https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyLm7OHaOaw
Transcript:
I have been accused in the comments on some of my videos, more than a few times, of being someone who relies too much on human logic and reason and not enough on scripture or revelation to make my case.
Or if that accusation isn’t made outright, I’ll often see complaints from people saying that I didn’t cite any or enough bible verses and that this is a typical problem with Catholics – we aren’t fluent enough in the Bible so we have to rely on fallible human logic.
And whenever this accusation arises, it’s usually at the hands of someone who is clearly aligned with a protestant theological position. And not all protestants would be motivated by this instinct, but for those that are, I would say they come by it honestly as something inherited from a tradition of thought that goes all the way back to Luther.
Before I progress in my commentary, I wanted to say that it’s easy to lament the apparent decline of the influence of the Church and Christian culture today. It seems like any time Christians try to do something worthwhile it’s always second rate to what secular culture offers – some Christian movies come to mind.
Which is why when someone puts something out that is of a high calibre, I want to see it succeed and that’s the case with this video’s sponsor, Sophia Institute Press.
They’ve just released this board game called Inspiration!. And I have to say, I was blown away by the depth of creativity and quality that went into this thing. The artwork, the packaging, and the content aren’t just good for what you might expect from a “Catholic boardgame” but from a standard that you might expect from anything in this genre.
There’s a whole adventure theme to it that let’s you assume these character roles and then engage in a collaborative strategy with other players.
And there’s this whole educational dimension to it where players are challenged by their knowledge of science, history, and the Church’s role and influence in both.
And I’m no scholar, but I don’t think I’m a slouch in those things either, but I was reading through some of the trivia cards and I was definitely learning things I didn’t know.
So, if you’re still looking for a gift idea but you’ve noticed that options that promote healthy and productive forms of leisure are scarce, then take a look at Inspiration from Sophia Institute Press and be encouraged that you’ll also be supporting a worthwhile initiative and Catholic organization.
I’ll leave links where you can find it in the description and in the comments for this video. [i]
Early in my own conversion to Christianity, and before I became Catholic, I became aware of some of the competing claims between Protestantism and Catholicism. One of the things that Protestants would say about Catholicism is that it had, at some point, become infected by paganism which is why it’s so ritualistic and why its theology goes beyond the essentials of the Bible.
And I have to admit, the first time I encountered St. Thomas Aquinas was in one of his proofs for the existence of God and I remember thinking, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t sound Christian… at all. It doesn’t sound like something you’d read in the Bible.
St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica is considered, by many, to be the absolute zenith of Catholic Scholasticism which was a system of philosophy and theology that relied a lot on Aristotelian logic and Aristotle was, of course, a pagan, philosopher of Ancient Greece.
And at face value, for someone like me encountering theology for the first time as a new convert, that didn’t sit right. That seemed to confirm what Protestants were saying about this infection of the Church with pagan thought. It sounded like Catholicism had sold out to outside influences.
And that never did sit quite right with me, but I noticed that Protestants, in the various churches I attended as I explored the variations of Christianity whether they be liberal mainline or conservative evangelical, were all doing something that I strongly sympathized with and which could be compared to what they were condemning in Catholicism.
Something I really admired about Protestants was how engaged they were with the culture around them. They were very deliberate about finding ways to reach out to the culture around them and make Christianity more accessible to non-Christians.
And to anyone who pays attention to Christ’s great commission to evangelize, this really resonated with me but what I saw Protestants doing was finding ways to build common ground with secular culture by making concessions to it.
So, in liberal Protestantism, I saw what CS Lewis called Christianity and water. They were diluting their doctrines so that their teachings would be more compatible with the sensibilities of the existing cultural climate.
In conservative evangelical Protestantism, I saw a similar dynamic expressed in a different way. Instead of compromising on their doctrines, they were compromising on their worship or what might be called liturgy. They recognized that when the secular world gathers in big groups for things like concerts, there are things like stage lighting, and smoke machines, and sound systems with bands.
And so, they got rid of their choirs, their organs, their pews, and their pulpits, and replaced them with elements that would be more recognizable in a secular stage production.
In both ends of this spectrum, we see an attempt to make Christianity more relevant to non-Christians, but relevance isn’t a virtue and it isn’t something that we see encouraged anywhere in scripture. GK Chesterton called it a degrading slavery.
The challenge with both of these approaches is that they require a concession, they require that some essential limb of the Church be amputated in order for it to be more approachable to the outside culture. Either it’s cultural worship or it’s doctrines and beliefs.
But I would argue that neither of these work in the end and that this is exactly what many have accused the Catholic Church of doing which is selling out to the surrounding culture.
The analogy that comes to mind is like a fitness trainer who looks around at society and sees a major health crisis stemming from our sedentary lifestyle.
But nobody wants to go to the Gym and get in shape because it takes a lot of discipline and time, it hurts, and it’s much more fun to watch TV and eat McDonalds.
So this same fitness trainer decides promote a fitness regimen that is way easier to accomplish. It won’t make you sore the day after and it won’t take nearly as much time as previous incarnations would have.
And so, people come because this sounds great. You can get fit without spending much effort or time. But then they discover they aren’t getting the results they were promised and grow disillusioned.
Sacrificing essential aspects of the Church’s character isn’t the way to evangelize, but there is a third way and it’s what the Apostles and the Church fathers did. They encountered a Greco-Roman culture that didn’t understand them and they couldn’t just start quoting scripture at them to evangelize them because the pagans didn’t accept the authority of scripture.
So instead of sacrificing something of their own, they added something that they recognized as a good and common to all people – our faculty of reason. They recognized the intellectual tradition of the ancient Greeks and Romans and integrated it into their own tradition.
Reason became the bridge that the outside world could cross that they might encounter Christ. And this intellectual tradition persisted throughout the Church’s history until Luther took a hostile reactionary approach to it out of a misguided sense that the Church had lost her identity by allowing Plato and Aristotle in.
But that’s not what happened. The Church was just following the example of St. Peter who wrote that we should always be prepared to provide a REASON for the hope that we have. And St. Paul who engaged in feverish debate with the Athenians at the Areopagus.
And the apostles of the apostles who took up this effort. People like St. Justin Martyr and St. Ignatius of Antioch.
So when people accuse me of relying too much on human logic, my reply is that I’m appealing to what is shared between the Church and those who do not yet believe. We’re not going to convince Atheists to believe in Jesus by quoting scripture at them. We first have to offer them a bridge based on something that is common to all people, and that is through the use of reason.