I agree. Perhaps the Eastern Orthodox would like to weight in...it seems the RCs want to weaken the witnesses of scripture as a grab for authority.
That depends on what you mean by "weaken" and "the witnesses of scripture." Those are rather loaded terms (as is "grab for authority" for that matter). Some (many) of the most Scriptural minds I have had the privilege of knowing have been RCC's.
To put it in the categories of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: tradition CAN distract from one Scripture (as could a bishop), but the point of the Holy Traditions (and the point of Church authority properly used) is that it engages one in a two-millenium long meditation on the meaning and import of Scripture and, since that meaning and import is ultimately Christ, the Scriptures, Tradition, and Authority of the Church all bring one Christ-ward in a single, full salvific movement.
Would you agree? Protestants have traditionally and confessionally rejected secular methods of textual crictism.
That's emphatically false (sorry!) - Protestants were the ones who started text criticism, source criticism, and modernist hermeneutics. Most of the giants of 19th and early 20th century criticism were Protestants.
Some Protestants reacted against that (among other modernist movements), but in general it was the Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox who were slow to "catch up" to the new forms of Biblical criticism. Catholics have, post-Vatican II, done the most to engage Biblical criticism directly (with Judaism right there with them); Orthodoxy is still not so sure about it.
Early Rabbinic interpretation has far more in common with early Patristic interpretation than either has in common with today's methods of criticism. And I say that as someone who is quite content to engage with and use contemporary forms of criticism (I actually find them really, really insightful in many cases).
Hope that helps a bit...
Two books that I'd recommend for anyone interested in Orthodox approaches to Criticism:
Eugen Pentiuc,
The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Fr. Eugen is an Orthodox priest and professor at Holy Cross Seminary in Boston. He's a well respected Biblical scholar, and this is his most recent book. I don't find him consistent on all the points he makes (actually, the book has a somewhat maddening tendency to make a fantastic point and then latter behave as if that fantastic point had never been made), but he does a really solid job of demonstrating and explaining what, to people steeped in the precision of Western Christianity, can look like an infuriatingly vague approach to Scripture by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Jon D Levenson,
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism, WJK Press, 1993.
Perhaps the foremost "traditionalist" (tradition-focused) Biblical scholar today, Levenson (a conservative Jew), uses this text to completely skewer the hidden Protestantizing agenda behind much of 19th and 20th c. Biblical criticism. He is incredibly well read, quite fair to those whom he critiques (there are NO shallow polemics in this text), and generally spot on. It should say something that this man is beloved by those whom he disagrees with (liberal and conservative alike) as much as by those who agree with him. He is someone fully capable of historical-critical exegesis (as any of his many exegetical books would show), but who is also quite aware of its limitations and its lack of true objectivity (despite its claims). He doesn't address Orthodoxy here, but many of the critiques he levels against liberal Protestantism could easily come from the mouth of Orthodox Christians.
Hope that helps...
In Christ,
Macarius
