/thread https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ArcticFamousIbex-size_restricted.gif >But in priority, the Church is first, since it is by the Church (or more accurately, by God, through His Church) that Scripture is canonized and thus given its authority. In this way, the Church is above Scripture, which, reacting charitably to the statement quoted, is what must have been meant. I think this ought to follow from straightforward reasoning. The revelations of God through Moses, and later through Christ, were temporal events (instances, in other words, and by extension: historical) whereby eternal Truth was transmitted in a necessarily *finite* mode. Now, this forges an important distinction! There comes to be a difference between the **eternal gnosis which is represented by the words** and the **tokens of ink on paper or parts of speech themselves**. This is, in one way, the very same mystery as Christ the *man*, i.e. the duality of that which is *unchangeable enduring within the changeable*. The eternal Truth does not change, nor can it yet provide the exhaustive list of every possible ceremonial/ritualistic contingency embodied in Christian *praxis*, now and into the changeable future. It's simple. The world changes - quite drastically. Therefore, the Truth itself must have both eternal components and temporal ones (which PS has called the *ceremonial*). The substantive parts of culture representing the moral battleground of the ancient near east were always going to change, and we can expect these to be vastly different for us 2,000 years from now. It seems obvious that this must be the case. I'd be inclined not even to view the Scripture and the Church as separate identities, rather as material and living vessels for the transmission of unchanging, abstract truths. The Bible itself (in the temporal sense) is a changeable book. Words on paper are not eternal, but *the Word* is eternal. The Church, as the living organism which *protects that spiritual DNA*, must change (cautiously and guided by the spirit) with the world, and therefore must have priority above Scripture as it concerns the *temporal aspects* of the way that eternal truth manifests in the finite ceremonial and ritual aspects of praxis. At least, I'm not inclined to think that eternal Truth hinges on what day of the calendar week mankind celebrates the Sabbath; what I mean is that I cannot see that things as important as creation, love, and salvation hang by the strings of Saturday or Sunday. I think there is a very good analogy which connects the Church and the Bible to a biological cell and its chromosomes, where we think of the DNA as Truth. On the one hand, we have the physical material of the DNA, which is just *stuff*. It is finite, but what it *represents* in terms of information is something abstract and eternal. We might think that there *just is* a perfect and true genetic code for the human organism, an Ideal Form. The actual material of DNA is like the words of the Bible, tokens of the eternal Truth that we could print billions of times (indeed, there are billions of people). The eternal Form which is *pointed to* by the DNA does not change. If you view the Church as operating like all of the cellular machinery built up around the sheltering space of the nucleus, it's clear that the Church has a great interest in preserving the *integrity* of the physical stuff of the DNA. The physical DNA is the actual interface of the Truth (eternal) with the duality and danger of the world. To transmit that physical truth to the next generation of cells means maintaining the integrity of the physical copy. Here is where the metaphor becomes interesting. The extra-nuclear cellular envelope (with all of its complex parts) exists quite literally *around* the DNA for a very simple reason, so that the cell membrane (acting like a shield) *senses the assault by and the changes in the world FIRST*. The cell's function **just is to sense the totality of pressure toward change issuing from the surrounding world, and to permit only certain change-signals to reach the nucleus, whereby the DNA does not change, rather, its expression changes**. Therefore, the Church acts as a protector of the physical stuff, and a transmitter of the representation of eternal Truth, but also as a mediator and arbitrator which can sense the changing world and permit certain changes to the Biblical *interpretation* that will preserve both the integrity of herself and the Bible mutually across their life in the world. The eternal Truth does not change; there is *always* within every cell a condensed truth script called DNA, which is modular in the sense that it has functional parts called *genes*, just like the Bible is modular. Some genes can be quieted while others are promoted, and this symphony of which involves the careful and skilled playing of *this key but not that key* across time is what preserves the integrity of the music. This is how both the DNA and the Bible, as physical tokens of something eternal, endure within a changing world. The Church is the cell which protects that Truth, interprets it, and transmits it. @ARM @Pickled @Ardvarcus