Audio only:
The Catholic Church is no stranger to controversy and scandal, whether it be the Crusades or the Inquisition or the role of Catholics in the colonization of the New World, or more recent scandals like the sexual abuse scandal. And non-Catholics might hear about all of these things and wonder, “how can you remain Catholic despite these things?” Here are some straightforward tips about what to say in response to that question… and what NOT to say.
Transcript:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to discuss the issue of responding to scandal today. I’m going to talk about this from a Catholic perspective, but if you’re not a Catholic Christian and you’re some other kind of Christian, I think 99.5% of this you’re going to relate to, even if the examples I use are specifically Catholic ones. But the basic problem is this. If you’ve been Catholic, if you’ve been Christian for more than a few minutes, you’ve probably had the experience of friends and family coming to you and demanding you explain some bad thing. One of your co-religionist did, some bad thing your church seems to have done, and wondering why are you still a member of that church? Why do you still practice that faith in light of XYZ kind of scandal? Sometimes it’s something historic, the Crusades, the Inquisition.
Other times it’s something much more recent. It could be the abuse scandal involving children. It could be whatever the latest comment is, Pope Francis said, or what the media says he said, or any number of things. The details don’t really matter for our purposes. The question is how should we respond? And I’m going to suggest there are three really common ways of responding that are not particularly effective and three better ways that happen to be rooted in the New Testament that are better ways of responding. The first ways not to respond to the scandal. Let’s begin with number one. Don’t respond with anger and defensiveness to the extent you can avoid it because look, this is the most important relationship of your life and understandably, if someone attacks that, you’re going to feel a strong desire to fight back and to attack back.
There’s something even healthy about that. But from the perspective of evangelization and apologetics, you need to curb that appetite. You need to curb that desire because the fight or flight thing that can kick in is not really helping you in this situation. There’s been a lot of interesting data on defensiveness. One of the common things is that defensiveness is often tied to when we feel a relationship is threatened in some way. And in this case, it’s pretty obvious what relationship that is. Someone’s insulting your mother, someone’s insulting the church, someone’s insulting Jesus. Defensiveness is likely going to kick in those situations because these are really important relationships. So, what’s the problem with defensiveness there? Well, one of the classic works on defensiveness is by Jack R. Gibbs from 1965 is just called Defensive Communications, and what Gibbs explains is that defense arousal, that is that fight or flight response kicking in prevents the listener from concentrating on the message.
When you’re calm, when you’re subdued, when you’re tuned in, you’re able to receive a lot of what the other person is communicating, both what their words are, but also their affect, their emotions, their underlying reasons. They might be presenting a certain piece of information to you or might be saying a certain thing. You’re receiving a lot more than just the text. When you are defensive, when that defensiveness kicks in, you’re trying to do that really nuanced, really complicated listening activity while also feeling fight-or-flight response kicking in, maybe also getting your anger up where it’s got this narrowing effect. Maybe also planning how you’re going to respond and maybe also lashing out because you’re thrown a little off kilter that’s not effective listening to say the least. Not only, Gibbs says, do you defensive communicate, so if I’m defensive and I’m speaking, not only do we send off multiple value, motive and affect cues, I seem defensive.
But also, defensive recipients distort what they receive. I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of this. Maybe you just caught somebody in a bad time, they’re already thrown off or they’re feeling defensive. Maybe someone just got done criticizing them and then you come in and you have an innocent comment, and they immediately misinterpret it. They assume the worst. Why? Because they’re in that defensive crouch. So, even though you had nothing but the purest motives, you find yourself feeling very attacked in return. So, effective communication is broken down in that situation. So, Gibbs says, “As a person becomes more and more defensive, he becomes less and less able to perceive accurately the motives, the values, and the emotions of the sender.” That’s a disaster for communication in any context. That is particularly a disaster for communication if you’re trying to explain who Jesus Christ is, why his church matters, trying to witness to that to somebody else.
That is already a hard job, and it becomes all the harder if you give in to defensiveness and find yourself trying to balance regulating your own emotions with listening to what the other person is saying and reading between the lines for the emotional subtext and everything, all of those things that go into good communication. So, watch out for defensiveness, again, some of it is natural, but push against it. Don’t give in to it to the extent that you can. Number two, data dumping. Now, I’m telling you at the outset the things that I’m telling you not to do are all things I’ve done. It may be that somebody is troubled by something that you know a lot about and maybe their emotionally upset about an event. Maybe it’s again, something like the Crusades. Maybe you’re an expert on the Crusades, something about the sexual abuse scandal and you’ve done a lot of research on it. The temptation is to just throw a tome of information at them.
This is not usually a good idea because people are not robots and that is not usually how we receive information best to begin with, but particularly if something is maybe emotionally throwing the other person off, if this is a scandal that maybe they’re a little thrown off about, then you responding in a way that seems completely detached by just dumping a lot of information is not only not persuasive, it can actually make you seem cold and indifferent. So, the first way not to go is getting really defensive and getting overly emotional in that kind of way. The second way to go is being really underemotional in a certain way, being coldly distant and detached and just being entirely like, well actually here’s 10 studies. There may be a time and place for that, don’t get me wrong, but it’s something that as a general rule of thumb, you’re going to want to watch out for because it’s as often as not going to send a different impression than what you’re trying to convey and may suggest that you’re not understanding the emotional impact or the real gravity of whatever the scandal actually is.
Third, missing the forest for the trees. The classic example of this, somebody posts a five paragraph argument on Facebook. It’s a really good argument, but they use the wrong form of two. They put T-O-O, and they meant T-O. So, you respond but just point out, hey, you made a grammatical mistake. Now you might come across feeling like you’ve scored a rhetorical point, but you’ve not done anything to answer their actual argument. No one comes away from that encounter saying, wow, I was initially persuaded by person A. Then person B pointed out that A had made a grammatical mistake, and so now I’m forced to reevaluate the argument. Usually, we’re not quite that obvious about it. Usually, when we’re missing the forest for the trees, maybe we’re finding a faulty argument. The other person used, oh, you made these 10 points, but that one point you made is actually false and I could prove it’s false. Don’t get me wrong, if someone makes 10 points and one of them is false, it might be really important and relevant to bring that up and show them that.
But if all you do is do that, you’re missing the forest for the trees. You don’t want to do that either. You might be saying, okay, well what is left then? I’m glad you asked. Here are three ways we should respond to scandal. I would say these are three Christian responses to Christian scandal. Number one, respond to the person, not the objection. Let me explain what I mean. I’m going to give an actual example from the Bible. It involves three friends of Jesus. So, Jesus, as you may remember, is friends with Mary and Martha. You remember the famous story of Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet while Martha tries to clean the house while he is there and their brother Lazarus. We’re not focusing on that first story. We’re focusing on the second story we know about their lives. Well, third story really, which is that at some point Lazarus dies.
John tells us about this in John 11. He reminds us of the second story that I just glossed over that it was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair whose brother Lazarus was ill. The sisters sent to him saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Okay, that’s a good frame. Jesus has healed a lot of sick people and now he has the chance to heal a sick person he loves. He knows personally that in his humanity they’ve spent untold hours probably together. Bethany seemed to have been something of a little bit of a getaway for Jesus when he wanted to just be away, to be alone, to relax. There he is, Mary, Martha and Lazarus.
How do you think Jesus is going to respond? He responds in a bizarre way on the surface. In verse four we’re told that when Jesus heard, he says, “This illness is not unto death. It is for the glory of God, so the Son of God may be glorified by means of it. Okay, so you’re going to really have two scandals here. One, why does Jesus let his friend Lazarus die? And two, why does he make what looks like a false prophecy that this isn’t going to end in death because once Lazarus dies it’s like, well, Jesus, you got that one wrong. But then there’s going to be a third part of this scandal as well, and I love the way John puts it. He says, “Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, so when he heard that he was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” John loves paradoxical expressions, the lamb standing as though slain, that sort of thing.
He loves to throw you for a little bit of a loop as a reader. So, here he says, yeah, Jesus loved them so much that he didn’t come when they called, he waited two more days. You should be saying, what? How is that loving? Because you’re invited into that confusion. You’re invited into that place of being a little troubled by this. In Matthew 8, the centurion comes to Jesus, and he’s got a sick servant and Jesus offers to come to the house and heal him. And this centurion responds by saying, “Lord, not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, my servant shall be healed.” So, Jesus could have with a word healed Lazarus from afar. He didn’t have to be there, but he might’ve at least gotten up and hurried to go be with him, catch him right before he died. But he doesn’t. He waits two more days and it’s baffling on the surface why he does this.
We know the end of the story. We know Jesus is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, and so him waiting actually makes sense. You’ll notice in verse 17 that when Jesus does arrive, Lazarus has already been in the tomb for four days. So, even if Jesus had come immediately, it still would’ve been two days too late. Him being dead for four days is better for showing the glory of God because it reduces the likelihood that Lazarus had been accidentally buried while not really dead. You’re not going to last that long entombed wrapped up for four days. So, him waiting two days makes sense with either a God’s eye view or at least the benefit of hindsight we have as readers. But at the time, this looks like a threefold scandal. Jesus doesn’t come when he’s called and even waits two extra days and claims that this illness isn’t going to end in death, and it does. He doesn’t heal him remotely, he doesn’t do any of these things. This is going to be the scandal that needs addressing.
Now, I want to say a word at the outset as a Catholic apologist, people sometimes want from me, from us, some kind of easy Q&A manual. If they do this, I do that. Just show me the course, show me the ropes and the response I always try to give is it’s not that easy. It’s not just they’re going to pull out this verse, you’re going to pull out that one. Sure, that happens sometimes there’s a place for that. But effective communication, and that includes effective evangelization and effective apologetics is rarely, if ever, that simple. You have to read the person, not just the objections. Now we’re ready for what those objections are. The first one’s from Martha in John 11: 20, when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him while Mary sat in the house. That’s an important detail. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” Okay. That’s the objection we’re dealing with. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.
But Jesus doesn’t answer it right away. He lets her give him more context. In the next verse she says, and even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. Why is that context important? Because it frames how Mary is working through this scandal, how Mary is working through this problem that in the midst of it, she’s gotten to a point where she can say, okay, Jesus didn’t come and that was a problem, but even now, he’s able to do something. Jesus confirms this in verse 23, he says, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha doesn’t seem to be quite ready to go to an immediate rising from the dead. So, she says, “I know that he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” And Jesus then takes that opportunity to say, “I am the resurrection in the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”
Then he invites her to faith. He says, “Do you believe this?” She says, “Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, he who is coming into the world.” There it is. That is, I think, how many of us like apologetics and evangelization to go. She has a theological problem. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. And then he walks her gently through this back and forth that leads to a theology of the resurrection, an identity of who Jesus is, beautiful and profound. Compare that with what happens next. In verse 28, Martha goes back and calls her sister Mary saying quietly, “The teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him.
Then in verse 32, we find that Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him fell at his feet saying to him, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” Does that sound familiar? It’s literally verbatim the same objection. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. Martha and Mary to the word say the exact same thing to Jesus, and he’s going to respond to them very differently. Why? Because he picks up more context. The next verse it says that when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
That word for troubled is like the word for when you trouble the water, you make ripples on the water, and that word for deeply moved is a really tricky word to translate into English. I know people say that about Greek words a lot, but this one is a confusing one. It’s used in other contexts outside the Bible to mean the sound horses make when they do that [inaudible 00:17:35] sound. That’s just that deeply moved in spirit. It often means like an agitation or anger, it means something is coming up. Jesus is not just a placid lake in response to this. He’s not stoic. He’s not Data from Star Trek. We sometimes imagine that’s what we’re supposed to be like. If I’m not going to be defensive, I better be cold and cut off. Jesus is not. Instead, he says, “Where have you laid him?” Notice his first concern, Lazarus. They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” And then famously, sometimes depending on the language and translation, the shortest verse of the Bible. John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”
The exact same objection. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus responds in a totally different way. She doesn’t need a theological lesson. She needs someone to cry with her. So, Jesus responds with compassion and then he responds by weeping with her because that’s what she needs. If someone comes to you and says, there’s this problem with the abuse of children, now it could be this is someone who wants to say, well, are the abuse rates really higher in the church than they are in public schools? And you can give them all the facts and figures then, or they could say, my kid just underwent the worst experience of their life at the hands of a man of God. If you jump in with some stats right there, you don’t understand what you’re doing.
Martha and Mary present the same objection, but Jesus doesn’t just answer the objection. He answers the women. Martha is asking a theology problem. Mary’s raising a problem of the heart. So, effective evangelization requires doing that, being able to go there with people, and that’s a lot harder than read these 10 books and you’ll have the ready responses to every possible question. Those ready responses can be really good for the kind of Martha questions, but don’t imagine that every conversation is going to be like that. That’s the first effective way Jesus shows us that. The second one, I call leaning into the scandal because I don’t really know a better term for it. Our temptation is to lean out from the scandal, to get defensive, to downplay, to deny, to dismiss, to gaslight even to say, oh no, you just misunderstood. It’s not really a scandal. It’s not really a problem. And that’s not really the biblical way that scandal is handled.
You saw in John 11 how John seems to heighten the sense of scandal. He heightens the fact that they’re legitimately confused and hurt and thrown off by Jesus’s apparently indifferent response to them. Jesus isn’t actually indifferent to them, and that’s true and that’s good to know, but it’s also good to know that they quite sanely felt like he was being indifferent. Jesus’s response seemed cold at first, and if we can’t acknowledge that, we can’t understand the text and we can’t do what Jesus does. Don’t avoid the scandal, lean into the scandal. This is a weird example to give or a weird place to go, but why don’t I actually talk about Patrick O’Hare of the White Motor Company because this is a passage from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that I found really insightful. He sets it up by saying that Patrick O’Hare was one of the star salesmen for the White Motor Company in New York.
Now, it’s important you know it’s called White Motor Company because otherwise when he mentions White trucks, you’re going to be like, why does he only sell white trucks? Well, it’s capital W White, it’s somebody’s last name. O’Hare says, “If I walk into a buyer’s office now and he, the buyer, says, ‘What, a White truck? They’re no good. I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me. I’m going to buy the Who’s It truck.” Okay, let’s pause for a second. That’s the objection. A White truck is no good, wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me. I’m going to go to the Who’s It truck. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to apply that to what, the Catholic Church? That’s no good. I’m going to go with Santeria or Methodism or something in between, whatever it is. How do we respond in that situation? Listen to how Patrick O’Hare responds.
He says, I say, “Who’s It is a good truck? If you buy the who it, you’ll never make a mistake. The Who’s Its are made by a fine company and sold by good people.” It sounds like they’re sold by Dr. Seuss because he chose Who’s it, but fair enough. That is a weird response. Imagine like jujitsu. I obviously don’t do jujitsu, but just imagine. The whole point of the martial art is that you use your opponent’s strength against them that rather than pushing against their pushing, you go in the same direction as them and suddenly they’re pushing doesn’t have any effect. That’s what it is when you lean into a scandal that this charge that they thought was going to be some major point against the church stops really being a major point against the church once you agree with it. Here’s how O’Hare explains it When he agrees, “Oh yeah, the Who’s It has got some great qualities.” He says, “He is speechless then. There is no room for argument.”
If he says, “The Who’s It is best. And I say, ‘Sure, it is.’ He has to stop. He can’t keep on all afternoon saying it’s the best when I’m agreeing with him. We then get off the subject of the Who’s It and I begin to talk about the good points of a White truck.” He says, “There was a time when a remark like his first one wouldn’t have made me see scarlet and red and orange, defensiveness. I would start arguing against the Who’s It, and the more I argued against it, the more my prospect argued in favor of it. And the more he argued, the more he sold himself on my competitor’s product.” That’s the idea. When you deny or downplay scandal, one of the things you’re doing is that you’re requiring another person to put more and more time and effort into proving to you there is a scandal which is going to have the effect of convincing them more and more that there is a scandal, more often than not. You’re making another person research arguments against the church.
You’re making them research reasons why there’s a scandal, and so you’re sending them two messages. Number one, there’s a scandal because you’re making them do all that research and number two, Catholics because you’re like the embodiment of the Catholic Church for them don’t care about the scandal. That is a disaster. That’s what not to do combined with what to do. When you downplay, when you minimize, when you do all that stuff, you often have the perverse effect of driving people away because people who are actually troubled by it aren’t going to treat your cavalier dismissal of scandal seriously. And you’re going to, if anything, make them double down on trying to prove the scandal exists and they’re going to become more and more convinced and more and more troubled by it, and you’ve done the equivalent of convincing them of the Who’s It truck. Only it’s something much worse like you should leave the church.
That’s not how Jesus approaches it. Jesus approaches it with the Christian version of Patrick O’Hara’s point. He’s not going to say, oh, the Who’s Its are great. But remember, Jesus is coming into a world of Jews and Gentiles, and he knows that the Jews have the revelation of God. He knows that Jewish leaders have authority. He also knows there are real scandals, and he doesn’t downplay those scandals. In fact, he calls us to obedience even in the midst of acknowledging the moral failures and scandals of our leaders. There’s one classic example of this in Matthew 23 when Jesus says to the crowds, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do for they preach but do not practice. The church scandals of Jesus’s day, so to speak, the scribes and Pharisees not acting like they believe the thing they’re preaching. Jesus doesn’t shy away from it, he leans into it.
If someone said, Judaism, do you know how the scribes and Pharisees are? Jesus would say, “I do.” You can read any number of things he has to say about that. Likewise, if someone says the Catholic Church, you know how church leaders are maybe even at a more profound level than a non-Catholic. Those scandals are not less disheartening for Catholics than non-Catholics. That’s okay to acknowledge and to lean into. Why do that? I want to suggest four reasons. Number one, it’s more honest. If you’re troubled by a scandal and someone outside the family brings up the scandal pretending like you’re not troubled by it is not honest, that’s a defensive reaction. It’s not an honest reaction. Number two, it’s more Christian. It’s what Jesus does, and we want to be servants of the truth. We want to be servants of Christ and acting in a way that’s unChristlike and untruthful isn’t really a good way to do that.
Number three, it doesn’t set false expectations. What I mean is if you whitewash the church, if you whitewash Christianity and maybe you win some converts that way, I’m going to suggest there’s an expiration date on those conversions because it’s not going to take a long time for them to realize things are not as nice as maybe you’ve presented them, and that there’s a lot more sin and corruption and messiness in Christianity and in the church of God than maybe what you’ve led them to believe. And Jesus is very clear about this. I love the line in John 6 after the Eucharistic teaching, after all the hard teachings there. He then gives us one more hard teaching because he goes to the 12 and says, “Will you go away also?” And then Peter responds with that beautiful line, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” But then Jesus is like, okay, one more. He says, “Did I not call you 12, and one of you is a devil?” Referring to Judas who was apparently troubled by the teaching in John 6. That’s a fascinating line.
Jesus wants us to remember that Judas is wicked and an apostle. He doesn’t want us to build a theology of the church where it’s only the true believers, and so Judas doesn’t really count. We’ve neatly avoided the scandal. Oh, he was a Christian in the name only. No, he was an apostle. Jesus called him. He’s the upper echelon of the church. First Corinthians 12. When St. Paul is talking about the church, he says, “First apostles.” You can’t get rid of him. And yet he’s also wicked. So, we can’t downplay it in the other way of saying, oh, maybe Judas was just misunderstood. No, one of you is a devil. That’s pretty strong language. What I mean to say there is Jesus leans into the scandal and in doing so doesn’t set false expectations. You should know if you read John 6 or look at a newspaper or anything in between that saying yes to the body of Christ, the church means saying yes to a kingdom of God on earth that has both wheat and weeds. Some of those weeds may do damage to you because that is what weeds do.
The fourth reason to lean into scandal is that it paves the way for witness. What do I mean by that? I’m glad you asked, because the third way to respond to scandal is to pave a way for witness. Here’s what I mean. If you acknowledge all of the sin and the scandal, yes, these figures in the church have hurt you. Yes, terrible things have been done in the name of Jesus Christ. There’s a logical question that people want to know at some point. Okay, if we actually agree on that point, if you’re as horrified by the abuse of children as I am, if you’re as confused by that remark as I was, if you are as troubled by what that cardinal is up to as I am, why are you still Catholic? That is actually a really good place to be. Why are you still Catholic is a question we want people to ask us. They might ask it in a hostile way sometimes. They might ask it in an authentic way, but it’s a question we want people to ask us why? Because this is where evangelization actually happens.
There’s a famous line we use in apologetics because it’s where the word apologetics comes from. 1 Peter 3:15, second half of the verse. He says, always be prepared to make a defense, an apologia to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you. Before we get into how you do it, do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear so that when you’re abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, but for now I just want to focus on the ground. Where does apologetics happen? According to St. Peter happens when people are asking you to account for the hope that is in you, why are you hopeful still? Look around.
If you’re a Christian in the first century, Nero is trying to kill you. You’ve been kicked out of the synagogue. All of your friends and family, Jewish and pagan alike have rejected you. Why are you still hopeful? I’m glad you asked. Likewise, when you’re looking at all of these fires, many of them self-induced in the Catholic Church, you look at all the people leaving, all the people confused, all the people doing stupid and evil things and say, yeah, those are some stupid and evil things. I’m not going to downplay it. I’m troubled by it. Why are you still Catholic? I’m glad you asked. Then you can talk about what really matters. In saying that, I don’t mean the other stuff doesn’t matter. I mean, the question of being Catholic doesn’t hang on what a priest does. It doesn’t hang on what the Pope says in his next interview. It doesn’t hang on any of those things and nor should it and never has.
Why we’re Catholic is because of who Jesus is and what he says he’s doing when he says things like, “I will build my church.” We want to be able to say yes to that in a way that isn’t contingent on a scandal free tomorrow. Because whatever else happens, we are not guaranteed a scandal free tomorrow. That’s it. That gets you to the place of evangelization. Now, your explanation, your witness for the hope that lies within you is not something I can give you, but it’s something you should be able to give and it’s something you should be in the practice of giving. If you’ve never practiced something like a witness, like a semi-prepared short, maybe a few minute explanation of why you’re a Catholic Christian, I’d encourage you to do so.
The more you can share from your own life how God has been involved in your life, the more effective that is. Many Protestants are actually much better at preparing their people to give witness. We should work on that. This is an area where I think there’s growth for Catholics because there’s incredible stories, and if you get to know Catholics, they often have these tremendous stories, but we’re not in the habit of learning to share them. I would suggest that if you can get the conversation to a place where the person says, why are you still here? What draws you? That does two things. Number one, it shows that whatever defensiveness there may have been in the first place has gone down enough that you’ve created something of an atmosphere of trust.
I haven’t talked about this yet, but the kind of counterbalance to defensiveness is creating a trusting environment where a person doesn’t feel fight or flight kicking in. They feel secure, they feel stable. So, one of the things you’re doing when you acknowledge the legitimacy of their grievances is you’re helping to create that atmosphere and that environment that then gives you the chance to the second thing, which is to share your witness and hopefully lead them to an appreciation for why it’s good to be Catholic, what you have that maybe it turns out that they want. Okay, the last point then, what about trolls? I don’t mean of course here the weird dolls from the ’80s with funky hair. I mean, what do you do when people seem to be arguing in bad faith? Now, we associate this with internet trolls, but it’s not a new problem, is it? Jesus dealt with it in the first century with the chief priests, the scribes, the elders, Pharisees. Sometimes the Sadducees would get in on the action. And it is instructive to know when to feed and when not to feed the trolls.
I want to turn back here to Mark 11. This is not really a fourth point because if I’m being totally honest, this is just another way of reading the person not the objection. Sometimes the person is not asking a question like Martha or like Mary. Sometimes a person is asking a question like the scribes and Pharisees in Mark 11. Jesus is walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, and they say, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you the authority to do them?” I want to say at the outset that is not an unreasonable objection. It’s not an unreasonable question that someone who’s a legitimate inquirer might have of Jesus. By what authority do you drive out demons? Good question. That might actually be foundation for a road to conversion, but not in this case because they’re not asking in good faith.
As with the example of Martha and Mary, you need more than just the objection. You need more than just the question. You need some context. So, Jesus seeks the context. He says, “I will ask you a question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things.” Notice, he has given a very clear condition if they will answer his question, he’s promising to answer their question. He’s happy to answer the question by what authority he does to these things, but only on one condition that they answer the question was the baptism of John from heaven or from men. And he says, “Answer me.” And they don’t. This is so telling. Mark 11:31, they argued with one another. Now, they don’t argue because their theologies are different. They argue because of a much worse reason. They say, “If we say from heaven, he will say, why then did you not believe him? But shall we say from men?” They were afraid of the people for all held that John was a real prophet.
What are we seeing here? There’s an indifference to the truth. They’re not actually trying to answer the question whether John’s authority came from heaven or from men, whether John was a true or false prophet. They don’t even seem to be asking that question to try to understand and answer. They just think about the political implications of each answer. If we acknowledge him as a true prophet, we’re going to be in trouble because we didn’t acknowledge him. If we don’t say he’s a true prophet, if we say he’s a false prophet, the people are going to be mad about that because they thought he was a real prophet.
There’s no concern for well, was he or wasn’t he a real prophet? So, they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” This answer is a lie. They thought they did know. Presumably they thought he was a false prophet, but they claim not to know, not because of any actual humility, but because they’re just trying to avoid taking a position. So, Jesus responds to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” I will tell you just showing my own hand here, I have found this to be a very effective model when I don’t know if someone’s being a troll or not, when I don’t know if someone is questions in good faith, and on the internet, it’s very hard to know that. Sometimes I’ll ask a question to gauge how interested they are in the truth. Because what were they missing? Jesus’ questioners here. What were they missing out on?
Well, it wasn’t ignorance. It’s okay to be ignorant. It wasn’t misunderstanding. It’s okay even to misunderstand things. Rather, what they were revealing was a complete indifference to the truth. That’s a much more serious problem. If someone doesn’t care what the truth is and is just going to spout off false information for whatever reason, don’t waste your time answering them. In saying that, notice what Jesus does before he gets there. He doesn’t just immediately say, I see you guys coming. You guys always ask me these trollish questions. I’m not going to answer you, keep moving. It’d be really satisfying to do that to them, I’m sure. He doesn’t. He instead gives them a chance to have a conversation in good faith. I would encourage that as a good first step. If you’ve got to err on the side of one way or the other, I would err on the side of assume good faith in other people.
If you start to suspect someone is not proceeding in good faith, they’re not asking you for any legitimate reason, they’re just trying to trap you. I’ve had this experience. I had someone ask me about SSPX in a private email conversation, and I tried to give a simplified answer because it was a teenager, and it turned out they were trying to make me look really bad to friends in the SSPX for reasons that are totally beyond me. Just proceeding in bad faith, trying to score some rhetorical internet points. I don’t know why. Those things can happen, but I’m still glad that I did my best to try to meet what I thought was a real need and concern from someone who I presumed was asking in good faith. You’ll find people who are not doing that, who are actually working in bad faith. That does happen.
But in the face of that, assume good faith and then let people show you if they’re not proceeding in good faith. I think it’s okay even then to do a third thing which we see Jesus do, call out their bad faith. Look at the response he gives. They say, “We do not know.” He says, “Neither will I tell you.” In other words, he doesn’t believe them, that they don’t know. Their I don’t know, is really we will not tell you. So, he says, neither will I tell you then. So even in responding to them, he’s revealing that he knows their hearts to know that they’re proceeding in bad faith. That can be something that not just a problem for other people, we can fall into that we can become so sure that we’re right and other side’s wrong, that we’re getting into debates, not because we’re concerned about the truth or the other person. We’re just trying to score points.
The most effective thing that can happen there is for someone to call us out on that to say, doesn’t seem like you’re trying to understand. It doesn’t seem like you’re actually concerned with what the right answer is here. That’s a good move. That’s a good response, and I think that’s what Jesus shows us for how to do and how to respond to trolls. But again, as I’ve already said, I’m going to reiterate it one more time here. Most people bringing up scandals, that’s not why. But you can imagine, I mentioned there are people who are going to have a genuine Martha like curiosity, a problem theologically, whatever. How could this be Jesus’s church if the abuse rate is so much higher than it is in the boy scouts or in public schools? And then you can say, okay, well I don’t think it actually is, and here’s why. We can have that kind of data level conversation. Or if it’s Mary and they’re saying, this is a tragedy and this breaks my heart, or this happened to someone that I know, you got to respond in a totally different way there.
Or if it’s someone like the chief priests and scribes and elders here where they’re just taking this horrible wound and hurt and trying to use it to score points, that’s evil and wicked and callous in ways that deserve to be acknowledged. You’re not a good person for taking the abuse of children to try to score points that you have against the church for totally unrelated reasons. That doesn’t make you some valiant, noble, good person that actually shows a pretty callous indifference that we should acknowledge. If you want to think about those three categories, real life, it’s more than just those three things, but those are three good personae where you can think about, okay, where’s this person coming from? Is this a question of the head, of the heart, is this a question of indifference or a question where someone’s really trying to understand the truth?
I hope these tools have been helpful. I hope that whatever the next scandal is coming, I’m not going to hold my breath, that when you get asked about that, you feel a little more equipped to know how not to respond and how to respond in a more Christian way. For Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.