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In this episode Trent shows how Protestant apologists like James White criticize Muslims for relying on liberal Christian scholarship but then they use the same liberal theologians against Catholicism.
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 if you’ve been watching the podcast for a while, you know I’ve done a few series called how Protestants Argue like Atheists. In those episodes, I’ve showed that some of the arguments and strategies that Protestants use to undermine Catholicism actually mirror attempts that atheists use to undermine Christianity itself.
Trent Horn:
For example, some Protestants say that Catholicism is nothing more than rehashed paganism, that veneration of Mary is no different than veneration of ancient goddesses, this is just repackaged paganism. But atheists do the same thing to Christianity. They say that the worship of Jesus Christ, the risen son of God, that’s just repackaged paganism. It’s taking dying and rising gods of the ancient world and repackaging it in the form of Jesus. Now, Protestants rightfully say, “No, there’s important differences here and Jesus is not like those pagan deities,” but then Catholics can say the same thing about veneration given to Mary. If you want more on that, check out those episodes.
Trent Horn:
But right now I am putting all of the observations I’ve made together into a book, and I’m hoping to finish that book actually by the end of this month, so it’ll have all of the different things that I’ve covered my videos and also other things I haven’t covered yet in one volume. I’m going to send it to some Protestant friends just to make sure that even if we disagree on certain conclusions or on some core issues dividing us by faith, I want to get some input from my Protestant friends, fellow scholars, and apologies to make sure that I’m at least treating Protestantism fairly when I’m making this criticism.
Trent Horn:
Today I wanted to share with you another eerie similarity of how Protestants argue like atheists, but I also noticed that this particular argument is very common among Muslim apologists against Christianity as a whole. That’s what I want to dive into today. Before I do that, though, just a reminder, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com. I got big news by the way. For everyone who currently is or becomes a patron of our podcast, so go to trendhornpodcast.com, for everyone who is a patron during the month of June, you will be given free access to my new course, Arguing Against Abortion at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. My pro-life course at the School of Apologetics is free to everybody who’s a patron, sign up at any level, you’ll get free access to that course. Definitely go and check that out and by supporting us, you help the podcast to grow and that’s available at trenthornpodcast.com. Definitely go and check that out.
Trent Horn:
All right, so here is the atheist/Muslim strategy some Protestants use against Catholicism, and that would be citing liberal allies. Some Protestants will cite, in defense of their positions, they’ll find Catholic scholars who are somewhat liberal in their theology and cite them as evidence for their view. A common one might be this. When Catholics make a biblical case for the perpetual virginity of Mary, a Protestant might say, “Why should I believe that? Look at Father John Meyer,” so he’s a Catholic priest, a well known historical Jesus scholar. In his book, Jesus: A Marginal Jew, he says that if you just looked at the evidence, he says, there’s very scant, if any biblical evidence, for Mary’s virginity after the birth of Jesus, and he’s a Catholic priest, a Catholic theologian, and it’s persuasive to see something like that, right? You say, “Oh, even he thinks there isn’t a lot of biblical evidence for the virginity of Mary after Jesus’ birth.” Some Protestants will cite Meyer against the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Trent Horn:
But what they don’t realize is that many atheists and non-Christians, like Jews or Muslim apologists, will also cite Meyer because in that same book, Meyer says that there’s very little evidence for Mary’s virginity before Jesus was born. Meyer is a liberal theologian, not just towards Catholic doctrines, like the perpetual virginity of Mary, he’s also liberal against classical Christian doctrines, like the virgin birth. Now he affirms them as being true, he’s not an outright dissenter, but he’ll say that we believe it more by faith, there’s not really good evidence for it. Meyer does the same thing with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Meyer says that the resurrection of Jesus took place outside of history so you can’t really say there’s historical evidence for the resurrection. William Lane Craig has a great article showing why Father Meyer is wrong in this philosophical argument he makes.
Trent Horn:
So you see how it’s inconsistent, right, to be a Protestant to cite Father Meyer. Like, “Father Meyer says there’s really no biblical evidence for the perpetual virginity of Mary.” But then if a Muslim said to him, “Well, yeah, but Father John Meyer says there’s no evidence for Mary’s virginity before the birth of Jesus,” or, “There’s really no historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus,” those Protestant scholars will say, “Oh, Father Meyer’s just a liberal. Oh, he’s just a liberal naturalist humanist theologian.” They’ll say that when Father Meyer is cited against the doctrines that they’re defending, but if Meyer can undercut Catholic doctrines, then all of a sudden he’s on their team.
Trent Horn:
Ultimately, that’s a double standard that you really should recognize and in general, I would say same thing for Catholics. If you’re going to cite somebody, make sure that they’re representative of that theological tradition because there’s a fair number of liberal Protestant scholars that I could cite on various issues. Sometimes I do, if I really believe their conclusions are quite correct and sound, but in other cases when I cite people, I’ll try to cite conservative Protestants. People like Douglas Moo, DA Carson, RC Sprawl, and I will cite them, NT Wright, well, some people say right’s more moderate, but others will say he’s quite conservative. Depends on who you ask. I try to cite them. We all should treat each other, this is not just me bashing on Protestants, by the way. We all should, when we are saying, “The other side’s theologians agree with me,” make sure they’re representative of mainstream opinion.
Trent Horn:
Another example that I want to give of this comes from the reformed apologist, James White, okay? White in his debates with Muslims will point out, especially his debates with the Muslim apologist Shabir Ally, when White engages Ally, he points out a correct double standard in Shabir Ally’s arguments. I’m going to play it for you here in this clip. This is from a debate that they had at Biola University several years ago on the question of is the New Testament reliable? White points out that when Ally defends the Quran, he defends it with very conservative Muslim scholars. Even though, actually, if you go back to my video where I was critiquing Sheikh Uthman, the Muslim apologist in San Diego, I showed that Sheikh’s views are ultra conservative, that even Shabir Ally disagrees with him when it comes to some parts of the Quran.
Trent Horn:
White says, “Look, Shabir Ally will use conservative scholarship to defend the Quran, but then when he’s analyzing the Bible, he cites very liberal scholarship.” Then after this I’ll show why that’s a double standard with how James White treats Catholic scholarship, but let me play this to get the full principle out there, and then I’ll pass it over to see what White says. Let me play it for you.
James White:
If he consistently applies one standard of the Quran and another to the New Testament, then we know his position is untenable. And it is just here that we discover the problem with the denial of the inspiration of the New Testament. Consistently, not just this evening, but over the course of the past decade as far as I’ve been able to tell, Mr. Ally has adopted the most radically liberal, skeptical, naturalistic sources as the mainstream in Christian scholarship, while using the most conservative forms of scholarship in defense of the Quran. While he uses conservative dating for the sources of the Quran, he pushes the dating of the gospels as far back as the scholars of the Jesus seminar, asserting wholesale redaction and corruption of the original intentions of Christ and the apostles.
Trent Horn:
Okay. White makes a good point here that if Shabir Ally is evaluating the Quran and he’s evaluating the New Testament, he should use the same standards. If he’s going to allow conservative scholars to inform him about the reliability of the Quran, then he should allow conservative Christian scholars, so if conservative Muslims factor into his appraisal of the Quran, conservative Christian scholars should factor into his appraisal of the New Testament. We should treat both of them equally.
Trent Horn:
Actually in a follow up blog post to this debate, I found this line interesting. It was kind of an open letter to Shabir Ally. Here’s what James White said. “I would be happy to provide you with a listing of in depth, serious works by men like DA Carson, Douglas Moo,” who I cite in my books as well, “John Murray, Michael Kruger, Darrell Bach, and so many others.” Here’s the interesting line. “Reliance upon the Jerome Biblical Commentary, Raymond Brown, and other notorious liberals who have no concept of allowing scripture to speak for itself, no concept of the very unity and consistency you asserted for the Quran last evening remains and will always be your Achilles heel.”
Trent Horn:
White is saying, “Look, if you’re going to evaluate the New Testament, why aren’t you looking at the scholars that are not just conservative, but they’re willing to allow presuppositions of God working in history. They’re not handcuffing themselves with methodological naturalism of the academy.” He cites conservative scholars, DA Carson, Michael Kruger, we’ll talk about Kruger here in a second. He says that he criticizes Ally for citing what he would consider to be notorious liberals like the Jerome Biblical Commentary or the biblical scholar Father Raymond Brown, but here is where the double standard really rears its ugly head because White himself, he cites these scholars against Catholicism and he doesn’t preface it by saying that they’re liberals or notorious liberals, he just says that they’re Catholic sources, as if he’s trying to show, “Look, even mainstream Catholic scholarship doesn’t accept this.” Whereas when Shabir Ally cites them, they’re notorious liberals, when White does it, they’re just Catholics. I’ll give you two examples.
Trent Horn:
One would be from his debate with Tim Staples on whether I Corinthians chapter 3 teaches the doctrine of purgatory. Here’s a part of it, and note where he cites the Jerome Biblical Commentary, which as he says is Ally’s Achilles heel. Here’s that part of the debate we’re White’s speaking.
James White:
Manner in which they have fulfilled their ministry and quote, “I know that the commentary I just read is the Roman Catholic Jerome Bible Commentary, which goes on to directly state that this text does not teach the doctrine purgatory. However, the doctrine can find quote, ‘Support,’ end quote, in the text, a far cry from the claim that this text clearly teaches purgatory.”
Trent Horn:
Okay. Notice here, it’s just an offhand reference to the Jerome Biblical Commentary, whereas it gets denigrated as liberal scholarship when a Muslim cites it, but White is perfectly happy citing it. Father Raymond Brown, I think, was one of the editors of it along with Father Fitzmeyer.
Trent Horn:
I’ll give you another example of citing a notorious liberal but passing it off as if it were mainstream Catholic scholarship. This is from White’s debate with Father Peter Stravinskas on the doctrine of purgatory. I’m not sure exactly when this debate took place. I want to say it took place in around 2000, 2001, because on White’s website, he did a 20 year reflection of it I think in 2020.
Trent Horn:
It’s funny. Whenever I look at video quality from before 2001, everything looks like it was shot in the ’80s because it’s all the same, DV quality, stuff’s not very good. But I want to say this one is from around the year 2000. James White is debating Father Peter Stravinskas on purgatory and he cites Father Richard McBrien on the doctrine of purgatory. I want you to take a listen.
James White:
To suffer loss is to lose reward in the passage, not experience satispassio, the suffering of atonement, which is what one experiences in purgatory. Hence as Roman Catholic McBrien admits, “There is for all practical purposes, no Biblical basis for the doctrine of purgatory. This is not to say that there is no basis at all for the doctrine, but only that there is no clear biblical basis for it.” End quote.
Trent Horn:
Okay. He just says here, I’m just going to cite Roman Catholic scholar McBrien. Who is that? It just gives the impression like here is a mainstream Catholic scholar and even he says that there isn’t biblical support for the doctrine of purgatory. Purgatory is not in the Bible. But who is this McBrien? Well, the answer is it’s Father Richard McBrien, who was a theologian, a priest and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He died a few years ago, he died in 2015. But even when you go to his obituary in the New York Times, or the article about him in the New York Times, it’s interesting that the summary that comes up here on Google. It say, “The Reverend Richard P. McBrien, a theologian and professor at Notre Dame who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council died in Farmington, Connecticut. He was 78.”
Trent Horn:
Even here the New York times, and it says, “Who is Father McBrien, unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy.” Later when you read other articles about Richard McBrien, it’s very clear that the bishops took a stance against him, that he was heterodox, if not heretical, in some of the teachings that he espoused. Fe was an open advocate, for example, of the female priesthood. He compared a church that would not allow women to be priests with a country club that would not allow Blacks to join. Although that does raise a double standard for Father McBrien, it’s like, “Well, okay, if you belong to a country club that was racist and wouldn’t let Black people join, why are you still a member of the club? Why are you still here? Why wouldn’t you leave? Just become a Episcopalian. They’ll give you everything you want.” That’s what always I find so interesting. I’m sure White feels the same way, frankly, about liberal Christian theologians. Just become an atheist. If the resurrection is just a resurrection of hope and you don’t believe in the virgin birth and you don’t believe in miracles, just you might as well be an atheist.
Trent Horn:
For me, for a lot of these liberal Catholic scholars who believe in female priesthood, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, just become more radical Episcopalian but they don’t want to give up the prestige that comes with being Catholic.
Trent Horn:
Father McBrien published a book. This is a good article, by the way, by Ronald [Wrightschlic 00:15:44] in Catholic culture about McBrien. It talked about how he was an editor of the Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, and that many of the entry decisions are highly questionable. He had Father Charles Curran, who’s licensed to teach theology was suspended because of his dissent, write the entry on contraception. The bishops ended up censoring his work. He put out a book called Catholicism in 1981. By the time of the third edition in 1994, there was still no imprimatur on the book. Then in the late ’90s, the bishops came out against it. Well, the Bishop’s report said of the book, “On a number of important issues, most notably in the field of moral theology, the reader will see without difficulty that the book regards the official church position as simply in error.”
Trent Horn:
To quote Father McBrien, to say, “Oh, well Roman Catholic scholar McBrien says this is about purgatory,” it leads the audience to think, “Oh, wow. Even Catholics admit that there’s no biblical basis for this doctrine.” Except you’re quoting a really liberal source. It’d be the same if I quoted a really liberal Protestant to undermine … If I quoted an Armenian who said, “Calvinism is definitely not taught in the Bible.” Well, that doesn’t mean anything, he’s Armenian. Of course he doesn’t believe that.
Trent Horn:
Same with you have all these other kinds of liberal scholars. If you’re going to critique an opponent’s position and say his own scholarship is against him, cite mainstream representative scholarship. For example, in my book on Case for Catholicism, I show the doctrine of perseverance of the saints, the idea that you can’t lose your salvation, was unknown before Calvin. I even cite Calvinist scholars like John Jefferson Davis in defense of that view. That’s what you want to do when you’re citing different individuals. You want to take the most representative members from that other side.
Trent Horn:
One last point I’ll leave you with is that sometimes White, he might say that, let’s say you have a Brant Pitre or a Scott Han, or my colleague, Joe Heschmeyer, defending a view that there was a first century Bishop in Rome, all right, so the papacy can be traced back to the first century. White would probably say, “That’s apologetics, not scholarship.” He would say that those Catholic scholars are doing apologetics, they’re going against mainstream scholarship on the history of the papacy. He’d be like Jerry Walls and say, “Well …” Cite Eno and McDuffy and Raymond Brown, these other Catholic scholars who will say there was no papacy in the first century. He’ll say the Catholic scholars who do argue that point, they’re just doing apologetics, they’re not doing serious scholarship.
Trent Horn:
But then it’s interesting, when people like White, when they try to defend their authority, remember both sides have an authority claim to defend. For Catholics, it would be scripture, tradition, and the magisterium. For White, it’s sola scriptura. Not just that, but that Christians can know what scripture is to practice sola scriptura, or how do we know the contents of the 27 books of the New Testament? The alleged 66 books of the Protestant Bible, which are missing the dueterocanonical books. How do we know that?
Trent Horn:
The problem here is that in order to defend his more conservative view on sola scriptura, White and similar apologies, they will cite people like Michael Kruger. Remember Kruger, he mentioned them that blog post with Ally. Kruger is probably the one Protestant, most conservative Protestant who’s done work on the question of the canon. He has a book Cannon Revisited and this book, The Question of Cannon. Here in this book, it’s actually, is fascinating. He writes, “The dominant view today, as we shall see below, is that the New Testament is an extrinsic phenomenon, a later ecclesiastical development imposed on books originally written for another purpose. This is the framework through which much of modern scholarship operates.”
Trent Horn:
Now, this is important because a lot of apologies like White will appeal to Kruger to say, “Well, we can have knowledge of the canon. The canon, isn’t something the church gave us in any authoritative way.” White would say that the can is an artifact of revelation, God inspired books, and so He revealed His written word, and in doing so, He also revealed the canon to us, and so knowledge of the canon, of what the canon of scripture is, is intrinsic in the books themselves. If you just read scripture, you will know that these and only these books are scripture. Kruger defends this as an intrinsic model of the canon. We know what the canon is from something that is solely within the documents themselves.
Trent Horn:
Now, I’m oversimplifying Kruger’s case, there’s more he would talk about, maybe he and I could dialogue about this, that would be fine, but he admits even here, he says that the dominant field, the status quo, he calls it, in New Testament scholarship, in canonical studies, is that the can of the new Testament is not intrinsic. It’s not something that organically emerges just from the books themselves, but that it’s imposed, that you have an authority like the church, helping people to understand that these books have a specific role in the church. Not that the church determines what is inspired, God does that when He inspires sacred authors, but that the church authoritatively declares it to be the case. I just think it’s interesting that for White, when you have Catholic scholars who would defend something that’s a minority in the academy like that there was a first century Bishop in Rome, he would say, “Oh, well that’s apologetics. That’s going against the mainstream.” But if someone like Kruger takes a minority view on the question of the canon that is favorable to White’s ultimate authority, well, he’s a courageous scholar going against the grain of scholarship being faithful to the word of God.
Trent Horn:
Just to close and summarize, let’s all get rid of the double standards. Protestants shouldn’t argue like Muslims or atheists, Muslims and atheists shouldn’t argue that way. And Catholics shouldn’t do the same thing to Protestants. If you’re going to critique the scholarship … If you’re going to critique another side and you’re going to use their scholarship as evidence against them, make sure it’s mainstream, make sure it’s representative of that position, and it’s not a weird outlier. That’s a lesson for all of us to learn, but I think James White exemplifies here how you can have that double standard and not want Muslim apologists to do this, but still engage in it yourself.
Trent Horn:
Now, before we close out though, I do want to give White a little bit of credit here, or I want to understand him as charitably as possible because if you see the clips that I showed, I feel like it’s very clear evidence he engages in this particular double standard of critiquing Muslim apologists when they use liberal Christian scholarship, but then using liberal Catholic scholarship against Catholicism. I think that the clip from those two debates is very clear that he does this, but he seems to be aware of it, but doesn’t quite put all the dots together, I’m not sure. Because I found this blog post, he wrote in 2009 on his website, “The Unity and Certainty of Rome.” I’m going to scroll down a little bit and he’s talking about a dispute with the Catholic anthropologist, Roberts Sungenis, and here’s what he says. “In general I think Sungenis says truth in his side when it comes to his complaint that the majority of modern Roman Catholic scholarship has been deeply infected with theological liberalism.” Now here’s the kicker where he says this. “I can’t tell you how often I hear Shabir Ally or other Islamic apologists trotting out Brown or Fitzmeyer to prove this or that Biblical teaching is mythological or the like.”
Trent Horn:
I’m thinking as I read this, “Well, then why do you do that to Catholicism? Surely you’ll come up with some kind of a profound defense as to why it’s okay for you to do that, but not okay for Ally.” Then he just goes on to say, “I’ve often expressed the fact that modern Roman Catholic apologists live in a context of contradiction. They defend Rome’s dogmas while at the same time Rome’s theologians of long ago abandoned any meaningful commitment to Rome’s theology. They pay lip service to it just like in many allegedly conservative evangelical seminaries where inerrancy is ‘believed,’ quote unquote, but not really. Rome’s theologians find a way to talk about papal infallibility of the assumption in a way to keep their jobs while using code speak to let the enlightened know they really don’t believe such medieval silliness.” He then writes, “Roman Catholic apologists know their own theologians are not their friends. In fact, most of their writings are a gold mine for quotes ‘for our side.'” Okay, well, quote, mining is actually not the best practice to do when you’re engaging others. “The real problem they face is that their own leaders in Rome, not only put up with the situation, they promulgate it and support it.”
Trent Horn:
So I think maybe I don’t know what difference White is trying to draw here. I think he’s saying not so much it’s that the liberal scholarship exists, but that the bishops just haven’t fired these people from Catholic universities. If the Bible could fire someone from a seminary, the Bible would’ve fired all these liberals a while ago if God could come down and set it straight. But the bishops could, and maybe since they haven’t it’s fair game for White to cite these people? I don’t know. Just because the bishops are guided by the charism of infallibility, that just prevents them from formally binding the church to error. It doesn’t mean that they are always going to monitor and regulate theologians as they properly should.
Trent Horn:
What’s funny is some Protestants will complain about how the church had an index of forbidden books and was very heavy handed with dissenters in the Middle Ages and then yet now it’s a bad thing if these dissenting Catholic theologians are out there or not getting the index treatment. I don’t know, but the point of the matter is this is not a meaningful distinction here that White is bringing up. He acknowledges the problem. I still love this quote. “Roman Catholic apologists know their own theologians are not their friends. In fact, most of their writings are a gold mine of quotes for our side,” except for the quotes from Scott Han, from Robert Koons, from Brant Pitre, from Father Thomas Joseph White, there’s lots of conservative, Biblical, Michael Barbara would be another example, and these are people who be on par with DA Carson, Michael Kruger, and others. Once again, the bottom line is let’s have equality here. Muslims and atheists should cite the best of Christian scholarship, the liberal, conservative, whatever, cite the scholarship that puts toward the best evidence for the case and protestants should do the same with Catholics, Catholics should do the same with Protestants. I think that’s a very fair thing to ask.
Trent Horn:
Finally, I don’t know if White will watch this video. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. I don’t know. Some people say, “Why don’t you debate James White? Why don’t you dialogue with him?” I’m going to do a debate, I think there’s a lot of disagreement. He has preferred things he would like to debate. I think he wants to debate Pope Francis. That’s a multifaceted topic that isn’t really related to the direct core claims of the truth of Catholicism. Rather what I think is better, and I’ve offered this before and will still offer it to him. We do two debates. He defends Protestant authority, sola scriptura, how he wants to define it, and I defend the other countervailing view of authority, which I think is firmly rooted in the doctrine of apostolic succession. I think before you can say whether or not the Bishop of Rome has the authority of the apostle Peter, you have to settle in your mind first did the authority of the apostles in general pass on to their successors, their teaching authority, for example? If you say no to that, the papacy won’t even make sense. I would offer it a White, I’ll debate apostolic succession with him and sola scriptura, two separate debates. He said before, it’s hard to define what apostolic succession means, yada yada. Sorry, if that’s a problem for him.
Trent Horn:
Gavin Ortland has agreed to do these two debates with me. We’re going to debate sola scriptura first, then we’ll debate apostolic succession. Gavin Ortland is fine with that. If James White would like to do the same topics with me, I’m more than happy to oblige him.
Trent Horn:
That’s that, thank you guys so much. By the way, remember if you want access to my pro-life course, given everything that’s going on, Supreme Court, all of that, everything that’s happening with the issue of abortion, definitely check out trenthornpodcast.com. But thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Speaker 4:
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