littleapologist said:
Did you not have to self interprete the Scriptures to recognize whether or not the Orthodox Church fit the characteristics of the NT church? Did you not have to self interprete the Scriptures to see that the church was following the NT to a degree that you had pre-determined or self interpreted from Scripture?
You had to self interprete the Scriptures, why then do you proclaim that protestants are in error for following the same standard?
Thanks for your (brief) testimony.
I think you are confusing private judgment as a permanent, recurrent working principle and the necessary exercise of human reason to arrive at a decision, in this case to surrender private judgment and submit to the authority of the Church Christ Himself founded.
It's a matter of whom one chooses to trust.
Most of us realize, at some point, that we do not know it all and must trust someone for guidance in the Christian faith.
Some of us, for many good reasons - that Christ founded a Church, promised the gates of hell would not prevail against her, that He would always be with her, etc. - , decide to trust the infallible doctrinal authority of the holy Catholic Church and to submit to that authority to guide our understanding.
Others decide to accept the guidance of other traditions and teachers that they find amenable - e.g., Luther and Calvin - but subject always to the individual's private reading and understanding of the Bible. For example, one might generally accept and like the teachings of Calvin and yet disagree with and reject some of those teachings, as Calvinistic Baptists do, for example, on the subject of infant baptism. Whatever the factors that influence such a rejection of a particular teaching, the reason generally given is that it is "not scriptural," or that it "contradicts Scripture."
Of course, since individuals who follow such a procedure recognize no outside authority who determines just what is and what is not "scriptural," such assessments are, in the final analysis, based upon private judgment as a recurrent, working principle.
Sola Scriptura is understood in different ways by different Protestants. Those who regard themselves as Reformed, for example, take into account Church history and the writings of the Fathers and attempt to find out just what is the great consensus of Christian doctrine. That consensus is supposed to carry a lot of weight as a hermeneutical factor or principle.
To the extent that the Reformed are willing to admit the importance of what Christians have believed in the past, such an approach is admirable.
The problem is that the Reformed do not really let Church history and the Fathers speak for themselves. Instead they subject them to a Protestant tradition that has already determined in many cases what is "biblical" and what is not.
Thus the Fathers are sifted. Despite the facts that the Church Fathers were in universal agreement on baptismal regeneration and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, for examples, the Reformed feel free to reject those doctrines as "unbiblical" or "contradicting the Scripture."
So goes the "great consensus."
In the end it falls to private judgment and is used more as a source of convenient prooftexts than as a real guide to understanding the Bible.
