In this episode Trent provides a critical review of the new book American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today on the podcast, I want to do a book review. We’re going to talk about this book, American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism by Sean Swain Martin. So, Martin is an assistant professor of religious studies at Viterbo University in Wisconsin. And the book appears to be based on if not identical to a dissertation he published at the University of Dayton to receive a PhD in theology.
Trent Horn:
So, I thought it was fascinating. I saw this prospective dissertation like a year or two ago, probably a year ago. I was searching for resources online. And I came across this dissertation was going to be published. And back then, I mean, the dissertation was called Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism. And I thought, “Wow, I actually can’t wait for this dissertation to be republished,” because I want to see how somebody can argue that Scott Hahn is a fundamentalist.
Trent Horn:
In the academic world, if not the larger world, fundamentalist is kind of a dirty word. It’s a way to just disparage someone and say, “They have nothing useful to contribute. They’re just a fundamentalist. They don’t believe in rigorous, intellectual, critical analysis of things, for example. They’re just a fundamentalist.”
Trent Horn:
And in my experience of Dr. Hahn, both in reading his works and being one of his students, and personally collaborating with him and putting on apologetics conferences at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Scott Hahn is not a fundamentalist. He is a conservative Catholic scholar, but he backs up his work with a lot of great research.
Trent Horn:
And unlike a lot of scholars, and this theme is going to come up more here in the review, Dr. Hahn is great at talking to other scholars. He will write academic works that are very rigorous, like his book, Kinship by Covenant, which is published by Yale University Press, politicizing the Bible that is a mammoth brick of a book that covers biblical criticism from the year 1300 to the year 1700.
Trent Horn:
But what makes Dr. Hahn amazing is that he also writes excellent popular level books. So, he could take what he wrote, and let’s say Kinship by Covenant, and distill it down into a widely accessible popular level book, like A Father Who Keeps His Promises, where Scott explains his covenant theology, in terms that any layperson can understand. That’s the genius of a good scholar, someone who can talk to other scholars, but also can talk to laypeople without being condescending towards them. And so, I would say Hahn is definitely not a fundamentalist.
Trent Horn:
Now, obviously, I’m going to be biased in my review of this because Dr. Hahn is a friend, a colleague, a mentor, but I don’t think that he’s perfect. I don’t think he’s infallible. Dr. Hahn would definitely say, he’s not infallible. And people can make legitimate critiques of his work. And I’ve seen people make critiques of different things that Hahn has put out over the years. What’s interesting is that those legitimate critiques, I’ll talk about those a little bit later here in the review, those actually don’t show up in this book. Instead, what Martin critiques it’s this is just a very poor book and poor dissertation overall.
Trent Horn:
And I was actually excited. I wanted to see a very rigorous approach that might give me some new insights. But if this book just is Martin’s dissertation, it is one of the worst dissertations that I’ve ever read. And I’m not being hyperbolic about this. I mean, you can look at the book, it’s really thin. A lot of dissertations will be about 80,000, 100,000 words. This book, I’d say, I don’t know, maybe 40, 50, at best, probably more like 40. It’s barely over 100 pages. And a lot of the page count is just merely summarizing what Scott Hahn has said. And there’ll be pages and pages and pages of summary. And then I find X troubling.
Trent Horn:
So, the arguments are very concise. I have read books that are this short, like 100 pages that are very dense, philosophical, or theological treatments that get right to the point. But this just doesn’t. Also, I know, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I can’t help but do so in this case. Now, I do want to let you know, if you ever see a book and you just hate the cover, or you hate what is written on the back of the book, please know that unless the book was self-published, it’s probably not the author’s fault.
Trent Horn:
I’ve had people tell me … I sought an online review. I knew that this book by Trent Horn was terrible after reading the back of it. And I wanted to reply under them, I didn’t write what was on the back of the book. The publisher does that. Sometimes the publisher will say, “Hey, can you give me some back copy?” But a lot of cases, I just trust Catholic Answers or Ignatius Press, just to write it for me. But in this case, it’s odd. So, the subtitle is the dissertation title from Martin, that’s from him. Scott Hahn, The Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism. The title of the book is American Pope.
Trent Horn:
And the cover is a picture of a monstrance with a eucharistic host in it, probably taken at Eucharist during adoration. And when I opened the whole thing, you can see that the host is put over the spine of the book. And it has the title American Pope stamped over the host itself, over our Lord. So, I just thought that the cover itself was a little bit in poor taste. So, not a great start. But I’m willing to overlook that if that was just the publisher’s fault rather than Martin’s. Then I dove into the book and I was disappointed.
Trent Horn:
So, what I want to do today is go through and share with you my review of this book. And I think in doing so, I’ll be able to point out different theological controversies and how some people in academia will try to make a mountain out of a molehill or they’re trying to make conservative Catholic scholars look bad so that people won’t look at their work. And that’s just difficulty. I’m not saying that that’s what Martin is necessarily trying to do here. But I just found that most of his critique was without merit. And so, sometimes it’s fun just to dive into things and see where they go wrong.
Trent Horn:
So, I’m going to share with you a little bit from the review that I wrote. Originally, I was planning to write just a 1200-word review to publish on the Catholic Answers website. But as it went on, I found so many things wrong with the book, my reviews stretched out to about 6000 words. So, now I’m trying to find a suitable venue to publish it in, so be on the lookout for that. But let’s jump right into my review.
Trent Horn:
First, I found it really odd that Martin does not critique Hahn’s academic work. So, he doesn’t cite Kinship by Covenant Politicizing the Bible, or one of the scholarly articles that Hahn has written where he goes into the very fine points of an argument for other scholars. Instead, Martin offers criticisms of four of Hahn’s popular level books. And so, there’s four chapters in this book on Hahn. And each of the chapters is really focused on kind of really nitpicky complaints about four of Hahn’s popular level works.
Trent Horn:
That would be Reasons to Believe, his book on apologetics, The Lamb’s Supper, his book on the Eucharist and the mass, Covenant and Communion, which would be Dr. Hahn study of the biblical theology of Pope Benedict XVI, and The First Society, which is a book about how the sacrament of marriage is necessary to restore Western civilization. And so, he critiques those things.
Trent Horn:
And then another thing that’s difficult is his thesis is basically that Scott Hahn is a fundamentalist. But Martin waits until the last chapter, chapter four, to define what a fundamentalist actually is. So, the next three chapters, he just offers these critiques of things in Hahn’s work, but he doesn’t say what a fundamentalist is or how that would show that Hahn is a fundamentalist. Now, when we finally do get to the end of the book and he offers that definition, it’s so broad that it would undermine his entire project. It would reveal that Martin himself is a fundamentalist. I’ll show why when we get to chapter four.
Trent Horn:
So, let’s go through each of the chapters. And I’m not going to be able to go through every single error that is in this book, but I want to talk about the notable ones because they will form nice springboards to talk about a wide variety of topics. So, chapter one of the book is called The Life and Thought of Scott Walker Hahn. And so, it kind of serves as a summary of Hahn’s autobiography. It talks about his conversion story, talks about the books that he’s published, but it kind of goes on and on and on talking about this, which is fine, except this book is very short.
Trent Horn:
So, as I was reading the first chapter, it was like that episode of The Simpsons, where Homer is the new character on the cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy, his name is Poochie, and they add him to the show. And in the plot, Itchy and Scratchy, the cartoon cat and mouse are trying to go to a fireworks factory where mayhem is going to happen, and then Poochie shows up and derails it. And Milhouse is off to the side saying, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”
Trent Horn:
Because when I was reading the first chapter, I’m like, “When is he going to get to Scott Hahn being a fundamentalist.” And so, he finally gets set around pages 23 and 24. And he says that Hahn’s approach to apologetics and his approach to conversion is kind of evidence of his fundamentalism. That he doesn’t like the Scott Hahn was alone in a library reading a bunch of books before his conversion.
Trent Horn:
He says that Hahn’s approach to winning over people with proofs of Christianity is, “at tension,” with the tradition with the Catholic tradition, which I thought was really, really odd. Being an apologist, someone who has read histories of apologetics to say, using proofs of the faith to help other people to become Catholic, how could that be a tension with the Catholic tradition, that is the Catholic tradition.
Trent Horn:
He then makes this comparison and he compares Dr. Hahn with Cardinal Henry Newman, and he compares Hahn to Newman’s conversion. And he tries to make this claim that Cardinal Henry Newman was really into reading books just like Hahn. But Newman was humble and eventually just gave up trying to study and use arguments to become Catholic and just gave himself over to the humble wisdom of a simple priests. This is what Martin says about Cardinal Henry Newman.
Trent Horn:
That Newman, this is the 19th century convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, who published an essay on the development of doctrine. So, probably one of the most famous converts to Catholicism in history, at least in the modern world. So, he says that Newman left a book unfinished, gave over his prideful belief in his absolute self-sufficiency, and turn to a simple holy man, a local priest, and asked of him admission into the One Fold of Christ.
Trent Horn:
And he picks out a line in Newman’s autobiography where Newman says, he said, “I had to make up my mind for myself. Others could not help me. Had it not been for this severe resolve, I should have been a Catholic sooner than I was.” And so, he’s saying that Newman did something wrong and trying to study a bunch. And that if you just gave up your pride and listen to the humble wisdom of friends or a priest, that would be better than trying to do apologetics.
Trent Horn:
So, Martin then asks rhetorically at the end of the chapter of Scott Hahn, where then in the story of his own journey of faith does Hahn turn away from confidence in his own abilities to fall upon the wisdom and strength of others? So, Scott Hahn is a prideful fundamentalist because he liked going to the library and read. This is just a really bizarre criticism for multiple reasons. Number one, it assumes that Dr. Hahn never actually spoke to a Catholic about Catholicism prior to becoming Catholic, which seems absurd to me.
Trent Horn:
Number two, it also makes it seem like okay, you should just give up critical thinking and just do whatever a local priest or the Catholic friends you meet, just follow whatever advice they give you. But if you applied that universally, that could justify leaving Catholicism to turn yourself over to the humble wisdom of a Protestant pastor or a rabbi or an imam at a local mosque. We shouldn’t be prideful and think that we have all of the answers. But there’s nothing wrong in reading a lot of books to find the answers.
Trent Horn:
People convert in different ways. Some people their conversion is very interpersonal. It’s a lot of late night conversations with Catholic friends. For other people, like me, it’s very intrapersonal. It’s engaging people through books that they’ve written because I want to go through the arguments systematically one by one. And Dr. Hahn is like that, because he’s an academic. He wants to make sure that he got it right. And number three, Martin really misunderstands Newman, Cardinal Henry Newman’s conversion. The way he describes it, that is not what happened.
Trent Horn:
So, Newman was saying, when he says, “If it not been for severe resolve, I would have been Catholic sooner than I was.” But the point was that Newman was worried because he was completely confident Anglicanism was true. And now he’s starting to think Catholicism is true. And so, he thinks, “Well, wait a minute. I was really confident in Anglicanism, and it turned out to be incorrect, not the complete faith, not the true Church.” And Newman is thinking, “What if I’m just as wrong about Catholicism as I was about Anglicanism.” So, he sets out to do his work and his investigation.
Trent Horn:
So, this is what he writes in his autobiography in 1844. This is the year before its conversion. It says that Newman, he writing himself that he came to the resolution of writing an Essay on Doctrinal Development; and then, if, at the end of it, my convictions in favor of the Roman Church were not weaker, of taking the necessary steps for admission into her fold. So, he’s saying, “All right, I’m thinking of converting. I’m going to write this essay on how doctrine develops. And if my conviction in Catholicism doesn’t even get weaker, I’m going to become Catholic.” So, he’s going to let study guide him.
Trent Horn:
He says, “As I advanced, my difficulty so cleared away that I cease to speak of the Roman Catholics and boldly called them Catholics. Before I got to the end, I resolved to be received, and the book remains in the state it was then, unfinished.” So, in his book, An American Pope, Martin makes it seem like that Newman, he just gave up writing on academics. And it says that he left a book unfinished, gave up his prideful belief and turn to a simple holy man, a local priest.
Trent Horn:
And he asked, why didn’t Newman or Hahn, you should turn earlier. Martin praises Newman for “how he turned earlier to the simple quiet wisdom of a local parish priest.” But that’s not what happened. In fact, the priests that Newman turned to for his conversion was Father Dominic Barberi. Father Barberi was someone who engaged in apologetics and arguments with other people who were thinking to be Catholic.
Trent Horn:
Father Barberi did this with John Dalgairns. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly, who was a roommate of Newman’s, I think it was at Oxford, but the two of them were friends. So, that’s how, why he went to this particular priest and converted in 1845.
Trent Horn:
But Newman says in his autobiography that Father Barberi basically one day came in. He was soaking wet, stepped out of the rain. He goes up to Father Barberi and says, “I want to be received into the Catholic Church.” So, Martin really misrepresented here. It’s not like that Newman gave up academic study and just listened to what a priest had to say about it. He did his research. And when he was satisfied from his intellectual journey, he went to Father Barberi and just asked to be Catholic.
Trent Horn:
And this is an important point because Martin seems to be critiquing as fundamentalist the idea that you can do intensive study and reach these important truths rather than relying on the Catholic community. That’s a phrase I always hear sometimes among more left leaning individuals, not the church, but the Catholic community, this very nebulous concept that you should put your trust in which I find to be interesting.
Trent Horn:
Here’s another argument that I found in chapter one that I thought was just, it was bizarre. So, you recall that Martin said that Hahn’s kind of a fundamentalist in his book, Reasons to Believe, because he tries to use apologetics to win people over and help them to become Catholic. And yet that is how apologetics has been used for thousands of years. And what Martin tries to do is he makes very selective arguments to say that’s not what apologetics is for. He thinks apologetics is just to help you share your personal faith and testimony with other people.
Trent Horn:
And he gives three arguments to say that the way Hahn or maybe I would use apologetics as attention with the Catholic tradition. Here’s the three arguments. First, he says that there’s something suspicious about how Scott Hahn in Reasons to Believe takes 1 Peter 3:15, always be ready to give a defense for the hope within, but do so with gentleness and reverence. He says it’s odd that Hahn chose the Revised Standard Version, the RSV translation of the Bible over the New American Bible, the NAB, which is the translation that the US bishops use at the mass, for example.
Trent Horn:
But probably one reason that Hahn did that is that the RSV, the NAB is more of a dynamic translation. It’s something that’s easier to listen to, but the RSV is a formal translation. So, it’s one that tries to get us very close to the original wording of the text. Even if it’s more awkward to listen to or listen to it being read, you’re trying to get to the very original words that were written in your translation. So, the RSV is very common among scholars. And it would make sense that Hahn would choose that given that he’s a Catholic scholar.
Trent Horn:
But the difference between the two renderings there’s not really a difference. The NAB says that in 1 Peter 3:15, we should give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope. And 1 Peter 3:15. In RSV, it says, “We should make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you.” So, he says, “Oh, they’re completely different. The NAB, it’s just talking about sharing your personal testimony.”
Trent Horn:
That’s not what the word apoligia in both of these texts mean, because the NAB the New American Bible translates Philippians 1:16 in this way. In Philippians 1:16, Paul says, “I am here for the defense of the gospel.” Apologia in the same word in 1 Peter 3:15.
Trent Horn:
It is really mountains out of a molehill. Really that is where you think Hahn has gone off the wrong track as he used the RSV, something that most Catholic scholars use in their academic work? He also says that Scott Hahn is wrong and reasons to believe to cite Justin Martyr as an apologist. He said this on page 23. I can’t believe that he said this. I wonder how much of Justin Martyr he’s actually read. He says, “And Justin Martyr,” who he also he calls Martyr rather than Justin and the text. Martyr is not his last name. It’s a title recognize that he was martyred.
Trent Horn:
So, he says of Justin, “We do not see someone who is seeking to win over his interlocutor with proofs of Christianity.” He says Justin Martyr was just correcting misrepresentations of Catholicism, not trying to win people over with arguments. Except in the dialogue with Rabbi Trypho, the dialogue he does with a Jewish rabbi, he is trying to win over the rabbi. He’s trying to win him and other Jewish people over to convert to Catholicism with proofs that Jesus is the Messiah from scripture. So, I just thought, that’s just very odd to cite Justin in this way.
Trent Horn:
He then tries to say that Aquinas was against using apologetics, because in Aquinas, his work, rationibus fide,Aquinas warns, he says that Aquinas, “discourages believers from attempting to prove Catholic doctrine to the nonbeliever.” But if you read rationibus fide, what Aquinas actually says is, “You shouldn’t try to prove it by necessary reasons.” You can’t prove the Catholic faith is true in the same way that you could prove two plus two equals four. And does say Aquinas does say, “Any Christian disputing about the articles of the faith should not try to prove the faith, but defend the faith.”
Trent Horn:
So, you should show why the arguments against it don’t refute it. And as Aquinas does, and Summa contra Gentiles, Summa Theologica, you should give reasons to show why what we believe is true, how the evidence points in that direction.
Trent Horn:
And essentially, if you saw my debate with Jay Dyer, you can see that there’s a ton of evidence that all throughout Catholic history, the church fathers used evidence or proofs to try to convince others that God exists, that Jesus is the Messiah, and that the Catholic Church is Christ Church. You see this in John Damascus, Gregory of Nyssa, how to help people who are atheists or who are polytheist. It goes on and on. So, I find it to be very odd.
Trent Horn:
I would recommend Cardinal Avery Dulles’s book, A History of Apologetics that shows the long history of this. So, it was just weird to me, this is the first chapter. Hahn is a fundamentalist because he tries to use apologetics to help people to convert. He says that’s against the Catholic tradition. That’s just not true.
Trent Horn:
All right. Chapter two is on The Lamb’s Supper. So, here, Martin examines Hahn’s treatment of a Lamb’s Supper. And the main thesis of that book is that the key to understanding all of the confusing images in the Book of Revelation, or at least have a better understanding of Revelation, the Book of Revelation is the mass, the liturgy. And when you read Revelation, you start to see that more. You see about being before the altar, the incense, the lamb that has been sacrificed that is there that is present, that when you go through and you read it.
Trent Horn:
And that’s what’s so beautiful about The Lamb’s Supper, it’s helped so many people who go to mass, and they’ll say, “I don’t get it. I don’t get what’s so heavenly about this.” And then Hahn does a great job of opening people’s eyes up to that to see the heavenly reality that we observe at the mass or at the divine liturgy. So, his basic critique is, well, Hahn just kind of overstates his case, saying that the mass is the key to understanding the Book of Revelation. And this is a critique that pops up a lot in Martin’s book. And it’s not really a fair one, because Hahn once again, he’s writing a popular level book.
Trent Horn:
And as we go through Chapter Two, Martin will say, “Oh, well, Hahn, didn’t footnote this. And he didn’t cite that.” Right because it’s a popular level book. For me, I don’t like footnotes. I find them to be confusing for people. Some publishers require that I use them. I’ve used them for my book, The Case for Catholicism, with Ignatius Press.
Trent Horn:
But even there, the one thing that I really dislike is when you read a book, and the footnote takes up 90% of the page. And there’s one little sentence at the top. When I see that, I sometimes want to say, “If it was that important, dude, just put it in the main text. It already basically is in the main text, it’s in the footnote.”
Trent Horn:
So, I kind of prefer end notes in that regard, because usually, my footnotes are just citations. And usually those are the back. Although I will admit when I read a book, I sometimes like seeing footnotes. I can quick glance down to see what it is instead of skipping ahead. But that’s basically the major critique here in chapter two is that Hahn might be a bit overconfident in some of his assertions or he makes generalizations. But that’s what happens in popular level books. The overarching core of Hahn’s argument that you can connect the mass with the imagery that’s in the Book of Revelation is rock solid.
Trent Horn:
So, what Martin does is he ends up nitpicking several things in this regard about The Lamb’s Supper. Once again to try to find that Hahn is a fundamentalist, but it doesn’t succeed. And he does so and I really think that it misrepresents Dr. Hahn in this regard. So, on page 31 of American Pope, this is what Martin writes about Hahn and the dating of the Book of Revelation.
Trent Horn:
So, he says, “Hahn briefly takes up the question of the date of Revelation’s writing. Almost all agree,” he writes, “that John’s measurement of the temple points to a pre-70 date, since after 70, there would have been no temple to measure.” So, here he’s quoting Lamb’s Supper.
Trent Horn:
And then he goes back as commentary, “It is first to note that there is nothing approaching any kind of consensus on this dating of the Book of Revelation among either ecclesial or scholarly discussion.” But Dr. Hahn never said that all scholars agree that the Book of Revelation was written before the year 70. That is a minority position. Most scholars will date it after the year 70. They’ll put it with the other Johannine literature maybe in the 90s or the late 90s. And Hahn is not a fundamentalist because he recognizes this.
Trent Horn:
In fact, the sentence right before the one that Martin quotes on says on page 70 of The Lamb’s Supper, scholars disagree on when the Book of Revelation was written. Estimates ranged from the late 60s to the late 90s. AD. And so, Hahn is aware there’s a wide array of disagreement. All he says is that this detail in Revelation 11:2, where John is told to measure the temple, that’s evidence that it was written before 70 because that would imply there is a temple that still exists for John to measure, because the temple was destroyed in the year 70.
Trent Horn:
In fact, Friesen in his academic work, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John, he says that this particular verse, “features prominently in debates about Revelation.” Now, Hahn definitely holds a minority position on the dating of Revelation if he endorses the view it’s written before 70. But he’s where the arguments on both sides, and that’s okay.
Trent Horn:
I think another theme in Martin’s book. And once again, this isn’t just about Martin, isn’t just about Hahn. I’m hoping that what I’m discussing here will be useful in any kind of interaction with scholars, because some people might try to paint you or others as fundamentalists because they endorse a conservative position. Like, for example, I think that these Synoptic Gospels, all of them were written before the year 70.
Trent Horn:
I don’t think that Luke or Matthew were written after 70. I think that Luke was written probably in the late 50s or early 60s, based on the fact that Luke is part one of Acts. And Acts doesn’t talk about the destruction of the temple, or the martyrdom of Peter and Paul.
Trent Horn:
Now, I recognize that as a minority position among biblical scholars, but I think that the evidence against it is not very good. I mean, I go through all this, by the way, in my reply to Father Casey Cole. You can check out that video here on my channel. But endorsing a minority position does not make you a fundamentalist, as long as you’re aware of the evidence and arguments on both sides and you put forward your case in a rationally coherent way.
Trent Horn:
To give you an example in biblical scholarship, there is a scholar, Mark Goodacre. And he’s written a book called The Case Against Q. Q stands for quelle or quelle. I think it’s quelle. In German, it means source. Probably one of the most popular theories in biblical scholarship is that there was an unwritten source of Jesus’ sayings or possibly a document that’s been called Q.
Trent Horn:
It’s supposed to be a source for the synoptic gospels to understand how the transmission, sorry, how the tradition was transmitted, this Q source or Q document. It was hypothetical. We’ve never discovered a manuscript that matches Q or anything like that. But it’s very common in biblical studies to assume that Q exists.
Trent Horn:
But Goodacre has written a book called The Case Against Q. And he says, “No, many scholars believe this, but I don’t think there’s good evidence for it, minority position, but not a fundamentalist one.” And I think even Martin would probably agree with that. And so, the same is true for Hahn because the next thing that Martin does in this chapter when he critiques The Lamb’s Supper is he goes after Hahn’s minority position on the status of the great city of Babylon. So, the Book of Revelation will talk about the great city of Babylon, how it persecutes the people of God, how it is wealthy and has power.
Trent Horn:
And so, Martin finds it troubling, and I’ll explain why it’s troubling here in a second, that Hahn believes the great city of Babylon in the Book of Revelation is the city of Rome, sorry, that Hahn believes that the great city of Babylon is Jerusalem, whereas most scholars throughout history believe that it’s Rome. And I’m partial view that it’s Rome as well what’s being talked about here.
Trent Horn:
But Hahn argues that saying that Babylon is Jerusalem rather than Rome helps to show how the new kingdom of God and the new priesthood has reached the fulfillment that the old priesthood was supposed to have and how the old priesthood and the old temple failed because it didn’t receive Jesus as the Messiah, because it was involved in a long history of killing the prophets. I mean, think about what Jesus said to the religious leaders, how you have killed the prophets, then failed to receive God’s revelation.
Trent Horn:
So, Martin, his red flag really flies when he sees that Hahn endorses the view that the great city of Babylon in Revelation is Jerusalem rather than Rome. Not just that it’s a minority position. But because he says that starting down this path leads you to endorsing anti-Semitism, which Hahn then immediately in Lamb’s Supper says, you should not take from anything that I’m saying that the Jewish race as a whole or the Jewish religion is evil or something like that he firmly denounces anti-Semitism in The Lamb’s Supper.
Trent Horn:
But then here’s what’s interesting. Martin says that in choosing to say that the great city of Babylon is Jerusalem, that Hahn is endorsing a troubling supersessionism. So, what is supersessionism? Supersessionism, also called replacement theology is the idea that the covenant the Jewish people had with God was replaced in some form with the new covenant in Christ. Now, obviously, as Christians, we have to believe that the covenant has changed, that God’s covenant has chosen people. It is not restricted to the Jewish people, but that it is universal. That’s what Catholic means.
Trent Horn:
And so, God’s covenant is for everyone, for all people, and ideally, the Jewish people will be a part of it. That’s why Romans 11, Paul has his hope, expresses his hope that all Israel shall be saved. But what I find ironic here is that Martin criticizes Hahn in chapter one for not being faithful to the Catholic tradition.
Trent Horn:
Then chapter two, he criticizes Hahn for an interpretation of scripture that can lead to a supersessionism or replacement theology that he rejects, that he says that the claim that the Jews rejected Christ, it’s troubling that it would revoke their status as the chosen people of God render their history after the fall of Jerusalem as fundamentally unimportant.
Trent Horn:
So, he says, “Hey, Hahn, you’re not being faithful to the Catholic tradition. And Dr. Hahn, this view could lead to an awful kind of supersessionism that says the Jewish people rejected God.” And yet, when you read the Church Fathers, many of them endorsed what will be called hard supersessionism that the Jewish people had been rejected by God. Theology professor, Michael Block. He wrote a whole article about this. I’ll try to link to it below. And he cites Ignatius, Irenaeus origin, Tertullian, Clement, Cyprian. And he quotes them using language like the Jewish people were divorced from God, rejected.
Trent Horn:
He writes, one theme espoused by the early church was that Israel was rejected by God, because of our disobedience and rejection of Christ. So, it’s really that Martin chastises Hahn about not being faithful to the tradition, but he rejects something that’s actually quite common in the Church Fathers. Now, there has been a development in this tradition so that after the Second Vatican Council, we see the church espousing more of what will be called soft supersessionism.
Trent Horn:
So, in the Vatican Council document, Nostra Aetate, it says, although the church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or a cursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scripture. So, I don’t want to get too much more into replacement theology. My colleague, Jimmy Akin, wrote an excellent piece on it at catholic.com about replacement theology and Pope Benedict. I’ll try to link to that as well as below.
Trent Horn:
So, my main point is that Martin’s critique of Hahn is inconsistent in this regard. And then, of course, about the city of Babylon being Rome or Jerusalem, minority position is not a fundamentalist one. And the Ignatius Catholic study Bible, Hahn says most scholars through the centuries have identified this as Rome. In modern times, other scholars have identified the city not as Rome, but as a [inaudible 00:34:28] Jerusalem, many presents both sides of the argument.
Trent Horn:
I’ll leave you with one last part of chapter two that some of the criticisms to me were just totally unfounded. He writes on page 37, and the theme that he’s building up to in the last chapter, by the way, about what makes someone a fundamentalist, is like a kind of overconfidence, a certitude or certainty that isn’t justified or even just certainty itself. So, he says on page 37, in American Pope, the level of insight that Hahn claims into the secrets of angels into their secrets, this part is he’s critiquing the part of The Lamb’s Supper where Hahn talks about what Revelation says about angels.
Trent Horn:
So, Martin says, “The level of insight that Hahn claims into their secrets,” the secrets of the angels, “here should strike us as troubling.” What exactly did Hahn say in Lamb’s Supper that’s troubling about angels? Basically, he says the living creatures in Revelation chapter four, which most people identify as angels, he says that they’re described as having many wings and many eyes and that that’s not literal. It’s symbolic of the fact that they have a wide array of knowledge that they see a lot of things, and that they’re swift. They’re swift and that they’re vigilant.
Trent Horn:
That’s what the many eyes and wings represent. Because angels do not have physical bodies. That that’s just correct. That’s not an insight into angelic secrets that is troubling. That’s just correct. The idea of what the wings and the eyes mean, you can find that in lots of commentaries on Revelation. And the idea that angels do not have physical bodies, that’s just Catholic teaching. Paragraph 330 of the Catechism says angels are purely spiritual creatures. And in paragraph 328, the Catechism says, the existence of the spiritual, noncorporeal beings, or beings without bodies, that sacred scripture usually calls angels is a truth of the faith.
Trent Horn:
So, it’s weird, Martin will read something in Hahn, this is very troubling. Why is it troubling? That’s just what the Catholic church teaches or is very commonly been taught. So, when Hahn expresses something that is certain, that is in the tradition, he’s a fundamentalist. But when he argues for a minority position and takes a risk in scholarship, he’s a fundamentalist because he doesn’t go along with the majority. So, this is a theological game of heads I win, tails you lose.
Trent Horn:
All right. So, Chapter three of the book, this is on Covenant and Communion. And this involves Hahn’s exploration of Pope Benedict XVI’s work in biblical theology. And the argument here was very confused. It seems to be that, well, American Protestant fundamentalists believe in the inerrancy of scripture and they’re fundamentalists. And Scott Hahn believes in the inerrancy of scripture.
Trent Horn:
And he tries to make Benedict a fundamentalist who believes in inerrancy. Therefore, Hahn is a fundamentalist, which is absurd, because magisterial documents going back to Pope Pius XII, Pope Leo XIII talk about scripture being without error, and Benedict XVI also endorses inerrancy. But he is not like Protestant fundamentalists who naively read the text.
Trent Horn:
If you look at the Pontifical Biblical Commission, they published a document in 1993, called Interpretation of the Bible in the Church. And this is how it describes the fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. It says fundamentalism, “understands a naively, literalist interpretation, one that is to say, which excludes every effort and understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development. It is opposed, therefore, to the use of the historical critical method as indeed to the use of any other scientific method for the interpretation of scripture.”
Trent Horn:
All right. So, the historical critical method is a way of trying to scientifically analyze the Bible to determine its meaning. And Hahn is very critical of the historical critical method, but so is Pope Benedict XVI. So, in the lecture he gave in 1988 called the Erasmus Lecture, Pope Benedict will when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, this is how he described the historical critical method. He said, “At the heart of the historical critical method lies the effort to establish in the field of history a level of methodological precision, which would yield conclusions of the same certainty as in the field of the natural sciences.”
Trent Horn:
It’s like, well, we can understand the Bible just like we can understand the natural world, just scientifically examine it. But Benedict in the Erasmus Lecture argues for what he calls a diachronic approach, not just analyzing the texts at one time, but how is the text been understood across time.
Trent Horn:
He says this is important because, as he says, “The observer determines,” to his surprise, “that these interpretations which were supposed to be so strictly scientific and purely historical reflect their own overriding spirit rather than the spirit of times long ago. This insight should not lead us to skepticism about the historical critical method, but rather to an honest recognition of what its limits are, and perhaps how it might be purified.”
Trent Horn:
And that’s the same position that Hahn takes. When you read his book, Politicizing the Bible, or his new 2021 book, The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture: How the Bible Became a Secular Book. And in that book, Hahn says that we should not use a historical critical method that rejects the supernatural out of hand that has an anti-supernatural bias.
Trent Horn:
So, when you are analyzing a text, and it has, let’s say a miracle in it, you have to reach the conclusion that a miracle didn’t happen. Instead, the text is being symbolic, it’s being figurative, or it’s just a legendary account. Instead, Hahn says we should use a historical method that takes the best of the historical critical method to help us understand the text.
Trent Horn:
So, he says in The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture, that a historical method, “can make well-grounded judgments about the authorship and dating of texts, whether they are genuine or forged.” We can do all that without adopting modern anti supernatural techniques that are common in the academic world.
Trent Horn:
So, in seeing all of this, that Hahn and Benedict are really on the same page. I mean, not going to be identical with one another, but they certainly would affirm the inspiration, the inerrancy of scripture. And so, when Martin tries to nitpick Hahn on his interpretation of Benedict, it really falls through. And the objections I think are fairly weak. For example, I think it’s on page 66 and 71 of American Pope, Martin says that, Hahn, in covenant communion tries to paint Benedict as a biblical theologian, even though Benedict never says, “I’m a biblical theologian.”
Trent Horn:
And look, there are these other scholars who say, well, Benedict is more of an Augustinian theologian. These are really minor points and actually found a quote, with an interview from Pope Benedict, who’s probably back and he was Cardinal Ratzinger, with a journalist, Peter Seewald. It was for the book Salt of the Earth. And in there, yeah, Benedict doesn’t call himself a biblical theologian.
Trent Horn:
But let me read the quote to you and I think you’ll see that Hahn is definitely on the right track when he talks about how Pope Benedict XVI is probably the first pope we’ve ever had, who is a world class biblical theologian, who is someone who takes the primacy of the written word of God as a starting point. So, this is what Benedict said in that interview.
Trent Horn:
Benedict writes, or Ratzinger, “I couldn’t imagine a purely philosophical theology. The point of departure is, first of all, the word, that we believe the word of God, that we try really to get to know and understand it. And then as I said, to think it together with the great masters of the faith. This gives my theology a somewhat biblical character, and also bears the stamp of the Fathers, especially Augustine.” So, classic Catholic tradition, not either-or both ends.
Trent Horn:
So, when Martin says he’s not really a biblical theologian, Martin also makes this objection, how can you say that he is a biblical theologian? Aren’t all theologians biblical theologians because the Bible is important? Well, yeah, all the Catholic theologians if they’re faithful theologians, affirm the inspiration of sacred Scripture. But there are theologians who focus on systematic theology, philosophical theology, understanding God’s nature, the Trinity, or moral theology, how to apply theological truths to moral situations.
Trent Horn:
Then you have theologians who really focus on the Bible, and its covenants and biblical themes, that would be more of a biblical theologian, someone like Scott Hahn. So, even here, you might have saying, “Oh, well, Benedict is more of an Augustinian theologian.” Yeah. Augustine is really influenced his thought. And Augustine really steeped himself in a study of scripture as being his starting point and understanding theology. So, once again, it’s not either-or, it’s both end here. And I see that Martin is trying to make a controversy in Hahn’s interpretation of Benedict that doesn’t actually exist.
Trent Horn:
So, I think overall, in that chapter, he doesn’t prove at all that Scott Hahn is in Hahn affirming that scripture is without error, that Hahn is like a Protestant fundamentalist, who says that the book of Genesis is just a straightforward account of what happened at the creation, that it’s a transcript or should be treated like some kind of scientific text. Hahn doesn’t do that. And I think that can help us to see that Martin’s identification of him as a fundamentalist in this regard just isn’t the case. If you look at let’s see, I have it down here, let me grab it. There it is, because I was looking at earlier
Trent Horn:
This is Hahn’s commentary on the Book of Genesis for the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. I heard pretty soon they’re going to have the whole Ignatius Catholic Study Bible Old Testament ready. I am super excited about that. But you read in here on page 18, Hahn’s interpretation of Genesis. He’s not a fundamentalist. He says on page 18, the seven days of creation are not intended to be read as literal history. The cosmological presuppositions of the author should not be taken as revealed propositions to be accepted by faith.
Trent Horn:
So, Hahn would say, “Yes, Scripture is inerrant. Benedict would say scripture is inerrant in what it asserts, not simply what it says.” You have to say, what is the author asserting? Is the author trying to give a chronological, literal account or is he saying something else? And Hahn notes in his commentary on Genesis that this is probably a nonliteral account of creation because on the first day, you have light. But on the fourth day, you have the creation of the sun, which is the thing that makes the light.
Trent Horn:
So, it seems like the author of Genesis is not trying to give a straightforward chronological account. Instead, he’s giving more of a type of logical account. He’s talking about how God created the realms on days, one through three, the light, the dark, the air, the sea, the land, the sea. He made the realms on days one through three, saying God made all of the realms of the world. And days four through six, God populated the realms. So, the sun, the moon, the creeping things, the fish birds in the air, and finally, man. So, Hahn talks a lot about this and about that there’s kind of cosmic temple theology in the creation account.
Trent Horn:
This is not the mark of a fundamentalist in any way, shape, or form. And it would perfectly correspond to what Benedict has said about creation accounts, literal versus nonliteral and all that. Finally, the last chapter, oh, boy, oh boy. Once we get to the last chapter of the book, this was the one that disappointed me the most, honestly. The first three chapters I felt were kind of nitpicky, didn’t really make a strong or solid case. Here, I felt the wheels kind of came off, both in the recklessness of the argument and in just like the contempt that Martin seems to have towards Hahn. It almost just feels like contempt.
Trent Horn:
So, let’s talk about the last chapter. The last chapter of American Pope is kind of a critique of Hahn’s 2018 book, The First Society. So, The First Society talks about how we need sacramental marriage to restore western civilization. And there are evils that have attacked marriage, we have to confront like abortion, contraception, no fault divorce, so-called same sex marriage. I think that Martin calls it nontraditional marriage in here.
Trent Horn:
That should always be a warning to you. If you read a Catholic author who refers to things, my ideal reference for same sex marriages, I call it so-called same sex marriage, because that’s an oxymoron. Marriage just is the union of a man and a woman. There is no such thing as same sex union. I mean, sorry, same sex marriage, there is no such thing. Now, there is the legal fiction called same sex marriage that there are people who claim to be married who are not, that’s why I call it so called same sex marriage.
Trent Horn:
But when I see Catholic authors use terms like nontraditional marriage to talk about so-called same sex marriage, I think they’re off base in that regard. An arranged marriage would be a nontraditional marriage. When the parents primarily choose who your spouse will be. And in arranged marriages, you still have veto power, you can still say I’m not going to marry that person.
Trent Horn:
But in most around the world, most arranged marriages, where the parents primarily choose who you marry, I would say that’s a nontraditional marriage. but it’s still a marriage, still valid. It’s a man and a woman who unite in a monogamous, ideally, lifelong union. But so-called same sex marriage is not that.
Trent Horn:
And so, it’s just an odd. This is an odd chapter. Okay? So, he goes through, and he spends the first three pages summarizing, JPII’s Ecclesia in America. And it seems like he only does that because later he says, “Well, if the answers are so simple, why doesn’t Scott Hahn just reached the same conclusions as Ecclesia in America on what is troubling the world, because authors will make different emphases on things. And that’s okay.” And here, Hahn is focusing on marriage as the building block of civilization.
Trent Horn:
And I agree with him, I think a lot of problems in the world, you have people who have bad marriages. And children come from those marriages, they don’t receive proper human formation. And then society starts to fall apart as they have marriages. And it’s like when you photocopy something, you copy it in a photocopier, right? And then if you take the photocopy and put it in the photocopier again, it gets more and more distorted over time.
Trent Horn:
And so, people can’t break the cycle. And then the bad habits and the bad virtues of the marriage you grew up in, gets repeated in your children and their children. And so, I agree with the thesis. But what Martin does in American Pope is he spends the first half of the last chapter, just summarizing either John Paul the second, or he spends nine pages, just summarizing Hahn’s book, The First Society. And I was back to, “When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?” He’s just summarizing, like, well, where are you going with this.
Trent Horn:
And at that halfway point, he says, “Underneath all of this, however, is a troubling certainty.” And then he spends another nine pages trying to define fundamentalism. He talks about the philosopher, Thomas Reid, David Hume, American, anti-evolutionism and he gets to all of this. And then, with just a few pages left of the book, he finally tells us what fundamentalism is. He says, “I argue that the distinguishing mark of fundamentalism born of unshakeable confidence in a common sense approach to knowledge is certainty. Certainty is the claim to own knowledge. It is the claim of complete mastery over at least a field of knowledge.”
Trent Horn:
I’m reminded once again, to make another media reference, The Wedding Singer, the Adam Sandler movie, The Wedding Singer, he gets stood up at the altar at the beginning of the movie. And he goes and talks to his fiancée and asked why he was stood up. And she was saying all these things that were wrong with his marriage and that she couldn’t marry him. And he said, “That would have been useful to me yesterday.” He screams in the great the Adam Sandler voice.
Trent Horn:
And to which I sometimes want to say when I read this definition, that would have been useful to me at the beginning of the book. This is what fundamentalism is, here is where Hahn falls into it, certainty, which of course leads to a paradox. Is Martin certain that this is the correct definition of fundamentalism, if he is certain, he’s a fundamentalist. And if he’s not, certain, he says, “I’m not really sure if this is what fundamentalism is.” Then why should we trust this scholarship? Why should we trust his conclusion that that Hahn is a fundamentalist or that his scholarship is not in line with the Catholic tradition?
Trent Horn:
Number two, there’s nothing wrong with certainty. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, the church teaches we can have certainty in many areas. As I said, in my debate with Jay Dyer, the first Vatican Council in fallible he decreed that it’s heretical to deny this proposition, the one true God, our creator and Lord, I’m sorry, it’s heretical to affirm this proposition. You cannot affirm this. Let him be anathema, who affirms this proposition.
Trent Horn:
The one true God, our creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made by the natural light of human reason. The council says you can’t believe that. God can be known with certainty from the natural light of human reason. And with faith, we can be even more certain paragraph 157 of the Catechism says, “Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.”
Trent Horn:
So, this is such a broad definition of fundamentalism. It refutes anyone who claims they might be certain about anything, that Martin seems to be certain throughout this book, that there’s not a consensus on this, we can’t know that. Well, then you’re also a fundamentalist. It’s a self-refuting proposition.
Trent Horn:
If I were writing his dissertation, I would say why don’t you pick a narrower definition of fundamentalism, like the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document I referenced earlier interpretation of the Bible in the church. It defines biblical fundamentalism in this way.
Trent Horn:
It says, “Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible being the word of God, inspired and free from error should be read and here’s the key part and interpreted literally in all its details. But by literal interpretation, it understands a naively, literalist interpretation, one that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development.”
Trent Horn:
So, what’s funny is whenever I meet a Protestant biblical fundamentalist, not one of them says that Jesus was being literal in John 6, when he said, “You have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.” They all say that that’s symbolic. So, they don’t take everything literally, which I find to be interesting.
Trent Horn:
It goes on, it tends biblical fundamentalism. It tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods. So, as I showed earlier, with Hahn’s commentary on Genesis, for example, Hahn is not some kind of naive, literal, fundamentalist. He talks about the text and about the formulation of the text and what the author is asserting versus what they are saying.
Trent Horn:
He looks at the text in a multilayered way. So, the problem is, if this were the definition of fundamentalism that Martin used is it would fall apart because Hahn is not a biblical fundamentalist. He’s a conservative scholar in that regard. He doesn’t adopt a lot of liberal position, really, I don’t know of any liberal positions in academia. But also, Dr. Hahn is not someone who’s just well, I’m going to cling to tradition, I’m not going to take any risks. That’s actually not true. Because Hahn actually was involved in controversy back in 2002.
Trent Horn:
So, back in 2002, he wrote a book called First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and in the Trinity. And in that book, Hahn was talking about how we can use maternal language to describe the unique role of the Holy Spirit. Now, there are Church Fathers who do, I mean, the Bible uses maternal language talk about God in general in some cases. And in the Psalms, it describes God and using maternal language, almost like as if God is a nursing mother that cares for his chosen people.
Trent Horn:
But in First Comes Love, Hahn was talking about maternal language, specifically, of the Holy Spirit. And some of his critics said that he went just kind of a bit too far in what he was saying that his arguments could be taken to mean that the Holy Spirit is feminine, which Hahn of course absolutely rejects, but they were worried about his arguments going kind of too far in that direction. So, Hahn took their criticisms. He rewrote that part of the book. And I think in the second version, a second edition of First Comes Love, he included that argument which courted some controversy in an appendix and he revised it.
Trent Horn:
So, here’s someone, a scholar willing to take risks, willing to follow the evidence where it leads and willing to listen to criticism and respond to a thoughtfully. That my friends, those are not the traits of a fundamentalist. Those are the traits of a scholar.
Trent Horn:
So, we’ve gotten to the end of the book, we only have a few pages left. And Martin has basically no evidence that Hahn is a fundamentalist. And the best he can come up with is he says that Hahn is a fundamentalist, because he expresses certainty, that in First Society, I’ll just read you the paragraph here, that Hahn expresses certainty about … That he brings up a lot of secondary issues in his book and that supposedly makes them fundamentalist.
Trent Horn:
So, he writes, “In this work, Hahn deals with notions of gender norms, sexuality, sacramentality, economics, Catholic philosophical commitments, historical understandings of marriage, abortion, contraception, ecclesiology, liberalism, biblical exegesis, Old Testament legal categories, western moral shift and degradation, Marxism, capitalism, Catholic social teaching, libertarianism, church and state, fertility, polygamy, homosexuality, self-marriage, divorce, and more.
Trent Horn:
This is an incredible breadth of topics on which Hahn offers very definitive conclusions. And yet given the wide range and critical importance of the topics he covers in those 182 pages, Hahn provides only 19 footnotes, several of which are to his own books.”
Trent Horn:
Well, first, that’s still about 80 pages more than what Martin tries to do or 70 pages more than what Martin tries to do here. This is such a silly criticism. He’s a fundamentalist, because in talking about marriage, he comments on many tangential subjects. Hahn never says in First Society that he is giving definitive treatments of all of these different subjects.
Trent Horn:
He talks about how marriage is touched upon in these different subjects. And that’s perfectly okay to do. And in many of them, you can offer definitive conclusions very quickly, like abortion, contraception, Marxism, homosexual behavior, these things are evil.
Trent Horn:
There you go. You can’t offer definitive conclusions on these things. But we’re descending into silliness and it only gets worse here. Because in the last few pages, as I hinted at earlier, the contempt comes about. Because he goes on to say that what is the mark of a fundamentalist is that it’s always somebody else’s problem. The problems in society or in our own lives, it’s always because of somebody else, never ourselves. And so, he says, of Hahn in First Society, “Well, why didn’t Hahn mention the Catholic sex abuse scandal as causing the downfall of society?”
Trent Horn:
And I thought, well, the sex abuse scandal was awful. It’s horrific. And it was an injustice that ruined thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lives. But we didn’t really know about the scandal until the Boston Globe broke the story in 2002. And society was breaking down decades, if not centuries, long before that point. So, it has nothing to do with Hahn’s thesis. And then he says that Hahn himself in a book about marriage, he can’t even admit to his own faults. And this is where the wheels really come off.
Trent Horn:
So, Martin quotes the following passage from the First Society. Here’s what Hahn writes that he said, remember, First Society is about how we need marriage to fix society. Hahn writes, “But let’s bring this down to earth. Living together is hard. Habits and preferences clash. Hidden tendencies and peccadilloes are revealed. Vices are magnified under the constant gaze of another person. I assiduously roll up the toothpaste. Kimberly does not. You can imagine the tension this causes.”
Trent Horn:
All right. So, what did you take from this passage from First Society? Most normal people would say that this is a cute little anecdote that illustrates how Hahn’s thesis in First Society is simple but not easy. That it is simple to say to fix society, we need to fix marriage. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to fix marriage. It’s not easy to even excel in one’s own marriage. And so, he picks a cute little difference between … Like, well if you’re married, there’s always something that there’s going to be conflict in marriage, even over minor things.
Trent Horn:
It’s a cute thing. And it’s part of the lovable prose that marks the work of Scott Hahn. That’s what I would think. Isn’t that what you would think? Here is how what Martin takes from this. He writes, “Like every other fundamentalist, the problem lies with everyone else. It is in no way the fault of the church and the abuse crisis that society’s become what it is. It is not even Hahn’s hidden tendencies and peccadilloes that are worth confessing in an account of the monumental difficulty of marriage. After all, Kimberly is the one who fails to roll up the toothpaste.”
Trent Horn:
And then I wrote in my own, I was reading what I wrote in my review that I want to publish. What started as an academic investigation into the Catholic identity of Scott Hahn’s scholarship has devolved in a little over 100 pages into a seething, incoherent gripe about a man whose friends and colleagues, we consider one of the most humble, authentic people I’ve ever met. And that’s it, that’s where it ends. He’s a fundamentalist because he never says he’s wrong. I’m sure Hahn would confess to his limitations like anyone else.
Trent Horn:
And he then tries to end by comparing Dr. Hahn to G.K. Chesterton. And so, he can’t even stick the landing on this. Because he says that Hahn is this prideful person who, I’m the perfect theology professor, which he doesn’t do this. And here are all my answers. And this should to save the church and to save the world.
Trent Horn:
And he tries to compare that to G.K. Chesterton saying that, when The Times of London put out a question for people to submit answer, you’ve probably heard this one before. The times of London put out a query saying, “What’s wrong with the world?” Submit your answers, what’s wrong with the world?
Trent Horn:
And Chesterton’s was published or one, because Chesterton wrote back what’s wrong with the world, he simply wrote back, “Dear sirs, I am.” And so, Martin tries to say, look, Chesterton could say, I’m the one who’s wrong with the world and not try to have all these certain conclusions about my arguments. Except if you read my book, what the saints never said, Chesterton probably never said this. This is apocryphal. I don’t think there’s good evidence to believe Chesterton actually wrote this.
Trent Horn:
The American Chesterton Society, they suspect it is true, but they say they have not found any documentary evidence for it. It’s just been retold so much. Now, Chesterton did write an anthology called What’s Wrong with the World. But it doesn’t mention the newspaper story. No one has ever found The Times of London submitting a request for answering this question. So, I don’t think that this actually ever happened.
Trent Horn:
But I will share with you a quote that Chesterton did say. Chesterton did say this, which cuts against Martin’s thesis about certainty and fundamentalism. Chesterton wrote in the Catholic Church and Conversion, “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right. But it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” So, we can be certain.
Trent Horn:
We can go through our arguments to say, “Yeah, my argument, there’s this objection, and that objection, and here’s where it could be a little bit weaker. But on the whole, I think it works. So, I’m certain.”
Trent Horn:
So, Chesterton is arguing against people who would say that it’s prideful or bigoted to say, yeah, Jesus Christ established the Catholic church, God exists. We can be certain, but we should always be humbled and oh, hey, there’s some things that we don’t know, for example. There’s things we may not be sure about and we should be willing to listen to others and to correct the things that maybe we haven’t done right. And I see that attitude very clearly in my years of experience with Dr. Scott Hahn.
Trent Horn:
In fact, a quote from his book, Reasons to Believe, I think shows that Hahn is not some kind of prideful, arrogant, know-it-all that Martin had tried to make him out to be in this critique. On page 13 on Reasons to Believe this is what Hahn says about apologetics. He says, “We need apologetics but we can’t just have the right answers.” That’s not enough. He says Saint Peter didn’t want us to just have snappy answers. Instead, our apologetic must be, “formed by profound study, by penance and by prayer, minds that are formed for humility, and generosity.”
Trent Horn:
So, at the end of the day, I don’t want you to take away from this episode that I’m trying to go after somebody because he went after my mentor. That’s not my case. I’m interested in the truth. I’m even interested in arguments that might show people I really enjoy reading, Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin, Alex Pruss, Ed Feser, whoever it may be. That’s why when I read these scholars, when I read theistic arguments from Pruss or Feser, or biblical arguments, even from my friend, Jimmy Akin, I’ll go online and see what opponents, what other people say about those arguments to see if they work or not.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why I was really looking forward to Martin showing what’s wrong with Scott Hahn’s arguments. But instead, the book really disappointed me. It was just a lot of nitpicking and almost at the end, seeing kind of contempt that he seems to have towards Scott Hahn, which I found to be unfortunate. But like I said, it’s not just about these two.
Trent Horn:
Hopefully, you’ll see in the course of this review, these are common themes that I have seen among more liberal academics, among those who don’t embrace more of a conservative position like Hahn that they will use to try to undermine conservative scholarship. And I worry about that being a slippery slope. We can’t be certain. We don’t know. And obviously, it depends on the situation what we are certainly not certain about, but it starts to unravel the sweater, to pull the thread and then kind of get the unorthodox ideas, the camel’s nose under the tent.
Trent Horn:
In order to do that, to try to disenchant people with the faithful orthodoxy that Scott Hahn preaches, oh, don’t trust him, instead, read this person, read somebody like Raymond Brown, who is a moderate scholar. It depends how you read him, honestly.
Trent Horn:
Because I think Brown, you can read him as denying the perpetual virginity of Mary or you can read him as saying we can’t prove it biblically. So, a lot of these scholars will they don’t like people like Hahn who show you can have intellectual academic rigor and not compromise on the essential foundations of our faith, and they want to get people away from that for some reason.
Trent Horn:
I don’t think we should do that. Doesn’t mean that everything that Scott Hahn says is infallible, it isn’t. But we should always give people a fair hearing. I feel like that I gave Martin’s book a fair hearing. I mean, there’s going to be points in here I haven’t addressed because I’m not going to do an entire rebuttal to the whole thing. But I think I’ve shown just the major overarching thesis simply doesn’t succeed. So, I hope this was helpful for you guys. Definitely check out the links below. And yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed day.
If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member-only content. For more information visit trenthornpodcast.com.