Apologetics Toolbox: Sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation

Pope Francis hearing a confession.
(Image source: catholic.com.)

The Catholic doctrines surrounding the Sacrament of Reconciliation (aka Confession, aka Penance) present a challenge to many Protestants, especially those of the free-church/Evangelical lineage. “Why,” the Protestant asks, “must I go to a priest to have my sins forgiven? Why can’t I just pray to Jesus directly? After all, my sins are between me and God!” If the Protestant is an Evangelical of the “once saved, always saved” stripe, he may even say, “Jesus has already taken away all of my sins, past, present, and future! Why would I need to ask?”

Sin is not a private matter

I’ve already discussed the assurance of salvation elsewhere; if you need to, please consult that post first. The rest of the discussion will assume that a mere assertion of faith in Christ is not sufficient in itself to achieve salvation, that we can lose our salvation through our own fault.

Sins don’t occur in a vacuum or a void space. In all cases, there is at least one person other than God who is offended by a particular sin — namely, the sinner himself, even if he fails to recognize it. Most of the time, there is at least one direct victim of the sin; there are often witnesses. Many sins hurt the community, even when they’re not illegal. And sins done in public cause scandal in the classic sense: they testify against the Church and the Faith to non-Christians. Moreover, we know just from watching the news that many sins done in secret become public knowledge due to circumstances beyond the sinners’ control, becoming scandals in the common sense. How could you ever think that your sins are “just between you and God”?

So we’ve assumed that an assertion of faith, even a “conviction of salvation”, doesn’t of itself secure salvation, because “if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.” (Hebrews 10:26-27 NASB)[*] Only those who “persevere to the end” (Matthew 24:13), who “[do] the will of My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21), will be saved. How then, does a Christian repair the damage and put himself back on the path?

Apologetics Toolbox: Catholic Answers for Slick Questions

A Facebook source led me to a page titled “Questions for Roman Catholics”, by Matt Slick of the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry. “The responses [I get],” Slick states, “vary from defensive tradition to ignoring them and hoping to go away. Some of the questions are easier for Roman Catholics to respond to, and others are not. I hope that these might be helpful in your dialogs with the Roman Catholics as you try to present to them the true and saving gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Well, it depends on the context in which Slick presents the questions; some are pretty intrusive. But overall, some of the questions are no-brainers, some misrepresent Catholic doctrine to some extent, and some just show how little Slick himself understands what he’s attacking. The overall presentation is supposed to lead the Catholic to question his faith and the Church. But it’s by no means an infallible (*ahem!*) wrecking ball. Here I present it with fearful fidelity, including Slick’s misspellings, along with the answers. (Note: Questions rendered irrelevant by the answer to a previous question — or, in the case of the oral tradition questions, based on a fallacious notion — are presented in strikeouts.)

Apologetics toolbox: Sunday worship II — St. Paul and the Law of Moses

Part I concerned itself with the basic case for Sunday worship against those communions which argue that we ought to worship on Saturdays, that Sabbath worship is mandated by “God's law” (i.e., the Law of Moses). Part II looks at a particular argument, which tries to reintroduce the Law of Moses via St. Paul.

Yesterday (3/22/14), I engaged in a Facebook argument in which a Seventh-Day Adventist attempted to lecture The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named on St. Paul and Sabbath worship. Apparently it carried over from someplace else, for when she posted to The Blogger’s wall a link to a video that asked, “Can the Majority Ever Be Wrong?”, he replied (quite lucidly), “Of course the majority can be wrong. But that is useless for demonstrating that you are right.” He then asked SAD why Christians are bound to observe the Jewish Sabbath when we’re not bound to observe anything else the Law of Moses mandates (i.e., phylacteries, kashrus, etc.).

Someone else noted that the Israelites were never bound to observe all 613 mitzvoth, a contention on which I held my piece though I felt it didn’t really answer the question. So I cited Colossians 2:16-17, with the punctuation, “Saint Paul FTW.” The Blogger, probably after heaving a mental sigh, advised me, “I’ve cited that previously. [SDA] shrugs it off with ‘you don’t understand Paul’ and then supplies no explanation of what he ‘really’ means.”

To her credit, SDA tried to enlighten The Blogger and me. However, within two sentences, her analysis went off the rails: “When the NT was written it had to line up in agreement with the OT.”

This is a problem we encounter quite frequently in combox controversies with less sophisticated sola scriptura types: Although we all acknowledge Scripture to be “inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16) — literally, Theopneustos, “God-breathed” — and thus to have a unity in the Holy Spirit, some Protestants treat the New Testament as if the books and letters were intended to be treated the same way they treated Old Testament Scripture. In fact, though, the NT works, especially the letters, were “occasional” in nature, written ad hoc to address contemporary issues and needs, without any obvious consciousness that they would one day be gathered together in a single codex.[*]

This makes a difference, because SDA continues, “The OT was the reference guide for Paul used [sic]. Paul had to learn and memorize the entire OT and not only that he was taught by the top notch Rabbi [Gamaliel]. Who is better at understanding and writing the NT. Obviously the NT had to be in agreement with the OT.”

Apologetics toolbox: Sunday worship I — the basic case

As a result of a Facebook argument, I decided to repost this as the first part of a two-part series. Part II was posted March 23, 2013, and concerns itself with an attempt to sneak the Law of Moses into Christianity through a back door; this is the basic case.

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“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27-28 NIV).

With these words, Jesus reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, was commanded not for the benefit of God, who can be — and ought to be — worshipped any and every day of the week, but for the benefit of his creatures doomed to eat their bread in the sweat of their face (Gen 3:17-19), to give them a day of rest (Ex 20:10; cf. Ex 23:12, 31:15, Dt 5:14). Indeed, the English word holiday is a contraction of “holy day”, a fact G. K. Chesterton played on when he said of the ancients, “And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.”[*]

But Jesus doesn’t simply remind the Pharisees that the Sabbath is for man’s sake … he also associates the Sabbath to himself: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:28; cf. Lk 6:5). Tertullian argued from the relevant passages, the plucking of grain from the fields (Mk2:23-28; Lk 6:1-5) and the curing of the withered hand (Lk 6:6-10), that Jesus as Son of Man and Son of God had the power to transfer the Sabbath to another day:

Now, even if He had annulled the Sabbath, He would have had the right to do so, as being its Lord, (and) still more as He who instituted it. But He did not utterly destroy it, although its Lord, in order that it might henceforth be plain that the Sabbath was not broken by the Creator, even at the time when the ark was carried around Jericho. … Now, although He has in a certain place expressed an aversion of Sabbaths, by calling them your Sabbaths (Is 1:13-14), reckoning them as men’s Sabbaths, not His own, … He has yet put His own Sabbaths (those, that is, which were kept according to His prescription) in a different position. Thus Christ did not at all rescind the Sabbath: He kept the law thereof, and both in the former case did a work which was beneficial to the life of His disciples, for He indulged them with the relief of food when they were hungry, and in the present instance cured the withered hand; in each case intimating by facts, I came not to destroy, the law, but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17), although Marcion has gagged His mouth by this word (Against Marcion 4:12).

Apologetics toolbox: Redemption and heaven

As unreliable as the MSM is in reporting on matters religious, religious bloggers and non-mainstream news outlets are almost as bad at reporting on what the MSM says about religion. Has anyone actually read an article or post which declares, without any weasel words or equivocal phrasing, “Pope Francis said Thursday that atheists can go to heaven by doing good works”? If you know where such posts can be found, please send me the links and I’ll post them here.

Of course, that’s not what the Pope said, as Jimmy Akin takes some time to explain. Pace Terry Mattingly, HuffPo’s headline (“Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed By Jesus As Well As Catholics, Pope Francis Says”) is only as dramatic as the fact is — all mankind has been redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. If there’s any problem with the anonymous author’s piece, it’s that s/he confuses redemption with justification: “…the Pope’s words may spark memories of the deep divisions from the Protestant reformation over the belief in redemption through grace versus redemption through works” [bold font mine.—TL].

Why would such an assertion be controversial? In strict justice, atheists can’t be wholly blamed for getting Christian concepts mixed up. For one thing, Catholic catechesis and religious formation have degraded considerably since 1965; for another, common Christian consensus understanding of such basic concepts has also fallen apart, as a natural consequence of sola scriptura and the rejection of human religious authority. If we don’t get these things right, how do we convince the non-believer?

The assertion is only controversial if we believe that redemption is a guarantee of heaven — that, because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, you don’t really need to do anything other than be “good enough” to go to heaven. This is the error that needs correction. So what is redemption?

Apologetics toolbox: Abortion and the silence of Jesus

[Vice-President Joe] Biden is not wrong on gay and abortion, Jesus NEVER took a stand on either of these issues.  Jesus only talked about love and a belief in him, you people better take a deep look into yourselves because he is coming back soon and not loving your neighbor and not taking care of the poor and the less fortunate goes against everything my lord taught and if you do not do the same you spit on him and I would hate to be in your shoes.

This combox entry appeared in Carson Holloway’s piece, “Paul Ryan, Joe Biden and Liberal False Equivalence”, on CatholicVote.org.  Of course, besides our anonymous troll’s factual error — that Jesus talked about much more than love and faith in him is easily demonstrable from the Gospels — s/he also commits an argument from Gospel silence.  Such arguments, as I’ve said before, can become ad ignorantiam fallacies unless the argument to be made from the silence is consistent with what came both before the Gospels (pre-Christian Judaism) and after the Gospels (the New Testament letters; the writings of the Church Fathers).

And yet, there are those who will insist that Jesus the Compassionate would have understood, and implicitly given his approval to, a woman’s desire to abort her unborn child … especially if she were young, poor and in some sense downtrodden.  Not only is this argument hard to sustain without Scriptural proof-texts, it perfectly illustrates why asking “What Would Jesus Do” is bad moral advice: it invites us to turn the Lord into a sock puppet telling us to do what we want to do anyway.

Matthew 6:7: Vain repetition or babble?

The early teen years are a time when charming misinformation is passed on from kid to kid with the solemn, easy assurance of time-tested wisdom.  “Schnauzer” is a dirty word in German.  The F-word is an acronym meaning “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (in fact, that became a Van Halen album title towards the end of the Sammy Hagar era).  And KISS, the name of the rock supergroup, stands for “Knights In Satan’s Service”.

Eventually we learn better.  Schnauzer, in fact, comes from Schnauze, meaning “snout”.  Although the actual root of the f-bomb is uncertain, enough cognates abound in the Germanic languages that it most likely comes to us from a common Indo-European stem through Anglo-Saxon.  And, according to Wikipedia, guitarist and founding member Paul Stanley first suggested the name “Kiss” when original drummer Peter Criss mentioned that he’d been in a band named Lips; at one point, founding bassist Gene Simmons claimed it stood for the old rule about sales pitches: “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

And yet, though we tell ourselves (and each other) that there’s nothing so stupid or counterfactual people won’t believe it if you repeat it often enough, in the main we fail to erect mental checkpoints where new data can wait for validation before they’re added to our lists of “everybody knows that” truths.  I’m sure most of us have listened or read as some blowhard confidently preceded some assertion of patent folly with the words, “Science has proven that ….”  Usually, this means one of three things:

• “Some recent study/experiment, using dubious methods and/or inappropriate measures, claims that …;” or
• “Although this theory can’t be tested under our current technical limitations, some scientists take it for granted that …;” or
• “Famous Scientist says that ….”  (Because, of course, Scientists never get stuff wrong, or speak on subjects about which they know bubkes.)

Apologetics toolbox: The Immaculate Conception (Part II)

In addressing the historical objection, we state that, whether the early Christians explicitly believed in an Immaculate Conception or not, it’s a legitimate development from things they held true about Mary from the earliest days: that she gave birth to Christ without labor pains (a legacy of original sin), and that she is the “New Eve”. Indeed, not only did the early Christians believe in a painless birth, many have argued from that time forth that her hymen remained intact … a position not strictly necessary to maintain her perpetual virginity, perhaps, but not one completely out of court, either.

But the doctrine also derives from the belief in Mary’s life without sin. And here’s where we start running the proof-text gantlet:

Objection 2: In the Magnificat, Mary “rejoices in God my Savior”(Lk 1:47). How could she require a savior if she was born without original sin, and had not sinned in her life?

Consider the following scenario: You and your mother are on a cruise ship that runs into an iceberg and sinks. Fortunately, another ship is nearby, and you’re pulled from the water with the rest of the survivors. Your mother, however, is fortunate enough to step onto a helicopter and be flown to the rescue ship without getting so much as a toenail wet.

Here’s the question: Was she saved or not? The answer is, of course, that she was saved, just in a different manner from how you were saved. But notice that the objection contains the answer to a different objection——

Apologetics toolbox: The Immaculate Conception (Part I)

Non-Catholics — especially Protestants who reject what they call “Mariolatry” — have several issues with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Of course, as with many other distinctively Catholic/Eastern Orthodox beliefs, it’s crucial that the sola scriptura block be settled before addressing these objections, especially if the non-Catholic refuses to ascribe any authority to anything other than Scripture; otherwise, you probably won’t get as far as first base.

It’s not as common an error as it used to be for Protestant non-Catholics to confuse the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin with the conception of Christ. However, when dealing with a non-Catholic, especially one raised outside of Christianity or whose religious formation was sketchy, it’s best to make sure you understand which topic you’re addressing, so you’re not solving the wrong problem.

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Objection 1: The early Christians didn’t believe in Mary’s immaculate conception.

One concept from our argument against sola scriptura bears repeating here: the occasional nature of the individual books of Scripture, especially the New Testament. By “occasional nature”, we mean that the Gospels and letters were written to address the particular needs and specific questions of their intended audiences, even though they’re useful for us to study today. The least likely thing for the writers to mention would be that which everyone believed or knew, except so far as they contributed to the topics to be discussed. We write letters and books like this even today; it would be tiresome and time-consuming to have to restate everything known and uncontested every time we tried to write about the little-known or the debated and debatable. In sum: Just because it isn’t in the Bible doesn’t mean the first Christians didn’t believe or teach it!

Apologetics toolbox: Sunday worship

Joe Heschmeyer of Shameless Popery posted some interesting material on Seventh-Day Adventists yesterday (9/1/11). While it’s worth reading in its own right, and I do recommend you check it out, I should also note that there are other, smaller Christian groups, like the Seventh-Day Baptists and Messianic Jews, who also insist on Saturday worship.

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“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27-28 NIV).

With these words, Jesus reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, was commanded not for the benefit of God, who can be — and ought to be —worshipped any and every day of the week, but for the benefit of his creatures doomed to eat their bread in the sweat of their face (Gen 3:17-19), to give them a day of rest (Ex 20:10; cf. Ex 23:12, 31:15, Dt 5:14). Indeed, the English word holiday is a contraction of “holy day”, a fact G. K. Chesterton played on when he said of the ancients, "And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men."[1]

Apologetics toolbox: Assumption of Mary

I'd intended to get this out much earlier; however, yesterday was hectic beyond belief. My apologies to one and all.

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Yesterday, August 15th, we celebrated the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holy day of obligation.[1] In the Eastern tradition, it's also known as the Dormition (Latinization of the Greek Koímēsis, "falling asleep") of the Theotókos ("God-bearer").

Both the Eastern and Latin traditions hold that Mary was taken bodily into heaven, in the same manner as had her Son. The Eastern tradition maintains that she died and was resurrected on earth before the assumption; the Latin tradition leaves it an open question. Certainly, when Ven. Pius XII promulgated the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus on November 1, 1950, he didn't insist that the Blessed Mother remained alive right up to that point; in fact, he alluded to her death several times.

However, like many Marian teachings, Protestants, especially Evangelicals, hold that because the Assumption isn't spoken of in Scripture it must not be a doctrine requiring Christian assent, let alone faith. Now, we've already spoken of the many problems inherent in sola scriptura; if you need reminding, then start with Part I. Suffice it for now to say that authority within the Catholic Church is a three-legged stool, resting not only on Scripture but also from the apostolic tradition and the teaching magisterium of the Church, which reconciles the other two.

Apologetics toolbox: Sedevacantists

“The other Protestants"

What is sedevacantism?

Sedevacantism describes a segment of people who, while holding themselves out to be Catholics, maintain that the documents of Vatican II teach heresy. As a result of this, the popes and bishops responsible for this council were de facto excommunicate; by extension, since heresy impedes priestly and episcopal functions, there were no true apostolic successors after that point, and the Chair of Peter is an empty seat (sede vacante).

Excepting for our current purposes the Eastern and Orthodox Churches, we can state that Protestantism begins with the rejection of the authority of the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church, and assumes that the identity of the true Church of Christ is transferable (i.e., Martin Luther would have never separated himself from Rome if he weren’t convinced that he and his followers were the true Church).

If we accept this model, then the central problem becomes clear: sedevacantism is a form of Protestantism. The only real difference is that, where the Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists and their descendants prop their rebellion on the twin pillars of sola scriptura and sola fide, the sedevacantists support theirs through appeal to their interpretation of Catholic dogmatic statements and comparison with their interpretation of the Vatican II documents.

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints III

First, let me apologize for the little hiatus in my posting. Actually, I’ve posted almost as much in the last three months as I did in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined, so I’m happy the “writer’s block” lasted no longer than it did.

In Part I, we argued that God does make saints, and that we’re all called to sanctity as part of our call to faith. In Part II, we tackled the “praying to saints is necromancy” argument; as Jesus told the Sadducees, “The Lord is God of the living, not of the dead” (Mk 12:27).

So okay, there are saints that are already with God in the heavenly kingdom. That doesn’t mean they can hear our prayers, though, right? In the last post, I dismissed the question out of hand. Frankly, there’s no good Scriptural argument to say saints can’t hear prayers; one passage — Revelations 5:8 — tells us that they pass on prayers meant for God, which argues that they can hear prayers, even when the prayers aren’t directed to themselves.

Jesus the “One Mediator”

Given the lack of Scriptural arguments against saints hearing prayers, there’s an indirect approach to the matter: Jesus is the only mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5). We can even back this up with another freebie proof-text: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Ac 4:12).

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints II

In Part I we looked at sainthood and sanctity as part of justification. We had to do this because we needed to establish that God can and does make people holy, and that we are all called to that holiness as part of our life in Christ. Sainthood is the result of justification through God’s sanctifying Grace.

Now we look at saints and their role within the Christian community. As I said before, the Church doesn’t make saints; rather, saints make the Church. And this is a wholly orthodox position:

After confessing “the holy catholic Church,” the Apostles’ Creed adds “the communion of saints.” In a certain sense this article is a further explanation of the preceding: “What is the Church if not the assembly of all the saints”(Nicetas of Remesiana, Explanation of the Creed 10)? The communion of saints is the Church (CCC 946).

We see in the New Testament that St. Paul addresses his letters to those “called [to be] holy [hagiois]” (Rom 1:7; cf. 1 Cor 1:2, 2 Cor 1:1, Eph 1:1, Phil 1:1, Col 1:2). In narrow scope, the communion of saints is the communion of Christians as the Body of Christ (Rom 12:4-5; cf. 1 Cor 6:15, 12:20-27; Eph 5:30). But that’s the horizontal axis; the vertical axis is through time: We are bound not only with Christians today but with Christians throughout history.

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints I

“Only God can make saints!”

Yes, indeed. To deny the need for God’s grace for sanctification is heresy. The Catholic Church doesn’t even claim to be the primary agent for the transformation; the best the Church can allege in any particular case is an “assist” or a “save”.

By canonizing some of the faithful, i.e., by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of holiness within her and sustains the hope of believers by proposing the saints to them as models and intercessors (cf. Lumen Gentium 40, 48-51). “The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church’s history” (John Paul II, Christifideles Laici 16:3). Indeed, “holiness is the hidden source and infallible measure of her apostolic activity and missionary zeal”(CL 17:3).[1]

In fact, it would be truer to express the dynamics the other way around. The Church doesn’t make saints; rather, saints make the Church.

Defending the communion and intercession of the saints takes some work, especially if you’re doing it “on the fly”. There are several related issues: How do we know that the Blessed Mother, saints and angels can “hear” our prayers?  Are they omnipresent?  Isn’t our prayer supposed to be directed to God alone?  Is there Scriptural evidence to back this up?  What about proofs from the Fathers?

Apologetics toolbox: Apostolic succession

When discussing apostolic succession with an Evangelical/fundamentalist who’s using the New International Version of the Bible, you’ll have to explain first where the word “bishop” comes from.

“Bishop”, as I’ve explained over on the other blog, comes from the vulgar Latin word biscopus (LL. episcopus), which in turn comes from the Greek word episkopos. In NIV, episkopos is directly translated as “overseer”; while that is what the word means, it can lead a person who doesn’t know New Testament Greek to miss the connection. If you have a standard English dictionary that shows word origins, or if you have Strong’s Greek Lexicon, you can show it to them from there.

(As an added bonus — if you wish to be an insufferable know-it-all — you can also point out that “priest” comes from presbyteros, which is translated in most English bibles as either “leader” or “elder”.)

Now, remember that discussions about bishops and apostolic succession are truly fights over authority: authority to interpret the Gospel, authority to discern authentic doctrine, authority to bind the conscience of the faithful to the teachings of the Church. That’s why even a person willing to concede that sola scriptura is flawed doctrine will hold that apostolic authority ended with the passing of St. John the Evangelist (ca. 90).

Apologetics toolbox: Infallibility—UPDATED

In discussing the teaching authority — the magisterium — of the Church, most people put up resistance to the idea that any single man or collection of men can be held infallible. This even holds true for many Catholics, whether their dissent is religiously conservative (SSPX) or liberal (Catholics For Choice).[1]

But as we remember from “The sola scriptura problems”, Jesus promised the guidance of the Holy Spirit to the Church (Jn 14:26, 16:13). If we hold the Holy Spirit — God — to be trustworthy and reliable (Rom 3:3-4; 2 Tim 2:13), then that guidance must necessarily impart infallibility to the Church’s teachings. And, indeed, St. Paul calls the Church “the pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Tim 3:15). Nor can the Church lose that guidance without breaking Christ’s other promise: “And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt 28:10 NIV).

Let’s consider it from another angle: Infallibility, in doctrinal terms, functions much like the American judicial principle of stare decisis (“let the decision stand”). Under stare decisis, lower courts aren’t free to controvert decisions of upper courts, especially not those of the Supreme Court. The only difference is, while SCOTUS holds itself able to overrule previous decisions at its own level, infallibility goes forward in time to bind future councils and popes: Pope Benedict could no more dispense with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception than he could overrule the doctrine of the Trinity.

Apologetics toolbox: The Real Presence

"I look at it under a microscope, and it still looks like bread and wine to me." I've heard this before; you probably will hear it yourself. It tempts me to retort, "Would you feel better about it if they looked and felt like flesh and blood?" (As has happened at least once, in Lanciano, Italy.)

As far as I know, only the Catholic and Orthodox Churches still maintain that the elements actually become the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ through transubstantiation. The Lutherans and Anglicans go more for consubstantiation: Christ is present "with, in and under" the elements.

Other Protestant churches hold the Eucharist to be symbolic, and that Jesus intended it to be so. Theologically "liberal" or "progressive" Christians also tend to hold that the Eucharist is merely symbolic, generally operating on the presumption that a literal transubstantiation is superstitious if not barbaric.

The problem with both consubstantiation and mere symbolism is that neither is true to the beliefs of the apostles and the Church Fathers. Without a literal understanding, its power as a symbol diminishes, though it doesn't quite become meaningless.

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part VI)

Scripture and Tradition

In the last part, we talked about the reason that Scripture is insufficient to act as the sole infallible rule of faith: the apostles never expected to teach Christianity out of a book, or even a series of books. There are lacunae in Scripture because the writers took for granted things they expected their audiences to know without being reminded. Moreover, the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire were functionally illiterate or semi-literate; Christianity was not the religion of the elite.

Instead, for most people, learning the faith was a matter of learning symbols, experiencing the liturgy of worship—and oral tradition.

Doctor Timothy Paul Jones, a Protestant minister and educator, cites 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 to illustrate the oral tradition as Paul used it: "For I delivered to you as of first importance that which I also received …." "Delivered" translates the Greek paradidōmi, and "received" paralambanō, which were used in the context of oral tradition. The pattern of and … and … signals the repetition of things to be memorized: that the Messiah died in accordance with Old Testament prophecy, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day, and so forth and so on. The same pattern is also visible in the same letter at chapter 11, verses 23-26, where Paul relates the events of the Last Supper in words that are echoed at every Catholic celebration of the Eucharist.[1]

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part IV)

Material sufficiency of Scripture

In Part I, we saw how the basic premise of sola scriptura (only Scripture is infallible) must implicitly contradict Scriptural promises of either the Holy Spirit's guidance or the Holy Spirit's reliability to be true. In Part II, we saw how sola scriptura effectively and logically denies anyone the authority of the Spirit, including the Protestant defender of sola scriptura.

Part III addressed the question of human authority as it affects the composition of Scripture. Again, the contradiction at the heart of sola scriptura denies the infallible authority of the Spirit to determine the canons: If the Church could be wrong about including the Old Testament deuterocanonical books, then all Christian churches could be wrong about denying a role for the Gospel of Thomas or the Book of Moroni.

In this part, we finally start to address the Scriptural backing for it. If we remember, the first principle of sola scriptura is: Scripture, taken by itself, is sufficient to act as the regula fidei, the infallible rule of faith. Although we haven't addressed this point directly, this is the key claim; if it's not true, then nothing else that follows from it can be true.