Kevin has taken the time to reply in a single post, "Epistemological Comfort Blankets," to my last two posts responding to him. Regrettably, however, though Kevin has obviously taken time to carefully argue his point, he has not quite taken the care necessary to address the actual substance of my previous replies. But this may have less to do with his avoidance of the fundamental items in the debate and more to my own inability to carefully articulate what are those fundamental matters. So I am grateful for the opportunity to sharpen the focus.
Before I do that, however, I want to just briefly address some tangential matters so that I, myself, may not be accused of avoiding them, and also so as to clear them out of the way as so much distracting debris. First is the historical matter of iconography and the Church. If Kevin will peruse the information on the following links on icons, he will find that his own position cannot be substantiated:
--Christian Iconography on Encyclopedia.com 2002
--Icon at Wikipedia
--Byzantine Icons: General References: Byzantine Empire, History of Icons and Mosaics, Eastern Orthodoxy
That latter, especially, is a wealth of archaeological and scholarly information. I'm certain, however, that Kevin will remain convinced in his own mind that icons are an anti-biblical tradition unjustified from Scripture, since there is no Scripture that commands all Christians everywhere to venerate icons. Thus, his logical fallacy of assuming absence of proof as proof of his own position will once again be committed by him, though he has failed to actually delineate what constitutes proof and whether his rules concerning such constitution are themselves valid.
Finally, regarding cessationism and 1 Corinthians 13, I simply point him to this reasonable and logical exegesis which says it better than I could:
Questions Cessationists Should Ask: A Biblical Examination of Cessationism
Besides all which, aberrant interpretations such as the one he applies to 1 Corinthians 13 only take us further afield from the issues under discussion.
But now let us turn to the matters at hand, namely hermeneutics and infallibility. It will become clear, however, that the argument has reached an impasse beyond which it is likely not to go further. I have taken due warning from one of Kevin's comrades-in-arms (in the comments here), however, and have no obsessive need to circle the axis of a dia-blog that has run out of tether. If we can advance the argument from here, well and good. Otherwise, I thank Kevin for the opportunity's he's given me to manifest the beauty and strength of the historic Faith once for all delivered to the saints and the Church which has been called both to guard it and to transmit it.
(A list of all the posts and replies between Kevin and myself follows at the very end of this post.)
The Question of Authority
It is not coincidental that when Kevin invited this online dia-blog via his response to the precipitating post I made affirming that one does not have the authority to change the Church's Tradition, from the very start the specter of hermeneutics and authority was raised. In his initial comments to that post, he wrote:
In affirming the sufficiency of Scripture, I am not denying the necessity of such secondary standards as creeds or confessions, or of preaching. In each case, however, these are examples of tradition justified from Scripture properly exegeted ( and where they are not, such as Nicea II, we are required to ignore them).
There is no equivocation here: the point of focus will be on the role of hermeneutics and the authority attendant upon such interpretations. But inextricably bound up with this notion of authority must be the issue of infallibility. After all, if one is faced with two competing and contradictory interpretations, one will have to decide between the two alternatives. And if the matters are of sufficient gravity, a decision will have to address the question of authority. For example, Kevin thinks the inference of the Holy Trinity from the Scriptures is clear and unequivocal, but he readily admits that his thinking on this has been shaped by the Church in her dogma of the last eighteen hundred years. I would argue that, historically, such an inference from the Scriptures was not so clear and unequivocal given the actual wranglings at Nicea I and after. What settled the matter was primarily the authority of the Tradition--plus, I like to think, a "donchew-talk-ta-yer-Momma-the-Church-that-way" cheek-slapping St. Nicholas and a much-persecuted St. Athanasius, who each instantiated the mind of the Holy Spirit for the Council.
In any case, let me address these two matters, fundamental to our entire discussion, in turn.
The Question of Infallibility
First, let's deal with Kevin's misconstrual of my argument regarding the Church's infalliblity. He confuses two things here: the Church's essence and how infallibility is a characteristic of that essence with the obvious need for an authority to discern between two competing claims about the truth of Scripture. In other words, contra Kevin's assertion, the Church did not invent her quality of infallibility so as to authoritatively determine Scriptural interpretations, but rather her infallibility came as a result of who She is, indeed, as a result of dominical promise.
In my earlier post, I made reference to three Scriptures which promised to the Church authority to bind and loose (Matthew 18:18-20), delineated her capacity on the basis of her own members to grow and mature into the Head, Who is Christ (Ephesians 4:16), and in which she is called the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). I might just as well have quoted Jesus' words to his Apostles during the last supper that the Church would be led into all Truth by the Holy Spirit (John 16:13).
Kevin attempts to address these passages through such tortured and tortuous exegesis that his desperate desire to avoid reading the Scriptures on their face is continuously manifest. For Matthew 18 he concludes, "The idea is that they are acting according to the will of Christ, presenty [sic] known by its revelation in Scripture. The idea is not a license for the Church to do as it pleases knowing that she can't be wrong. It is that, provided she is acting according to the revealed will of God, then her verdicts will reflect those that are true in heaven." Funny thing, though, nothing in the context of the Matthew 18 passages says anything about the Church exercising discipline in terms of what is "presently known by its [i. e., the will of Christ] revelation in Scripture." In point of fact, what are the conditions the passage notes? "Again, assuredly I tell you, that if two of you will agree on earth concerning anything that they will ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven" (v. 19). While I don't disagree with Kevin that such things must be done in concert with the revelation of God, I do not, like Kevin, limit such revelation to a body of written texts. Nor does Matthew. And, again, I would have to stress, since all of the New Testament had not yet been written, let alone canonized, even if there were the connotation of Scripture in this passage, it would have to be the Old Testament, not the New, which wasn't, properly speaking, yet in existence.
I'll save 1 Timothy 3:15 for last, since it is the most egregious of all, so let's go on to his account of Ephesians 4. In short, he attempts to show that the only thing Paul means by "speaking the truth in love" (which is, in part, how the Church builds herself up into the Head, Who is Christ), is, in the end, only by the preaching and teaching of the Word. Now he goes to great l