Kevin continues our dialogue on Scripture. And I am duty-bound to respond--besides, he's very polite, a good arguer, and we apparently both find this an interesting exchange. Now, let's hope I can continue to do justice to the honorable parameters of our discussion.
(Justification from Properly Exegeted Scriptures--was "Sufficiency of Oral Transmission")
You are right to note my failure to take account of your backing off of your thesis. And in fact, you make such distancing even more explicit when you write, "I am willing to extend this necessity for oral transmission of the Tradition for as long as the entire canon had not been made available." But then you go on to claim that this does not entail an argument that Tradition is not limited specifically to the content of Scripture (which you clarify is both OT and NT, though we may quibble over OT canonical matters).
But I'm afraid that here you leave yourself open to the great weakness of your claim: what exactly is the "content" of the Scripture? I'll stipulate, for the sake of our argument here, that the canon of the Scriptures is the Protestant 66. Is the content nothing more and nothing less than the verifiable propositions of (that which can be explicitly enjoined from) the Scriptures? Or is it also that which can be reasonably inferred from them? You have indicated in previous comments that you accept "examples of tradition justified from Scripture properly exegeted (and where they are not, such as Nicea II, we are required to ignore them)." But this simply leaves you wide open to the simple fact that if there is no contradiction between Tradition and Scripture--which is to say, Tradition is "justified from Scripture properly exegeted"--then you have no case. You must accept all those things you now think to be extra or additional.
I know, I know, you will stress the phrase "properly exegeted"--and I note that you dismiss Nicea II quite handily, but I suspect you have not read St. John of Damascus' three treatises on the icons, nor the work of St. Theodore the Studite on the same matter, because both of these illumined gentleman do a great deal of "proper Scripture exegeting."
But this really is the final rub, isn't it? Difference in interpretation. I believe it entirely possible--though I am far from wholly competent to do it--to go through the Tradition and show its complete consonance in its entirety with properly exegeted Scripture. I know that there are some big issues in which this has already most ably been done: the nature of the Lord's Supper, the necessity of an episcopal polity itself grounded in and on the reality that is the Lord's Supper, the role of Mary, the nature of proper Christian worship, the communion of all the saints, and so forth.
But I suspect, which you indicate by graciously passing over the issues of asking the intercessions of the sainst in you