Bill East wrote:
> The question has been raised as to when the Church began to enforce rules
> against polygamy and other sexual irregularity.
As more than one poster has already made clear, it is highly problematic to
attribute a single purpose or policy to The Church in the 7c. If this question had
been raised in this form, it would have been uninformed. But the discussion has
been more careful than that (we're all good at splitting hairs, if nothing else!).
> Of course, there are many regulations about such matters in the New Testament.
> It is as well to bear in mind that the New Testament was written by the Church,
> which existed before the New Testament was written; indeed, for best part of a
> century, before some of its books were written.
More accurately, there were several churches: you'll recall Paul writing to them?
(and their variations in praxis are made perfectly clear by Paul's never-ending
prohibitions and corrections). So even in this period the absence of a single
Church (outside of Paul's imagination) should be obvious.
> Rules in the New Testament are rules made by the Church; it is not a case of the
> Church coming along afterwards and discovering a rule-book which it may or
> may not have read carefully.
And if you had been reading carefully, you might have noticed the further
differentiation of Paul's Church into churches as Christianity spread into Europe.
Your conflation of the various historical and regional (not to mention doctrinal)
churches into a single "Church" is just plain bizarre. Can you actually be unaware
of the heterogeneous nature of Christianity in the period in question in Britain?
In Europe?
If the writers and the interpreters were the same people, or part of a coherent and
consistent tradition, we wouldn't even NEED the word "ecumenical," but we do. There
wouldn't have been a Reformation (no need to update our soteriology if it's all
clear to begin with), but I seem to remember that there was. You are deliberately
confusing several extremely different institutions. Why?
(This is the sort of stuff I would expect to be handed on a street corner!)
The development (and therefore the history) of the uses of scripture by successive
generations of clergymen is not a new or controversial issue!
|