It looks like Prejean's favorite ploy is to lure some unsuspecting Evangelical onto his own turf by debating Nicene Christology, and refinements thereof, where he feels confident of his superior historical expertise. He's attempting to discredit his theological opponent by branding him a heretic.
This is, however, a suicide mission. For in order to brand most evangelicals as heretical, Prejean must also brand most of his fellow Catholics as heretical. I mean, you’ve got to wonder just how many of the Mexicans who mow his lawn and weed his garden happen to have read Wessel’s Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy.
Don't you suppose that most lay Catholics and not a few priests are heretics by his benchmark?
So he's using this neutrino bomb to kill off his Evangelical opponents—a WMD which happens to have the unfortunate side-effect of annihilating most-all of his fellow Catholics in the process. So he wins by making both sides lose.
No, that’s not quite correct, either. He only wins by making his own side lose. For a Protestant, the acid test of orthodoxy is not Nicene Christology, but Biblical Christology.
I've got a response up; we may be in closer agreement on the actual quarrel than you think.
ReplyDeletehttp://crimsoncatholic.blogspot.com/2005/08/steve-hays-gets-it-right-again.html
To briefly summarize that response, my objection currently is solely that the terms "unhistorical" and "unverifiability" are being used hypocritically in place of substantive philosophical arguments. I do not, however, pretend that those philosophical discussions are easy or that there is no room for judgment on those matters. I simply want the same consideration for my views; I don't want them dismissed on parochial (and unexamined) philosophical presuppositions masquerading as appeals to objective historical criteria.
I take issue with the notion of labeling views as heresy to "discredit" my opponents. I am not accusing people of inconsistency for denying Nicene Christology; I am calling them heretics for doing so. They are not obligated to believe Nicene Christology, but they are obligated to own up to the denial if the facts demand it. As with the correct usage of terminology, I only want the discussion to be responsibly above board in terms of making plain what it is that everyone believes and what the current state of the scholarship is on these subjects.
My goal isn't to make the other guy look bad; it's just to lay all of the facts on the table for both sides so that people can make their own judgments. When people start holding out their personal conclusions (as opposed to a reasonably comprehensive survey of the relevant literature) as facts, that's a problem.