Mark Shea on the Duh Vinci Code* and Ahistoric Protestantism
*Thank you, Xavier.
- [H]aving to do battle with people like the Jesus Seminar and Dan Brown is the penance that anti-Catholic Protestants must do to atone for the various lies they told to justify their anti-Catholicism. Dan Brown is, after all, simply regurgitating the same sort of crap Loraine Boettner did. Except he is making the (perfectly logical) leap from 16th Century Protestantism to 2nd Century Protestantism and saying, "If Christians after the Seven Councils could just decide for themselves who Jesus was and what the faith it, then why could Christians *always* do that?" Good question.
The Catholic faith has a response. It's called Sacred Tradition and apostolic succession. Evangelicalism's response (judging from my experience in Hollywood last week) is either "Tell people your personal story about how Jesus changed your life" or "What is truth? Let us be open to diversity! 42 million DVC readers can't be wrong!" I have a modicum of respect for the first response. The gospels are, after all, accounts of how Jesus changed people's lives. Personal witness does count for something. But personal witness that is not rooted in the awareness that we are saved *as. a. people* and that the Church is prior to us and not about our personal preference and notions of what the gospel should be is ultimately doomed.
As to the second response, I have basically nothing but contempt for it. It's a naked capitulation to the dictatorship of relativism.
My hope, bolstered by the response of the audience at the Hollywood do, is that most Evangelicals are as dissatisfied with these weak-tea responses as I was and want to have something more solid to underpin their faith. Several people remarked on the fact that they didn't know anything about Church history and that this was why the DVC was so hard for them. They're perfectly right, of course. For many Evangelical [sic], Church history begins with Jesus, pauses with the death of John, enters a vast parenthesis with something about pagans, monks, inquisitors and Mary worshippers, and then resumes with Luther. With a knowledge like that, the DVC does have you as a sitting duck.
*Thank you, Xavier.
Redeemed by Our Savior, I work out my salvation with fear and trembling in Pohang, South Korea, where I live with my wife, daughter, and son and teach English at a science and technology university. Baptized a Methodist and raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran in Buffalo, NY, I spent six years as a guest of the Anglican Communion before being received by the Grace of God into the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church on the Feast of Saint Andrew, my patron, anno domini 2002.
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