The sad state of Catholic anti-intellectualism

Jonathan Prejean has now sallied forth once more from his on-again/off-again retirement to wage war on no fewer than four different fronts: Jason Engwer, the Pedantic Protestant, D. T. King, and yours truly.

1.Prejean takes issue with the PP’s charge that the Catholics he has known have an amateurish grasp of Scripture.

The problem here is that you have two kinds of Catholics. On the one hand, there are those with a very competent command of exegesis. These are scholars like Ray Brown, Murphy-O’Connor, Joseph Fitzmyer, and L. T. Johnson, to name a few.

They’re liberal by evangelical standards, but they ask the right questions of the text and they often give the right answers.

Problem is: what they say doesn’t make a dent in Catholic theology. It doesn’t feed into Catholic theology. Catholic dogma is driven by historical theology rather than exegetical theology. Catholicism committed itself to certain positions a long time ago, and these are not subject to revision in light of better exegesis. The Catholic church only turns to Scripture to legitimate a preexisting practice or belief. It doesn’t derive its practice or belief from direct interaction with the text of Scripture. And even if it did, a dogmatic misinterpretation is irreformable.

The other kind of Catholics follow from the first kind. Because they know that tradition is the steam engine and Scripture is the caboose, they don’t bother to have a competent grasp of Scripture. They have no incentive to ask the right questions. They simply go through the motions of appealing to Scripture.

As Kung said of Rahner:
“A second fundamental defect in Rahner’s theology also becomes evident to me: the lack of historical-critical exegesis. Rahner once laughingly advised a student known to me that it was enough to go to lectures on exegesis for one or two semesters; but in the end dogmatics was decisive,” My Struggle With Freedom (Eerdmans 2003), 252.

2.Prejean also brings up St. Jerome in this connection. That’s an ill-chosen choice to illustrate his position. Evangelicals have great respect for Jerome. Because he lived in the Holy Land, because he studied with rabbis there, he’s a useful source of information.

Evangelicals agree with Jerome’s argument for the Jewish canon of the OT. Evangelicals also agree with Jerome’s exegetical defense of Daniel’s prophecies (I own a copy of his commentary), whereas Benedict XVI has sided with Porphyry, the great pagan opponent of the Christian faith. The only reason to agree with Porphyry is if you share his worldview.

So I appreciate Prejean’s high regard for Jerome, and if he happens to have the Pope’s email address, perhaps he could encourage Benedict XVI to recover that same measure of respect for Jerome’s exegesis.

3.Prejean then levels the accusation that “These people aren't capable of questioning Scriptural authority, and that's an intellectual weakness.”

i) This is a very simplistic allegation. To begin with, it is a fact of life, and a very striking fact indeed, that many men and women come to the faith by merely reading the Bible. That’s it. Nothing more. Just reading the Bible is sufficient for many to engender faith in the Bible. The Bible, all by its little lonesome, has that kind of persuasive power.

And if, in fact, the Bible is the word of God, then one would expect it to have that inherent power to persuade.

And, as a practical matter, it could hardly be otherwise. Most Christians are not intellectuals.

So what are we to do with all these Christians, and they’re not all Protestant, by any means, who find that they can’t help believing in the Bible? That they have this spontaneous and irrepressible faith in Scripture? They cannot not believe in Scripture. They simply find it compelling and convincing as is, period.

And there’s nothing all that unusual about this. Belief is essentially involuntary. We don’t will ourselves to believe or disbelieve. Belief is not a sheer act of the will. Rather, we are predisposed to believe certain things when presented with suitable evidence. The combination of the evidence with the predisposition automatically triggers a believing state of mind. And the same evidence presented to a jaundiced observer will trigger disbelief.

ii) Which brings us to the next point. For other Christians it isn’t all that simple. They come to the Bible with certain preconceptions which form an intellectual impediment to faith. Until the impediment is removed, this is a mental block to faith in Scripture.

These individuals need explicit reasons, corroborative evidence, and answers to their objections. This is all the more so given the cottage industry we’ve had since the Enlightenment to discredit the claims of Scripture at every turn.

iii) In addition, some people are temperamentally prone to self-doubt, which spills over in religious doubts of one degree or another. They also benefit from supporting arguments and supporting evidence. Feelings are feeble, fickle things, but reasons have a certain tenacity to them.

4.Prejean next takes aim at the doctrine of inerrancy:
“That's why I consider the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy so incredibly implausible; I can't imagine how I could credit the truth of propositional content based solely on authority.”

This totally misses the point. The Chicago Statement was never intended to make a case for inerrancy. It was framed at a time when various Evangelical institutions like Fuller Seminary, the SBC, and the LCMS were mainstreaming and liberalizing.

The purpose of the Chicago Statement was to clarify the boundaries of inerrancy, of what inerrancy allows and disallows. It was designed to eliminate certain loopholes and rebut certain red-herrings.

The Chicago Statement presupposes the inerrancy of Scripture rather than proving it. By definition, only Bible-believing Christians would ever subscribe to the Chicago Statement. In these respects it has the same functions and limitations as any other creed.

If you’re looking for an argument as to why we should subscribe to the doctrine of Scripture formulated in the Chicago Statement, you will have to look elsewhere.

BTW, I don’t see that Pius IX or Leo XIII would have had any great difficulty being signatories to the Chicago Statement. The fact that Prejean doesn’t like it is symptomatic of the triumph of modernism in the Catholic church today.

5.Finaly, Prejean says:
“This whole "damned if you do; damned if you don't" matter of anti-Catholic stereotyping is pretty incredible. If I'm intellectually curious, then I'm "speculating beyond the bounds of Biblical authority," and yet, I'm simultaneously supposed to be so incurious that I accept whatever the Magisterium tells me.”

Actually, the arguments that Jason and I and the PP (I can’t speak for King) have had with Jonathan have next to nothing to do with the authority of Scripture.

For the most part our debates were over the proper hermeneutic to use when interpreting a document from the past. A guy like James Barr, who has zero respect for the authority of Scripture, employs the grammatico-historical method no less than does the Evangelical inerrantist.

Again, Prejean is free to speak for himself, but in my many exchanges with Roman Catholics on the Internet, it’s just like talking to a Mormon or J-Dub. They give me their reasons for what they believe. I critique their reasons, on their own grounds. They then reply by simply repeating their original reasons—like a prerecorded message.

But even this is a cut above Prejean, who gives no reasons at all, but spends all his time prepositioning himself for the perfect playoff, which—conveniently enough--never comes.