Not to sound like a bleeding-heart liberal, but that doesn’t sound like the Christ of the New Testament.

And the church is local. The Vicentian Canon being a myth that is easily dismissed from our vantage in history: name one thing that was “everywhere always and by all” outside of the Resurrection. We can’t even, historically, agree on what that means - unless you start slicing off people as heretics until you’re left with one sect and say “this *is* everyone everywhere.”

In Philippians Paul prays that “your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best”

That’s also the book where he says “work out your salvation.”

I agree it’s a bunch of absolutes conflicting. Even the claim that there are no absolutes is an absolute. I think they are all trumped by the absolute command to sit down together in love.

You don’t have to! Of course reading and studying scripture are good but the church saves you the bother of trying to interpret it all yourself.

In yesterday’s sermon/my after-Mass online read, Revd Jane at Hoosier Musings had a good go at explaining this.

Of course the church selectively interprets things too. That’s not in itself bad.

Sorry, Protestants and liberals, but I’ll take the church’s reading of it all.

In the end the Episcopal row isn’t really about obeying canons and ecclesiastical polity like the liberal side pretends. It really IS a battle of the absolutes, between two magisteria: the church versus private judgement. (Even though many of the liberals do believe in the creeds and most of the conservatives are Protestants.)

BTW the outcome of that battle won’t affect 99 per cent of Episcopalians in any way.

Your comment to Susan Russell was spot-on. I am glad you called her on it.

In actuality, Russell’s approach to Scripture is similar to the Church’s approach to Scripture. She has decided what the central message of Christianity is (radical inclusiveness, etc.), and that central message is the interpretive rule she uses to read the Scriptures.

In the same way, the historic Church believed that it knew the central message of its faith, and the Church used that central message as its interpretive rule in reading the Scriptures. If Russell is reading her own beliefs into the Scriptures, then the historic Church did so as well.

The difference, I suppose, is that the Apostles and the early fathers made the claim that their interpretive rule (the “rule of faith”) was not something they made up, but was given to them by the Messiah. And so, while that rule is perhaps not obvious from the Scriptures themselves, it is nevertheless (on this view) the correct one.

You are right that we all “.. read the parts we like … read into the parts we can [and] discards the parts we don’t like.” But where that comes from is the altogether modern notion of treating the Scriptures as a vast well of information from which we, as autonomous rational agents, can deduce the Truth. Russell does that, the “reasserters” do that, I do that, and (quite possibly) you do that as well.

But that is not what the Holy Scriptures are for …