Jimmy Akin explains why the Church began encouraging more laypeople to explain and defend the faith, and discusses how we can judge whether someone is giving us a good answer.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Dave in Cincinnati, Ohio listening on Sacred Heart Radio. Dave, you are on with Jimmy Akin.
Caller: Thank you very much, hello Jimmy. I beg your indulgence with a short background here but I don’t want to send the wrong impression with the question. I am a life-long Evangelical, and I am seriously considering a conversion. I’ve been listening to a lot of EWTN because I spend a lot of time in the car, I listen to you repeatedly, I listen to a lot of Al Kresta, and the point is, I find a great deal of clarity in the answers, I go and I research them in the Scripture. I’m getting more and more confident about the conversion, but there are a number of issues that really are–they’re difficult changes for me as an Evangelical.
Here comes the question: I’m really surprised by the fact that that many of you, who are presenting the official Catholic answers to our questions, are not priests. And my mind frequently says, “Okay, if I rely on these answers and I then make a conversion, then I get myself involved in the Church and I find from priests that I’m getting different answers, I don’t go through that experience.” And so I guess the upshot to my question is, why are there so many non-priests addressing these questions? And what can I rely on here to know that you guys represent the official Catholic positions on these answers?
Jimmy: Okay, well, so ideally a priest would give you the correct official answer on everything, and that’s something that’s been true ever since the Old Testament. I mean, one of the things it says in the Old Testament is that the lips of the priest should guard knowledge. And so they, priests even back then, had a teaching function. But the very fact that the Old Testament points out that this is what should happen means that it doesn’t always happen, and so you don’t want to rely overly much on the fact that somebody is a priest. God willing, they’re going to give you great answers.
Also, though, you don’t have to be a minister in order to give good answers. That’s something we see also from both Testaments in Scripture; it talks about how in the Old Testament, people would urge others to know the Lord, even though they weren’t priests. Similarly in the New Testament, when you have someone who actually was functioning as a kind of minister, Apollos, who initially preached accurately about Jesus, but knew the baptism of John only, and so we had an incomplete knowledge of Jesus and his message; Priscilla and Aquila, who were not ministers, took him aside, and Priscilla being a woman, especially, was not a priest, but it points out that they took Apollos aside and gave him additional education in the message of Jesus and helped him grow in his knowledge of the Christian message. And so you don’t have to be a priest in order to accurately teach the Christian faith.
In terms of why there are so many folks who are non-ministers who are participating in the teaching of God’s Word in Catholic circles these days, it’s for a couple reasons: the fundamental one is that the Church, a number of decades ago, began specifically urging the laity to take on a greater role in promoting the Christian faith, in promoting who was–in the language of the time, was called the apostolate. So the Church has this apostolic work to be done, and it urged laypeople to get involved in that because there aren’t and never have been enough priests to reach the world with the message of Jesus. It takes the cooperation of all people to do that effectively, and so the Church wanted laity to not just sit back and say, “You know, that’s a job for priests, so I’m going to leave it to them,” they wanted everybody actively engaged.
Now of course that does mean understanding the teaching of the Church and communicating it accurately. And precisely because I’m not a priest, I know I don’t have a clerical collar that people are going to defer to me on the basis of, you know, so I have to be really sure I’m right when I say stuff, and that means I take special pains to make sure that I’m accurately representing the Church’s teaching, I study constantly, I study the Church’s official documents constantly, I parse them very carefully. Sure, I’ll make mistakes sometimes, and I own up to that and I correct them when I find them. But, precisely because I’m not a priest, I take special pains to make sure that people can trust what I say, because otherwise I would just be subverting and destroying the ministry I’m trying to engage in. I want to be effective for Christ, and that means, you know, doing my homework and being right.
But how do you know I’m right? Well, the ultimate way to check is by checking up on me, looking at the Church’s official documents. Now you’ll want to be careful, because sometimes I’ll be saying “This is the teaching of the Church,” but also you’ll hear me say, like I did earlier today in the question about predestination, said “There are different options here,” and I said, “Some people have proposed this as an idea.” Well there, I’m not saying the Church teaches this; I’m saying “This is one option.”
And so in addition to checking up on that, in addition to checking up on what the Church’s official documents say, you can also go and look at reputable theologies, books of theology, that go beyond just what the official teaching is into the different ideas that have been proposed. Because there’s a difference between “doctrine,” which is what the Church actually teaches–that’s what the word “doctrine” means, is “teaching–” and “theology,” which is seeking to understand the teaching.
And so I would say, check me out. Look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that’s probably your first, best resource. Look at in the other documents at Vatican.va, the different encyclicals and audiences of the popes, the documents published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Read reputable Catholic theologies by Orthodox Catholic theologians, like Joseph Ratzinger or Avery Dulles or people like that. Those are the people who are informing my thought, and that’s what I’m trying to convey to people in general when they ask questions.