Bible scholars don't agree!

That is profoundly significant. It has been claimed as a principal
doctrine of evangelicalism that people can read the Bible as the
final/ultimate authority to determine the truth of God. The other
day I read M. Sabom's "Light And Death", and he, as an evangelical
Presbyterian physician says: "Bible scholars don't EXACTLY agree on
PRECISELY what it means to be a Christian." p.108.(my emphases) I
don't know about you, but that, to me, is a shocking statement in
it's implications! "Bible scholars"!, not ordinary Bible readers,
but professionals, don't "agree" on what the Bible means. And this is
not about the so-called "non-essentials". If what it means to be a
Christian is not an "essential" I don't know what is. In all sincer-
ity, I hate to say it, because it will be offensive to some people,
but in light of observations like this, to insist on the Bible as
the "final" authority, sounds "Dumber and Dumber". Worse than that,
it is the mother of all confusion. It makes its exponents appear
evasive and misleading at best. Unbelievers can see through the absur-
ity even if we can't; although we can and do, but we know of no
alternative! Or, at least, in pride or not knowing better, we refuse to
even imagine we could be wrong."Sola Scriptura"- the Bible alone- is
what I was taught- polemically and apologetically (to assert and defend).
I trusted my evangelical ancestors who had so tortuously worked out a
theological formula that most of them could agree on. Rome had an
"infallible" authority, so Luther needed one. He picked the Bible.
That's when the whole thing fell apart; now everyone was his own "pope";
millions of "popes"! And the real tragedy is, it's all so unneccessary:
Christ did not leave his Church to drift on the claims of thousands of
sectarian notions. Nor did he leave it to the "authorities" of Rome; nor
to a book over which thousands of "Bible scholars" might squabble and
disagree. The truth was "once and for all" deposited in that church which
maintains the Apostolic Tradition. No disagreeing over what it "means to
be a Christian". And no "denomination" to find, or sect to seek, that
happens to agree with you (the"pope"). Those questions were settled 2,000
years ago. The true Faith/Church -Catholic and Orthodox- did not dry up
and "blow away" simply because Rome went off on a path of its own.