DTK, I have not had the opportunity to read your books on this topic. I certainly hope to read them soon. At the moment I'm concentating what little reading time I have on the defense of the historical reliability of the Bible (just got F.F. Bruce's book
The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? on the doorstep yesterday! I know a number of people who've been reading Bart Ehrman's books and it seems I'm more likely to encounter people who question Scripture's integrity, let alone its sufficiency.
Thanks for your thorough look at the use of "tradition" in the NT letters. You raised an excellent point that is now quite obvious, though it hadn't occurred to me before--that the traditions referred to by Paul had
already been given. He was writing his epistles to, among other things, clarify what these churches already knew and where they were wandering off course.
Some time I'd like to round up a few RC converts, and a few EO converts, who all testify to discovering their need for "sacred Tradition" and seeing the bankruptcy of
sola scriptura, then lock them in a room to sort out who has the right tradition. Keeping in mind, of course, that it's
sola scriptura that keeps getting people confused about what to believe...
Also, wasn't Cardinal Newman a convert from the Anglican church? I wonder at what point he realized that Rome's view of tradition was untenable? Did he develop his theory of development to justify his own conversion? If he saw the inconsistencies from across the Tiber, I find it hard to see how anyone would convert to something that needed to have its core tenets reworked to become historically believable.
