Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu (Charley Wingate) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The three-legged stool Message-ID: Date: 1 Jul 89 07:36:04 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 69 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Our Fearless Moderator writes: >I've been thinking about the three-legged stool. [....] But the analogy >doesn't quite do it for me. I have two problems. First, it implies more >parallelism between Scripture, tradition, and reason than I see. I don't think that this is intentional beyond the notion of each as "essential". THe idea is that if you try to go without one of the legs, the stool (representing theological "truth", whatever that is) does not stand. >Second, I think maybe there should be a fourth: the Holy Spirit. I would think of It as more like the floor. :-) Seriously, I'm not really sure why the notion doesn't mention the Spirit. I think I might say two things here. First, my comment about the floor; if the Spirit doesn't uphold *any* of the legs, the stool falls. Protestantism has tended to emphasis the Spirit in Scripture explicitly, in Reason implicitly, and in tradition not at all. But if Scripture is uninspired, or the reader is uninspired, or the church is uninspired, then theology departs from His face, whithers, and dies. Second, the Stool is simultaneously a theory of theologizing, and a standard. The Stool claims to describe *how* people theologize, whether or not there is any substance of Truth to what they say; in this wise the Spirit need not be present (and what we get is bad theology). On the other hand, as a standard, it insists on turning to reason, to the scriptures, and to tradition as references. We cannot turn to the Spirit in quite the same way. The Stool does not say that a particular doctrine is true or false; it only establishes a model of theological reasoning against which any particular doctrine can be tested-- not to see if it is True, but to see if it merits consideration as Truth. I don't think the model which OFM presents in the passage which followed is inconsistent with the Stool. It seems instead to subsume the Stool by explaining out the functions of the four elements in greater detail. I think the main point of dispute is in the following: >2) Does Scripture interpret itself? The Catholic claim is that >Scripture needs interpretation, and that the Church is the authorized >interpreter. Protestant claims are that Scripture interprets itself, >when read prayerfully through the Holy Spirit. Thus an authoritative >interpreter is not needed. The anglican answer is in two parts here. First, the Roman claim: we've been around before how it is inarguable. Anglicans simply don't believe it. However, we are forced to accept some of it by the historical observation that the extreme protestant claim is not borne out in practice; indeed, if one accepts the notion that (for example) Nicea and Chalcedon were "right", it seems that heterothodoxy is in direct proportion to one's commitment to individual, unadvised christianity. Hence, we are essentially forced to two negative conclusions: against the Roman church, that reason must be brought to bear on both scripture and tradition, and against Protestantism, that tradition is necessary as a tutor to reason as it reads scripture. It think it is plain that this leads straight to a lack of the kind of authority that the other two views cited offer us. I'll be frank: I don't think such an earthly authority exists. I think we will just have to learn to live with the risk of believing wrongly about theology. SUrely we must cry to the Spirit for guidance, but just as surely, we must never make the mistake of identifying our voice as the Spirit's voice. If you want to reduce this to a slogan, I would say it thusly: "Not `scripture alone', but `not just scripture.'" C. Wingate + "The Peace of God, it is no peace, + But strife closed in the sod. mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu + Yet brothers, pray for but one thing: mimsy!mangoe + The marv'lous Peace of God."