Some thoughts on apologetics

[cmotherofpirl]

Some Thoughts on the Apologetics Subculture

A couple of things have happened in the past few days that have set me thinking again about apologetics and the boomlet in what I call the "apologetics subculture" in the Church. But before I discuss them, let me digress a bit.

On the whole, I'm glad of the boomlet in apologetics that has happened in the past 20 years, due almost single-handedly at first, to the efforts of Karl Keating and the good people at Catholic Answers. For some reason, apologetics became a dirty word after the Council, with the predictable effect that Catholics soon lost the ability to articulate what the hell they believed and why. Karl is the guy who took action to turn that around. The reason for the boomlet was, in no small part, due to the relief Catholics felt after years of hearing what geniuses they were for believing the Faith and having few tools other than a gut feeling to tell them they weren't such geniuses as all that.

Part of what fed (and feeds) the interest in apologetics is simply the thrill of learning and articulating the faith. That's certainly what motivates me. People call me an apologist. I generally don't call myself one, because I primarily think of myself as an amateur teacher. I think the Faith is fascinating and just like telling other people about it, because I love to watch the lights come on and I love to watch the Faith liberate other people as it's liberated me. Sometimes that involves "defending the Faith". A lot of times it simply involves proclaiming the Faith.

The two, by the way, are different and those who love apologetics would do well to remember it. The first and primary task of the believer is *not* to defend the Faith, but to proclaim it. In other words, evangelization comes first, and apologetics is, at best, its handmaid. You don't *need* to "defend the Faith* unless the Faith is being attacked. And if you enter into a conversation with a defensive mentality, don't be surprised if you ignite a hostile mentality in the person you are talking to. Not a few times have I seen hot-headed, testosterone-driven young single guys (in short, the sort of person who is typically drawn to apologetics) forget this and come on strong with a pugilistic attitude that radiates "You probably think there's something wrong with my Faith, don't you? Don't you? Come on, try me buddy. Just try me!" Such folk mean well usually. They are young bucks full of piss and vinegar. A thousand years ago, all that masculine energy would have been spent on something like a healthy crusade. But today, there are very few channels through which the Valiant Knight hormones can go, so they go into apologetics, often without anybody to instruct these guys that the medieval ideal also include the model of the verray, parfit gentil knyght who comes in peace before he comes in war.

Most of the apologists I know who have wound up becoming (for want of a better word) "known" apologists seem to get this. Most of them do what they do, first and foremost because they love the Faith, not because they are spoiling for a fight. The goal is to generate light, not defeat somebody in combat. And more than that, the goal is to learn about everything, not simply to learn about apologetics. Jimmy Akin seems to me to typify this very Catholic mindset. His blog certainly deals with apologetics. But it also reflects his interest in everything from weird fiction to science to what have you. Similarly, Scott Hahn, who's certainly done his share of apologetics, isn't really *about* apologetics: he's about scripture, the Fathers, the family, and the subject of the (literally) 50,000 other books that are wedged in the rabbit warren he calls his library, stuffed into the basement of his house (those who have seen it know what I mean).

The first of wave of Evangelical-to-Catholic convert apologists started in the late 80s and early 90s with almost no human coordination--just the Holy Spirit watching the wave roll in. There was a flood of converts and, as Evangelicals do, they started trying to articulate what they had done and why for the benefit of those they had left behind. Then, they slowly started looking around and realizing they weren't alone. Result: The First Wave started "networking" just as a second wave of converts who read the books of the First Wave were persuaded and started to convert. I was, without realizing it at the time, part of the First Wave. Big influences on me included Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, Lewis, Chesterton, and Sayers. I also read Karl. Only later did I discover that guys like Hahn, Madrid, Akin, Ros Moss and the whole current crop of people existed.

I started writing about the Faith for the only reason anybody should write about stuff: because I found it very interesting. Soon, to my surprise, I found this whole subculture existed, not only of Catholic apologists, but of their various opponents, as well as a sort of growing cheer section for both. And I discovered (by experience) some of the problems that go with that.

Probably the most dangerous thing that goes with it is a curious sort of idolatry that can arise. The other day, I got a letter from somebody which read, in part:

Recently I came across a protestant web site of a Mr James Swan. He is extremely well educated regarding the writtings of Martin Luther. He has convincungly shown how our Catholic Apologists have taken quotes of Martin Luther out of context to try to show that he was a nutcase. It has really opened my eyes and it has got me wondering where else our Catholic Apologists have errored. Today on his blog, he posted an article which refutes your assertion that St Jerome, before he died, accepted the apocryopha as canonical. I am posting it below to give you a chance to respond. I hope you can. This bloq site has deeply disturbed me because Swan is shown many times where the Catholic Apologists that I have come to admire and learn from have been making serious errors in scholarship resulting in faulty conclusions. I have written Robert Sungenis, Scott hahn, Art Sippo etal to visit this blog and form some refutations if possible. I do not know if they have done so and it is really bugging me. Would you please take a look at James Swan's blog (beggarsallreformation) because Catholic Appologists will be hearing from this guy soon and you had better be ready for him.


A number of things concern me about this note. But the first and foremost is that somebody's faith could be disturbed by the fact that Catholic apologists have erred. But it's not the first time I've encountered the tendency to anoint me or some other apologist as a sort of Alternative Magisterium to the real Magisterium by a "fan base" that is somewhere between a school of disciples and a cheer squad. It's a very dangerous thing to do, because we apologists are not protected by the charism of infallibility in the slightest. In this case, for instance, from what I read of the critique of my article on the apocrypha in the materials forwarded me, it would appear that I did indeed misread Jerome (not wilfully, as the article suggests, but nonetheless erroneously). That is, it would appear that Jerome, although he did include the deuterocanon in his Vulgate, did so grudgingly and never really bought the idea they should be in the canon of Scripture. That's the breaks. I make mistakes. It does not mean everything I've written is worthless, it doesn't even mean that the central point of my article--that the only authority we have for canonizing Scripture is the Church and not some guy named Ray Aviles--is wrong. But it certainly does mean that St. Paul is emphatically right when he urges us "test everything, hold on to what is good." I'm as prone as the next guy to passing on pseudo-knowledge. So are James Swan and Ray Aviles.

For this very reason, it should be noted that this very principle that the Church-- not mere individuals but the Church--is the final arbiter of the Faith, means that Jerome is just as prone to be wrong as the rest of us. So at the end of the day, it's kind of a teapot tempest to spend massive amounts of electrons pinning down precisely what Jerome thought about the deuterocanonical books, because it wasn't Jerome's call, as he himself well knew when, despite his grumbles, he took it as axiomatic that there was no sin in submitting to "the judgment of the Churches". My counsel to anybody tempted to anoint apologists as an alternative Magisterium is to do like Jerome.

In a related vein, I think it would be well for the apologetics subculture (particularly the one in cyberspace) to simply get some air and remember that it really is just a subculture (at least in the Catholic Church). There are some Protestant "ministries" out there that are pretty much about nothing *except* apologetics (and often, anti-Catholic apologetics). When a guy adopts the handle "prosApologian", you pretty much know where this guy's sense of identity is invested. He knows Greek and you don't. He eats and sleeps apologetics. He will fill your screen with enough gaseous ASCII to fill the Hindenburg in pursuit of the exact parsing and declension of heos hou (all while asking if your credentials are as big as his credentials). He's ready to rumble. Right. Got it.

And then Catholics respond. Some of the responses are from Catholics who are interested in light. So, for instance, Jimmy Akin, with a groan and a sigh, undertakes the task of replying yet again to whatever it is James White is gassing on about. He does so out of interest in clarity, not out of testosterone-driven need to prove his manhood. And there is, most of all, a healthy awareness that the Faith, like life, is more than apologetics. So while White is filling the air with nothing but his arguments and the glories of his spotless record of zero defeats in conflict with absolutely everybody who has ever disagreed with him (including his own sister), Jimmy is, like, stopping to smell the roses, chat about Max Headroom, speculate on apostolic succession on other planets, post curious photos of Indian Mounds that figured in H.P. Lovecraft stories and, in short, be a normal human being.

Not all Catholics have this sense of perspective and it's easy to get sucked into the cramped little world of endless hairsplitting that the apologetics subculture can sometimes become. But the fact is, the Faith and the world are larger than mere theological abstractions and we Catholics don't have to live in the hothouse. Indeed, if we do, we can often communicate a radically different vision of the faith than you actually find in the world of incarnate, flesh and blood Catholics, who do not rest their entire faith on what Jerome thought of the Septuagint, who do not obsess over the meaning of heos hou in Greek, and who could not, for the life of them, articulate a detailed analysis of the Aristotelian roots of Thomas' doctrine of Transubstantiation. All these things matter in their proper place. But none of these things occupy the entire field of vision for 99.999999999999999% of Catholics in the world--or Protestants for that matter. If we give people the impression they do, don't be surprised when they react as Greg Krehbiel did when he converted from Protestantism to the Catholic Faith and discovered that actual Catholic faith (that is, the faith as it actually incarnate in the Church of flesh and blood people) is very different from the diagrams found in cyberspace.

Diagrams are important. But they aren't the whole story. If you only think in terms of diagrams, you will not only overlook, you will often oppose the teaching of John Paul, who said that each man and each woman are the way the Church must walk. If you tend to conceive of the Faith as a mere body of abstractions that must be programmed into each human brain until it is in right working order, you will respond to, say, suggestions that the Church needs to understand the attraction of Pentecostalism by asking, "Why? What does Pentecostalism have to teach the Church?" Note how the person is entirely absent from such a question. Pentecostalism is simply a body of doctrine which are either derived from or corruptions of the Catholic faith. As such, it has nothing to add and can simply be dismissed. The person who believe it--their loves, hopes, fears, yearnings, hates, and idiosyncracies--none of these enter the equation at all. The goal is to defeat Pentecostalism in open combat with the True Faith by logic and argument, not to proclaim Good News, nor to hear the possibility that the Spirit who blows where he wills might have been doing something good in these human beings without our approval.

The gospel speaks to this rather directly:

John answered, "Master, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us." But Jesus said to him, "Do not forbid him; for he that is not against you is for you." (Luke 9:49-50).

None of this is to deny that the fullness of revelation subsists in the Catholic faith. Rather it is to deny that the fullness of revelation subsists in the apologetics subculture.

I reiterate that I'm very glad for the work that the apologetics subculture does in the Church. After all, I do it myself cuz I think it's a vital job. I just want to remind folks that it's not the only job. Sometimes it's good to just get out and take a walk for a while.