Starting Out as an Apologist
People often ask, "How should I begin to train
myself to defend my faith? How do I prepare for the inevitable knock on
the door? I don’t want to have to stand there open-mouthed." The best place
to start your homework is the Bible. Almost every American home has one.
It’s either a well-worn, well-used book (if that’s how it is in your home,
you may skip the next several paragraphs), or it’s the book with the thickest
layer of dust.
Step 1. Blow off the dust.
Step 2. Open the Bible to the Gospels. Here is
where you should start. St. Jerome, that wise, old Doctor of the Church,
noted that a Catholic who isn’t immersed in the Gospels doesn’t know Christ (cf. Comm. in Is., prol.).
Knowing propositions about Christ is one thing, and it’s needed, but reading
his words and understanding the settings is crucial. It doesn’t matter
in what order you take the Gospels. The easiest way is to follow the order
in the text: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three, known as the
Synoptics, are much alike; they follow the same general order in the way
that they present the material about Christ’s life and teachings. The fourth
Gospel, John’s, is distinct. Beginning with Matthew, set aside a fixed
amount of time each day until you get all four Gospels read. Plan to read
slowly, but not too slowly. Some people take only one verse at a sitting.
That’s fine, if you’ve already gone through the Gospels a dozen times.
If you’re on your first reading or your fifth, you’ll either want to read
straight through or at least read in long stretches. That way you’ll get
more of an overview. Later you can do the detail work. The Gospels aren’t
long. The New Testament itself isn’t long. The Gospels comprise close to
a third of the New Testament, and in most printings they run about thirty
pages each—just about right for a leisurely evening. So make that your
goal: one Gospel a night. In four nights you’ll have them done. Then re-read
them, before doing anything else.
After the Gospels
Next? Try Acts, which is about the same length
as each of the Gospels. Then go to the epistles: Romans, 1 Corinthians,
Ephesians. Work in the other epistles gradually, and be in no rush to get
to Revelation. Take it last. You can get through everything within two
weeks, reading no more than thirty pages an evening. Each evening’s work
is about equal to a thorough reading of the daily paper, which you may
be in the habit of doing anyway.
So now you’re ready to do battle, right? Wrong.
You’ve just begun. But you have begun, and that’s the important thing.
You’ve situated yourself and obtained an overview, but there’s much homework
to do.
Read The Catechism
Next you should read a systematic presentation
of the Catholic faith. VirtualIy all of the Church’s teachings are present,
either explicitly or implicitly, in the pages of the New Testament, but
they aren’t organized in an easy-to-remember manner. Now that you have
read the New Testament and begun to absorb its material, you need to know
how to organize and interpret that material. This is something we cannot
do on our own. Many sects start precisely because someone reads the Bible
and interprets a particular passage in an unusual way, then makes this
normative for how they read everything else in Scripture. Rather than reading
the passage in the context of the whole of Scripture’s teachings, they
lock on to a particular passage and give it a strange interpretation. They
may be unaware of the rest of what Scripture has to say on the same subject,
or if they are aware of it, they may twist the rest of what Scripture says
to fit their interpretation of this passage.
The apostle Peter was very concerned about this
problem, and addressed it in his letters. In 2 Peter 1:20-21, we find our
first rule of Bible interpretation: "First of all you must understand this,
that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,
because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the
HoIy Spirit spoke from God." By prophecy, he simply means anything that
Scripture teaches (prophecy does not always mean predicting the future).
For this reason, we must avoid the temptation to evaluate passages by simply
asking, "What do I think this verse means?" Christ gave the Church teachers,
and he did so for a very specific reason: to assist people in how to understand
Scripture and its teachings. Therefore, rather than simply looking to private
interpretations, we must look to the public interpretation of Scripture,
which is what the Church has. We must read Scripture in the context of
what the Church has historically understood it to mean, for it was the
Church that Christ established as "the pillar and foundation of the truth"
(1 Tim. 3:15).
There are significant dangers if we do not do this.
The letter of Peter spoke highly of what his fellow apostle, Paul had written,
but he cautioned that Paul’s letters can be difficult: "There are some
things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist
to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Pet. 3:16).
So ignorant people (those who have not been taught the true interpretation
of the scriptures) and unstable people (those who do not adhere to the
true interpretation that they have been taught) can twist the scriptures
to their own destruction. Strong words, indeed! Yet Scripture includes them so
we would know that we must not approach Scripture as an ignorant or unstable
person would do, ignoring the context of how the Church has always understood
it.
This makes it important to have a thorough g.asp
of the Catholic faith as you read Scripture. The best way to get an overview
of what the Church teaches is to read a catechism. You may already have
read one while growing up, but even if you have, it never hurts to review
what the Church teaches. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (released
in 1992) is the first universal catechism the Church has issued in four
hundred years. Reading it requires some commitment, since it is seven hundred
pages long, but it is well worth the effort. For those who are not able
to invest that much time at once, there are many excellent shorter catechisms
available too. (Contact Catholic Answers if you would like recommendations.)
Learn the Objections
Next you need to learn what kinds of objections
are made against the Catholic faith. Sit down and read the right stuff.
Get samples of anti-Catholic literature, by ordering it from anti-Catholic
groups if necessary.
After you learn what the charges are, you need
to learn the responses. Don’t presume that mastering the Bible will be
sufficient. It’s trickier than that.
True, you’ll have to make much use of the Bible
in your talks with non-Catholics. (Don’t swallow the argument that discussing
interpretations is worthless: it can be immensely worthwhile for everyone
concerned.) But, as a rule, you’ll find it difficult to know just where
to look for the most appropriate verse unless you’ve studied arguments
by other Catholics, which means turning to books other than the Bible.
We recommend Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism, which
is a full-length treatment of the disputes between Catholics and "Bible
Christians."
All the major issues are discussed, and the positions
of "professional anti-Catholics" are given in their own words, so you know
exactly what they say to their own people. The Catholic position on each
issue is proved from the Bible, early Christian writings, and plain, old
common sense. Other practical books, by authors such as lay apologist Frank
Sheed and Scripture scholar Fr. William Most, are also distributed by Catholic
Answers.
There are also publications available to help you
learn how to tackle anti-Catholic arguments. One of the best is This
Rock. (Contact Catholic Answers to subscribe.)
After Your Homework is Done
Let’s flip a few pages on the calendar. You’ve
read the New Testament any number of times. You’ve dipped into the Old
Testament. You’ve read a catechism and learned its teachings thoroughly.
You sent away for anti-Catholic literature. You have gone through Catholic
books, such as Catholicism and Fundamentalism with yellow marker.
You "know it all," or at least you think you know enough. This is a good
start to your preparation as an apologist. More study will certainly be
necessary, but now the fun begins.
Today’s Catchword: "Divisive"
If you engage in apologetics, which is the branch
of theology that deals with how to defend the faith, sooner or later you
will be brought up short by someone who says disagreeing with others about
religion is "divisive." ("Divisive" seems to be the "in" word nowadays.)
If you acquiesce—that is, if you give up ever mentioning differences of
opinion and speak only platitudes—the result is that no mental progress
is made, either for you or for others.
C. S. Lewis wrote about what he called "mere Christianity,"
more or less those positions on which nearly all Christians could agree.
But "mere Christianity" is also incomplete Christianity, and it can be
at best a way station, not a final destination, as Lewis pointed out in
his book on the subject. He compared staying with "mere Christianity,"
with only those doctrines all Christians accept, as living perpetually
in the hallway of a house rather than entering into one of its rooms, where
the living is meant to be done. Even though we may have to go through a
hallway to get to a room, it is the room that is our destination, not the
corridor. Thus Lewis rightly declared that we have the responsibility to
accept and embrace that set of particular doctrines which we find to be
true upon investigation. We cannot stay in the incomplete (if ecumenically
comfortable) no-man’s-land of "mere Christianity."
And if that is true of "mere Christianity," it
is all the truer of the "religion" upon which all people—Christians, agnostics,
what have you—can agree, which, if it ever existed, would be a religion
no one would be willing to die for.
The Ways to Handle Differences
Some have proposed the analogy of the world’s religions
being as different roads winding up a tall mountain, with God in a cloud
at the top awaiting our arrival. The paths are supposedly all man-made
conventions reaching to heaven, so no one religion is really any better
than the others. However, this misconception overlooks one enormous truth.
One religion’s path was not paved by man from the bottom of the mountain
to the top, but was paved by God down the mountain to man. That road is
Christianity, and it is arrogant to prefer a man’s path to the one blazed
for our sake by God himself.
The fact is, not all religions lead to God. Christianity
teaches that there is one God, that we have one life, and that human destiny
lies either in an eternal heaven or an eternal hell. Buddhism, by contrast,
teaches that there is no God and that human destiny lies in reincarnating
to suffer until we use the Eightfold Path to kill our individual identity.
Two more different religions can scarcely be imagined. The first step in
true ecumenism is to understand others as they really are, their beliefs
as they really are. There are differences between the Catholic and Protestant
faiths. To pretend there are not isn’t ecumenical—it’s just ignorant. What
is true on a grand scale in inter-religious dialogue is also true in ecumenical
dialogue between Christians. There are real differences that divide people,
and it’s vitally important that those differences be clearly understood.
After all, solutions cannot be found unless the problem is clear. What
is truly ecumenical is to get around the squabbles and finger pointing,
that so often obscured discussions in the past, to see what commonality
there is and to cooperate based on that commonality, to the extent one’s
own principles aren’t compromised. Let’s admit it: There’s much room for
cooperation—not infinite room, since the real differences preclude that,
but still much room. This cooperation can be all the more fruitful if we
have a real appreciation of one another’s position. Cooperation becomes
almost impossible if we ignore differences. Fear of differences result
in paralysis, not increased cooperation. This means, in the long run, that
abject avoidance of "divisiveness" actually promotes present divisions,
while honest and good-natured discussion of differences (and yes, of similarities)
makes for fewer, not greater, divisions. The road to unity is paved with
good sense, not merely good intentions.
NIHIL OBSTAT:
I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
IMPRIMATUR:
In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004
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