Posted on 04/21/2015 8:37:59 AM PDT by Gamecock
I still have a problem with your phrasing of the matter. I would argue that it is actually the rejection of Holy Tradition that is at the root of this.
In fact, as an Orthodox Christian, the notion that the Scriptures are “the authoritative Word of God” is strange to me. The Word of God is Our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, the Scriptures are the Church’s books that provide the primary testimony to Him, both prospectively in the prophecies and typology of the Old Testament (and the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian) and retrospectively in the report of His conception, birth, earthly ministry, teachings, Passion, Saving Death, Glorious Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven, and the history of the earliest days of the Church, including the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the Church in the New.
All writings, even (or perhaps especially) divinely inspired writings, need a hermeneutic tradition in which to be interpreted, and it is the final abandonment of any remnant of Holy Tradition as the basis for Scriptural hermeneutics by folks like Anglicans and Presbyterians that leads to this.
Sorry, from the context of you post, I thought you were using Word of God to refer to scripture, and was using it the same way.
Indeed, the Logos of God is Jesus, but the written word of scriptures points to Jesus.
The rejection of scripture as the inspired teachings of God is the reason for this error. The PC USA has declared that the Bible contains the word of God, but it is not inspired.
As for the hermeneutic interpretation, there are many “traditional” interpretations that do not always agree, and they have changed over time. Otherwise, why are there so many subdivisions of “traditional” Christianity? If there is a preferred hermeneutic, why are there differences in “traditional” Christianity?
There aren't really that many subdivisions of traditional Christianity -- there are us Orthodox, the Latins (and Eastern Rite churches in communion with them), the Monophysites, and the Nestorians. There are a lot more subdivisions of the strain of Christianity that purports to adhere to sola scriptura.
As to why the four way split prior to the "Reformation" blowing Western Christendom into confessional smithereens, I can go through the sequence I put to people looking for the original Church: there's no question which it was until 431 since all the groups that fragmented off prior to then died out, at which point you have to decide whether the unity of God and Man in Jesus Christ is strong enough that you can call Mary "Theotokos" (birth-giver of God, sometimes Englishes as "Mother of God") or only "Christotokos" (holding that "the Divine Logos is one, the one from the Virgin another) -- if you think the later, then the Assyrian Church of the East is the Church -- otherwise, fast forward to 451 and decide whether we can speak of Christ subsisting in two natures, fully human and fully divine, or think it better to speak of "the one Incarnate nature of the Divine Logos" -- if you think the later, better find a Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian or Syrian Jacobite church and join up -- if you pick the former, you get a package deal around the 11th century -- if you think (as I do) that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (as Jesus told us), that all bishops are fundamentally equal, that there no purgatorial fire prior to the river of fire at the Last Judgement, then you conclude what is now called the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Church; if contarariwise, you think the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, that the Pope of Rome has a special Petrine Charism that makes him superior to all other bishops, and that those who are saved in Christ are subject to a purgatorial fire to cleanse them of their sins prior to the Last Judgement, then you better sign up with the Latins.
Of course at another level, the answer as to why there are differences is much simpler: sin, the same thing that causes schisms between confessions which all claim to "believe the Bible literally".
In the end, you're left with a question of which tradition you follow -- the conception of Holy Tradition held by any of the churches that predate the "Reformation", a sola scriptura tradition that interprets the Scriptures in deliberate opposition to the way they were interpreted by the Latin church, a "Reformed" tradition that regards Calvin's Institutes as the decisive commentary on Scripture, the "inclusive tradition" of Anglicanism, . . .
Sorry, I should have looked at your original post. I think I conflated your post with another. Again, sorry for the confusion.
As for the split in the church, if unity is supposed to be the goal, then any separation is wrong.
It gives a reason to go after and attack the church, legally, or possibly even physically. Homosexual rights are a gem for all anti-church groups because they can legitimately claim that the presence or people who don’t think in agreement is a threat, and is oppressive. It’s convenient for everyone opposed to religion, including the atheists, to jump on the same bandwagon
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