I recently was struck by the phrase "never seek their prosperity" in Ezra 9:12, and reading it in its context, I'm all-the-more convinced of the attitude I discerned in the rest of scripture concerning our participation in secular politics -- that is, that we participate solely for the pragmatic ends of our obedience to God. How should I vote? Precisely in the manner which appears most accommodating for our obedience to the great commission, and in no other manner.

I'm listening to Vincent Lerins at the moment, who opens his book in the same way that Joseph Smith opens his first vision account, by citing the variety of denominations in order to shed doubt on man's ability to understand scripture -- as though the words in scripture could not be properly understood without the addition of more words.

"...owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."

It is as though the words and grammar in scripture had no independent meaning at all!

No, I've seen people bring outside ideas to the book, and construe the text in order to make the text coherent with their idea. The problem isn't that the text is ambiguous, but that it is complex. I maintain that no idea can survive scrutiny in view of the totality of scripture, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort to perform the scrutiny necessary to detect the flaw in an idea.

A friend of mine articulated it thus: "I understand that the witness of the fathers may sometimes be uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean we can do away with it...The best Protestant scholastics and theologians agreed that we should subscribe to all matters of faith and morals on which the fathers of the church were unified"

I don't think I have good reason to agree with this, to be honest. It's certain that there is safety in numbers, and that proximity to the apostles is likely to increase awareness of apostolic teaching. However, the apostles were, themselves, as humans, not infallible, and the Bible itself records many instances of apostles rebuking one another or various local churches. Those churches did not become infallible by the rebuke, and their shared local culture may have resulted in any number of shared errors, so even their consensus is not infallible. If their mistakes were discoverable by any means other than comparison with scripture (i.e. God's own words, as in the case of Moses's mistake), then someone might be able to accuse modern dissenters of being new-Korahs because of their rejection of the various extraBiblical ideas which existed in the early church. But as it stands, we have God's own words already, and scripture condemns many members of the early church, while claiming itself to be sufficient for equipping in all righteousness. So, the only reliable and infallible witness I have is the Bible.

But, the catholic will suggest, isn't the Bible merely a product of church consensus? 

Well, no. It isn't. These ancient churches were not in close contact with one another, moderating one another's canon, but rather that they separately maintained like canons in disparate and unconnected lines of transmission, only to find much later that they had all preserved the same texts. Those men were not deferring to consensus by preserving the books, but instead they were maintaining artifacts in virtue of their own beliefs about the artifacts themselves. To contrast, modern Catholicism requests for believers to defer to their top-down interpretive authority as a church institution. The canon is not a work of deference to consensus or top-down ecclesiastical guidance, but of separate and independent maintenance of written records known to be divine.

But what about when these disparate actors disagreed? Was it the councils which rescued the canon? No, I don't think it was. Those councils didn't spontaneously generate a canon, but they analyzed and reasoned about the facts in order to conclude, as we do, that the canon is divine.

In the end, the papal ecclesiasty gives me no reason to listen to them. I can read the Bible and discuss it with the church Catholic, as in the universal and invisible church, through my local body of believers, and if it is truly sufficient to equip us then it will equip us. As far as it is helpful, I can even read the works of past Christians, to understand their hermeneutic methods and arguments. I am not here rejecting the role of corporate church applications of reason in interpretation, but I am rejecting the suspension of reason in deference to papal interpretation.

Also, unrelated, I guess I'm not putting the little quotes at the bottom of my blogs anymore. I used to enjoy it, as an inside joke for myself -- putting down a quote that stood out to me that day. Also, it felt like a nice way to bookend the posts -- like a stamp at the end, formalizing that the post is closed, which felt especially satisfying for some of my very long posts. But looking back, I realized that placing them at the end of the post made them look like they were supposed to have a lot of gravity to them, which (given the cryptic nature of many of those quotes) was really cringe. (I mean, I cringe when I look back on it). So, I suppose my posts are just going to terminate in some other random way, like maybe even mid-senten