Erick Ybarra posted the following concerning apologetic methodology after I was done with the blog entry on the normative authority model. While it wasn't written in response, I think it's very helpful for illustrating exactly why I proposed this model in the first place. Erick wrote:
I am working from the field of discourse that has a falsification of Catholicism on one side of the table and then the robust exegetical falsification of Protestantism on the other side of the table. There are some apologists that *simply* want to hush these debates and simply go to the theoretical models about divine authority, faith, and the paradigms of epistemology, and try to refute Protestantism this way.
While I think that certainly has a place (heck, I wrote extensively on it in my published works), I think we do a disservice if we do not address the exegesis and the barebones of the argument on both sides. Now, don't get me wrong. No one is obliged to get into apologetics to begin with, let alone do it in the way that I'm suggesting. But I'm speaking to a preference.
I'm also speaking from years of dialogue with people who think the Catholic magisterial principle is falsified by an internal contradiction. In other words, the strongest Orthodox and Protestant arguments are those which try to show that a falsification has occurred in the Catholic magisterial system that cannot happen if said magisterial system is true. And at this point, one cannot simply say that "This cannot happen because we believe God cannot lie." Whether you are dealing with Orthodox or Protestants, you have to address their claim if you want to even maintain the bridge between the two of you.
Moreover, in my experience, these arguments contra Catholic magisterium are not fly-by-night easy-peasy spitballs that we can just relegate to the bin of "bad arguments." And if anyone thinks so, they haven't spent enough time actually sitting in front of opponents in live discussions with masters/phD level opponents.
Having done this myself, I believe I have earned the right to say that we cannot dismiss Protestantism's arguments that try to survive the perspicuity of Scripture on grounds that Scripture is *obscure* all the whilst we are dodging bullets like Neo from the Matrix on literally countless arguments against the clarity of the magisterium itself.
Now, if someone simply wanted to observe the systems of Protestantism and Catholicism and either capacity to sustain religious truth and unity, then I can understand harping on this point. But such a thing tends to be more theoretical than practical. Just think about. I can posit the very same paradigm of authority and epistemology for something completely made up. That wouldn't get close to defeating the Protestant arguments or their own system.
At least from my perspective, it's got nothing to do with wanting to quiet the debates, at least not in the sense that Erick means of trying to avoid discussion of issues or hard cases. My point is that most of these debates are irrelevant. Catholicism and Protestantism both managed to kill a lot of people in wars of religion and then spent basically the next century and a half having the same war in the academic and political arenas, of which the only upside was the fact that the academic debate was so esoteric that it made the entire discussion completely irrelevant to the vast majority of the population. This is more or less the same situation with the Catholics and the Orthodox, who took their Church-dividing schism into squabbles over Palamas between neo-Thomists and neo-Palamites with more or less the same result. I'm extraordinarily glad that no one is being murdered anymore, and the academic engagement has driven truly excellent scholariship in this area. But the result of this obsessive focus on so-called "Church-dividing issues" is that Christian intellectualism has been so ghettoized at this point that it's been relegated to the same academic wasteland as anthropological studies of first century Mongolian basket-weaving.
Thereon follows my joyous Easter message. Let's be honest; nobody cares. Not even Christians care about this anymore. I've been in parishes of hundreds of people for a couple of decades, and outside of the Internet, I think I've met one person in real life who was actually interested in this stuff (if there's somebody other than Bill A., sorry for forgetting you!). I have an entire library of books, the vast majority of which no one else I know has ever read or is ever going to read (with the exception of Perry Robinson, who reads everything). That is the "field of discourse" in which Erick is operating here; perhaps not the Magisterium of academia, but the battlefield of academia nonetheless. This is the antimodern approach: the Japanese soldier stuck on an island for fifty years still fighting a war that nobody on either side cares about anymore (typically complaining about how no one else is truly loyal to the Emperor, even though the current Emperor disagrees).
So how do we get off the island and actually move to where the war is being fought today? That's essentially why I came up with the normative authority model: to move the discussion out of the Victorian-era academic discourse and into something like mainstream intellectual thought. Christians have spent far too long viewing modernism as tantamount of Satanism and not as a legitimate expression of human reason, which it absolutely is. We shouldn't be antimodern reactionaries; we should be trying to integrate modernism just like we integrated paganism. That is the path of Christian ultramodernism.
Part of that path is discarding obsolete relics from nineteenth-century philosophy that have no relevance today. "Falsifiability" is an example of an obsolete concept: it's pretty well conceded by everyone that it doesn't even apply in the hard sciences, and even when people did believe it, it couldn't even apply in principle to history. Erick complains "I can posit the very same paradigm of authority and epistemology for something completely made up." Indeed! Welcome to modern science after Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The courtroom model where we are trying to ascertain the truth of relatively narrow propositions or events with a defined set of rules of evidence has long passed its expiration. C.S. Lewis's "God in the dock" or Lee Strobel's "case for Christ" are hopelessly dated in methodology, although they do provide an antidote to unhealthy skepticism by showing that there is no reason to be disproportionately skeptical about religious matters. But in terms of providing a full-blown intellectual justification, forget it. This is not how proof or evidence works in modern science, even modern social sciences.
That idea, that this sort of artificially constructed academic debate with elaborate formal rules of proof is where the winner is true, is the one that is purely theoretical and completely impractical. The real situation is that people look at real, concrete facts and situations and try to come up with explanations. Whether it's apples falling to the ground or light coming from the Sun or why the guy named Julius Caesar appears in ancient texts was apparently murdered. This is just what we do; we look for reasons. That is the part that makes modern science compelling: it finds reasons for things that make sense of real things around us. And that's why it works so well. It actually does make sense of things, because the created things around us do make sense, and we know that they are going to make sense because none of them would exist if God didn't exist.
That's practical. Even a child can ask "why?," and that is probably the cleanest way to do apologetics, which is to give a reason. That's because anyone who is inquiring or interacting with any Christian has a "why?" in mind. Modernism's basic problem is that it is concerned (because of nominalism, by the way) that we can't do this, which leads to this obsessive "but what if I'm wrong?" obsession so that we don't actually ask those important "why?" questions. But we can't possibly be that wrong about everything. We exist, which means there's an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator who isn't going to have some Cartesian demon (or Architect of the Matrix) screwing around with our sensory perceptions so that the world isn't real. If that were the case, we wouldn't be here. So forget the formality, the Scholastic syllogistic reasoning and the Ivory Tower arena combat, and even forget that their souls may be in jeopardy, and let's ask the question like children: "what is the reason?"
So sure, you can start with Christ. People say he rose from the dead; kind of weird, why is that? That's the "case for Christ" piece. "Well, other people have claimed to be raised from the dead." "Yeah, but those tended to be in explicitly religious contexts, and they didn't have societies around them acting as if this thing actually happened, unlike those mythical accounts," etc., etc. But that's not going to be good enough as an explanation, because the next question is "why would God reveal Himself that way?" And none of the "you're a sinner, and you need a Savior" line and none of the academic discourse is going to answer that reasonable question.
There's actually a straightforward answer that follows from what we already said: "because God isn't like us." When you're dealing with this omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, forming a relationship is not a simple matter. And evil, which is clearly an option of us, can get in the way. So even apart from the details, you've got an answer that isn't crazy. And you've started talking about the problem of evil, which is the biggest problem for theism generally, if we're being honest.
So *if* we get there: that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who is going to reveal Himself in a manner that allows Him to relate to us despite sin and our creaturely finitude and that the Resurrection of Christ is probably related to this, then we can start looking at other things that are best explained by being part of that revelation. For example, there is a 2000-year old organization that billions of people recognize that dates back all the way to Peter and Paul, who were disciples of Christ, and there is also a Bible that billions of people recognize that this organization claims to have preserved to the present day. Again, like the Resurrection, kind of weird. It's the sort of claim that sticks out, and it's unusual simply because organizations aren't usually able to hang around that long at that scale.
So here's how that chain of "why?" goes with the Protestant and a Questioner.
Q: I'm with you so far. There's this Church that is a body of the faithful that is part of this body of divine revelation. But you're asking me to believe that this group ... got this Bible thing wrong? That really needs an explanation.
P: Yes, and that's because, as we discussed, people can sin, and break their relationship with God, so these people made mistakes. But we have the Bible to prevent that, which those people should've just stuck to believing.
Q: OK, but then we need an explanation for how the Bible got here. The 2000-year-old organization makes sense as an explanation, but you're saying that those people are wrong and that organization's laws don't apply, so what's that about?
P: Well, *some* of them were wrong, but not *all* of them were wrong. There are people in this society who get it, who are led by the Holy Spirit, but there are some who don't.
Q: OK, but that sounds an awful lot like a magical explanation, like people who used spirits to explain things that they couldn't understand well enough to explain otherwise. What you said about Christ was based on real things that happened that are hard to explain, and the same thing with the existence of the Church or the Bible, but now you've moved away from that. What gives?
P: It sounds to me like you don't have faith in God's providence or the Holy Spirit!
Q: [walks away]
Don't get me wrong; I love scholarship and academic engagement. But it doesn't matter if you don't get the fundamental theology right! You can have whatever academic debate you want, and there might even be hard problems, but you can't turn that into the battlefield, because it just isn't. We don't want to be the Japanese soldier on the island fighting a way that absolutely nobody cares about, but that's exactly what the Ybarra program is leading us to do. Unless we want the discussion to be completely academic, which I'm absolutely fine with doing with suitable bracketing to say that it really doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things but that it's an interesting scholarly problem. But I'm not OK with giving the pretense that there is something huge at stake (or really even anything at stake) among the Ivory Tower gladiators. That's a relic of the nineteenth century, and we absolutely know better now.
