For a number of years I’ve wanted to write about one of the greatest fallacies pervading apologetics discussions between Protestants and Catholics. Though many participants sense its presence, it has been hard to point out for a simple reason: It doesn’t have a popular name.
In some conceptions of demonology, it’s necessary to name the demon before it can be driven out, and I think something like that applies here. People need to be able to not just feel the presence of the fallacy but to name it, explain why it is a fallacy, and, in so doing, banish it from the discussion.
So let’s start with a name: I call it the “technical statement fallacy.” It amounts to taking something—in apologetics usually an utterance of Scripture—as a technical statement when in fact it is not.
Technical Statements
Technical statements are characterized by comprehensiveness and precision. A technical statement (as I am using the term) provides a complete treatment of the topic it describes. It treats its subject precisely, without approximation or hyperbole.
Technical statements do not have to be supplemented by additional information for one to have a comprehensive and precise account. The statement itself is all you need. Examples of such statements might include these:
- The value of pi, calculated to five decimal places without rounding, is 3.14159.
- A bachelor is an unmarried man.
- If A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C.
- By the foreknowledge of vision (scientia visionis) God foresees the future free acts of rational creatures with infallible certainty.
- By his omnipotence, God is capable of effortlessly making actual any logically possible state of affairs.
Another characteristic of technical statements is that they’re tedious. They’re also hard to produce. Being comprehensive and precise in what you say requires effort. Imagine the lengths early mathematicians had to go to when they tried calculating the first five decimal places of pi. That’s not easy, especially when you are discovering the mathematics needed to do it. The guy who pioneered the effort probably even got it wrong the first few times and had to keep trying.
Because of the difficulty of technical statements, we don’t use them much. One most commonly encounters technical writing in legal, scientific, and philosophical texts, as well as in dictionaries, encyclopedias, reference manuals, and textbooks.
By contrast, one finds non-technical writing and speaking almost everywhere else. Everyday conversation is almost always non-technical, as are personal letters, diaries, editorials, and nearly all other forms of written and verbal expression.
Non-technical statements are by far the most common type of statements that humans use, but even here there are degrees. Some cultures require more use of technical statements or at least a greater degree of comprehensiveness and precision.
High Context, Low Context
In fact, there are names for the different types of cultures in this regard. Anthropologists classify cultures based on how much background information they expect a person to know already in order to understand and get along in society.
Those cultures that expect a person to know a lot in order to function successfully in society are called “high-context” cultures. Those that do not expect a person to know a great deal of background information to function are called “low-context” cultures.
The United States is considered to be toward the low-context end of the spectrum. In order to function well in the U.S., one needs to know a marketable job skill, the English language (usually), and certain basic laws. Detailed information about U.S. history, religion, customs, who is allied with whom, etc., is not necessary. A person needs only basic information to “get by” in the U.S.—at least compared to some cultures.
By contrast, Middle Eastern cultures tend to be high context. Not only does one need to know a trade, the language, and basic laws in order to function in Middle Eastern countries, but one also must understand how certain groups are allied and opposed to other groups. And most importantly, one needs to know how to avoid transgressing unspoken boundaries—”unwritten laws”—that could place one in danger if violated.
How high or low context a culture is has an impact on the way that culture uses language. Low-context cultures tend to be much more explicit when communicating information. They offer step-by-step instructions, and they less often assume that the reader will “fill in the blanks” based on the shared cultural context. A consequence is that low-context cultures tend to be more literal and more precise when formulating things. They also can tend to communicate more slowly.
High-context cultures do the reverse. They tend to be less explicit. They do assume the reader will “fill in the blanks.” They thus have the freedom to be less literal and precise and more expressive and artistic in their speech, since the reader can be assumed to spot non-literal and imprecise expressions. As a result, they often can communicate ideas more quickly since there is less need to cover the basics.
The Disconnect
Both strategies involve different ways of speaking, and both have their advantages and disadvantages. The problem comes when people from one kind of culture try talking to people from the other. The same disconnect affects how they read documents from each other’s cultures.
The consequences of this disconnect can be grave when Scripture is the document in question. Since Christians of all stripes recognize the divine authority the Bible, they insist on implementing the doctrines and practices they perceive Scripture as requiring.
The problem is that people from a low-context culture like ours tend to read Scripture as if we had written it; as if it were a document our culture had produced. With our greater preference for technical statements, and knowing the importance of the word of God for our faith, we have an impulse to see technical statements in Scripture, to take what Scripture says more literally and precisely than was intended by the Author.
“Seventy Times Seven”
Take Jesus’ exhortation to forgive “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22). Who hasn’t done the math on this and been tempted to conclude that we need only to forgive 490 times? A friend of mine, knowing the degree to which the Gospels parallel God’s willingness to forgive and ours, thought as a boy that on our 491st sin we would be damned.
Jesus’ point, of course, is that we should be willing to forgive an unlimited number of times. That’s why he frames his answer around the number seven, which in biblical idiom often signifies completeness or totality. He doesn’t intend us to take his statement as a technical one.
“You Shall Not Kill”
Another statement in danger of unintentionally being taken in a technical sense is the commandment “You shall not kill” (Ex. 20:13; Deut. 5:17). Many have wanted to read this as an endorsement of total pacifism, not simply a prohibition of homicide. They join this statement with Jesus’ exhortations to turn the other cheek (cf. Matt. 5:39) and love one’s enemies (cf. Matt. 5:44).
Admittedly, the commandment does sound absolute as it appears in many English translations. Part of the problem here seems to be a translation issue. The Hebrew verb being translated as “kill” (ratsakh) is not one of the usual Hebrew terms for “kill” and has a specialized meaning.
Jewish scholar Jeffrey Tigay explains: “Hebrew ratsakh refers to illicit killing, both intentional and accidental (cf. 1 Kgs. 21:19; Deut. 19:4). The translation ‘you shall not kill’ (RSV) is too broad. It implies that even capital punishment and war are prohibited, whereas the Torah sometimes mandates these” (The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, 71).
Traditional English Bible translations have rendered this command in an absolute sense. (More recent translations have begun using “You shall not murder.”) This accounts for much of the pacifists’ misunderstanding.
But other passages of Scripture expressly endorse killing in some circumstances. As Tigay points out, the same set of biblical books that enshrined “You shall not kill” also mandates war and capital punishment. Clearly not all killing is wrong.
Thus even if “You shall not kill” were the best translation of the commandment, one could not take it as a technical statement of the matter because it isn’t complete: It doesn’t reflect the other relevant things Scripture has to say on the matter.
“Christ Did Not Send Me to Baptize”
The fallacy of taking non-technical statements in a technical sense is something that also complicates the controversy with Protestantism. Many Evangelicals, in seeking to show the irrelevance of baptism to salvation, take 1 Corinthians 1:17 in an overly technical sense.
In this passage, Paul declares: “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel.” We know from other passages that the gospel is what brings salvation, so if baptism can be divorced from the gospel, then it also can be divorced from salvation. Paul’s mission to bring salvation to the Gentiles included preaching but not baptizing.
But just how technically did Paul intend us to understand his statement regarding baptism? Did he regard baptism as something he was not authorized to do? If so, then he regularly acted without authorization, for immediately before this passage he told us:
“I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.)” (1 Cor. 14–16).
Not only did Paul baptize people, but he did so with such apparent frequency that he can’t remember how many times he did!
The fact he baptized on a regular basis suggests that baptism was not foreign to his job as an apostle. The other apostles baptized as well (cf. John 4:2), and they commanded people to be baptized in response to the preaching of the gospel (cf. Acts 2:38). Even people far below the rank of apostle baptized those who responded to the gospel (cf. Acts 8:12, 38).
It is much more likely that Paul was being a bit hyperbolic in what he said. Baptism was indeed part of his mandate, as the sacrament itself is a mandated response to the gospel. But he was stressing what was distinctive about his ministry: Building the Church by preaching the gospel was his primary activity. He focused on making the initial proclamation (cf. Acts 9:15), while the follow-on response of baptism was something that would come afterward. Baptism assumed a less prominent place in Paul’s activity and, indeed, may have been left to his companions in ministry Since preaching is the invitation to salvation, baptism is the response to this invitation, and Paul was saying that his focus was on the former.
One concludes that Paul simply was not making the kind of technical statement that would allow baptism to be divorced from salvation—certainly not the kind of statement that would negate forceful statements of the efficacy of baptism elsewhere in Scripture (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:21).
“If You Confess with Your Mouth”
Another Pauline passage that is often taken in a technical sense is Romans 10:9–10, where he states, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.”
If this passage is taken as a technical statement of what one needs to do to be saved, it would rule out a Catholic view of salvation. But would the result be an endorsement of the typical Evangelical position?
No. Take this passage literally and everybody who is mute would be damned. People who can’t talk can’t confess with their lips.
Paul isn’t talking to prospective converts to Christianity and telling them what they need to do to embrace the Messiah. He’s writing to the Christian community in Rome—people who have been baptized already. For them, the question is not how to get saved but how to retain what they have received, and at this stage in Church history exhortations to confess Christ carried the connotation of confessing him in the face of public opposition and persecution.
Paul’s focus here was to tell the Roman Christians that they didn’t need to submit to the Mosaic law in order to live out their commitment as Christians and be saved; they need only to maintain their Christian profession, even in the face of hardship (cf. Rom. 10:1–12).
Context by Any Other Name
The problem of Christians committing the technical statement fallacy is a real one, affecting both doctrine and practice.
There have been Christians in history who literally have cut off their hands, based on a misinterpretation of Matthew 18:8–9. I remember a phone call I took at Catholic Answers years ago in which I had to counsel a young man not to pluck his eye out, which he felt divinely required to do if it turned out that a particular indiscretion was technically adultery.
Though it affects Christians of every stripe, the technical statement is a special problem in Protestant circles. Protestantism arose in Northern Europe and significantly developed in America—cultures at the most risk for misunderstanding a high-context Middle Eastern set of documents—and began with a deliberate attempt to de-contextualize Scripture.
The Protestant slogan of sola scriptura, or “Scripture alone,” entailed a stripping away of the traditional interpretive matrix of Scripture and a denial of Tradition as authoritative in biblical interpretation.
Especially as later versions of Protestantism evolved, the attempt was then made to treat Scripture as the ultimate low-context document, such that all theological truths could be derived from Scripture without allowing any authoritative role to Tradition or the Church (and, often in American Protestantism, denying them any role at all).
But this amounted to stripping Scripture of the context needed for interpretation. Scripture, as noted, is the product of a Middle Eastern, high-context culture. The context—the material that isn’t spelled out but is assumed to be understood—is vital to interpreting documents of this nature.
These documents are not like systematic theology manuals, in which every term is defined and propositions are comprehensively and precisely framed. Scripture is a collection of diverse texts in different literary genres, from the historical to the poetic, and in almost none of them do we encounter technical statements.
Middle Eastern speech and writing is more emotive, colorful, approximate, and hyperbolic than what we Westerners are used to. It is subtle and nuanced, and Westerners make a major mistake if they treat Middle Eastern modes of expression as if they were as dry, blunt, and analytical as Western ones.
The context has been passed down from the apostles in the Christian community, and we know it under another name: Tradition.