Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Do We Need Full-Time Apologists?

Every so often I peruse the New Advent website for the latest from the neo-conservative Catholic clique. Between the Fr. Longenecker and Fr. Zuhl posts, and the “Everything in the Vatican is Fine” stories, one occasionally finds a new article from the retired president of Catholic Answers, Karl Keating. Most recently, he has been writing about why Fundamentalist Protestants should be okay with sacramentals, and how they hypocritically use them even while denying this.

It all seems rather overbearingly redundant. Keating has written so many of the same types of books and articles against Fundamentalists that I’m surprised the CA blog editors haven’t just republished his old work. In spite of his international travels and hiking expeditions—all publicized on Facebook—he seems to be bored enough to scribble out more tracts against dying heretical sects. It feels obsessive, much like the fact that he took the time in his later years to write a 366-page complaint against a fellow who used too much soy sauce with his meal.

All of which brings me to my major question: Should people be treating apologetics as a full-time job? I am not questioning the necessity of apologetics nor the need of learned people to be taking significant amounts of time engaging intellectually with attacks against the Faith, but the decision of laymen to devote much or most of their time to such engagements appears to be a recent phenomenon. Ever since the creation of the Catholic Evidence Guild in 1918, their peculiar method of public interaction with anti-Catholic rhetoric has been the norm in apologetics circles.

The work of apologetics used to be shouldered by men who lived primarily other avocations. They engaged in apologetics as necessary, but not as a full-time career, whether that be in the form of public speakers in Hyde Park, radio broadcasters, or bloggers. Many of the best apologists were not just apologists—Augustine was a bishop, Thomas Aquinas a monk and philosopher, Blaise Pascal a mathematician and inventor, G.K. Chesterton a journalist and novelist, Ronald Knox a priest and schoolmaster, Peter Kreeft a university professor, and so on. Even C.S. Lewis, the best Protestant apologist of recent memory, was chiefly a scholar, professor, poet, and novelist.

The greatest apologists were men who lived lives of broad interest and learning, who made their livings in other ways, much as how St. Paul paid for his own expenses by tentmaking. The men who focus all their intellect and livelihood on the defense of the Faith are apt to end up with middling obsessions. One needs only to look at current figures like E. Michael Jones, Michael Voris, Mark Shea, Karl Keating, and a thousand full-time bloggers to see the proof of this. I always worry when a Catholic blogger announces he has decided to devote all his time to defending the Church against atheists/neo-Catholics/Democrats/rad-trads/Fundamentalists/Choose-Your-Poison; within five years I expect him to be foaming at the mouth with a tiny readership, yelling in an unseemly way at his chosen target.

Go outside. Read a novel. Plant a garden. Visit Europe. Go fishing. Write a poem. Play a video game. Find something else to occupy your time in between your job and your intermittent apologetical engagements. Chesterton could not have written Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man without losing his sense of humor had he not spent his leisure time drinking wine, wandering the streets of London, and smoking good cigars. Full-time apologists end up either as obsessed extremists or as religious businessmen, which is what usually happens in the Protestant world (as with Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, Lee Strobel, and Hank Hanegraaff). When apologists start selling tickets to “Learn Your Faith” sea cruises, simony has found its foothold.

8 comments:

  1. I think some apologists think that if they don't write what they write then the truth can not be known and while I enjoy reading some of the articles they write, there is a serious lack of levity.

    O, and speaking just for me, when I was in London and Hyde Park I told the Bride about Frank Sheed. I would have loved to have had a pint or two and listen to both the apology and mocking of it.

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    1. Sheed was an intriguing figure, an odd mix of stuffy Thomism and yet constantly defending the aggiornamento of the times. He tried very hard to mesh the spirit of Vatican II with older Catholic teaching, much like Ratzinger continued to do over the decades.

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  2. Many of the early 20th century "apologists" like Knox, Chesterton, Belloc, and even Fulton Sheen wrote either about religious topics or current events from a Catholic perspective, which is more appealing to those outside the Church and better teaches them the thinking instinct of the Church than protracted treatises on "Why you should agree with me."

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    1. I think that the straight-apologetics approach does work for some strains of Evangelicalism, since they are used to that type of narrow argumentation without the benefit of a larger social/cultural framework. Giving a Catholic Answers book to a Calvinist might work, for instance, but it would likely not benefit an Anglican or a Lutheran.

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  3. Street preachers are reappearing in some major cities. In West Palm Beach Fl there is a former Catholic who shows-up outside the Framer's Market and he takes his position on the sidewalk and begins to spout various accusations against the Church.

    I walked up to him last year and tried to start a conversation - I spoke at the same level as he was- and he was not amused; "This is my spot and time and I don't have time for fools like you"

    Ha!!

    So, I stayed, countering his every accusation, until he just slinked off.

    Part of me was hoping for a fight, to tell you the truth.

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    1. MJ, I don't know you, but I like you. Something about your post appeals to the USMC in me. Omne bonum!

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    2. I agree! He is my favorite Catholic theologian!

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  4. Capreolus. Thank you, Sir. That comment was quite bracing.

    Rad Trad. Well, that is quite humbling coming from a man I am well known for admiring and promoting. I wonder is it is too early for a celebratory glass of Chartreuse?

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