Orlion wrote:rusmeister wrote:
With the Sola Scriptura position you can play 'Philadelphia lawyer'. Sometimes Christians will broadly agree, sometimes they won't. And whoever is opposed to a position or understanding can pretty much ALWAYS disagree on the same grounds - using and pointing to Scripture. It is in practice WHY they disagree; why you have division in the first place.
No problems here, and it's kinda the point of my post. Once again, it is only a problem with Sola Scriptura religions. Any other religion that claims 'Tradition' can come up with whatever they want (sounds harsh, so I'll say that is how it appears to outsiders
). Establishing authority becomes increasing difficult the farther from, in this case Christian, belief you go. For example: any Christian will probably be able to establish Christ as an authority, from there one can try and trace a 'tradition' down to their religion. For a, say, atheist, this approach will not work, since you have to establish tons of stuff even before you get to Christ as an authority. But I digress. What I really want to address is:
Again, I see a contradiction in Donaldson fans taking seriously a story about Sunder son of Nassic inheriting a 4,000-yr tradition that is actually true (within the story) and yet denying that a paradosis of half that length could possibly happen.
The tradition that Sunder inherited was corrupted. It had some truth in it, but it was changed do to time passed and necessities imposed by the Sunbane.
I see that it can be done - if the people do so religiously; if it is a matter of drilling in lifelong practice of teaching and practice.
Once again, this may preserve certain 'core dogma', but certain events (Nero, German Barbarians, mad Arabs writing sanity shattering books...) will (and I believe have) corrupt the system somewhat. At this point, we get to a 'my tradition is purest' debate... which, may actually be the only solution.
So the logical chain (the short one) is that
a) Paradosis is possible
b) If the Christian faith is true, then paradosis is essential. (If there is no paradosis then we may confidently discard the Christian faith)
c) We must find that paradosis if we hope to be sure of having correct understandings of the Christian faith. Without it we are reinventing our own understanding of what that faith is (and the skeptic has fair intellectual grounds to dispute/discard the faith)
d) Any claim of paradosis must be able to show consistency and continuity in teaching and practice from the beginnings to now. Thus, one must have a continuous history. History can show if a thing existed, and its absence gives the skeptic good grounds to doubt.
Ultimately, I don't think this can work in such a strict manner. If, however, you can prove that your current tradition is the one 'least corrupted', it would certainly give a better starting point for divining the 'pure tradition' then if you start with a more corrupted tradition. However, it would seem to me that all (well, maybe most) traditions, regardless of corruption (I use this word to mean 'change from original' and not with any other connotation) has some very core beliefs that could, theoretically, start one on the path to 'true tradition'.
A pain-in-the-butt for the multi-lingual poster - when your keyboard is set to the wrong language, and you've typed a paragraph or more before you realize that you've typed a lot of gibberish...
Yes, I quite agree with your first point. I hope it's clear that I think the big thing excluded from consideration is that of history. Generally there is a very narrow prismatic view of it, usually that dictated in public school textbooks, where the entire history of religion in Christendom is reduced to
1) Christians vs lions
2) The Crusades (although much of the time the motivation is written off as pretty much exclusively the greed of leaders rather than the beliefs of many of them and of most of their followers)
3) Boy, that Catholic Church sure was corrupt in the Middle Ages!
4) Indulgences
5) The Inquisition
oh, and
6) Galileo, of course.
That list is based on fairly extensive comparison (by me) of textbooks approved for public schools, which most of us are graduates of.
If anyone can see any particular bias in the particular facts selected...
But we weren't taught to be biased now, were we?
Actually, as I recall, (running on fading memories here) Nassic had it pretty much right, though in symbolism that he hardly understood - it was the Clave that deliberately twisted it and that he was actually preserving the tradition from. I might be wrong there, but my main point was that we accept the idea of a truth being passed down over a looooong period of time in fiction, but not in practice - or at least in relation to one particular religion. (I think most of us accept the maintenance of ancient Buddhist and Hindu pratices.)
So when you say "Certain events WILL corrupt the system" you do seem to deny the possibility of paradosis in practice. I disagree. I think that we do happen to have some texts that have been faithfully copied from the ancient world, that not everything has been "corrupted" and that some quotes have been preserved, even verbatim, for thousands of years. And the written word is merely reflection of the oral word.
Now we definitely have a problem when facing a claim "My tradition is the purest", I agree. So then you can ask, "On what basis do you think so?" Someone, somewhere, is rather likely to hold to a version mostly or completely identical to that of one's ancestors compared to other versions.
I've already offered Church history as a way to prove, not the truth of the Christian faith as such, but that certainly there were definite practices and a definite history, and these things can be shown and examined, unlike mere claims of belief, and that they can offer proof (or 'strong evidence' if you prefer) of the practical paradosis of a given tradition; that it is not, in fact corrupted (in the sense you use it in).
An example of a different sense would be the discussion of the struggles in the Church between orthodoxy and heresy - which is predicted by the very orthodox teachings from the premise that man is Fallen and IS going to screw up on his own. I in fact agree with you for the most part about corruption - except that I see a logical exception - IF an institution IS divinely guided, then deviations WILL be corrected when the people go wrong. So my summary is that I believe paradosis to be possible in theory, nearly impossible in practice, but not completely impossible. And the proof is when we see the ancient teachings and practices duplicated in a Church existing today. The Orthodox Church is practical proof of paradosis - again,
not of the truth of the Faith itself - but of its successful handing-down. An examination of the early Church, of the writings of the ancient ante-Nicene fathers, of the edifices, the icons painted or engraved therein, the practices in worship described - reveals that it has something that is unchanged in its essence. THAT can be proved. (PS - I am aware of Roman Catholic and other claims, and for now would treat them as the same - the thing being to establish that there was an institution that has existed continually and has not in fact changed its doctrine, though it may have developed and clarified existing doctrine, and has maintained all vital practices. Once that is established, then we could go on to other questions.)
Now from my experience here, I know some people will object to my bias - they want all versions and forms to be considered equally valid and object if one finds that one really does have a better claim than others, for the driving desire is that none of them should have a better claim. But if we CAN prove something via history, logic, etc, are we not reasonable in being so biased and unreasonable in demanding the denial of such a conclusion?
"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one." Bill Hingest ("That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis)
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." G.K. Chesterton
Luckily I'm feeling magnanimous today. You can have this one free pass, because I doubt Linna will mind, or complain.
Do you think everyone would "go for the deal" if we were just born into a world where more things "went right" for us from the start, and the character of this employer was was more obvious?
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