The Bryan Cross Treadmill

Darryl Hart should know better. Maybe Protestants who discuss things with Bryan Cross will learn at the outset that it's best to treat him as a hostile witness.

Bryan can't discuss anything with Protestants, because anything a Protestant says is "begging the question" because it proceeds from a Sola Scriptura point of view. (Never mind that anything he says from "the Catholic paradigm" is begging the question from our point of view).

So he comes up with the notion that we can discuss a "paradigm" that can be discussed on its own merits, where he doesn't feel compelled to say "begging the question" all the time.

But he has now turned this around, so that someone like Hart disagreeing with his "paradigm" ends up "unaware that it is a caricature of the Catholic position." That's the gist of Bryan's response to this Hart post.

This seems to be Bryan's own version of the sacramental treadmill.

In a post entitled the Sin Paradigm, Hart noted:

If human beings really are dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul describes them in Ephesians 2, the agape paradigm doesn’t make a lot of sense. We might cooperate with grace all we want, we might do works that show a genuine faith, but what if we still have a sinful nature? This was part of the doubt that haunted Luther....

After a few comparative citations of the Baltimore Catechism (about 1900) and the Heidelberg Catechism, he asks:

the extent and depth of sin seems to be a category not sufficiently considered in the ongoing debates about how we become right with God, whether by faith alone or by a faith that has within it charity of love which will produce good works and will unite us with God. Those wonder-working aspects of the agape paradigm do not address the real problem of sinfulness and God’s just demand for a perfect righteousness. We may love till we’re blue in the face, but given our sinfulness and the ongoing sin in believers’ lives, how do we know if we have really loved enough?

Bryan Cross, as he usually does, responded to Hart almost immediately:

Hart claims that “if human beings really are dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul describes them in Ephesians 2, the agape paradigm doesn’t make a lot of sense.” However, he doesn’t explain how the apodosis of that conditional follows from the protasis.

If you don't really have a good explanation, use big words that will impress the peanut gallery.

Bryan again:

He seems to think that “having a sin nature” is somehow problematic for the agape paradigm, but he doesn’t explain how or why.

Hart's real objection is: We may love till we’re blue in the face, but given our sinfulness and the ongoing sin in believers’ lives, how do we know if we have really loved enough?

Noting that Hart's repsonse "is a kind of ad hominem, he notes that he has previously addressed that objection:

The problem with the argument is not the structure of the argument, but its claim that the position it is criticizing is the Catholic position. This is why it has traction only for persons unaware that it is a caricature of the Catholic position.

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The whole "agape paradigm" is not "THE" Catholic position. For Bryan, here, the "agape paradigm" in the hands of a Protestant who is disagreeing with it is merely chasing his tail, because it's not really "THE CATHOLIC POSITION".