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The answer to the question in the title is “me”. It could be ‘ne, myself and I’, or, as in Struans’ post about sources of theology, it could be ‘me, tradition, Scripture’ – which is another way of expressing the classic Anglican ‘three-legged stool’ – reason, Scripture and tradition. We all do it, even those who say they rely on the authority of their Church; that is a choice they have made, with their reason. So, if we take our friend quiavideruntoculi, who regards his present Pope and half the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith as hopeless modernists, cleaves to the truth of Catholic teaching. How does he find this? He uses his own reason to tell him that some of the leaders of his church are in error, but that by his own researches he can discern the true tradition; so so we all, so do we all.
Even if we are born into a tradition, we make the choice to stay in it. We are given free-will by Our Heavenly Father, and any attempt to shift that to someone else, fails. It may well have been (as it was in my case) my mother who took me to chapel, and my mother and grandmother who encouraged my desire to know more about Jesus, but then I was a child and I thought as a child. When I became a man (indeed before then) there were plenty willing to tell me otherwise, and being the sort of person who is interested in ideas, I was happy to investigate what my secular/atheist contemporaries assured me was a more rational way of looking at the world. It made no appeal to me and I rejected it as based on a particularly reductionist form of rationalism. I recall asking a friend at college who was hot on this sort of thing, how he could be sure his girlfriend loved him and was faithful to him, and he answered that he believed it was so, his instincts and feeling told him so; well, my instincts and feelings told me God existed, so he could love his girlfriend for reasons he could not quantify, and I could love God on the same grounds. That wasn’t to say I had no reason for the hope that was in me. The more I studied Scripture and early Church history, the clearer it became that the Gospel accounts deserved to be believed.
So, as a fully-functioning adult, I made a choice. I can say in a sense I had no choice because I have always felt the closeness and reality of God. He’s there for me like gravity is.. But I still had the choice of rejecting His teaching. There were certainly times when it seemed irksome to my younger self to confine myself to the one woman I married, and it may well have been (with more excuse) the same for Mrs S. But we didn’t give in to temptation; we’d made holy vows to each other and we kept them. Would I if I had not been a Christian? I don’t know, but I do know that being a Christian was a great help in the face of temptation.
Who am I to judge? I am the person who will stand one day before the Lord to be judged on how I have used the life and the gifts he has given me, and I don’t feel it would be a very convincing report to say: ‘Well, Lord, he told me it was OK.’ I feel the Lord might well ask me why I hadn’t used the brains he gave me. Who I am? I am the one who will have to answer for what I have believed and why I believed it. So are you.
All Along the Watchtower 
You utopianist, you. You must be, you just described the real utopia, here it is, “I am the one who will have to answer for what I have believed [in another context, I would add, “said, and done’] and why I have believed it. So are you.”
Perfect description of the closest we will ever come to heaven on earth.
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Ah well, out of the closet on that one then 🙂
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Indeed, I’m right there with you. 🙂
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Aye, well, we’ll have much to be judged on – and can’t balme a computer programme for our failings 🙂
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Nope,we either wrote it or approved it. It’s our failing, either way. 🙂
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How very radical of us 🙂
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You know, the scary part is that in today’s world, it is rather radical. SF, and C are fond of the construction, “What has always been believed by everyone”, this is still another case of kicking over the traces of a well-ordered society. 🙂
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Yes, clearly what really matters is keeping our butts covered 🙂
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Yep 🙂
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The world notices many things though they explain what they see through their individual lenses.
We all make use of these legs to strengthen our spiritual life and to transform ourselves in Christ for our betterment.
Therefore it is not hard for those with a particular lens to declare that the Catholics are adorning the three legs of the stool with accoutrements and declaring that we have thereby changed the faith.
However, there are those who have taken sandpaper to one or other of the legs in order to ‘smooth’ it out. Once started, some do not know when to stop. At present, the leg of Tradition’ has seemingly been so sanded down that it seems to barely hold the stool upright much less hold the weight of a member’s spiritual edifice. I wonder if anyone will notice.
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That depends on what you mean by tradition. Do you disagree with my notes?
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It is hard to say with some of the notes as some are rather cryptic and others rather ‘boiled down.’ Agreement and disagreement will come with expositions on the individual points. We may have contrasting views on how we interpret them after all. And that is why people tend to divide over what they see, read or hear because we do so from our own perspective.
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Yes, that’s a fair comment. It was particularly a sense of tradition below that I thought you might find particularly objectionable (where ‘Church’ is the community of all believers):
The tradition of the church is not the handing on of meaningless actions and practices—It is the faith of the Church as lived—It is the Church, the body of Christ living out and handing on all that she herself is and all that she herself believes.
Thanks for engaging.
S.
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Perhaps when Richard Hooker’s three-legged stool hypothesis was originally suggested in the 14th century it looked an attractive way to explain the utilisation of the faith, however with hindsight and the rupture in the Body of Christ nearly 200 years later that was the deformation, we see it for the fallacy that it really is.
There is no such thing as the famed Anglican “three-legged stool,” nor can there be, because a stool, with three (equal-length) legs, would infer that Scripture, reason and tradition are equal, they are not and to suggest such a thing is to put human reason at the same level as divine revaluation, and no Anglican I know should do such a thing… Oh wait a minute..
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Mark, that is a good point. It does seem to obscure the two dimensions of the Church; the Divine (invisible except through the eyes faith), and the Human (visible witnessed in the Living Stones of the individuals who reside therein). For the Church Herself is a mystery that, like Christ, possesses two natures. Reasonable faith is great: but a lopsided reasoned faith requires no faith at all; just a belief in our own ability to think aright. The revealed faith and the Church’s ability to appeal to our logic to show that it is at least reasonable helps us accept these mysteries without doing violence to our human reason. That seems a central task of the Church. To bring us to Christ and to embody the 4 marks of the Church for all time so that we might be recognizable as an alternative to the world’s wholly reasoned outlook that accepts nothing of Tradition or Revelation.
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The other thought that occurs on the ‘three legged stool’ hypothesis is that it is completely relativistic. One has to ask, ‘whose interpretation of Scripture? whose choice of tradition and whose reason and why?” As with the Evangelicals’ theory of sola Scriptura all one has in the end is individual opinion. The three legged stool turns out to be a theological pogo stick.
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Such is your personally derived opinion, as one who has made the personal theological decision to subscribe to the claims of the bishop of Rome.
Are you on a pogo stick too?
S.
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So Strauns rather than deal with the issue at hand, which I believe you raised, you go for the man, adding the taunt popularised by that most generous of souls, Cranmer as insult ‘The Bishop of Rome’ You missed out Vicar of Christ to the Universal Church, I’m sure it was an oversight, you are usually so complementary in your dealings with the Catholic Church. Alas it was ever thus, I fear you are a true pupil of Cromwell.
I hope you do well on your course, what institution are you studying under, I may have missed that.
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