“Am 8:4-7

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! ‘When will the new moon be over,’ you ask, ‘that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat? We will diminish the ephah, add to the shekel, and fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!’ The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: ‘Never will I forget a thing they have done!’”

(Via United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.)

This was the First Reading at Mass this morning on the theme of the day: socio-economic justice.  I always read this Bible passage as a general attack on the exploitation of the poor and so it is.  But it’s worth examining exactly what’s going on here.  Diminishing the ephah and adding to the shekel is pretty straightforward: It’s evil to cheat the poor.  But buying the lowly for silver the the poor for a pair of sandals hit me because it speaks to the morality of living wages and paying people below them.

The free market zealots might think such an outcome is “efficient” but even so, it is not a moral one. In a post-industrial society where wage labor is the primary means by which people earn a living, we need to think about how our society makes such possible or better yet, impossible.  I remember reading a disturbing statistic that 30% of the jobs in the U.S. pay less than $10.00 per hour or $20,800 a year.  That’s a real problem because that means those wage-earners cannot support themselves despite the fact that they are working full time.  These are not people on the welfare rolls.  They are workers.  If a business is only viable because it hires below living wage (full time) labor, then we have a serious problem because it’s exploitive.  To argue that such an outcome is defensible is simply morally wrong.  You can’t justify to “buy the lowly for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals.”  Not good.  Not good at all.  You might retort, “Education is the answer!”  If only that were so.  Even if we gave a Ph.D. level education to everyone in the country for free, flipping burgers would still be low wage labor.  And it’s not like the workers who fill such jobs have options because all the other jobs are taken very much like musical chairs.  Only 7 out of 10 Ph.D. thus would be able to live on their wages!

This is why I’ve lost my faith in the free market.  I realized it was like worshipping a golden calf.  Markets are merely objects, tools.  They are a means, not the end.  And with all due respect to Adam Smith, “free” markets do not a utopia make.  We need to be adults, collectively.  We need to make responsible, moral and conscious decisions about how to organize our society.  Freedom, which is the fruit of justice, demands no less.

Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to reestablish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice.  Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Recently, I was taken to task about the morality of homosexuality and how the Bible “clearly” teaches it’s practice is a sin.  Frankly, I never believed that and having other priorities chose not to bother examining the issue other than cataloguing some verses.  Other things are important to me in my faith journey.  But given all the proud bigotry surrounding so-called “gay marriage” and the civil rights of LGBT persons I’m seeing, I decided to give it a look see.

What the Word Is Not: A Golden Calf

As a Catholic, I come from a faith tradition that recognizes human tradition (sometimes to a fault) in the organic relationship it has with reading the Word of God in the Bible.  Proper interpretation is known by its adherence to apostolic tradition, that is the tradition of understanding God as Jesus’ apostles do.  My Protestant brethren do not necessarily see this very well.  I have heard them quote Jesus as he quoted the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15:9 or Mark 7:7 in criticism of my church: “In vain do they worship [God], teaching as doctrines human precepts.” (Of course, they neglect to read the previous two verses which speak of hypocrites who don’t love God and who only give lip service to him, but that’s another story.)  For my Protestant brethren, it’s the Word and only the Word and the Word says so!

There isn’t problem a problem with Sola Scriptura per se but often in my experience I see my brothers and sisters conflating the Word with their interpretations of the Bible and implicitly ignoring this fact, compounding that error.  What you hear is, “I believe in the Bible” or equivalently “I believe in the Word” (which strictly speaking is not true if there is an interpretation with which they disagree).  At that point they have forged a golden calf.  Belief becomes bibliolatry.  Simply reading the Bible is an act of interpretation inseparable from us and contains all our biases.  This is why I am deeply skeptical of any person who with any certainty claims to speak with God’s voice.  I am not speaking here of confessing one’s faith only problematic utterances that omit implicitly or explicitly the important caveat: “This I believe.”  

It takes discipline to give more than lip service to the notion that the Word is beyond our understanding and that we have but a dim view in God in the Bible.  We see through a mirror darkly.  It’s hard work to believe in something ardently and yet always open to change.  We instead want the quick fix, the emotional comfort that certainty through blind faith entails.  I am not immune to this.  So when we read the author of 2 Timothy writing in St. Paul’s name:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Amen.  We can read into the verse that Scripture is all we need and get lazy about it.  We forget historical context is important.  What we are not often taught is that, at the time 2 Timothy was written, scripture consisted only of the Old Testament, the Septuagint as a matter of fact!  The Gospels had not been written yet, but were little more than disjointed oral stories and traditions about Jesus.  This verse is often used to make the classic appeal that the whole Bible refers to itself as the Word of God with no realization that in context, it did not.  If you ask the average Christian about this, they probably have no idea.  Theologians do.  Catholic priests do.  Seminarians do.  But rarely the folks in the pew do.  It’s problems like this that make talking about the Bible and its contents with my fellow Christians so difficult.  And this is just one tradition that goes unnoticed, invisible.

If I bring stuff like this up, I’m often met with all kinds of resistance, anger, name calling, etc.  My faith is questioned.  My love of Jesus is called into doubt.  My allegiance to Satan is implied.  Yet, all I’ve done is read the Bible as it is, in the context in which it was written.  People are invested in their traditions, they are loathe to give them up.  And that is a very human thing.  Again, I am not immune to this.  So I understand that it’s much easier to malign me or claim I’m in the thrall of all manner of delusions than to admit one’s cherished beliefs might be mistaken.

I say all this to say that things are not nearly as ironclad as is often asserted in the Bible.  God and his Word always seem to elude being boxed in.

What the Word Is: God’s Biography

So what the hell is the Bible?  For me, the Bible is to quote my Church, “the Word of God written in the words of men.”  It’s one of the central ways of getting to know God in the intimate, personal way Jesus said. A way that connoted the deep intimacy of sexual intercourse.  So, I cherish my Bibles, all of them.  They are sacred.  Not in some magical or superstitious way but in holiness, that is “set apart.”

And the Word is written in the words of men who were full human beings limited in time and space with personal beliefs, biases and understandings that are evident in the text.  That’s why the sky is a dome and the earth flat in Genesis.  This was the “scientific” understanding of its authors.

So when I go to Bible study, I have these facts in mind.  I’m looking for God to teach and correct and such but with the clear-eyed view that the Word is distorted by the words, by me.  Just as any biography can only scratch the surface of a person’s life and who they are/were or just as no words could ever fully describe my love for my wife and son, words as symbols fall short of reality.  And most importantly, symbols are not the reality.  This does not mean that symbols are less than reality.  Just as my Christian brothers are one with Christ as his body and represent him in this world, we are not Christ.  So too do I see the Bible and the Word.  It is deep intimate connection, not identity.  So I am very, very careful to separate the timeless from the time bound, the transcendent from the mundane, and frankly, the good from bad.

Homosexuality: “Clearly” a Sin

So let’s get back to “the gays.”  I want to be illustrative rather than exhaustive for the sake of brevity, but my main point can be applied to other parts of the Bible.  My point being that people who claim what the Bible “clearly says” is not so clear on further inspection.  Room for interpretation abounds.

First let me quote from the Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 6:9 in New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition:

Do you know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers–none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

and the New American Bible:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

(I love the word choice “practicing homosexuals” vs. sodomites. My church is PC.  LOL)  Sounds cut and dry doesn’t it?  I mean a sodomite is a sodomite.  But remember context.  This was a letter written in the Roman empire where man-on-man sex was deeply taboo because patriarchal as the Roman’s were, they couldn’t stomach a man penetrating another in coitus.  Men should penetrate lesser forms of human being, i.e. women and boys, since the penetrator is considered dominant.  Further, this fact is implicit in the footnotes for this verse in the New American Bible:

1Co 6:9(b) The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamites, i.e. boys or young men who were kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology this was the function of Ganymede, the “cupbearer of the gods,” whose Latin name was Catamitus.  The term translated Sodomotes [This was rendered "practicing homosexuals" in the updated text but apparently the footnote was missed in my edition.]  refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. See similar condemnations of such practices in Romans 1:26-27; 1 Tim 1:10. [emphasis mine]

So we have important qualifying information about the biblical text.  Paul is literally saying that NAMBLA-esque pagan gay temple sex and those who engage in it are wrong and will not be part of God’s kingdom.  It is we  today who interpret and expand that to include, say, two men raising a family in a domestic partnership seeking to get married.

The Bible Reports: You Decide

And that is why I stand up for my LBGT brothers and sisters.  I believe such interpretation is wrong not because of bad exegesis (frankly it’s not) but because of the bigotry and hatred it engenders and gives joy to.  My Master teaches, “You shall know a tree by it’s fruit.”  The fruit ain’t good.  Because God is love and marriage is a public expression of love, to quote this verse to malign such between LGBT persons is proof enough for me that the interpretation is problematic at best, evil at worst.  We are supplanting our bigotry for the Word.  Not good.  Not good at all.

Evidence for a Young World:

“Here are fourteen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers listed below in bold print (usually in the millions of years) are often maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages. The numbers in italics are the ages required by evolutionary theory for each item. The point is that the maximum possible ages are always much less than the required evolutionary ages, while the Biblical age (6,000 years) always fits comfortably within the maximum possible ages. Thus, the following items are evidence against the evolutionary time scale and for the Biblical time scale. Much more young-world evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with the old-age view only by making a series of improbable and unproven assumptions; others can fit in only with a recent creation.”

(Via Institute for Creation Research.)

Droppin’ Science

That said, I think it important for us to lay down a few definitions of what science and the scientific method are. According to the New American Oxford Dictionary, science is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment [emphasis mine].” And the scientific method is “a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses [again emphasis mine].” In short, science is a method of knowing how the world works through hypotheses, proposed explanations of how the world works, and testing those hypothesis to verify them, or more rigorously show they are not falsified. As Einstein said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” (It is not a coincidence that the Age of Reason/Enlightenment also began roughly in the mid 17th century. Modern science is deeply rooted in it.)

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

In the article, the author lays out several pieces of what he considers evidence. I want to focus on two pieces because they exemplify nicely what I think is wrong with Creation Science besides its name.

According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas.

And

Uranium and thorium generate helium atoms as they decay to lead. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that such helium produced in zircon crystals in deep, hot Precambrian granitic rock has not had time to escape.[25] Though the rocks contain 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay products, newly-measured rates of helium loss from zircon show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 (± 2000) years.[26] This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously.

So what could possibly be wrong here? Well, there are a few problems.

1. Selective memory. The article is selective in its use of evidence, specifically only the evidence that comports with the hypothesis: the biblical chronology of our universe is true and is thus scientifically accurate. If this is considered science, how does Creation Science deal with evidence that doesn’t go with the program? The answer is: It does not. Ironically, a Creationist has refuted this articles take on supernovae using scientific observations of supernovae remnants hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years old disproving the Young Earth theory on these grounds. Here is another by a non-Creationist.
2. Defeating Your Purpose. The “evolutionary” theory of our universe is based on physics, a study of the physical world using mathematics to represent, describe, and predict natural phenomena. What nuclear physics tells us is that it can take billions of years for supernovae to occur because that is how long it would take such massive objects as stars to burn enough of a their nuclear fuel to explode. So Young Earthers are using the remnants of well understood phenomena to “prove” the time span needed for that phenomena to exist is impossibly long. If that isn’t scientifically contradicting oneself, I don’t know what is.
3. Where’s the Beef? Under a Shell. Now the point of the article is to list some data or interpret data in such a way that the Earth can scientifically be considered 6,000 years old . Yet, this is exactly what he didn’t do. He attempted to falsify the “evolutionary” theory of our universe. OK, but the author provides no evidence whatsoever nor–and this is critical—a means of testing that evidence to support the Creationist hypothesis on how our universe was created and evolved, pun intended. Remember, science is about testing hypotheses not merely asserting their truthfulness. The Bible and the fundamentalist ideological understanding of it are all the “proof” that is needed. Now that might be good religion or pseudo-science but it is piss poor science.

Keep It Real

Again it is not my intention to disprove Creation Science. I leave that to myriad people on the Internet with the time and inclination to attempt do so. And their Creationist opponents to refute the refutations. My problem is honesty. I am a disciple of Jesus Christ which means I love truth…come what may. Creation Science is not grounded in a respect for truth, but a need to define it. And that leads to intellectual dishonesty if one isn’t careful. It is intellectually dishonest to call punching holes in a theory, however unsuccessfully, appealing to the miraculous and providing no evidentiary support for one’s own theory science. If you don’t follow the rules of science, it isn’t science. It is a sophist shell game at best and chicanery at worst.

African-American spirituality is based on the Sacred Scriptures. In the dark days of slavery, reading was forbidden, but for our ancestors the Bible was never a closed book. The stories were told and retold in sermons, spirituals and shouts. Proverbs and turns of phrase borrowed freely from the Bible. The Bible was not for our ancestors a mere record of the wonderful works of God in a bygone age; it was a present record of what was soon to come. God will lead his people from the bondage of Egypt. God wil preserve his children in the midst of the fiery furnace. God’s power will make the dry bones scattered on the plain snap together, and he will breathe life into them. Above all, the birth and death, the suffering and the sorrow, the burial and the resurrection tell how the story will end for all who are faithful no matter what the present tragedy is.

For Black people the story is our story; the Bible promise is our hope. Thus when the Word of Scripture is proclaimed in the Black community, it is not a new message but a new challenge. Scripture is part of our roots; the Bible has sunk deep into our tradition; and the Good News of the Gospel has been enmeshed in our past of oppression and pain. Still the message was heard and we learned to celebrate in the midst of sorrow, to hope in the depths of despair and to fight for freedom in the face of all obstacles. The time has now come to take this precious heritage and to go and “tell it on the mountain.” [emphasis mine]

The Bible is everywhere in our culture and community. Even a Muslim preacher can get a church full of Christians to stand up and clap with a little John 10:11-12 and some 2 Chronicles 7:14. Turns of phrase are so ingrained we can repeat them almost automatically when called out. The inevitable response to, “To whom much is given…,” is of course, “Much is required.” (Lk 12:48) These phrases are like inside jokes, incredibly pregnant with meaning. MLK said, “I’ve been to the mountain top…I have seen the promised land.” Even Tavis Smiley’s and Cornel West’s Covenant with Black America has no meaning if you don’t have a deep sense of the Bible.

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In trying to explain my point of view, I’ve noticed that I’ve had trouble conveying my thoughts, beliefs, and convictions because when I speak with my brothers and sisters in Christ we often use the same words to name very different perspectives on things. Today I was inspired by remembering a personal story that I think does justice to explaining where I’m coming from. It shows how I can disagree with my fellow Christians about the Bible’s ontological nature vis-á-vis the Word of God, yet agree to its Truth.

I grew up as a boy believing in Santa Claus. I would be that kid that spied “to see if reindeer really know how to fly.” One year, my parents decided to have a little fun and give me a thrill. It was getting late on Christmas Eve and my mother took me into the kitchen ostensibly to give me some warm milk and honey before go to sleep. We talked about Santa and what gifts he might bring. We talked about how he was going to make a stop at our home and perhaps we might catch him this year leaving some presents. Suddenly, Mom said that she heard something in our living room and that it might be good ol’ St. Nick. Well, warp speed had nothing on me that night! I was in the living room in a flash hysterical with joy at the presents that suddenly appeared under the tree and asking my father a million and one questions about Santa. What did he look like? Did he speak to you? What did he say? (I’m sure Mom had a good laugh with Dad about that. They gave me a wonderful, joyous memory I’ll cherish to my grave.)

As I grew older and outgrew the Santa myth, I questioned how they were able to pull off such a stunt. Mom explained how they managed to get those presents to appear: My aunt who was also my next door neighbor passed them through a front window to Dad. Mom would simply have me wait a few minutes in the kitchen and after a short time get me into the living room to see what “Santa” had brought.
Many of the elements of that story have parallels with my burgeoning understanding of the Bible. As a young Catholic, I was taught many of the familiar ideas: inspiration, eyewitness accounts, holy history in the Holy Writ. I had quite a jolting experience when in Catholic high school, I was taught that things were not quite as advertised. (That cause be no little consternation and crisis, but that’s a story for another time.) I came to see the people-in-the-pew understanding of the Bible as myth divorced from the reality taught to priests and theologians and unsuspecting Church History students. But rather than rejecting the Bible, I’ve come to cherish and appreciate it now more than I ever did with my earlier understanding. Just because one doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, doesn’t mean that I didn’t receive those gifts. Neither should a more rigorous historical understanding of Scripture and that anthology we call the Bible somehow make it less True. Changing the explanation for a truth doesn’t change the truth. Thank you, Jesus!

For the New Testament is True because each book reflects its author’s belief and is a human expression of faith and community tradition. This is especially true of the Gospels which are anything but cold, disinterested, historical accounts. The authors had a clear agenda. Every word is intentional  in that sense, the books of the NT (and I would assert non-canonical books as well) are the words of God expressed in the words of men. To those who cherished them, they were and are the Word. I find that distinction critical. Specifically, that faith is what makes Scripture not the other way around. It really is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

So why is the Bible ontologically not the Word of God? Here are some of my reasons:

• While faith is a gift of the Spirit, belief and ideology are quite human. We are not perfect nor omniscient. We can believe in things that aren’t so, e.g. Santa Claus, to explain things that are, e.g. presents appearing under the tree. Simply asserting that the Bible is the Word of God doesn’t make it so any more than saying the sky is falling should cause panic.
• Even if the autographs, that is the original works of the biblical authors, were the dictated Word of God, we don’t have His words. Our earliest manuscripts are copies of copies of copies that date centuries after the authors wrote. On top of that, these manuscripts show clear evidence that the texts were altered and/or expanded by later copyists. These are facts not opinions, supported by direct, incontrovertible evidence. (Why they were changed is subject to debate. The fact that Scripture was “corrupted” is not.) Because of this, our Bibles today are products of scholarly educated guesses at the author’s original intent. There is no way to know what changes were made between the originals and our earliest copies for which there is no evidence.
• The canon, i.e. the list of Scriptural books, did not descend down to us from heaven. It’s creation was quite a human process fraught with politics, power, vitriol, debate, and competing faiths. This process has examples and features I would consider less than Godly. I’m quite leery of anyone who says that there should only be four Gospels because there are four elements, four points on the compass, four winds, and four corners of the earth. Or if not for a very persuasive man who was skilled at strong reasoned argumentation, we probably would not have the Book of Revelation in our Bible today since many doubted its apostolic credentials. Even my Church acknowledge that the grounds for claiming that the John is John the Apostle is shaky. Or that those one might consider “heretics” were often the victim of slander, much like conservatives today distort who liberals are and what they stand for, in order to bolster arguments of that liberal beliefs are “perverted”.
• Because the Bible is a temporal object subject to interpretation by imperfect humans, I find it considerably weaker than a timeless, unalterable sublime truth. We must spend considerable effort to explain and rehabilitate that which we find uncomfortable in the Bible, e.g. Jesus telling the Jews they are the spawn of Satan in the Gospel of John or Paul’s acceptance of Roman chattel slavery. We must advocate for the “correct” interpretation for that which could be used for evil. Why should God’s Word need our help? Why does our interpretation matter at all?
• Because the Bible is an anthology which did not exist at the time the Scriptures were written, it is not always consistent in small and large ways. These include large things like the irreconcilable birth stories in Matthew and Luke. (Herod died in 4 B.C. years before Quirinius was governor of Syria 6-7 A.D.) To small things like how could Paul have consulted with the apostles in Jerusalem as Acts tells us if he emphatically denies this in Galatians? It’s hard to reconcile that with historical accuracy or reliable eyewitness testimony.

In the end, I concluded that it’s just not safe to believe uncritically that the Bible is (ontologically speaking) the Word of God. I’d have to believe in copyists, the canon, scholarly educated guesses, politics, etc. as I do God and Jesus. Fat chance! And I can’t go back to pre-high school biblical knowledge. I’d have to somehow believe in Santa Claus again while denying facts that I know to be true and somehow through all that not lie to myself and my Lord. I find it far safer to let people’s faith speak for themselves, trust that, and have faith that God will take care of revealing Truth to me as any other person of faith.

My personal Christian faith has been an evolving one over the space of years, as I try to clarify the “rule of faith” by which I live. Fellow Christians often asked me, “What is your standard?” Here I give a brief discussion to answer this important question.
All of my understanding of the Early Church Fathers stems from the role of the “primitive,” “catholic,” and “apostolic” tradition that was seen to be the “rule of faith” for orthodoxy and how it developed. It mightily influenced the Canon of the New Testament and other Christian doctrines. In fact, the central authority claim of the Roman Catholic Church that raised me is centered on an unbroken succession of apostolic authority in the church. It’s even in its creed: “…we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church…” This tradition locates genuine Christian authority in Peter and the Apostles whom Christ charged with authority in the Gospel of John.

What has been a real shocker for this Catholic kid is the lack of records of these apostolic churches, save for the see of Rome whose founder the Apostle Peter is “The Rock” (Foundation of the Church) from whom the Pope would spiritually descend to lead the Roman Catholic Church. So, the apostolic claims of the Early Church Fathers can be little more than claims to an non-partial observer. Still as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries moved on, there seems to be a catholic tradition that is generally adhered to. Of course, the victors of any war write the history. So this can be considered an open question. But ignore this for now.

I study the history of my faith because it enhances my understanding of a) Christian doctrine and dogma, and b) how this can be connected to Christ, which is the whole point of my endeavor. So I began with the the Word of God. Why is it the Word of God? How can I tell? What criteria were used to discern it? Ironically, it was by using the Protestant hermeneutic of Sola Scriptura that I understood my mother church more clearly, esp. about her warts, failings, etc. I also found the doctrine of Sola Scriptura a non sequitir. How can I attack the authority of a church whose tradition produced the very documents I claim supersede that tradition? By tradition, I mean what is orthodox in authority, biblical exegesis, and dogma. Protestants presented me with a difficult dilemma. The claim is, as I understand it, that the RC Church is not the proper authority on God’s revelation because it doesn’t align with Scripture. It’s traditions are falsehoods. Yet these traditions are what informed the canonization of Scripture in the first place! The tradition defined who was the author of a sacred book, if it told The Truth, if it had the power of God, if the people of God accepted it, etc. This was the central argument against the heretics of the early days, e.g. Marcion and the Gnostics. It’s why the Gospel of Mark is “correct” and the Word of God, and the Gospel of Thomas is not.

This left me with some tough decisions to make. If I accept the Bible as is, I must accept the tradition that drives its existence and “proper” interpretation. Otherwise, I fall into a self-serving relativism which I want to avoid. The only Church that can reasonably make a claim to a so-called authentic tradition is the RC Church through unbroken succession. (I have a full list of all Popes going back to Peter himself in my Bible.) If apostolicity is the rule of faith, then the RC Church is the only church with real authority since it has determined what is orthodox and heretical for centuries on this basis. The Reformation, while gratifying, makes precisely the same claims to authority that the primitive heretics made, that is, via God (Holy Spirit) through “proper” understanding of His Word. I agree with much of what Protestants claim about one’s personal relationship with Christ, etc. But this flies in the face of the Apostolic Tradition. If apostolic authority is the rule, then despite the beauty of what Protestants profess, they teach falsehood. They do not have the “correct,” that is orthodox, understanding of God’s revelation because this can only be correctly understood by those with the genuine authority to determine truth, i.e. the RC Church. But I am a student of history and I’m fully aware of such proud affairs as the Inquisition, the Crusades, and persecutions of scientists such as Galileo. They have proven the RC Church to be the undeniably infallible arbiter of truth that it unquestionably is. So, ultimately I was forced to look with skepticism upon the Tradition. But the correctness of the Bible depends greatly on that Tradition.
Now you might say, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And I agree with you. Here the paradox: Protestants deny the authority of an institution whose authority must exist for that denial to make sense. This is why I’m skeptical of it all. If the RC Church is fallible, then so must be tradition, and thus our understanding of canonized Scripture, particularly the doctrine of Scriptura Sola.

Any claim about Scripture is thus relativized and personalized, i.e. a matter of personal faith without an objective rule to govern rightness or wrongness. That sucks because objective rules have a strong appeal to a rational minded engineer like me. So without such a rule, I’m searching for the essence of the practicable truth that can be found in my faith. I’ve become a pragmatist. If what we practice causes life to grow and blossom, healthy and whole, then I see God and am an instrument of His Peace. This is why I believe in Jesus, because I have yet to see anything but life and love in the Christ. If we see life diminishing in the forms of fear, oppression, hatred, and unfreedom, then evil is among us. That is my hermeneutic. Rough and unseemly, but quite workable.