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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
THEOLOGICALLY ADRIFT ON THE HIGH SEAS
HITLER, MUSSOLINI, AND DAVE HUNT
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
You may be one of those who has not seen my E-Letter for a few weeks.
If so, your e-mail account may be with AOL, which recently started using new software designed to weed out unsolicited e-mail.
Unfortunately, the algorithm used by the software is so broad that some messages that shouldn't be blocked are.
We test-send each E-Letter to a small list of addresses, and my own AOL address is among them.
I haven't' been able to receive my own E-Letter! (Poetic justice, you say?)
Jim Rodgers of Catholic Answers has been trying to effect a workaround for this problem.
We won't be surprised if some subscribers who use an AOL address still aren't receiving the E-Letter.
We hope to have things completely fixed soon.
Of course, if your copy of the E-Letter is being blocked, then you aren't reading these words anyway ...
which reminds me of that famous billboard: "Illiterate? Write for Free Information!"
CHECK YOUR BOARDING PASS CAREFULLY
I don't suspect you'd mistake one for the other, but just in case ...
You know about the Catholic Answers apologetics cruise to Alaska.
(See www.catholic.com if you have forgotten the details.)
If you intend to sign up, make sure you go to our site, not to Mike Gendron's site, where you will find an ad for a December cruise titled "Confronting the Claims of Roman Catholicism & Islam."
(I presume Islam was stuck in there because of its topicality.)
The ad for the anti-Catholic cruise is vague and does not say where the ship will take you (other than into theological error, of course).
Given the winter schedule, I presume the ports of call are in the Caribbean.
Not too many people sail to Alaska in December.
I admit that Gendron's cruise is cheaper than Catholic Answers', but surely this is a case of getting what you pay for.
So now you have fair warning:
Go ahead and sign up for a cruise, but make sure it's the right one!
(The right one departs July 26 and heads north; the wrong one departs December 6 and heads south.)
A one-time Catholic, Mike Gendron heads a ministry called Proclaiming the Gospel.
It is headquartered in Plano, Texas.
He might be considered the successor to Bart Brewer, the former priest who for many years has headed Mission to Catholics International.
Brewer suffered a stroke some months ago (please keep him in your prayers--perhaps his illness will be the occasion for his repentance and reconversion), and his ministry is more or less moribund.
If you want to know what it did and what it stood for, see my book "Catholicism and Fundamentalism," which has a chapter devoted to Brewer.
Gendron--who has been an active anti-Catholic for years--seems to be filling the role Brewer used to play.
He goes to small Protestant churches, explaining to the members the illogic and hopelessness of the Catholic position.
In his statement of principles he mentions not only sola scriptura and sola fide, as one might expect, but also the doctrine of the total depravity of man.
This is a Calvinistic principle that is rejected by the large majority of Protestants, even by most Evangelicals and not a few Fundamentalists.
It is a principle that Brewer did not give much emphasis to.
Still, up to this point there is not much to distinguish Gendron from Brewer and from many lesser lights who have made it their business to go after the Catholic Church,
proclaiming their version of the Good News mainly at "independent" or "Bible believing" churches.
Gendron graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1991.
DTS is the intellectual hub of dispensationalism, so it is not surprising that Gendron pushes the doctrine of the rapture.
He says he rejected Catholicism because he did not find its distinctive teachings in the Bible.
On this basis he should reject the rapture in particular and dispensationalism in general, since neither is scriptural.
No one heard of dispensationalist beliefs, including the rapture, before their invention in the early nineteenth century--such ideas were quite foreign to Luther, Calvin, and the other Protestant Reformers.
If Gendron rejected Catholic tenets because he could not find them plainly in the Bible, it seems he ought to use the same criterion on dispensationalism.
THE PATHOLOGY OF ANTI-CATHOLICISM
I have not seen Dave Hunt since 1994, when we debated one another before a large audience in Michigan.
Prior to that we had debated on radio two or three times.
Much intellectual tendentiousness is displayed by people like Mike Gendron and Bart Brewer,
but no one I am familiar with comes close to Hunt for brazen untruths and misleading statements.
I forget the precise topic of our first radio debate, but I remember that I was taught a lesson:
Never let Dave Hunt have the last word, because he will abuse the privilege.
At the end of the debate I gave a brief summary of my argument, and Hunt summarized his points.
Then, in the closing seconds, he asked the listeners:
"Why should you believe anything told you by a church that counted Hitler and Mussolini as members in good standing?"
With that low blow, we were off the air.
Like Queen Victoria, I was not amused.
Nor was the Protestant host of the program, who remonstrated with Hunt for his cheap shot.
My annoyance and the host's did nothing to deter Hunt from using exactly the same line during another one of our debates,
but by that time I had learned to insist on having the closing words, so at least I could point out to the audience that neither Hitler nor Mussolini was a Catholic
(or a believer of any sort) and that Hunt was trying to poison the well.
Why did Hunt feel the need to use the Hitler-and-Mussolini line repeatedly?
I presume he used it not just when debating me but as a frequent part of his anti-Catholic remarks, whether in debates or in regular talks.
There is nothing true in his claim that Hitler and Mussolini were Catholics, except that they had been baptized into the Church as infants.
Each left the faith in early youth.
It would have been as though I claimed that Protestants should not believe Bart Brewer because he really was a Catholic--which he was, at one time,
before apostatizing and becoming a Fundamentalist.
If I were to make such a comment about Brewer, listeners, both Catholic and Protestant, rightly would condemn it as a misrepresentation.
I'm sure that not everyone in Hunt's Protestant audiences believes his line about Hitler and Mussolini.
What prevents those who know better from standing up and remonstrating with Hunt?
Why do they remain in their seats, silent?
Is it because anything that tends to undermine Catholicism is permissible and that standards that apply elsewhere are suspended when dealing with the Church of Rome?
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