose the teaching is to prove that Catholicism wasn't the religion that Christ founded, which relies on extra-scriptural arguments. People like Martin Luther or John Calvin or
Dennis Bennett can't just announce that their beliefs are orthodox Christianity just because they have a Bible and an opinion.
I hope this answers your questions. And maybe
@Scottty could learn a little something, eh? I'd like to hear what his thoughts are on this.
Again, apologies for jumping in here.
You guys were having a interesting discussion but I felt pretty strongly about this specific part of it.
No need for apologizing. You did nothing wrong.