Debates, Sermons, and Truth
There have been a few discussions about the best way allow people to arrive at truth when there are opposing viewpoints. On Catholic Exchange a few days ago there was an article on political talk shows. How certain shows tend to give more time to one side of an argument. Then there is the discussion about cross examination and oral debate involving James White and Dave Armstrong. There are some common threads. Especially the notion of expecting somebody to answer a complex question in a short amount of time. Questions that have a number of assumptions embedded in them are a common debating tactic. It works well because you spring it somebody with no warning and they are likely going to struggle to pull it apart and explain the hidden complexities. The audience invariably sees that struggling as a sign of weakness in the responders position. Really it is just a bad question.
These are all good points except for one thing. The points about debate technique get confused with debate content. A conservative talk show host is forgiven much if you happen to be conservative. A protestant apologist is applauded by protestants almost regardless of the tactics used. We don’t even notice when bad tactics are used in the service of what we believe is the truth. The trouble is we can be wrong about what is true. In those cases we don’t notice when misleading arguments make us more sure of false teachings.
I noticed this big time when I started to question some of the basic protestant biblical assumptions. I listened to a lot of sermons both at church and on the radio. I used to agree with almost everything. I would even have said that it was clearly in the scripture being preached on and not coming from the preachers tradition at all. But when I became more familiar with other ways of looking at scripture I began to notice a ton of logical fallacies. The most common one was ignoring or dismissing alternative interpretations. It is amazing how much a preacher can get away simply because there is nobody to question him.
I remember one when a pastor was preaching on Matthew 25. It ends with the words, “He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Now the pastor just asserted that “This does not mean works are somehow related to salvation.” Then he moved on. Now I was reading some Catholic stuff so I was asking “Why not?” Nobody else was asking that. I knew a year or two earlier I would have just accepted it as well. These kinds of moments happened a lot.
The trouble is that people think they are receiving biblical truth when they listen to a sermon. In reality, listening to sermons is a terrible way to find biblical truth unless the preacher already has it. It is an act of trust. How do you know he has the truth? Because he has been immersed in a tradition that is true. But how do you know which tradition is true. That is the key question. It is one that sermons won’t help you solve.
The same is true of most oral debates. The quick give and take is a fun sport. But you should not expect the winner of the debate to be on the side of truth any more than you should become Catholic because Notre Dame beat Southern Methodist University at football. It simply has no value at bringing out the truth.
Not all debate is like that. There is the slow detailed debate. That is much more likely to give you truth. First of all, you need debaters that are honestly more interested in teaching and learning than they are in winning. Those are hard to find. Then you need to spend time. You cannot tackle complex theological questions in 30 or 60 minutes. They need long explanations. Then days or weeks to contemplate. That needs to be done again and again. There really is no short cut.
Well there is one short cut. That is to find a tradition that you can trust. That is a sacred tradition rather than a tradition of man that Jesus warns against. Protestants say there is not such tradition so they are out of luck. Every protestant must contemplate every question because no amount of consensus can be trusted. This is impractical but it is the only way to be true to the Sola Scriptura principle. Catholics, of course, believe tradition not only represents the contemplations of man but it is protected from serious error by God. So you can trust it.
But what about politics? The same problems exist there. You have a liberal tradition and a conservative tradition. How can we tell which is right? The church gives some guidance on issues like abortion that have a clear moral overtones but what about everything else. Well there is no shortcut. Catholic tradition offers some thoughts but we need to contemplate. We need to think outside the categories that are being presented to us. We need to forget about our own interests and think about the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned of this world. That is hard to do. It is tempting to just convince ourselves that what is good for us will be good for them to. That we really don’t have to sacrifice.
“In reality, listening to sermons is a terrible way to find biblical truth unless the preacher already has it. It is an act of trust.”
That’s a very good point; I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
I have some Protestant/Catholic debate recordings, but they’ve been a real disappointment– much heat and not much light.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:01 pm