Twist and Shout
I like to keep a mental catalogue of apologetic “best books” to recommend, lend, or give away in various situations where time constraints or circumstances prevent me from saying everything I would like. For non-Christians who are curious about Christianity in general, I usually reach for Peter Kreeft’s Yes or No? For non-Catholics who are curious about Catholicism, I like Alan Shreck’s Catholic and Christian. For Catholics interested in understanding and dealing with anti-Catholicism, I recommend Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism. On the development of Catholic doctrine, Newman’s and Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough. On the ordination of women, Manfred Hauke’s Priestesses in the Church? is excellent.
In his second book, By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition, Mark P. Shea has written the definitive book to recommend, lend, or give away to Evangelical Protestants on the subject of Sacred Tradition—and for Catholic readers who want to know how to share their faith on this fundamental subject with their Evangelical brethren. (Shea’s first book, This Is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Eucharist, was already the definitive book for Evangelicals on the Eucharist.)
Readers of This Rock will be familiar with Shea’s apologetic writing: engaging, insightful, methodical, popular but not superficial. He writes with a verve and style that are much more than mere literary flourish or embellishment: His prose is eminently readable and memorable, and an argument that goes unread or unremembered accomplishes nothing. His creative flair goes beyond the simply literary to the organization of his case. He connects points and ideas in ways that might not occur to other thinkers. But there is nothing idiosyncratic or quirky about the structure of his argument—the reader is led relentlessly from one point to the next until, in the end, he is not so much compelled to accept the conclusion as brought to realize that he already accepted it in some way without realizing it.
How many apologists would think to begin an argument on Sacred Tradition by invoking the likes of Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong and of the Jesus Seminar? Shea’s unusual starting point is grounded in the principle that drama—including theological drama—is only as good as its villain. He begins with villains that will readily elicit boos and hisses from Evangelical readers: unbelieving pseudo-scholars who produce reams of theobabble devoted to the premise that the figure of Christ presented in the New Testament bears no resemblance to the “historical Jesus.”
Evangelical cheers are sure to be heard as Shea summarily exposes, then demolishes, the unfounded assumptions and circular arguments underlying Modernist claims. As he finely puts it, the Jesus Seminar “asks us to believe that the Misunderstood Sage of Nazareth was a figure so riveting, inspiring, charismatic, and mesmerizing that he galvanized a movement of deeply devoted disciples into ignoring everything he said and did.” So far this seems a farce rather than a drama, but what the reader doesn’t yet realize is that this satirical opening act is a setup for two crucial twists.
The first twist comes at the end of the first act, as Shea allows the Jesus Seminar Modernists to cross-examine one of Evangelicalism’s own unfounded assumptions, the canon of Scripture. The question arises: How do Evangelicals know that the Jesus Seminar is wrong to lump its “fifth Gospel” together with the canonical four in The Five Gospels? In fact, what reason do Evangelicals have for confidence in a New Testament canon that wasn’t settled until centuries after Christ?
Shea then marches the reader into blind alleys that fail to provide a credible Evangelical basis for confidence in the canon. He demolishes attempts to rely upon direct spiritual illumination or upon the witness of Christ or the apostles. Then he opens a casebook of clues pointing to the authority of Sacred Tradition (the use of tradition by the Old Testament writers, the New Testament writers, and Jesus himself). He steers the reader into a minefield of Evangelical convictions that seem to explode when examined critically according to Scripture alone (abortion, polygamy, the Trinity).
Not until the final act does Shea spring his second crucial twist. After illustrating how thoroughly Catholic the earliest Christian writers were in their reliance upon Tradition and belief in apostolic succession, Mary, and the Eucharist, he sets his sights on the Evangelical notion that “the pure biblical gospel” was very early corrupted by pagan “superstitions and philosophies.” The twist is simply this: This Evangelical notion is no different from the Modernist idea he already has debunked, that the truth about the historical Jesus was distorted beyond recognition by the New Testament writers. Shea brings the point home with devastating force.
While Modernism proposes that Jesus “was both a profoundly wise rabbi and also the dumbest cluck in human history,” whose hand-picked disciples “ran off the moment he was dead to b.aspheme all he held dear,” the Evangelical view holds “exactly the same thing of the apostles and their disciples.” In fact, in the Evangelical view, “everywhere the apostles went they—all of them—appointed successors who perverted their teaching on a dozen different subjects as badly as Modernism said the apostles had converted Christ’s . . . (and [perverted] it everywhere the same way)” (156). At this point, any Evangelical reader who has cheered Shea’s critique of modernism is going to become distinctly uncomfortable as he feels the weight of the same arguments coming to bear upon his own head.
Not all Protestant Christians will find this argument equally compelling (or troubling). Like a laser beam, Shea’s writing is powerful because it is focused, and his focus is the Fundamentalist-style Evangelical milieu in which he had his own spiritual nurture. Non-Catholic Christians who stand more in the classical Reformation heritage or the mainline Protestant tradition do not necessarily adhere to the “Pagan Creep” theory of the mass apostasy of the early Church; more commonly, they try to claim theological continuity with the early Fathers, and it is beyond the scope of Shea’s book to try to respond to this argument. But for the sort of Evangelicalism with which Shea is concerned, there is no better book to recommend, lend, or give away than By What Authority.
— Steven Greydanus
By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition
By Mark P. Shea
Our Sunday Visitor
192 pages
$7.95
ISBN: B0240
The Gospel According to Rome
We all know Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism. James G. McCarthy’s The Gospel According To Rome follows Boettner’s dubious lead in “explaining” the Catholic faith. The book’s subtitle is Comparing Catholic Tradition and the Word of God, and the book is called a response to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Even though Church documents and catechisms are quoted to show the Catholic position on various topics, including Mary, the Real Presence, and the papacy, I have never seen the Catholic case misrepresented so utterly. One might wonder how Catholicism can be misrepresented, even though original Church documents are quoted.
The answer lies in the fact that James McCarthy simply won’t understand what the Church (or the Bible, for that matter) teaches. For example, he presents the Catholic doctrine of Mary as the Mother of the Church “versus” the plainly evident biblical teaching that she is a member of the Church. Is a mother not also a member of the family? Can Mary not be both the Mother and a member, as is the case with each and every human mother?
Or consider this: McCarthy correctly notes that the Catholic Church teaches that the Mass is always holy and acceptable to God, regardless of the spiritual condition of the priest who offers it. This, he says, contradicts the Bible in Proverbs 15:8, where we read that “the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord.” McCarthy does not understand that Catholicism also teaches that Jesus Christis the priest and the victim in the Mass. The human priest simply represents Christ, and, therefore, when offering this sacrifice, he offers the righteousness of Christ, not of himself. Every priest is an alter Christus, “another Christ.”
Another example: The Church is said to teach that we ought to praise Mary with special devotion, which is true, of course. McCarthy contrasts that with the biblical doctrines that God, who alone is exalted above heaven and earth, is to be praised (Ps. 148:13) and that we must not have any other gods besides Yahweh (Exod. 20:3). Again, no Marian dogma contradicts Scripture, for the mere fact that God is to be praised doesn’t exclude any creatures from being praised (look at what Elizabeth did in Luke 1:42–45; also refer to the commandment to “Honor your father and your mother”).
Such bad scholarship is persistent throughout the book. It is a shame that former priests and nuns praise this book as an adequate response to Catholicism. One wonders how “Catholic” those former clergy and religious ever were in their lives. It shows how much they have misunderstood Catholic theology. The same goes for McCarthy, who is a former Catholic. He cannot have comprehended Catholicism very well, for he has not responded to what the Church teaches in his book, but to what he thinks the Church teaches. His arguments are no more than straw men. Just as in his video, Catholicism: Crisis of Faith, McCarthy misrepresents Catholicism and keeps teaching error in the name of Jesus Christ. May God have mercy on those who believe in the “Gospel According to James McCarthy.”
— Mario Derksen
The Gospel According To Rome
By James G. McCarthy
Harvest House
397 pages
$12.99