re: Protestant-Only Religious Service at Pentagon

You keep saying you’re fine with authority, just not infallible authority, but that’s exactly where your position breaks down.

On the Pharisees, you’re proving my point. Yes, they had real authority, and yes, they could err. But notice what that creates. If the authority that interprets Scripture can err, then disputes about what Scripture means are ultimately unresolved. That’s exactly what you see in Protestantism today. Competing interpretations with no final, binding resolution.

On the canon, you keep repeating “we can be certain without being infallible,” but that doesn’t solve the problem. You’re claiming an infallible rule of faith while admitting your identification of that rule could be wrong. That’s not just a philosophical nuance, that’s a foundational issue. If your canon could be mistaken, then your “infallible authority” could include non-inspired books or exclude inspired ones. That undermines the whole system.

Appealing to “the Spirit” and “abundance of evidence” doesn’t fix that either. Every group claims the Spirit. Every group thinks the evidence is on their side. That’s why you get contradictory doctrines from the same Bible. So again, the method doesn’t produce certainty, it produces fragmentation.

Your John the Baptist analogy still doesn’t land. Recognizing Christ in front of you is not the same thing as identifying, preserving, and binding a universal canon of texts for the entire Church. One is immediate revelation, the other is a historical, ecclesial process. Those aren’t parallel.

On Acts 15, you’re trying to soften what actually happened. The apostles didn’t say, “Here’s our best fallible opinion.” They issued a binding judgment for the whole Church, and explicitly grounded it in authority: “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” That’s not just “real authority,” that’s authority claiming divine guidance.

And here’s the key point you keep sidestepping. You say the Church can err and be corrected by Scripture. But who makes that call? You… Or your tradition… Or your interpretation… That just relocates authority to the individual level, even if you don’t want to say it that way.

At the end of the day, your position still rests on fallible identification of an infallible canon and fallible interpretation of that canon, while denying any infallible authority to resolve disputes. Calling that “certainty” doesn’t actually make it stable, it just makes it subjective.

If you can’t admit as much I guess this is where we part ways. You’ll see the truth one day. FWIW, I used to be in your shoes. Mostly.