[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Trying to understand God will find you curled up in a corner somewhere babbling something about His ways being higher than your ways.
[/quote]
You mean such an attempt naturally results in a frenzied misinterpretation of Isaiah 55:8-9? Crazy how that happens… 
Just had to razz you a little…[/quote]It was a use of generally biblical language to portray the incomprehensibility of God. Razzing received.
@Severiano: You know neither what you are talking about nor the God about whom it is. I urge you to forsake confidence in yourself and ask Him to change both situations which are actually two sides of the same situation anyway. He will ya know.
[/quote]
Both of you rely on personal interpretation. I don’t see how you can say his view is invalid and unsound and your view is, however, sound and to be believed. You both rely on your own authority.[/quote]
Seriously, BC? This stuff again?
I gather you’re a former Protestant; is the question of authority the one that turned you? You respond to what Christian Smith calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism” in Protestantism by running to the safe halls of Catholicism, where the answers are supplied by those who claim special interpretive authority. That’s one possible reaction, and I saw a number of students (mostly philosophy majors) go that direction in college. Other Protestants, faced with the same dilemma, react by entrenching themselves further in “old” positions, trusting that Wesley or Calvin or Luther or Zwingli or SOMEONE was sufficiently inspired so as to interpret Scripture rightly. The latter position entails remaining in Protestantism and generally goes back 500 years and assumes that its system reflects the beliefs of the early church; the former jumps into the boat that claims a 2000 year lineage and perfect continuity with the faith of the church fathers.
In my opinion, the turn to Catholicism for the answer to the desire for doctrinal certainty is an inherently cowardly move. It ignores the fact that Catholicism continues to function because its leaders maintain interpretive hegemony and curtail all historical sensitivity, pretending that Irenaeus holds to the same beliefs as Tertullian or Basil the Great, who in turn hold to the same beliefs as Anselm or Aquinas. The realities of historical distance and theological development are evaded by the careful harmonization of dissenting voices, the explicit denial of sociological and cultural factors in the shaping of dogma, and the unthinking acceptance of the church fathers’ own illegitimate claims to the unity of their beliefs.
No, I don’t believe that the Catholic church is maintained by the devil or irrevocably leads people astray. I do, however, believe that Catholicism maintains its claims to interpretive hegemony only by refusing to critically and honestly scrutinize its own roots. Work miracles in the power of the Holy Ghost, claim to have witnessed the risen Christ, and show me logically, with some degree of historical sensitivity, how your beliefs actually harmonize with the words of Paul and Peter in the New Testament. Then I’ll consider laying down my tool belt and following. But if a bunch of men possessing no greater claim to authority than that they were touched by someone else in a long line of people touched by preceding bishops (who may have gone back to the apostles) try to tell me how to interpret a particular biblical passage, I’m going to ask them to prove it, not jump ship and say, “thank you so much for helping me out. For so long I was confused. Now I can finally turn my brain off and KNOW what these passages mean.”
Paul never said, “trust me - I have authority. Peter laid hands on me.” Paul said, “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with utmost patience - signs and wonders and mighty works.”
As far as “private interpretation goes” (an idea which you still need to define), I don’t think you could be more off the mark. Tiribulus and I were joking because we DO agree about the meaning of that passage.
More importantly, “private interpretation” carries the negative connotation of “the way one person reads a passage that no one else would agree with.” That’s certainly doesn’t apply here. Thoughtful Protestants attempt to apply sound hermeneutical principles to the biblical text (something the Catholic church does not condemn), which militate against an interpretive free-for-all. We do not simply say, “this is what I think it means,” but also, “this is why I think it,” allowing our views to be subject to scrutiny and refined through dialogue with other perspectives.
If you want to find genuine “private interpretation,” by which I mean reading the passage without any sensitivity to its original historical (or even literary) context, read some Origen, or even Irenaeus. There you will find PLENTY of interpretations that simply boggle the mind, yet were plenty convincing to these guys.