“If this is Karl reading this, stop sending people to hell.”
The postscript caught my attention. Like many people, I often read the end of letters first. When I saw Debra K.’s final comment, I knew it had to be one of those letters. We get them periodically. Angry people like her — some formerly Catholic, some not — are convinced not just that the Catholic faith is incorrect but that it is incorrigible. Anyone who promotes it is not just making an egregious error; he’s “sending people to hell.”
Mrs. Kilpartrick writes from a town in Michigan. I don’t know her, but I hope other residents of the town have a higher view of Catholicism than she has. Her view is about as low as can be. Her letter illustrates some of the attitudes Catholic apologists must confront.
What set her off? I don’t know. She doesn’t say how she came to know Catholic Answers or me. Perhaps someone gave her a copy of This Rock. Maybe she saw Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth. Maybe her pastor egged her on. Her letter is instructive no matter what prompted her to write. Let me quote her remarks, commenting on them sequentially. Here we go:
“Catholic Liars (better name for this organization): I pray, if you’re a clerk receiving this, that you read, ponder, and investigate. Investigation must be done with a King James Bible, not the Catholic man-made lie book.”
“Catholic Liars”? Let it slide. I’ve seen worse — and cleverer — alternatives for the name of this apostolate. What about Debra’s insistence on using the King James Version? This marks her as belonging to a minority within a minority. Most Fundamentalists, while preferring the KJV, don’t adopt a KJV-only position. They think you can get by with other versions. But some KJV proponents insist that the translation enjoys a quasi-inspiration enjoyed by no other. Peter Ruckman is the best known advocate of this thesis; so vociferous has he been that other Fundamentalists call his position “Ruckmanism.” The curious thing is that the KJV-only idea can satisfy only English-speaking believers. What about German Protestants, who have access to Luther’s translation, which is older than the KJV? They are not likely to agree that an English translation is more authoritative than theirs or has some kind of divine approbation that theirs doesn’t have.
Debra may not be worried by such considerations. She is convinced that the KJV is a bulwark against Catholicism’s “man-made lie book.” Probably she hasn’t thought things through — she may not be able to articulate why the KJV is supposed to be better — but she may have heard KJV partisans make noises about the Textus Receptus, the Greek manuscript tradition used as a basis for her favorite translation.
The Vulgate — which is a far older translation than the KJV — and other Catholic translations were based on manuscripts such as Vaticanus (which must be suspect, given its name), and “everyone knows” that manuscripts other than the Textus Receptus are flawed. In what way? Don’t bother to ask Debra. She doesn’t know, and for her it doesn’t really matter. She doesn’t pretend to be a scholar. She may not be able to distinguish a Greek alpha from a Hebrew aleph. She hasn’t come to her translational preference through wide reading or a series of syllogisms but through prejudice. She just knows Catholics are wrong, and thus translations they use and manuscripts they translate from are not to be relied on.
“You say we say ‘not saved.’ You’re not if you believe that salvation comes from the Church. Salvation comes from believing and trusting in Jesus Christ only as your personal Savior. Romans 10:9: ‘That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’ Acts 4:12: ‘There is salvation in no one but the Lord Jesus Christ, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
Yes, it would be a fine thing if Christians knew with absolute assurance that they would go to heaven no matter what, but nowhere does the Bible teach such a thing. Romans 10:9 might seem to support the traditional Fundamentalist idea of “once saved, always saved” (and its corollary: “Once Catholic, always lost”). But a little thought — and the reading of passages such as the closing verses of Matthew 25, the story of the sheep and the goats- – will lead one to see that Paul’s words include implied conditions: If you believe in Jesus, you will be saved, provided you keep God’s commandments and die in the state of grace.
“Get the book A Woman Rides the Beast by Dave Hunt. It will open your eyes!”
Indeed it will. It will show the open-minded reader how poorly argued the anti-Catholic position can be. Dave Hunt, an inveterate anti-Catholic, has written many books, about half of them against the New Age movement and half against Catholicism. (Actually, I should rephrase “written”: He has his name on books that were ghostwritten for him.) In a public debate he and I had five years ago, and in radio debates we had earlier, he never failed to use a technique perfected by Cato the Elder (234-149 B.C.). Cato ended every speech before the Roman senate with the admonition, “Carthage must be destroyed!” It didn’t matter what the issue at hand was. The senators might have been talking about farm subsidies, but Cato always threw in his trademark line. Eventually Rome did destroy Carthage, perhaps partly to keep Cato quiet.
In his public remarks, Dave Hunt never seems to leave out “the Catholic-Nazi connection.” The topic at hand might be the Immaculate Conception, but Hunt will make a side comment to the effect that the Catholic Church backed the Nazis and thus can’t be believed on any doctrinal matter. His claim is groundless, of course. For a refutation of A Woman Rides the Beast, see James Akin’s “Hunt-ing the Whore of Babylon,” This Rock (September and October 1994)
“Mass: Not the real sacrifice to do over and over. Christ’s blood was poured out on the cross and when he said, ‘It is finished,’ it’s exactly what he meant. The Last Supper was a Passover meal only! So when you eat together with other Christians and bless the food in his name, ‘You do it in remembrance of me’ (food, not blood and flesh).”
Debra claims something for the Mass that we don’t claim. She claims that in the Mass Christ is sacrificed “over and over.” The Church never has taught or believed that. Catholics say that in the Mass the one sacrifice of Calvary is re-presented “over and over.” It isn’t a new sacrifice, and Christ isn’t sacrificed more than once, but the one sacrifice is presented again, through every age, until the end of time.
As for the Last Supper being nothing other than a regular meal, well, that’s not what Christ seemed to be saying in the accounts of the event, and such an idea can’t square with his remarks in John 6. In that chapter our Lord said he would give us his flesh and blood to eat and that they would be “food indeed” (John 6:55). “Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?'” (John 6:60). Then they left his company (John 6:66), the only time Scripture shows anyone leaving him for a doctrinal reason.
“Statues: Exodus 20:4: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.’ This is one of the Ten Commandments given by Moses. It’s basic, it’s simple. Has the Pope read it?”
Read it, yes, and even understood it properly, as Debra has not. She thinks that Exodus 20:4 forbids the making of statues for religious purposes. Were she to read a little further in that book, she would find that the Lord later commands the making of statues for religious purposes. In Exodus 25:18 he orders that the Ark of the Covenant be adorned with two statues of cherubim. Later still, Solomon, following the will of the Lord, installs giant statues of cherubim in the sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kgs. 6:23-35). Debra misses the point of Exodus 20:4. God isn’t saying that we shouldn’t make statues. He’s saying that we shouldn’t worship them or the false gods they may represent. He is forbidding idolatry. He is not forbidding artwork that draws our hearts and minds closer to him.
“We do not claim Mary is not the mother of God. She is. She had children after Jesus — is that a perpetual virgin? She was a good and holy woman, I agree, but no better than we who try to live our lives according to the gospel. Matthew 13:55: ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James and Joses and Simon and Judas?’ (Four brothers here.) Luke 11:27-28: ‘And it came to pass, as he spoke these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which thou has sucked. But he said, Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.’ (We are blessed also, same as Mary.)”
There is an odd element of self-complacency here, maybe even presumption. “We are blessed also, same as Mary.” If so, then it doesn’t seem that Mary was very highly blessed — not if she was like the rest of us. After all, we tend to be more remarkable for our failings than our sanctity. It seems not to have occurred to Debra that God might have provided, as the mother of the Savior, a woman at least as heroic in sanctity as the other great women of the Bible, a standout among women, someone blessed in a way unlike the rest of us. It seems not to have occurred to her that Gabriel’s greeting- — whether translated as “Hail, full of grace” or as “Hail, highly favored daughter” — implies in its formulation a singularity: Yes, we may be blessed, but not the “same as Mary.”
“First Timothy 2:5: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.’ Where does this put a priest-nowhere! Confessions should be spoken to Christ only.”
After telling Timothy that he urges “supplication, prayers, intercession, and thanksgivings be made for all men” (1 Tim. 2:1), Paul explains why these human attempts at mediation work: precisely because Christ is the “one mediator between God and man.” Without his status as the Mediator of the New Covenant, our attempts to offer prayers for others would be fruitless. And what about confession? Debra seems to have overlooked John 20:23: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This can be understood only as a grant of power to the apostles, a grant emphasized in the preceding verse: “And when he had said this, he breathed on them”-only the second time in Scripture that God breathes on man, the first being when he made Adam a living soul. Adam was given life, and the apostles (and through them their successors, the bishops, and the bishops’ helpers, the priests) were given the power to give spiritual life (grace) to the repentant.
“There is so much more. I pray for your eyes to be opened and your heart softened. Love, Deb.”
Thanks, Deb. We’ll pray that your prayer boomerangs on you. We’ll pray for the scales of prejudice to be removed from your eyes and the stoniness from your heart. Then you will be able to do what you advise us to do, “ponder and investigate.” We’re game — are you?