HWS is suddenly entertaining (read the comments), as ELCA guy Clint defends himself from my favorite former discussion topic: heretical churches vs non-heretical churches. I salute John for clarifying the central issue

One other crucial point is that no-one is saying that the boundaries of the church are coterminous with those of the Missouri Synod.
Hey John….are you sure no one is saying anything close to that? :) To the casual reader, it appears most discussions head towards that target with high velocity, only to veer off at the last minute :) I thought you put it well in saying the further one goes from the “center,” the less certainty one has. But in my experience, many Christians tend to put the actual, literal, local church of their choice at the center

My two cents on the “Mary ever virgin” discussion: The Church Fathers were right on a lot, but wrong about some things having to do with sex. They were in an atmosphere where defending the humainity/divinity of Christ was a real, everyday, blood on the floor argument. The reverberations of Augustinian errors about sex stayed with the church a long time. The legacy of that era has dominated much of Christianity. It needs to be said that despite what many of those Fathers and later Reformers thought, the doctrine of perpetual virginity is wrong. I’m not insulting those guys or saying we are smarter. I’m saying they get to be wrong sometimes and they were clearly wrong on that one. If you want to say it’s one of those neutral, either/or matters…fine. But it is a doctrine that grows entirely out of a wrong view of humanity, sexuality, the transfer of sin, etc. and can’t be defended with clear, unambiguous and consistent exegesis. The problem with Roman Catholicism is that it has no “reverse gear” for errors passed down. Instead, errors must be defended or tolerated because they came from the Fathers. Thankfully, sola scriptura frees us from having to put ANY authority on a list on names who believed something. Like Luther, we can say that it doesn’t matter what the resume of a doctrine is if it’s not taught in scripture and by evident reason.