We Without Them

I am going to walk you through an odd line of reasoning.  It may be a little shaky, I’m not too sure about it, but it ends in an interesting place.

Non-Protestants will often argue that you need to subject private interpretation of the scripture against “the tradition” or you might end up way off base.  (I believe this argument may map to what we say about personal inspiration and prophetic authority, or to secular experts appealing to “the consensus.”).   This argument is correct but it goes too far.  It means you can’t be more correct than that tradition either.  It reminds me of the secular efforts to smooth out the business cycle.  You avoid sharp declines at the expense of explosive growth.  I fully expect our Catholic and Orthodox friends to disagree, but to me it sounds like an appeal to safety that will put off the man of spirit.

A better argument for the person who wants to reach their personal heights is Newton’s statement that he was a dwarf standing on the shoulder of giants.  To the man who asks why he should be chained by these dead figures the better response might be that he will go much further personally by engaging with them than by trying to recreate everything from the ground up.

Your mind goes interesting places as the miles roll past you.

But what occured to me is Joseph Smith had the best response of all for why you need to commit to the Church.  “We without them cannot be made perfect.”  It’s not just more likely that you will get there as part of the group, its essential. Measuring how high you can go on your own misses the point.