Drop the condescension. You have a B.A. in Classics; I have a Ph.D. in Religion from what was at the time the fifth-ranked doctoral program in North America. The history of Christian thought and the history of Biblical exegesis, including the historical-critical method and the alternatives to it, were all things I studied at a very high level in graduate school and afterward. Also, unlike yourself, I have taught religion in Catholic, Protestant, and secular institutions of higher education. I don’t need lectures from an almost complete autodidact in these areas.
If you want to address specific points, you may do so. But you are wasting everyone’s time here if you pretend (as you regularly pretended elsewhere) to be an oracle on theology and Biblical scholarship, when in fact you are merely a hobbyist in these fields. Just make your points, and stop trying to sound like the grand old man of theology and Biblical studies.
Yes, I am aware of all of them.
Yes, I’m fully aware of how much modern Churches have compromised with the principles of the Enlightenment.
Yes, I’m fully aware of it. I was studying thnetopsychism back around 1980, when you were either not yet born, or still running around in short pants.
It is nothing new that Anglicans rise to high rank in the mainstream Anglican churches with very little commitment to anything like traditional Christian doctrine. This is why so many Anglicans have broken away from the mainline Anglican churches and continued the original Anglican tradition which the mainstream churches have abandoned.
The main thing you miss, of course, is that if all of Christian tradition is negotiable, and the final standard of appeal is the Bible, then Christianity can only hold together if there is broad agreement across denominations and confessions on what the Bible teaches. And there isn’t. You would like to believe that there is, and that the “consensus” is pointing in the direction of your own Christadelphian beliefs, but in fact the situation today is virtually anarchic. And indeed, if you understood the trajectory of historical-critical scholarship at the deepest level, you would see that this must be the case, since the very conception of “Bible” with which Calvin and Luther could use as a club with which to beat down the Roman Church is rendered problematic by historical-critical approaches.
This is not to say that nothing can be learned from historical-critical scholarship, but in itself it recognizes no limiting principle, and has as a matter of historical fact acted as an acid, dissolving the foundations of Christian thought. If you took your historical-critical-inspired skepticism of mainline church tradition to the logical extreme, you would see that your own sectarian Protestant position cannot hope to survive it, and would have to go over to the side of the atheists here. Indeed, I regard their position as more logically consistent than your own.
There is also grovelling servitude to the “consensus” of Biblical scholarship. (Which doesn’t exist, but even if it did, it would be wrong for Christians to automatically defer to it. Christians of all people should be aware of the very worldly motivations which animate the majority of Biblical scholars, including those who are nominally Protestant or Catholic.)