Turning to Catholicism-5

This is the fifth and final installment in my review of Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism. Before commenting on excerpts, I'll make some general observations:

1. The format of the book is conversion testimonies. I assume the reason for the format is to make it more sales-worthy. Personal interest stories have popular appeal. But the format is a weakness:

i) You can plug anything into that format. Conversion from Christianity to atheism or atheism to Christianity or Islam to Christianity or Christianity to Islam or Calvinism to Arminianism or Arminianism to Calvinism, and so on and so forth. The convert comes to see the light, regardless of where he began or where he ended. So there's something relativistic about the format.

ii) Having for work through an autobiographical narrative is inefficient. Cut to the chase. I just want to hear their reasons for why they are Catholic. Cut the dead wood. 

iii) But the greatest weakness of that format, given the philosophical slant of the book, is that what matters is the quality of their justification for Roman Catholicism: not the reasons they had for becoming Catholic but the reasons they have for being Catholic. The reasons that trigger conversion may not reflect a more mature assessment. Over the years, you may retain your position, but improve on or replace your initial reasons. 

iv) Perhaps, though, their current reasons are identical with the reasons they had for converting. But that's a problem if you bill yourself as a philosopher. It's like the teenage atheist who, based on his vast research, concludes that Christianity is bunk, and maintains that position for the rest of his life based on that juvenile understaning. 

There are converts who engage in critical self-reflection up to the moment of conversion, but once they convert they don't cease critical self-reflection. They don't engage in ongoing critical self-reflection That's more understandable for the average layman, although many layman would benefit from being more reflective, but it's inexcusable for trained philosophers. 

2. An unintended takeaway of the book is that having a doctorate in philosophy doesn't make you a smart person. The amount of intellectual flabbiness on display in this book is startling. 

Before philosophy became a profession, the only qualification to be a philosopher was an analytical mind, a high capacity for abstract reason. Now it's about credentials. Degree programs. Buttering up mentors. Checking all the boxes for the philosophical fads du jour. 

In general, the most gifted thinkers in any discipline are intellectual mavericks who have difficulty fitting in because they buck the system. They challenge the received wisdom. Ironically, that makes them poor students. They think outside the textbook. By the same token they tend to be poor teachers because they operate on their own wavelength. 

The difference between a philosopher and a philosophy prof. is like the difference between a physicist and a physics prof. Most physics profs. aren't physicists. They simply teach physics. They lack the probing, creative intelligence required to push the boundaries. 

3. The way contributors to this book discount historical evidence that runs counter to Catholic claims parallels atheists who filter reported miracles through methodological naturalism. The Catholic contributors ultimately fall back on their a priori argument for Catholicism. God must have done it our way because the alternative has untoward consequences. It stands to reason that this is how God did it. Like methodological atheists, they install a screen so that counterevidence is never allowed to get through. 

4. Because, with the partial exception of Bryan Cross's Kuhnian argument, the book repeats the same dogeared, flashcard arguments for Catholicism that Catholic apologists always use, I don't really need to comment on the specifics. I've been over this ground many times before. But to give people who haven't read the book a sample, I'll comment on some representative statements. In addition, I sometimes find something new to say even when commenting on a familiar issue. 

I saw the logic of natural law arguments against contraception and was convinced by the historical arguments that Christianity had indeed condemned contraception from the beginning…By the end of the century, Protestants had essentially caved in completely on this issue, and the Eastern Orthodox were increasingly wobbly (51). 

i) Many Catholic philosophers and theologians find the natural law arguments against contraception decidedly illogical. 

ii) In addition, Feser's statement is confused. Prescientific objections to contraception were bundled with objections to abortion because, before developments in 20C medical science, contraception and abortion were inseparable in principle and practice. So while prescientific Christian opposition to contraception was commendable, that's been overtaken by science. We can be more discriminating than our Christian forebears were. 

Yet as we went on, we discovered that Anglicanism was dying and all but dead (72).

i) That's misleading. In context, Budziszewski is referring to the ECUSA in particular rather than Anglicanism in general. 

ii) Actually, Anglicanism is self-renewing. That's true of Protestant theological packages in general (e.g. Baptist, Anabaptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian). There's a distinction between Protestant denominations and the faith-traditions they exemplify. Denominations come and go, but the next generation continues the tradition. Denominations are just vehicles for the faith-traditions they embody. Denominations die out, but the faith-traditions live on by hopping on to a new vehicle. In that regard, the Protestant faith is constantly self-renewing. That's fundamentally different from Catholicism, where there's just one vehicle, even if the wheels are falling off. 

The Reformation had led to tens of thousands of "denominations"…most of them drifting like the wrack of gale-struck ships. According to the Protestant idea, all of them together are the Church. But St. Paul called the Church the  Body of Christ. A bloody arm here, a severed leg there, a torso floating in the river–no matter how many such things were added into the total, they could never make up his Body (73-74).

i) One issue is what Paul meant his metaphor to illustrate. You can't just seize a Bible writer's metaphor and redeploy it to illustrate your own theology. Was Paul using that in contrast to "schism"? Or was he using that to make the point that different Christians have different roles to play in the life of the church, all of which are important? 

ii) In addition, the metaphor isn't simply a metaphor for unity but a metaphor for diversity as well. A body is both one and many. One head, many body parts and organs. So Budziszewski's appeal is arbitrarily lopsided. Paul doesn't prioritize unity over diversity, but holds these in balance. 

…I thought it was clearly desirable to belong, in a substantial and meaningful way, to the historical Church. Somewhat more specifically, I thought that Christian practice should take place within a body that is reasonably continuous with the church of the apostles. The Catholic Church stands in clearly continuity with the church of the apostles in a way that no Protestant communion does (94).

What kind of "continuity"? Historical continuity or continuity in faith? Suppose a castaway is stranded on a desert island. Ransacking the derelict ship for anything useful, he finds a Bible. He never read the Bible before. He has no Christian background. He's a blank slate. But he has nothing else to read, nothing else to pass the time, so he constantly reads that Bible. He becomes a Christian by reading the Bible. He has no historical continuity with the apostolic church, but he shares the faith of the apostolic church. That's what they have in common. 

Historical continuity is a mummified corpse. What's essential is continuity in faith. That transcends time and space. 

  

…I was convinced that there is an urgent practical necessity for a magisterium, for a living teaching authority to resolve disputes that threaten the unity of the church. (We can look to the history of mainline Protestantism over the past few decades for an illustration of this practical necessity) [95].

If that's "an urgent practical necessity," why hasn't God provided compelling evidence? God could make that more convincing by making that more explicit.  

The biblical case against Arianism, for example, is not cut-and-dried, nor is the biblical case in favor of Trinitarian dogma or the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's person (95). 

If that's why you think, why the prior commitment to these dogmas? If they aren't revealed truths, why take them for granted? 

I felt at the time that being a non-Catholic Christian would mean that nearly every theological question would be up for grabs, and that in practice this would mean I would just make  up my own theology from scratch (95-96).

That's dumb. We have 2000 years of historical theology. Begin by considering the theological paradigms already on the table. 

There are of course many visible, this-worldly institutions called "churches", but the Church writ large is an invisible entity made up exclusively of individuals who have a personal relationship with the Lord…a kind of Gnostic ecclesiology (105).

Catholics have a schizoid ecclesiology. They bifurcate "the Church" into two divergent churches: on the one hand is the church that does all the bad stuff. The church with all the corruption, contradictions, and blunders. On the other hand is the spotless Bride of Christ. The pure, indefectible, infallible church.  

They knew that in his High Priestly Prayer Christ's dying wish (as it were) was for the Church to be one as he and the Father were one, so that the world might see their unity as a sign of divine legitimacy and come also to believe (Jn 17). So they took schism deadly seriously, in marked contrast to the apathetic, unruffled attitude displayed by most Evangelical Calvinism (106).

i) Is the kind of unity in the church of Rome the kind of unity Jesus was talking about? 

ii) How does the church of Rome even remotely resemble the unity between the Father and the Son? That's a very damaging comparison if you think about it. 

iii) Is that what the world actually perceives when it views the church of Rome?

I came to realize (gradually) that I was a heretic–that "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual" was Gnosticism, the oldest and most harmful heresy in Christian history. God never told us to be "spiritual"; he told us to be "holy" (132).

That's pretty rich coming from a sect with the dogma of Mary's perpetual virginity, including her in partu virginity. Not to mention the whole ascetic tradition. A body-denigrating, world-denigrating piety. As a noted art historian observed:

The symbols by which early mediaeval art acknowledged the existence of natural objects bore unusually little relation to their actual appearance. But they satisfied the mediaeval mind. To some extent they were the outcome of mediaeval Christian philosophy. If our earthly life is no more than a brief and squalid interlude, then the surroundings in which it is lived need not absorb our attention. If ideas are Godlike and sensations debased, then our rendering of appearances must as far as possible be symbolic, and nature, which we perceive through our senses, becomes positively sinful. St. Anselm, writing at the beginning of the twelfth century, maintained that things were harmful in proportion to the number of senses which they delighted, and therefore rated it dangerous to sit in a garden where there are roses to satisfy the senses of sight and smell, and songs and stories to please the ears. Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art (Harper and Row 1986), 3.

There's always been this tension in Catholic theology. On the one hand the cult of virginity and the ascetic ideal. On the other hand, the sensuous riot of Baroque and Rococo churches and music. 

But then I confronted the historical fact that it was the Church (the apostles) that wrote the Bible (the NT), and I knew that there could not possibly be more in any effect than in its cause, so if they Church did not have infallibility, as Protestants maintained, then the Bible didn't either (134).

Ironic how Peter Kreeft commits the composition fallacy. Shouldn't a philosophy prof. be alert to such an elementary fallacy? 

And how could we be sure that the four Gospels we had were true and the many others (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas, or of Judas) were not (134)?

That's just so willfully obtuse. He doesn't even try to think through the issue. For starters, the Gospels of Thomas and Judas are necessarily spurious since they were written far too late to be authentic. Judas and Thomas had been dead for many decades. Does Kreeft bother to do the most rudimentary research? This is village atheist fare.  

The doctrine that blew me away the most was the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Not a single Christian denied it for one thousand years…How could the Holy Spirit have fallen asleep so badly for 1500 years that he let all Christians commit this ridiculous and egregious idolatry (145)? 

i) So we have polling data for what every single Christian believed for the first thousand years of church history. Where is that archived?

ii) Does the fact that Jews overwhelmingly reject Jesus mean the Holy Spirit has been napping? Does the fact that the real presence is widely rejected since the Reformation mean the Holy Spirit has been napping for the last 500 years?

In college, while already exploring things Catholic…I listened  to the sacred music of Palestrina for the first time…Clearly, this could only have come from angels, not mortals (I mean that literally.) It was the music of heaven…I loved the old Protestant hymns and still do; they are good water for thirsty souls, but this–this was great wine (140).

i) So heaven has Palestrina. Where does that leave Black Gospel music? In Purgatory or hell?

ii) How is it honest to compare Palestrina to Protestant hymnody? What about comparing Palestrina to Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn–among others?  

A third Catholic surprise was reading my first Catholic saint. It was St. John of the Cross…I followed it up with the works by other Catholic saints: Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux; and Therese, the "little Flower"; as well as the classic Catholic works by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection…Why don't we have saints and believers like that?(140-41).

So the standard for saintliness are monks and nuns. Not devout fathers and mothers, husbands and wives. Isn't that a "Gnostic" ideal of piety? 

If the Catholics are wrong, then they've invented the most idiotic idolatry in history, worshipping wine and bowing down to bread as if it was God. That's an either-or as stark as Christ's claim to divinity: if it is false, it's fantastically false, and if it's true, it's terribly true. It's also like the Church's claim about herself: a tremendous truth if it's true and blatantly blasphemous if it's false. No other Christian church claims the infallibility and authority she does…The Catholic dogma about the Eucharist fit the same pattern (145-46).

That's a good way of putting it. 

I quickly learned that the disputed books were present in the Septuagint manuscript tradition…This shocked me, since I knew the Septuagint was the OT of the apostles and early Christians… (160-61).

i) That's like saying the Bible of a missionary is the translation he uses. 

ii) He commits a classic blunder by equating the books in a codex with the canon. For one corrective: 

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/codex-and-canon.html

In a bootstrapping maneuver, many Christians claim that the Bible establishes its own canon (164).

How about the bootstrapping maneuver Catholics apologists use to establish "the Church"? 

They can't use anything outside the canon itself lest they imply that it has authority over the canon (thus violating sola scriptura). [166]

When the disciples used their senses to recognize the Risen Lord, did that imply that sensory perception has authority over Jesus? 

Jesus left us an institution–people filling offices with derived authority–rather than a book (166).

How does he know that. Did he read it somewhere? Which book would that be?

The Church teaches that Christ gave to the apostles an office that had powers that include the power to make Christ truly present in the Eucharist (236).

That's what his sect teaches. That's not what the NT teaches. There's nothing in the NT about the bread and wine changing into the body and blood of Christ. 

Our Episcopal church in Waco used leavened bread for communion. One day, the bread was particularly dry, and so it was crumbling as people were receiving communion with crumbs falling on the ground. People ignored the crumbs that were accumulating on the ground; some crumbs may have even been walked on by people. The crumbs remained there until the end of the service. After the service, Lindsay, a friend of ours, and I went up and picked up the crumbs. We weren't sure if Christ was really present in the full sense at that point, but we thought that if he was, then just leaving him on the ground to be walked on was irreverent. From this experience, I could see that the Anglican and Episcopal lack of clarity on the nature of the eucharist had important practical ramifications. I was, for that reason, attracted to the Catholic Church's claim that God has provided a clear teaching on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and a corresponding clear standard for how the Eucharist should be treated (237). 

I commented on this before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/07/quantum-transubstantiation.html

Now I'd like to make a different point: the practical ramifications of transubstantiation include all the Jews who were murdered on charges of Host desecration.