Problems with Traditionalist Defenses of the Faith

Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

It’s good to be back, everyone. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, an epiphany, and I just hope you’re ready for new episodes of The Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker, Trent Horn.

Today I want to talk about some apologetic arguments and approaches I find among more traditional Catholics that concern me because they provide relatively weak defenses of some parts of our faith. But four things before I continue with this topic.

First, I want to be clear this episode is not an attack on traditionalism or Catholics who prefer the Latin mass or anything like that. I just want to point out problems related to defending the faith that I’ve seen among some traditionalists, not all by any stretch of the imagination, but some.

Number two, these problems are not exclusive to people you would call traditionalists. I’ve seen other people who have engaged in these kinds of errors, but I’ve seen it particularly among this group, partly in due to their love and their fervent defense of tradition, which I’ll explain shortly.

Three, I’m not saying it’s wrong for individual Catholics to find these arguments persuasive. I’m not saying that. People look at evidence in different ways and find different things helpful for them. If these particular arguments are helpful for your spiritual journey, praise God. I’m just saying that these arguments have a greater likelihood of not being persuasive to many non-Catholics, and so we should reevaluate our use of them.

And number four, please be respectful of all traditions, especially the tradition we have here at The Council of Trent podcast of asking people to like this video and subscribe to the channel to help it grow and to reach more people.

Now, as I said, I find these arguments more among certain traditionalists because they love tradition. They love the past heroes of our faith, and so they’re more likely to incorporate these kinds of arguments into their defense of Catholicism, even if some of these arguments aren’t the most effective at reaching a non-Catholic.

But when they do this, they are confusing sacred tradition that comes from God, which we have to defend. It’s a part of divine revelation, so we call it Tradition with a capital T. They confuse that with parts of the faith that come from the people of God that can change over time or that involve things like private revelations that no one is bound to believe with Catholic faith. You’re free to believe them, but you don’t have to believe in these things. And in using these kinds of approaches, they can build the faith on a shaky foundation that makes it more difficult to share with non-Catholics.

Here’s an illustration to help you see what I’m talking about. Think of an argument like a table. The tabletop is the conclusion and the legs of the table are the premises of the argument. If you have no premises for your argument, the table can’t be supported. It has no legs. But if the legs of the table are thin or weak or rotting, the table is going to collapse if you put any pressure on it. Likewise, an argument built on weak or flimsy premises, it’s going to fall apart once you put pressure on it. The best arguments are those that are built on premises that even the critic admits are correct.

In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas addressed the question of whether the Trinity could be proved by reason alone. He said it could not be done that way, and he criticized people who tried to do that even though they had very noble intentions. Noble intentions don’t justify bad arguments. Here’s how Aquinas put it, “When anyone in the endeavor to prove the faith brings forward reasons which are not cogent, he falls under the ridicule of the unbelievers since they suppose that we stand upon such reasons and that we believe on such grounds.”

Okay, here’s some examples I’ve seen from traditionalists using less effective arguments. So first, I’ve seen some Catholics defend the deuterocanonical books of scripture like Tobit, Maccabees, or Sirach by saying they contain prophecies that were fulfilled in the New Testament. That’s a good argument, but one of the examples they use isn’t that helpful.

It’s Sirach 24:24-25. It says, “I am the mother of fair love and of fear and of knowledge and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth. In me is all hope of life and of virtue.”

This is supposed to be a prophecy of the blessed Virgin Mary being the mother of Jesus who, of course, calls himself, “The way, the truth, and the life,” in John 14:6.

The problem with this example is that these particular verses, they’re only found in the Latin Vulgate in the Douay-Rheims Bible. Most other modern Catholic Bibles omit this passage because the earliest Greek manuscripts of Sirach do not contain these verses. If you check the RSVCE, for example, the verse is listed as Sirach 24:18 and it’s blank. It’s not included. Verse 24 in the passage I read to you is found in longer Greek manuscripts, but not on the older shorter Greek manuscripts or Hebrew versions of Sirach. Verse 25 isn’t found in the Hebrew or Greek. It appears to be a Latin interpolation or addition to the text.

Now, there are people who have argued that this is still inspired scripture, and if you find that persuasive, that’s fine, but just know that using this example is going to add an extra difficulty when you’re trying to engage someone like a Protestant who’s already skeptical of the deuterocanonical books. So adding in an element of citing a verse that has somewhat of a spotty textual history, that’s going to make the argument more difficult for the non-Catholic you’re trying to reach.

In fact, there are other passages I’d recommend instead, passages like Wisdom 2:12-20. This is much more powerful evidence of prophecy because this passage describes one who calls God his father and said that God would save him.

This is the same taunt that the priests gave to Jesus that’s recorded in Matthew 27. He said, “God is his father. Let God save him.” And yet that’s not recorded anywhere in the protocanonical books of the Old Testament. The only place this could come from would be Wisdom 2. So it’s a great example of a prophecy of something in the deuteroconical books that finds its fulfillment in the New Testament. If you want more on that, check out Gary Machuta’s great book, Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger.

All right. Here’s another example. Some people say that icon veneration is apostolic in origin. It comes from the first century because St. Luke painted an icon of the Virgin Mary. In fact, in the Summa Theologia, St. Thomas Aquinas answers the following objection, “Scripture does not lay down anything concerning the adoration of images.” To which Aquinas responds by saying that the apostles gave teachings by sacred tradition, and that’s true. He then says that one of these sacred traditions is this. He says, “Blessed Luke painted the image of Christ, which is in Rome.” This isn’t true, or at least there’s insufficient evidence to show that it’s true. Even St. Thomas Aquinas gets some things wrong. There are several icons today that claim to be in the style of the alleged image that St. Luke painted of Mary, but there isn’t any good historical evidence for this claim. The earliest source we have for the icon Luke painted of Mary comes from the eighth century.

And all of these icons seem to show a Byzantine or a Medieval style, not an ancient Roman or ancient Judean style of art. So it’s just not that great of an example to use. And if you do use it, a skeptical critic of icon veneration is going to say, “Oh, well the defenders of Icon veneration use really weak anachronistic or a historical arguments.” It’s not the best way to go about that. I’ll leave a link in the description below. Suan Sonna actually put forward a very great defense of icon veneration going through the historical sources. Definitely check out his recent video if you haven’t seen it already. I’ll leave the link in the description below.

In other cases, no distinction is made between events in Catholic history that have better evidence for them and events that have worse evidence. So people put forward the events that have worse evidence as their best cases. Never a great idea. For example, when discussing the subject of Marian apparitions with a Protestant, I’ve seen Catholics make the bold claim that Mary appeared to the Apostle James in what is now called Zaragoza, Spain in the year A.D. 40.

This is called Our Lady of the Pillar, but according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the oldest written testimony of devotion to the Blessed Virgin in Zaragoza usually is quoted is that of Pedro de Librana in the year 1155. And there were other Cardinals, people like Cardinal Caesar Baronius in the 16th century who doubted that this particular apparition took place. It’s approved there is a local tradition of venerating Mary in this part of Spain. That’s absolutely correct. But the story of the apparition to St. James, that particular encounter, that doesn’t appear in the historical record until 1,000 years later. That doesn’t mean the event never happened. It doesn’t mean this is an illicit local devotion. If this helps your faith, that’s great, but this particular apparition, it’s not going to be very convincing to a skeptic. It’s better to put forward apparitions that have much more recent evidence behind them so that at least the claim that someone had an encounter with Mary, that claim itself cannot be doubted, as is the case with apparitions of Lords or Fatima.

As I show in my book, when Protestants argue like atheists, Protestants have to go to great lengths to dismiss the evidence for these more recent apparitions that in some respects have better evidence for them than Christ’s resurrection, such as the fact that these events were recorded in newspapers immediately after they were claimed to have happened. Now, the resurrection has other evidence for it that Marian apparitions do not like the willingness to suffer and die and be martyred. But my point is that in order to make arguments that are convincing to skeptics, you have to have premises that are not extremely vulnerable to their skepticism. Obviously, some skeptics are overly skeptical of the evidence and their methodology would destroy any attempt at historical knowledge. But in other cases, they raise a valid objection that the Catholic is overly trusting of his own sources.

I’ll give you an example of this kind of overly trusting of the evidence. Consider this argument from Protestant apologist Allen Parr for the resurrection of Christ that ends up overly trusting the evidence in a way that a skeptic is not going to find convincing.

Today I want to give you five undeniable reasons why you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Reason number one is because of the precautions of the Romans. Now, you must understand that the Romans started hearing rumors that the disciples were going to come and steal the body of Jesus Christ away and say that he rose from the dead. So in order to prevent this from happening, they did three things.

First of all, they put what’s called a guard around the tomb, and a guard was nothing more than a group of 10 to 30 soldiers who were highly trained to protect this tomb and guard it with their lives.

The second thing they did was they put a stone around the opening of the tomb, and this stone weighed somewhere close to 3,000 or 4,000 pounds. So this hindered anybody who wanted to come in or get out.

And then the third thing they did is actually put a Roman seal around this stone such that if anyone tampered with or broke this seal, they were punished by death.

To suggest, as some would, that the disciples broke in and stole the body of Jesus Christ and claimed that he rose from the dead would be highly unlikely.

Of course, a skeptic could just say, “How do you know Matthew didn’t just make up the guard story and the seal on the tomb?” This kind of stops the argument in its tracks. If we should believe these details simply because the Bible says that they happened, well, why not believe Jesus rose from the dead simply because the Bible says that it happened? Now, if you’re a skeptic and you’re not going to believe something just because the Bible says that it happened, then the argument’s not going to work.

Instead, a better argument for the resurrection uses historical details that even critics admit are genuine, like St. Paul’s claim to have seen the risen Jesus or his claim to have met the apostles who also saw the risen Jesus and trying to explain these post-resurrection appearances as well as Paul’s conversion. And there are also historical details involving the empty tomb that you can use to make a really good argument against things like the theft hypothesis.

Once again, I’m not saying that people should not believe in the guard story or not believe this part of scripture. I’m just saying that merely saying the Bible says this is not going to be very convincing to a skeptic. You’re going to have to take other approaches with them.

By the way, defending Christ resurrection, it also brings up another vulnerable Catholic traditionalist argument. These would be arguments that say, we know the apostles were sincere. They didn’t lie about Jesus rising from the dead because all of them, except for St. John, all of them died as martyrs and then quoting the different saint stories and Chronicles of their martyrdom.

But the problem with this argument is that skeptics are really only willing to grant the historical evidence for maybe three or four of the apostle’s martyrdoms. They’re not going to grant all of them because the evidence for the apostle’s martyrdom is uneven in its historical quality. Some of the evidence that they were martyred was written far later, for example, and skeptics are going to be more likely to doubt those particular episodes.

Also, we only have to show that the apostles risked death, not that they were actually martyred to show they were sincere in their belief that Jesus rose from the dead. I talk about this in one episode of the podcast as well as in a subsequent dialogue with an atheist. Once again, you can check those out in the links below.

That’s enough for now to show my concerns. And I want to reiterate, I am not saying Catholics are not allowed to hold these arguments, or it’s wrong to hold these arguments or anything like that. If these particular evidences I presented, if they help you, that’s great. Praise God. I’m just saying that when we present evidence to skeptics, it’s best to use the least controversial evidence possible. Even if the evidence that we really like tends to be very controversial, we have to put the needs of our listener first to present what’s going to be most compelling to them.

I’ll leave you with Colossians 4:6. It says, “Lets your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.” What we will say to people is going to be different based on their temperaments and what kind of evidence they find to be convincing. So let our arguments be seasoned appropriately so we can know how to best answer every one. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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