Audio only:
Joe addresses 5 bad catholic arguments that you think are good, but actually aren’t. And he gives you some tips on how to be more convincing when engaging Protestants!
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I want to explore five bad arguments that we as Catholics need to stop using in our conversations with our Protestant brothers and sisters. These are arguments that I’ve heard and sometimes made and they’re bad arguments and we can do better. So before I get there, I want actually lay out a few kind of positive tools because I think it’s important in kind of laying the foundation here to say, if this is how we’re not going to evangelize, if this is how we’re not going to debate, if this is how we’re not going to proceed, how should we proceed? I think if you have a positive vision of how to do the thing right, it becomes more obvious, which argumentative moves are mistakes and are missteps, and it becomes more obvious to know, oh, you shouldn’t have done it that way.
You should do it this way instead. So I’m going to give you five replacements for these bad arguments, but before I get there, I want to give you just a handful of helpful tools to hopefully help you argue evangelize, debate persuade better. So this is going to be, as I suggest, useful in Catholic Protestant discussions or in evangelizing atheists or in anything in life where you might be called upon to persuade someone else to do something different than they’re currently doing. So hopefully this will be pretty useful across the board. The first tool is really simple. As much as possible, ask, don’t tell. And the reason for this is really easy. If I tell you the answer and you don’t want to listen to it, you can just ignore me. But if I help to lead you into the right answer, well it’s much harder to ignore yourself.
Blaze, Pascal puts it like this in the Poe, people are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. And so one way you can approach this is by using something called the Socratic method. If you’re not familiar, Socrates was famous not for making bold proclamations on the nature of the virtues, but rather for having dialogues for asking other people what they thought and then working with them to see if they couldn’t find some holes in the thinking and then asking them more questions that might provoke them to go a little further, a little deeper on these topics. And it’s an incredibly helpful way to get towards the truth if both people involved are patient enough to do it. Now, I want to give that as kind of a caveat. This works better in person or when you have a protracted period of time to have an ongoing conversation, it’s much harder to do in something like this. I can’t just ask you a question and then wait for all of you to comment and then follow up the video from there. It would take way too long. But nevertheless, this is adapted from how to win friends and Influence People. But this is a very helpful explanation briefly of a Socratic method aiming towards what’s called a pattern of yeses.
CLIP:
This can be achieved by employing the Socratic method, a technique that starts the dialogue from common ground and gradually moves to unfamiliar territory. It starts with asking a series of simple agreeable questions to establish a yes momentum. Can we agree that X? Yes. Is it fair to say Y? Yes, getting a yes momentum increases your chances of open communication once the discussion reaches topics of conflict.
Joe:
Now, as we proceed, I’m going to give plenty of examples where I have done this very badly or done the various things I’m telling you not to do. But here I want to actually give an example of this going well or actually remembered what to do in the moment. I was on a university campus and I was speaking to a young woman. I’ve told this story before, so apologies if you’ve heard it before, but I was speaking to a young woman who’d grown up Catholic and then had drifted away when she went to college. And so she would go to mass when she was with her family. And so I asked naturally why what happened? And she said she didn’t agree with the Catholic church on certain issues, and she pointed out abortion as one of the chief wants, and I asked her what her views were on abortion, and she said, well, I’m not okay with abortion across the board, but I think it should be legal in certain cases, rape and incest in the life of the mother.
Now, anyone involved in pro-life activism of any kind has heard that kind of response before and it’s very easy to immediately jump into the defensive mode and say, oh, hey, here’s all the good reasons why you should think that of child’s life is worth protecting even in those cases. But I didn’t do that. I did something that I think works better. I said, well, why are you against abortion and the rest of the cases? And it took her back. So, so much so that I actually had to repeat the question because she thought I was going to ask the other question. The very predictable why are you okay with abortion in these extreme cases? But instead it was like, okay, well look, those cases together are maybe 3% of abortions. You’re against 97% of abortions. What have we done here? We found some common ground, but the second thing we’ve done is I’ve now put the burden on her to explain why do we have that common ground?
Why are you against 97% of abortions? Because once she has to say those words that it’s an unborn child, it’s a life worth protecting, you then are in a place to broach the topics of conflict so that it’s no longer me just saying, Hey, you should care about the life of the unborn. She’s already saying in 97% of the cases I do. Okay, well, all you’re asking for now is a little bit more consistency. So hopefully that’s clear. Hopefully that helps and it doesn’t always work in practice, but that’s the kind of way to do it. If you can think about the difference between immediately jumping into, no, you’re wrong and here’s why you’re wrong, compared to starting with, okay, where do we already agree and why do we already agree? That gives us some tools. Many of you have asked, why do you spend so much time answering Protestantism rather than atheism or something else?
And I think there’s two answers to that, frankly. Number one, it’s what I’m passionate about, interested in, experienced in and knowledgeable about. I know much more about the nuanced arguments based on having grown up in a pretty Protestant part of the country than I do about other things. I think the differences between Catholics and Mormons are bigger or Catholics and Jehovah’s witnesses, but I didn’t grow up in a Jehovah’s Witness part of the country or Mormon part of the country. So when I speak on those topics, it’s a lot harder to speak accurately and a lot harder to make a convincing argument because I know less about it. And so knowing the kind of common ground can be really important and just having a deeper knowledge of the thing. The second reason I often focus on those questions is because there are simply more areas of common ground.
We can have a more fruitful conversation. And so people say, well, these other people are further away. Yeah, that’s also why it’s harder to have the really good conversations with them. Now, you can do that, but only by establishing some common ground first. When you’re talking to a conservative Protestant, you can take almost for granted. Well, they believe in the authority of scripture. So if you can prove a thing from scripture, they’ll take that seriously. If you’re talking to a Hindu, what are you going to point to that you know that they’ll accept? But you really have to do a lot of groundwork to figure that out. So hope that helps. Hope that makes sense, both in terms of explaining why I focus on the topics I do, but more importantly, how do we persuade effectively? And having something like a Socratic method where you can find the common ground and build from it can be very helpful, particularly using questions as often as you can ask, don’t tell.
Second tool, steal man. This is really the inversion of a very common Catholic argument that we get badly, which is, and by no means are Catholics unique on this. Everybody has issues with this. We’ll say, there’s a tendency to take a sort of silly version of the other person’s argument and as much as possible, and this can be very hard to do, especially if it’s not a view that you’re sympathetic to or maybe a view you feel like you understand very well make the best version of the argument. Now, I want to caveat that and say, sometimes people will say, okay, you shouldn’t take the popular version. You should take this other version that only a handful of nerdy theologians or scholars actually believes in. I don’t go that far. Sometimes you’ll find the theologians just disagree with the popular level, and if they’re disagreeing, then I’d say answer both.
It might just be two different arguments. If there’s a take, for example, people who say, Constantine founded the Catholic, no scholar says that, that I’m aware of because it’s a pretty ridiculous position, it’s hard to steelman that one, and the Steelman version of it would just be the church changes and grows over time or something that is really just a different argument. In those cases, Truda is different arguments and steelman in there might just be recognizing this is a popular level argument. This isn’t what the more well-formed Protestants are going to believe. And so it’s a way of doing justice to the other person, even if you can’t do greater justice to the argument. The model of this is St. Thomas Aquinas, Bertrand Russell, who was an atheist and his book on the history of Western philosophy praises Aquinas and said, even if every one of the doctrines in the summa was mistaken, it would still be an imposing intellectual edifice.
Why? Well, because when Aquinas wishes to refute some doctrine and Russell’s words, he states it first often with great force and almost always with an attempt at fairness. Now, I would maybe go beyond almost always, but fine, fair enough that Aquinas regularly presents the strongest form of his opponent’s argument stronger in many cases than the opponent themselves might do. And then he praises him in particular saying he knows Aristotle well and understands him thoroughly, which cannot be said of any earlier Catholic philosopher. Now, if you watch my recent episode where Luther claims to understand Aristotle, well, this actually gets to a key difference in how the two men work in terms of their argumentation. Aquinas is very calm. He collects the strongest objections. He presents them in a way that his opponents would recognize. Now, this is the key. When you’re in a conversation, if you can say to the other person, I think your argument is X, and they say, that’s it, you’ve got it, then you’re ready to answer it.
But if instead you rely on the name calling and the caricatures and everything else, which again, if you want to contrast Luther and St. Thomas Aquinas on this, it’s not hard to do. Well then the other person who’s going to say, no, I am not saying these things. You’re putting in my mouth. And so of course I’m not persuaded if you just call me names. I’m not persuaded if you give an intentionally distorted kind of strawman version of my argument. And so as much as possible try to find this strongest and best way you can present your opponent’s argument. And that’s probably going to be see the first tip by asking them for ongoing clarification because maybe the first time you try to formulate it, they say, that’s kind of it. That’s not quite it. And then, okay, let’s find out a little more. Doing that also and doing it rigorously can help to reveal some of the errors in their position that maybe wouldn’t have been obvious otherwise.
The more you try to get in their shoes, the more you might say, aha, I see where things have gone wrong here. It’s worth pointing out that St EU of Leon in the second century was our number one source on gnostic theology until the discovery of the non Hamadi library in the 20th century. I think that was 20th century in modern times whenever that was. And the reason is very simple that he really wanted to document exactly what gnostics believed before he felt comfortable showing why they were wrong. And he does this to an extent that a modern reader, I think would fairly call boring because we don’t want to read page after page after page of obscure agnostic theology. But he’s doing this work in laying the foundation of what his opponent believes so that he can answer it. That’s hard to do. It’s time consuming again, but if you want to do this well, let’s how you do it.
The third kind of tool I would just call Pascal’s model of persuasion. And I’m going back to Blaise Pascal, who I quoted already in the Ponte, in Pon number nine. He says, when we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he heirs. So notice the framework here. If you want to convince someone they’re wrong, great. This is the method to do it. We must number one, notice from what side he views the matter for on that side, it is usually true. And number two, admit that truth to him. But number three, reveal to him the sight on which it is false. Pascal then says maybe, hopefully he is satisfied with that for he sees that he was not mistaken that he only failed to see all sides. So let’s make sure you get those three steps. Number one, figure out why it is that your friend or the person you’re speaking to believes what they believe believes the way that they do.
Number two, once you see that, affirm what is true in that to them. And then number three, reveal what’s missing. I’ll give another example from the abortion debates. I know I’m turning to Protestantism in a second, but these are nice neutral examples for Catholics or Protestants to hopefully see. If someone says, I believe my body, my choice, then I think it’s important to say, look, I appreciate and understand the desire for something like bodily autonomy. I don’t want people performing random science experiments on me. I don’t want people telling me I can’t do things I should be allowed to do with my own body. That’s all completely legitimate. And I think as pro-lifers, we sometimes forget to point this out, and so we just sound like we’re anti bodily autonomy, which is crazy.
Just acknowledge this. Maybe this thing that you think is so obvious, you take it for granted, acknowledge it to the other person like, Hey, look, the thing you’re worried about is a legitimate thing to worry about. Bodily autonomy is an important principle, but it is also, I think we can also agree on this, not an unchecked principle. It is something that has to be bounded. I can’t use my bodily autonomy of waving my arms around to punch neighbor in the face. And other people have bodily autonomy too, which is why bodily autonomy can’t be an absolute because my bodily autonomy may interfere with your bodily autonomy if I push you or whatever. And so we have to respect one principle of bodily autonomy is that it is a self-limiting principle. Meaning if I believe bodily autonomy is a good for all humans, then that means I can’t use my bodily autonomy to violate somebody else’s.
So there’s an inbuilt limitation to bodily autonomy even if you don’t consider any other values. So then you say, okay, cool. Once we’ve established that we’ve built from this common ground, we can then say, look at this. Scientifically, the unborn child is another human being just as a matter of principle. And so if everything you just said is true, they also have bodily autonomy in such a way that we can’t use our bodies to harm theirs. Now of course, there are various ways you can harm somebody’s body unintentionally, but you can’t use your body to intentionally harm somebody. And so it seems like we’ve had a pretty good argument from bodily autonomy, from my body, my choice against abortion, but only by patiently unpacking what the argument is getting right first and then seeing the limitations in what part it’s missing. So that’s Pascal’s model of persuasion.
So with that said, let’s look at some of the various ways we fall short of living that out. So these are five bad Catholic arguments that I’ve heard or maybe used, and then five better alternatives. Number one has to be there are 30,000 or 37,000 or 40,000 or 45,000 Protestant denominations. And already by the mere variety of numbers, something seems like it’s up. Now, if you’re wondering this isn’t coming out of thin air, there’s actually a decent foundation for this. So Gordon Conwell Seminary has an encyclopedia that tries to keep track of every Christian denomination on earth and they update it periodically. And so the most recent update in 2024 says that there are 47,000 denominations on Earth. Now, many people reading that without, and you’ll notice if you look at that chart, there’s no explanation on that page explaining what they mean by their terms.
So someone reading that naturally says, aha, there are 47,000 Protestant denominations, and then they run with that. The reality is a little trickier because if you look to how the encyclopedia defines a denomination, here’s what it says in their own words, they say it’s an organized Christian Church tradition, religious group, community of people aggregate of worship center, usually within a specific whose component congregations and members are called by the same name in different areas regarding themselves as autonomous Christian, excuse me, as an autonomous Christian Church distinct from other churches and traditions. Okay? So it’s pretty much self-determined. What denomination do you consider yourself to be in? And if you say one thing and your neighbor says something else, you guys are in two different denominations. That is frankly a pretty good definition of a denomination. But you’ll notice in that good definition, it says they’re usually within a specific country because some denominations aren’t the Seventh Day Adventists, for example, the Anglicans for example.
And if you were to treat Catholics and Orthodox as a denomination, well, we’re also international. Now, that’s going to be important because even though they acknowledge that international Christian churches or denominations exist for purposes of their study, they do it at a country by country level. And so denominations are defined and measured at the country level. That is a huge and important detail. Why? Because it means that the Catholic church, because it exists in all 234 countries on earth, is counted for their purposes as 234 Catholic denominations. And in fact, more than that, because they treat each right like Byzantine and Latin as separate denominations. Now that’s kind of a disaster because it means, okay, that number is just wrong, then it’s pointing to something true. But because they’ve defined denomination in this kind of weird way, it doesn’t really work and it lets Protestants who reject this argument sort of laugh off the 40,000 denominations. And I’ll give you an example. This is from ready to harvest, arguing against the use of these kind of numbers and these kind of statistics, and notice how they kind of get around the denominational numbers on the basis of this weakness.
CLIP:
If you’re using these numbers to say there are a lot of Protestants, you’re inherently accepting a methodology that leads to there being 234 Catholic denominations. Most Catholics would say that there’s only one Catholic church because being in different countries doesn’t mean the church is divided, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Joe:
And so at this point, I think a lot of people who have heard this debate go back and forth kind of cringe when someone jumps in the YouTube comments and throws out a 40,000 or 47,000 denomination number because we realize, yeah, there’s real methodological shortcomings with that. What’s a better form of that argument? Well, remember the very first positive tool ask rather than tell as much as possible. So you should just ask the other person, well, how many denominations are there? Or if you want to use some other version of how many churches, how many competing versions of Christianity, how many theological traditions are there, et cetera. And so in this case here, just other guy we just heard from would answer that question,
CLIP:
If the Catholic Church numbers can be divided from 234 down to one, then the Protestant numbers also need to be cut tenfold, at least
Joe:
To be totally honest with you, I’m a little dubious about that math. It just seems like that at least we have to reduce by 90% feels pretty arbitrary. Even if you do that, you’re at somewhere around 4,700 denominations, which is still a huge number of Protestant denominations, but where’s he getting? We need to reduce by 90%. As Gordon Conwell points out, the reason they’re doing this country by country is in part because most denominations on earth exist only within a specific country. So it’s probably not that on average every denomination is in 10 different countries, so you don’t really need to reduce tenfold, but that’s fine. I mean, even if you take that number, I don’t think whether it’s 4,700 or 9,000 or 40,000 is particularly important for the question. So just to give a second example, GLM, which is an evangelical group that largely answers Mormons, church of Jesus Christ for Latterday Saints, they hear this argument from Mormons as well, who’d say, look, you guys are so scattered, why would we listen to you? And in response, GLM claims that there’s really only 10,000 denominations.
CLIP:
Now it’s really, really hard to ascertain a specific number, but it’s likely that there are around 10,000 Protestant denominational institutions with only around 300 notable and meaningfully distinct Christian traditions.
Joe:
So there’s the advantage. Now, you’re no longer debating about the exact number. You can just accept whatever number they give you because whatever it is, it is going to have to be pretty high. And obviously all of us are estimating to some extent. Nobody including researchers who’ve done country by country analysis can tell you exactly how many there are, partly because the number of Protestant denominations is constantly going up. Now, I think that helpful division between 300 different meaningful traditions is actually an important second level to this that many Catholics don’t understand because we imagine that the big differences in Protestantism are denominational that Presbyterians mostly agree with other Presbyterians, and they mostly disagree with Baptists, and Baptists agree with other Baptists, and they mostly disagree with Presbyterians. And the truth is not really like that. You have this whole thing called evangelicalism that is cross denominational.
So you’ve got a bunch of different denominations that are either evangelical or have a population of evangelicals in there that might agree with other evangelicals in a different denomination, more they agree with the non evangelicals and their own denomination. So the major denominations have these split between what’s sometimes called the mainline Protestants and the evangelicals. You don’t need to get into what all of those differences are, but you have major doctrinal differences, sometimes not between two denominations but within the same denomination. And so you can have a bunch of independent Baptist churches that actually basically agree on doctrine at least for the most part. And so GLM wants to say, well, we’re only looking at about 300. If you just say competing forms of contradictory forms of Christianity, 300, okay, fine, not 40,000, not 47,300, that’s fine too. Nothing in the Catholic argument turns on the precise number.
So I would just say number one, you should just ask how many competing forms of Christianity there are. And then number two, ask if that number is going up or down within Protestantism. Anyone who is being honest and knows anything about church history knows the number of Protestant schisms in terms of competing forms of Protestant Christianity was lower at say the death of Luther than it was a hundred years later, which was lower than it was a hundred years later, which was lower than it was a hundred years later, which was lower than it was a hundred years later. And so on. If you read that encyclopedia of denominations, you’ll notice an explosion just in the time they’ve been keeping track of how many denominations on earth there are. And that isn’t because the same handful of denominations are just expanding to more and more countries.
That is principally because there are really a bunch of different Protestant denominations and they’re growing further apart, not closer together. Why does that matter, by the way? Because many Protestants believe scripture is clear, at least on the important doctrinal questions. And so if people just faithfully and prayerfully read scripture, they’ll come to common conclusions on those things. But historically, I mean, we very clearly see that’s not true. I mean, we see within Protestantism itself that that’s not true, and that’s not historically how Christianity has ever operated, where people just read the Bible and expect to come to the same conclusions. They don’t. This is why you have things like church councils. That’s why you have the council in Acts 15, because people were interpreting the Bible differently. So pointing out that the number is number one way too high, and number two going in the wrong direction is important for showing that there is something going wrong in Protestantism that is not new.
It’s not like, oh, these new guys on the scene are the problem. No, no, this has been the problem for the entire life of Protestantism that it has proved completely incapable of resolving. Which then leads to the third question you should ask, which is, well, how many different versions of Christianity should there be biblically speaking? Because of course we want to acknowledge there can be diverse expressions. There can even be areas that aren’t of great doctrinal importance that we’re allowed to agree to disagree on. But on the big ticket things, the things that might keep us from being in one church together, well, how many things should we be in schism from one another on? Well, the answer should be there should be nothing. It should be one body biblically. There is one church just as there’s one Lord and one baptism. And so getting someone to state that for you is much better than you just boldly declaring something you don’t really know a lot about, which is the number of denominations there are on earth.
So hopefully you can see that asking the questions is a lot better than making the not very easily supported claim. Second argument, assuming that all Protestants are basically Baptists or low church or lingly or however you want to describe it, there was a great Catholic answers article from 24 years ago, I think, where this was addressed head on, yeah, 24 years ago. Greg Kriebel says he warns that we criticize Protestantism because there are, so the story goes 23,000 different Protestant denominations. You’ll notice how much that number has grown, all teaching different things, and then a minute later, the Catholic apologist will speak to a Methodist as if he’s a Baptist or a Lutheran, as if he’s a Pentecostal, if they all teach different things. And for heaven’s sake, don’t treat all Protestants the same. And I think that’s exactly right. And I think specifically we often treat Protestants as if they’re all Baptist.
Now I will say historically this was a tricky thing for me to learn because a lot of the people I grew up with were Baptist or evangelicals or non-denominational who believed pretty well the same things and Liturgically were pretty close to one another. But the reality is on theology and on doctrine, there are massive differences. One of the worst things you can do is overlook that fact and try to push the person you’re trying to reach into more of your stereotypical Protestant view. Here’s what I mean by that. You will find, for instance, Baptists who believe in the real presence or charismatics who think, oh yeah, prayer to the saints is fine, or whatever things that by our lights don’t really make any sense. But if you ask the questions, you might find common ground in places you don’t expect it at all. And that can be very helpful if you don’t come in with a bunch of assumptions about what they must believe because they’re Protestant or even what they must believe because they’re Baptist or Lutheran or Anglican or whatever.
Because the reality is Protestants can believe whatever they want to believe. I mean, that might be too strong of a statement, but on almost any doctrine you can imagine that divides Catholics and Protestants, you’ll find a wide variety of Protestant on the subject, including things like justification. By faith alone, you’ll find plenty of Protestants who will say, nah, justification is by faith and works. We’re fine with that. And that may not match your stereotype. So don’t force someone into the box furthest from you. That’s a terrible move in any kind of act of persuasion to just be like, oh, no, you’re a Protestant. You’re supposed to totally disagree on this. Well, they don’t. So don’t try to force disagreement where there is agreement. But second, don’t assume that an argument that works against an evangelical is also going to work against a Lutheran or an Anglican.
And this is, I’ll tell you flat out a very tricky thing to do in something like Sham Ri as a channel. I can’t speak to every individual Protestant. So I speak to the common arguments that I hear, and many of the common arguments that I hear, many of the things that get the most kind of energy in terms of traction online are things from low church evangelical or non-denominational or Baptist or reformed Protestantism. And I know many of the Lutherans and Anglicans Washington are cringing because they totally disagree with all the arguments they’re hearing, and they realize all the ways those things are wrong. That’s fair. But there’s simply no way to address everyone’s unique perspective on every topic every time it comes up. So what I try to do is highlight who I’m speaking to. Even if I say, oh, the Protestant argument here, I’ve usually, sometimes I forget to do this.
I’ve usually tried to caveat that by saying, here’s somebody who argues this, or here’s a group that is arguing that and then trying to work from there because there’s no Protestant pope, there’s no Protestant catechism, there’s no set of things you have to believe in order to be a Protestant. There just simply is not. There are people who try to say that, but then there are plenty of self-proclaimed Protestants who ignore those labels and still believe things like justification is by faith and works, and they still count as Protestants because no one connects them from Protestantism. So don’t assume the other person is basically Baptist or whatever in their theology. Similarly, sometimes liturgically, I’ll hear arguments like, oh yeah, you should come to the beautiful Catholic mass rather than going to your mega church with its rock band and smoke machine. It’s like, guys, number one, I don’t know how beautiful the local Catholic mass is. And number two, I don’t know how ugly the local Protestant service is because particularly if you don’t know anything about the person you’re speaking to, Protestant liturgy can look anything from this. Our Lord Jesus
CLIP:
Christ on the night when he was betrayed, took bread
Joe:
To this.
CLIP:
Here
We go. It’s Sunday the absolute best day of the week. Yeah, I invite you to receive this greeting. May the grace of our Lord and Savior, the son of God, Jesus Christ
Joe:
To this. So you don’t want to make an argument. I just had someone ask in the comments recently, she said, I’m coming into the Catholic church, I’m desiring to be Catholic, but it’s been very hard for me to take a real step down liturgically because many of the churches here that are Catholic don’t have altar rails, and the priest isn’t praying out, orient him. That’s totally not the stereotype of the Catholic Protestant liturgical divide. But you’ll find people who are coming from Church of Sweden or high church Lutheranism or high church Anglicanism, where it really is in many cases a liturgical step down in terms of smells and bells as they go to a kind of mainstream Catholic parish. Okay, so what’s a better form of the argument? Well, quite simply ask the other person with as much as possible, no preconceived label, just say, what do you believe about X, Y, Z?
Now knowing stereotypical Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican reformed theology can be very helpful in kind of guessing where they might be going once they tell you, I’m reformed on tulip. Okay, now I have the background to know what that means, and I have some people I can cite to and I can kind of press into that. Even there, they might say, oh yeah, I disagree with Jonathan Edwards there. I disagree with even Calvin over here. And they’re allowed to do that. Nobody’s infallible, nobody has any real authority in a binding sense. Those kind of things can be very helpful to know. So the background reading can be helpful as kind of a base level, but you’ve just got to ask them directly. Alright, the third bad argument, exaggerating Catholic unity. So I believe James White in his book Roman Catholic Controversy calls this the what a mess you guys have over there, something like that argument.
And his point is, Catholics will make that kind of claim about how messy different Protestant denominational infighting is. And all this while ignoring fights within Catholicism. And I actually largely agree with James White there. I think there is a danger in exaggerating how chaotic Protestantism is and also exaggerating how unified Catholicism is. And this is not a new objection from Protestants. St. John Henry Newman in the 19th century pointed out that when you point out the variations of Protestantism and all of the denominational infighting, the answer comes that divisions are as serious in the Catholic church that you’ll find just as bad of infighting. In fact, they’ll say, sure, Lutherans are divided and creed from Calvinists and from Anglicans and from the various denominations of dissenters that which have their own doctrines and interpretation. But hey, Dominicans and Franciscans and Jesuits and Jansenists before they were condemned have had their quarrels too. So that’s something to take very seriously. There is some weight to that argument. In fact, Newman will say that they’ll press the argument even further and say, well, the greatest alienation, rivalry, indifference of opinion exists among different priests. So even though the church is nominally one, it’s one on paper, her pretended unity resolves into nothing more specious than an awkward and imperfect uniformity.
So what’s a better form of the argument? I think that this argument is pointing to something true, but how would we say this? Well, Newman puts it in terms of the church being unifying rather than united, meaning that the different classes of human beings who make up the Catholic church, there’s presently 1.2 billion. They don’t just all naturally believe all the same things. They didn’t all just pick up the Bible one day, read it and come to all the exact same conclusions and on a great many other things, they’re wildly different interpretations. And Newman gives the example of nationality that there’s all sorts of issues where national interests can come in and it can color people’s approach even to things related to the faith. So for instance, ask a group of Catholics, what’s the right solution between Israel and Palestine? And you might get a shocking number of answers. That nationality thing comes in because we have different political biases, different national biases and the rest, and that’s part of the humanity that is baptized by Christ. It’s not annihilated when it’s baptized, though it still exists. So Newman puts it like this.
He actually suggests the striking thing is not that we disagree on a lot of issues. The striking thing is that on matters of the faith, Orthodox Catholics all agree. I would say if a number of parties distinct from each other gave the same testimony on certain points, their differences in other points only strengthen the evidence for the truth of the matters in which they’re all agreed. And the greater the difference, the more remarkable the unanim unanimity. In other words, when you can have different Catholics saying, yes, I believe all the dogmas and teachings of the Catholic church, while they have wildly different views on so many other things in political life or in personality or fill in the blank, maybe they have personalities that are like oil and water. The fact that they agree on all the things they have to agree on is really striking, and it’s all the more notable.
Now, notice here, Newman’s not dealing with somebody who is a dissenter because as he points out, well, the whole fact that you can point to a dissenter, someone who rejects the teachings actually points to the clarity of the teachings. The thing we talked about in the last point is there’s no such thing as a dissenter, like a bad Protestant who rejects the teachings of Protestantism because there’s no set of teachings of Protestantism. So you can find someone who claims to be Catholic while rejecting teachings of the Catholic church, but all you’ve done there is shown that you recognize that the teachings of the Catholic church or something other than what they’re doing, what they’re living. So that’s not an interesting argument, but you can find people who claim to be Christian and live in UNC Christian ways. That’s not a particularly striking commentary on whether Christianity has clear moral teachings, say the fact that people don’t practice what they preach well, but on the issues of the faith, on the things that are actual dogmas of the faith, the fact that believing Catholics, those who aren’t intentionally dissenters agree on all these things, despite having every natural inclination to go in opposite directions from one another points to something really special, something really fascinating.
And so as Newman puts it in truth, she, the church not only cheat you in spite of these differences, but she’s ever taught by means of them. The very differences of Catholics on further points have themselves implied and brought out their absolute faith in the doctrines which are previous to them. In other words, the fact that we might see eye to eye not at all on the things we’re allowed to disagree on, is only more evidence of the importance and the profound spiritual power of the things that we are required to and able to agree with one another on. It’s actually very beautiful when someone who’s naturally very liberal or naturally very conservative can alike pray the same creed and mean it, that all of those things where they wouldn’t normally come to many of the same conclusions in life on they can come to these conclusions on that tells us something really beautiful and really fascinating.
And in fact, when you have these fights on say, how should we handle immigration problems? And both sides are pointing to principles of the faith, this doesn’t undermine the faith. This points to something where both sides can recognize, yeah, this is an important principle we have to live out. And so is this other thing. In Newman’s words, the doctrines of faith are the common basis of the combatants, the ground on which they content their ultimate authority and their arbitrating rule that if either side can show to the other, actually your position contradicts Catholic teaching or contradicts this thing that the Bible very clearly teaches. They win, they win the argument. And so that’s actually an important point for church unity. So we don’t want to exaggerate the unanimity and unity of Catholics because there are real differences on non-binding issues and there are real dissenters who reject even binding issues.
But if you frame it correctly, all of that makes sense in light of the teaching of Christianity from the very beginning, you’ll find all of those things in the first century, and this is still markedly different than a bunch of different denominations who don’t have any principle by which they’re going to resolve their differences. And the last thing I’d say there is just adding to something that Newman couldn’t add, which is the church solved the problem of jansenism. Jansenism does not exist anymore. So you’ve got real solutions. And the fact that the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church can actually say, this is right, this is wrong in a way that you don’t have to the same degree or very clearly at all in Protestantism that you have two different Protestant denominations and nobody can say, okay, this one is right, this one is wrong, and both sides have to accept it. That happened with Jansenism. That does not happen within Protestantism as near as I can tell. Alright? The fourth bad argument is exaggerating the unity not of Christians today, but of Christians in the past exaggerating the unity of the church fathers. Now I’m going to, for I think the second time in two weeks, blatantly steal from Austin of gospel simplicity as he asked good questions about Catholicism on what I hope and maybe suspect is his slow journey into the Catholic church.
CLIP:
And so this is the argument that just makes blanket claims to all the church fathers agreed, all the church fathers said the unanimous consensus of the fathers without necessarily giving any limitations to what you mean by that. And the reason this is a bad argument is because it makes too big of a claim that’s too easily undermined.
Joe:
This is something I’ve been guilty of. I was in an online debate on Sola script Torah. I was a two on two debate. I had the inestimable Peter D. Williams on my side facing off against Merrick Kaiser and Jeremiah, nor or nor his own congregation pronounces his name different, sorry, Jeremiah, I’m not sure which it is. And I made the mistake in there of saying, well, in the early church when he talks about the word of God is living in active sharper than any two-edged sword in Hebrews four, that this refers to Jesus and that the church fathers were unanimous on this. And what was going on in my mind is I vaguely remembered this brilliant essay by Father James Sweat who just died this year I discovered in preparing for this episode. So God had mercy on his soul and may his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace, a brilliant, brilliant scholar who taught at the biblical for decades.
But he points out that in the early church in different schools and among Greek fathers and Latin fathers in Syriac fathers, we find people pointing to the logos in Hebrews four, not meaning scripture is sharper than any two-edged sword, but that Jesus is because the verse goes on to talk about how the logos is going to come and judge the world, which makes much more sense if it’s talking about Jesus than talking about scripture. So I was pointing it out as sort of an aside about how there was this kind of elevation of the small W word of God scripture over or equal to the large W word of God, Jesus. But here’s the thing, at no point does sweat him claim this is a unanimous interpretation of the Fathers. He simply gives examples of church fathers that had done this. But it had been, I don’t know, probably some years since I’d read his actual essay and in my brain it had evolved into, oh yeah, everybody in the early church.
And it took no time at all for the other side to be like, no, here’s Augustine looking at Hebrews four and thinking that the word is scripture and not Jesus. And I was wrong. I was just totally wrong about that. How do you avoid embarrassing yourself in that way? Well, the better form of the argument is quite simple. Just do two things. Number one, speak of the consensus of the fathers Consensus doesn’t require unanimity. So if you know the church fathers enough to know, okay, overwhelmingly we’d see time and time and time again, they’re believing this and they’re not believing that, just speak of consensus. It leaves you in out in case somebody finds some obscure document. I’ll give you an example on this. So on the rapture, Cox will sometimes say nobody before the 19th century believed in the rapture. And people who believe in the rapture will try to pull out really obscure early church texts from people nobody’s heard of.
And if you’ve made the blanket statement, well then you’ve been proven wrong and you’ve undermined your own credibility and it makes it very hard to continue to proceed if you just say, yeah, the consensus view was clearly not a rapture in the early church or in the medieval church or in the reformed church. And tell the 19th century when you get this offshoot of anglicanism with dispensationalism, that argument is clearly true. And then them saying the best they can find in the early church is an obscure document from a hermit nobody’s heard of, only underscores your points rather than undermining it. So just speak a little more cautiously. Second, recognize that there are some things that there appears to be unanimity on or nearly so. And then there are other things that are more controversial. So for instance, on the Eucharist, nobody to my knowledge believes Eucharist is just assembled anywhere except for gnostics who deny that Jesus really had a body.
And Protestants don’t want to say that they’re siting with gnostics because gnostics aren’t Christian in any meaningful sense of the term. So you can point to something like unanimity there. But on other issues like say Mary’s perpetual virginity or sinlessness, be more cautious with it because you can find outliers and the outliers only hurt you if you are claiming more than you can claim otherwise. I would just remember this principle. There’s a reason the church has councils. If everybody always agreed in antiquity, there wouldn’t be a need for things like church councils to settle disagreements. Now, what the church has, and I pointed to this in the prior point, the church has a mechanism to establish unity, but that doesn’t mean everybody was always just unified. You’ll find people even among holy saints of old who will occasionally venture a theological opinion that’s just wrong.
And as long as you’re not acting like that’s not true, as long as your statements about the early church are carefully enough nuanced, then you’re on good ground. So look, as Catholics, we follow the principle that was laid down by the early church fathers themselves that we follow antiquity and consent among the fathers that look at St. Vincent of Loren, for instance, he talks about this when the fathers agree on X, we agree with them, but the fathers don’t always agree on X. There may be a situation where some say X and some say Y, and that’s where the church has to intervene and say it’s experts Y. Or to clarify, both sides are getting something right on Christology. For instance, the Alexandrian and Antioch in schools of theology are both affirming things that are true, but sometimes to the exclusion of other things that are true about the nature of Christ.
Won’t get into all the details there, but the church’s job there was to basically say to each side, you’re right about this, but don’t go too far. You’re right about that, but don’t go too far because you don’t want to divide Jesus into two people cohabiting a body, but you also don’t want to fuse Jesus’s humanity and divinity in such a way where they merge into one, got to keep all that stuff straight. So in all of those cases, the church has this important role of clarifying when good faith disagreements come up, and then the clarity often helps drive greater unity among Christians. So just say consensus is basically the short version there, instead of unanimity. If you can avoid it, and particularly if you’re not a hundred percent sure, and the fifth and final argument is super easy, anything where you’re simply assuming bad faith, oh, you’re just Protestant because you want to be your own pope, you’re just Protestant because you don’t want anyone limiting your unlimited human freedom.
Look, even if those things are true, accusing people of that is probably not helpful and you don’t really know if those things are true. Maybe they’re Protestant because they’re convinced Scripture clearly teaches X, and the Catholic church clearly denies X. Now, you and I may know that what looks like a biblical contradiction, isn’t that what looks like the church disagreeing with scripture isn’t. But many people in good faith haven’t found the tools to get around that. And if you start off by accusing them of bad motives, they’re probably going to be less likely to turn to you and say, Hey, I’m really struggling to see the truth of this thing that you claim is true. Can you help me? So you’re not doing yourself or the church any favors if you come in guns blazing and assuming bad faith. So the better form of the argument, of course, is just to assume charity assume the best.
It is much better to be in a situation where you thought better of someone than they deserved, than to be in a situation where you thought worse of someone than they deserved. That’s true, both in terms of persuading them towards the truth, but also in terms of your final judgment of you not treating other people charitably out of your own ignorance. So there you go. I mean, look, with any tools like this, you always have to bear in mind. Reality can be complicated, and what sounds good on paper, sometimes it takes a little more work to actually hammer it out. So with that kind of caveat, I would say I hope these are helpful tools for you. I hope that these are good in showing you what not to do, but also even more importantly, hopefully giving you some tools to be a better evangelist and a better apologist for the faith. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.