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Here, again, in "Notes on the Doctrine of Authority" (16 January 2001), I assume, mistakenly, that having authority, which is all that a phrase like "the paramount authority of Christ" need be taken to mean, is the same as being an authority. Unless this mistaken assumption is made, there's no good reason for my criticism in ¶ 2 that certain passages "obscure my distinction between primal source of authority and authority (or authorities)."

19 July 2006

                                                                                          Notes on the Doctrine of Authority

1. It seems clear enough that my understanding of authority is yet another variation on the traditional Protestant understanding -- at least as set forth in The Catholicity of Protestantism: 115-127, 131-140. Indeed, aside from the failure of that traditional understanding to observe the limit of all authority -- that no appeal to authority can eo ipso settle the question of truth -- there is only one main point where my understanding significantly departs from it -- namely, its assumption that the canon of scripture is "our primary witness to-day to the original Apostolic Christian faith" (125). But once allow that this assumption can no longer claim lithe testimony of scholarship," and that "the apostolic message concerning the Word of God" is, in fact, a canon before the scriptural canon, and my understanding logically follows as the only way to continue to uphold the primacy of the apostolic principle. (Just how important this principle was to the early fathers is evident from the statement of J. Lawson cited on 124,"To inquire whether tradition or Scripture is the primary authority is to obscure the mind of Irenreus by asking the wrong question. To him both are manifestations of one and the same thing, the apostolic truth by which the Christian lives. The authority within the Church is all one, 'the apostolic,' however transmitted.")

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