Rants: Alliterative Licks

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I can feel myself getting into a dust-up over Church tradition/apostolic succession over at Disputations. Rather than act the troll over there, I’ve decided to transplant my consternation over here, to my home turf.

What got me going was this following parenthetical barb, tossed off by Tom as a kicker to his post about a book under his review:

(Yes, yes, we can learn lots of valuable things from modern scholars. But somehow they never seem to want to teach us the value of our earliest traditions.)

My response to that, over there, was:

By "teach" I assume that you imply "affirm?"

And we’re off to the races. My question is: would it be preferable that biblical scholarship had consisted entirely of 1800 years of simply reiterating that Irenaeus (et al.) was 100% correct? If so, then better that men had stopped studying circa 200 A.D. and the university system had never been created.

Then Western man could have persevered in a perpetual peasantry of plough, plunder, plague and preprogrammed piety: perfect. Publish post.
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