I'm not feeling it, it seems your attitude is the same no matter what the authority is. Whether it is Scripture or tradition you want to moralize at random.
There's nothing whatsoever RANDOM about my moralizing. No matter what the traditional basis of Christian authority is: book or institution, it has led to bloody horror. And that's a problem - a DELEGITIMIZING problem. When the logic of your religion leads to burnt flesh and bloody executions and upholding slavery, as traditional Christianity - whether Bible-based or institution-based - has, then you've arrived at the same place as the Muslims, who likewise have a book and a tradition.
And that place is not legitimate.
We know how we "got past" the bloodiness of the Christian past: we secularized. The state and individual liberty grew, and the authority of religion - whether book or church-based - was pushed down. It is that secularization that allows us Christians today to speak so openly about religion and God on a site like this. Muslims are still in the grip of their book and their institutions, and if THEY try to do this, they'll end up killing each other in short order. WE were like that too, not so long ago. And it wasn't through our religious beliefs that we solved it, but by external, secularizing force: the religious beliefs were not flexible enough or rational enough to arrive at a point of tolerance. They literally had to be forced down into subjection to political force.
Now, that was the actual tradition that ended religious bloodshed in Christendom, but it never resolved the inherent contradictions in Christianity - it simply paved them over by something else.
Considering the degree to which Christians right here are bickering about details of the First and Second Century of which there are a bare handful of writings to tell us anything, it is legitimate for me to focus on the raging problems of Christianity that really became visible in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries, because THOSE problems are still there today, unresolved, and those problems are widely attested and widely known, and act as a barrier to belief for millions.
None of this is random moralizing. I am focused directly on the weakest link of Christianity: all of the horrible violence done by the Christian Churches under their powerful leaders, with the enthusiastic participation of the Christian masses, not very many years ago. THOSE problems are much more damaging to the Christian enterprise - and to the believability of Christian religion - than what Irenaeus may or may not have thought two thousand years ago.
Scripture alone led to the burning of people and the justification of slavery by ALL of the major sects. And Traditionalism based on the authority of the Church in apostolic succession also led to exactly the same crimes against humanity.
Obviously, therefore, these techniques BOTH failed. They BOTH produced something very much like Islam, and it was only superior force from OUTSIDE of the religion that pulled the fangs out of Christianity and broke the political power of Christians so that they could not do that anymore.
And THAT IS A PROBLEM for Christianity, because the evils that were done following the logic of Scripture Alone, and by following the logic of Traditional Authority in Apostolic Succession BOTH FAILED.
Since they both failed, it really don't do, in 2018, to go and fight about who said what in the Second Century and why THAT approach is right, because BOTH contending approaches failed utterly in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. Those more recent failures are much more important, because they created our world today, and because they show how neither of the two belief systems ultimately works.
The Catholic Church failed, and the Protestant Churches failed. Their logic and their authority and their beliefs turned them BOTH into bloody Muslim fanatics, just as the Muslim versions of Sola Scriptura (the Sunnis) and of Apostolic Succession and Traditional Authority (the Shi'ites) have turned Islam into a dog's breakfast of violence and savagery. Christianity killed 40% of the population of Germany in the Thirty Years War. That's not a little thing. It's WHY Christianity died as the primary philosophical force in Europe and the Age of Reason and of the secularizing states swept in.
THAT is the fundamental flaw of Christianity, whether Catholic or Sola Scripturalist, that is important. THAT is what has to be faced and addressed. THAT is the hard part. Arguing about the First and Second Centuries is easy, because there's very little material and it's all abstract. Facing the Christian jihad and the burnt flesh and the enslavement of much of the world by Christians in the name of Christ: THAT is much more recent, and THAT is very hard to face. But THAT is what the rest of the world remembers - and rightly so - and it MUST be addressed by Christians, at least if they ever hope to turn the corner on things like abortion, the homosexualizing of society, restrictions on religious liberty, etc.
Your traditional Churches are emptying out because of the unresolved problems of the RECENT past. Of course you don't want to face these problems, because they highlight the failure of Apostolic Christianity and also the failure of Sola Scriptura. The only Christian Churches that are really growing are emotionalist "charismatics" whose claims to authority are shaky (at best) but who make their people feel good. Also, the mosques are filling up - in Europe and in America.
So you can grouse at me for pointing directly at the clay feet of Christianity, but I'm doing you a service. The Second Century does not matter nearly as much as what Christianity did in the 16th Century - burn tens of thousands of people for witchcraft - and in the 17th - kill a third of Germany, depopulate two continents and enslave and transport a race across the seas to generate profits for Christians. Those are the foundational elements of all of our modern post-Christian states, and those crimes against humanity - carried out by Catholic Traditionalists and Sola Scripturalist Protestants alike - are THE REASON Christianity has lost its claim to moral authority. Christianity in the time of Christ was pretty wonderful. Christianity in its full political power, carried to its logical conclusion as the primary program of European and American states, was an utter nightmare. Which means that Sola Scriptura and Traditionalism do not work at getting to a good end. You need something else, something new that can overcome the temptations of power in both of those traditional ways of practicing Christianity.
I'm here to talk about that, because THAT is the fatal flaw in Christianity that lays like an open sewer. Historically, Christianity's horrors ended the way that it appears Islams current horrors will have to end: secularized rulers paying lip service to traditional religion but not really believing it, imposing uniform rules on everybody, and taking down religious institutions and people by armed force where necessary to break their power to do violence and inspire it. The powerful monarchies and nationalist states of Europe are the RESULT of the failure of Christianity to peacefully rule.
And if the flaws in Catholic and Protestant authority are not recognized and addressed, Christianity can never return to the leadership of the culture: it failed too terrible to be allowed to do that again.
So, you guys want to bicker about the Second Century. It's pointless. In the 21st Centuries Christianity is ebbing away because of the Christian sins of the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, and the spectacular failure of Christianity to reign in the Christian-on-Christian (and Christian-on-Jew) bloodshed of the first half of the 20th Century.
You have to address the issue I am addressing, because it is the far more important one. If you've decided you're a Sola Scripturalist like Luther, Calvin and Knox - fine! Great! How do you prevent the witch hunts and callous disregard for the poor? If you've decided that the Pope and Tradition are the cat's meow - wonderful! How do you stop the Church from burning Joan of Arc and the Pope from granting the slave-trade monopoly?
Where is the SCRIPTURAL or TRADITIONAL authority that prevents you, when you have power, from executing witches and heretics and oppressing your opponents. Christianity never solved that problem - not ever. Wouldn't even admit it IS a problem. And so Christianity broke itself.
That's the question: what is the limit on Sola Scriptura? What is the limit on the Pope. In history, Christians had no limits on their logic - so they burnt witches and burnt Germany and chained Africa and ended up having to be chained by kings and the secular state.
That's where things stand today in Christendom and in Dar es Islam. Neither Christians nor Muslims have figured out the internal boundaries and limits on religious power. The Christians imposed boundaries on religion externally, by force, through state power: Christian theology has not yet found an answer to control ITSELF. Neither has Muslim theology, but there, the secular state is not yet strong enough to break the teeth of the religion and bring it to heel, as the European kings and republics were eventually able to do with Christianity.
I can understand the desire to avoid the subject, but it is THE subject that matters, because it is THE reason that Christians have steadily lost the social wars of the past two centuries, and why the Churches are emptying out.
I haven't left. I'm still in the pews pointing directly at THE issue. But my fellow Christians seem to be as walled off and crazy about the wrong things as they were in the 1500s. The selling of indulgences was a petty matter compared to the BURNING of human beings as witches! WHY did Luther and Calvin and Knox and Pope Leo think they could burn witches?
Do Christians TODAY still think that they are authorized to do so, that - if they had the power - "You shall not suffer a witch to live?" Christians have to be able to answer that question "NO", and then they have to explain WHY they are directly overthrowing a direct order of God in the Bible, why that is ok.
Protestants never forget Purgatory and the sale of indulgences, and Catholics never forget that Jesus gave Peter the Power of the Keys. But you both need to be talking about the burning of witches, because you Protestants burnt 100,000 people alive under the auspices of Luther, Knox and Calving, and you Catholics burnt a messenger of God alive in Rouen marketplace and granted a monopoly to Portugal to conduct the slave trade. And you justified these things with the Bible. Why were your spiritual ancestors - Luther, Knox, Calvin and the Papacy - TOTALLY WRONG in doing so? Why did they all read the Bible and interpret the Power of the Keys in ways that were satanically evil?
You have to answer that - and in doing so, you have to ADMIT the hellish evil that came from Luther, Calvin, Knox and the Papacy in these regards: they all failed - they followed Bible Alone and they followed the Power of the Keys - and they unleashed hell on earth and did massive evil. Why did they fail? What did they misinterpret? What part of their interpretations of the Bible and their grant of authority through the Spirit was wrong?
If you can't address that, then your religion is stuck in 1519, and it still hasn't faced up to the inherent potential for evil in its organizing philosophy.
And if unleashed, you would follow the same pathway into evil again, just as the Muslims do.
If you cannot address this and fix it, with repentance, and with the admission that your belief system needs to be perfected and improved upon, and provide the improvement that the Catholic and Protestant Churches failed to figure out, well, then you're going to be condemned to arguing about the second century forever as your churches continue to empty, the emotionalists continue to grow, and the mosques continue to fill.
You have to address the evils unleashed by Traditionalism and by Sola Scriptura, or you're playing in the sandbox of irrelevancy.
There's nothing "random" about any of this. Christian violence is the gaping self-inflicted wound caused by Sola Scriptura and by Catholic Traditionalism. It has never been addressed. Nobody here is addressing it. And if you don't address it, you're just talking about useless nonsense. The Bible is an evil piece of trash if it really means you can and should burn witches, and that it's ok to enslave Africa if the Pope uses the power of the keys to say so.
THAT is what you MUST address if your religion is going to save itself.
It's easier to go down the cow path, like blind cows, and fight the same arguments that have been fought for 500 years. But you must confront Luther and Leo and Calvin to their faces and ask: why did you evil men think you could put men into the FIRE? Why did your religion fail so spectacularly? Why did YOU fail so spectacularly as Christian men and do such hellish evil? Were you possessed by the Devil? Or is there a fatal flaw in your belief system about the authority of book and Church? Or both?
Answer that. You have to answer it, or you're just a cow on the path.