Brisbane priest responds to Abp. Phillip Aspinoll

All this while true is a red herring to the question of Scripture's authority. For Christianity, authority of anything on divine matters rests on its connection to divine revelation. God actually revealed his word to mankind; the actual infinite Ancient of Days has revealed and inspired something, someone, out there, to convey his very word itself. By reading Scripture, you are reading divine thoughts themselves. If the infinite creator of reality as such, chose to convey his message via messengers, that is the thing we call divine revelation, and accord it the highest authority that a human being can accord to something.

That's it, that's the gist of it. The clever points about transmission delays, various eras, obfuscate this basic point that this is revelation itself we are dealing with.

You're not allowed to look at Muslims and say, "whatever they are, I share nothing with them." First of all, are you islamophobic? We recently saw leftists widely calling Justice Clarence Thomas the n****r word on Twitter, so we know just how deep or how shallow many leftist 'virtues' of 'tolerance' are. So stop using Muslims as the byword of all that is bad and evil.

It doesn't matter what they believe, or how similar or foreign they are to us, or we to them. They are a copy of us. According to John of Damascus, Islam is but a later corruption of Christianity, a form of a Christian arian heresy gone amuck. So they are following us; not we them.

That doesn't mean they copied us, or that by looking at them we can find the Christian way of doing things. As I said, they are a later corruption. So what can we learn about ourselves by looking at them? Nothing. We have nothing to do with them, we came prior to them, and we have our own very strong and unassailable doctrine of Scripture, divine inspiration, revelation. We may have views which overlap with them, or differ from them. Let's rest our thoughts on our own doctrine of Scripture, rather than trying to consider ourselves the very opposite of those brown people whom we enlightently consider so distasteful.

 

This is disingenuous in the extreme, and you know it. I've defended Islam against unfair criticisms of it numerous times on this Forum. The phrase "the Bible is not the Qur'an" - which is true - is hardly tantamount to 'Islamophobia'. My purpose was merely - and obviously - to contrast two different views of inspiration. The Muslim view of the Qur'an is not 'bad', it's just different from the Anglican view of the Bible. If you disagree with 'concept inspiration', that's fine, let's talk about that. But leave the dishonest ad hominem nonsense out of it.

 

I’ll also note that the only thing ‘Islamophobic’ in this thread is the assertion that Muslims are a race:

 

I have seen Article VI referred to a few times in this thread and thought I'd post a brief reflection.
St. John of Damascus wrote that, "...God gave us knowledge of Himself at first through the Law and Prophets and then afterwards through His only-begotten Son, our Lord and God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we accept all those things that have been handed down by the Law and the Prophets and the Apostles and the Evangelists, and we know and revere them, and over and above these things we seek nothing else...With these things let us be content and in them let us abide and let us not step over the ancient bounds or pass beyond the divine tradition." Elsewhere he wrote, "...[God] worked our salvation, for the sake of which all Scripture and every mystery has been revealed..."
When I first read this Saint's work which I am quoting, I couldn't help but see some parallels in the 39 Articles, Article VI being the obvious example. I read somewhere that St. John of Damascus was really skilled in summarizing the Church's doctrines from the early centuries (albeit I realize his work has Eastern emphases and so not every particular will necessarily fully align with Anglican thought). Anyway, since the 16th century Church of England was seeking to reform in accordance with the early Church (ultimately with Holy Scripture) I think her success can be seen in the continuities between Article VI and St. Damascene's writing as to the purpose and sufficiency of Holy Scripture. In contrast, the Church of Rome in its Council of Trent, Fourth Session, Decree on the Canonical Scriptures went further to assert that unwritten traditions (said to be of apostolic origin which Rome herself had maintained) concerning faith and morals were to be received with equal piety as those in Holy Scripture. And so, in my view, it was to the English Church's credit that she refocused attention on Holy Scripture while maintaining allegiance to the Creeds, Councils and Fathers of the early Church but to a degree no more or no less than what could be read in or reasonably concluded from Holy Scripture.

 

I'd like to share a good quote from Packer's Heritage of Anglican Theology:

In philosophy and modern discourse...the word reason is ambiguous...The authentic sense--the fundamental, primary sense--is that reason is the capacity of the mind to receive...Receptive reason is reason in its basic form. Receptive reason, I would say (and Hooker implies) is what God gave to Adam and Eve. Receptive reason is how basically we should think of of reason and its role today...Receptive reason in God's universe should never do anything more than say: "I receive what Scripture tells me. It is from Scripture that I learn what's what. I judge everything else that I read or observe--all my experiences of life, all my experiences of relationships and of other people--I assess all that by what is written in God's word. Yes, I judge--but I judge by allowing the Bible to judge."

You cannot, of course, take this line unless you think that Scripture doctrinally is self-interpreting--that is, that one passage throws light on another passage in terms of what they teach about God and created reality...

We moderns are confronted with a view of reason that so emphasizes the concept of reason the ruler that it hardly has any space for the idea of reason the receiver in philosophy or theology. We say, in effect, "What is important is that I spell out what is in my mind and heart, because I've got the insight; my reason is the ruler of what everybody else says, and my reason does not receive; it rules."...

What about tradition? The substance of Hooker's thought, though he never says it in quite these terms, is that tradition helps reason to receive what is in the Bible. Tradition is the precipitate (we may call it), the legacy of centuries of work by Bible readers...seeking to draw out of Scripture what is there and to articulate the full faith in light of it.​

 

He was arguing the opposite, actually…

 

I wasn't even hurrying to the debate on this. I was actually denigrating the notion that bronze age 'laws' should necessarily apply to either 1st or 21st century people just because they appear somewhere in a book called The Bible. It's nice to have my opinion confirmed in principle though by no less than The Council of Jerusalem.
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