Jennifer Kozumplik, left, and her partner of 17 years Nicole Webber, right, from Sacramento, Calif., hold their 18 month-old daughter Sophie as they pose for a photo after receiving their marriage license on the first day of same sex marriages at City Hall in San Francisco.

The printing press revolutionized apologetics. Suddenly it became possible for books to be widely disseminated with a relatively small expense. Today, the Internet has reduced that expense even further. As with the printing press, the blessings are mixed. The technological advances make defending the faith easier, but they also making attacking the faith easier. Apologetics remains important – and the defenders of the faith have an important role to play.

Mr. Shea recently wrote an article for Catholic Exchange discussing Roman Catholic apologetics. The article was not narrowly focused on any one topic, but addressed some history, some ad hominem, and some meta-apologetics. The historical part of the article deals with some of the evolution of post-Vatican II Roman Catholic apologetics, especially focusing on the last two decades. The ad hominem section has already been addressed by Dr. White (link) and James Swan (link). The bulk of my response is directed toward the third part of the article, the meta-apologetics aspect: defending the defense of the faith

Mr. Shea seems to take a rather cavalier attitude toward apologetics in his article. He portrays the history of modern Roman Catholic apologetics as disorganized and largely individualized and seems to glory in this, commenting that “I don’t believe in organized religion. I’m a Catholic.” He brings up an example of his apologetic failure in a dispute against Mr. Swan, but dismisses the matter as unimportant. He tries to portray Dr. White (and metonymically other non-Romanist apologists) as having an inordinate (and unhealthy) interest in apologetics, while praising his fellow Romanists for their lack of exclusive focus on apologetics.

Of course, it has not always been that way. The notable counter-Reformation apologist Cardinal Bellarmine is more likely to be praised (by those of his church) for his tireless focus on attempting to respond to Reformation apologetics than for leading a balanced life. Indeed, while I have not attempted a survey of his biographies, one would expect that devotion to his work would be one of the many praises he would receive from favorable biographers.

In dismissing his failure against Mr. Swan, Mr. Shea tries to minimize the historical error he made in claiming that Jerome accepted the canonicity of the Deuterocanonical works, by indicating that it does not matter that Jerome rejected those works. It does, of course, matter. Once Rome acknowledges that its foremost Bible translator disagreed with the canonicity of some alleged books of Scripture, we realize that the set of beliefs held by Jerome was different from the set of beliefs held by modern Roman Catholics. That’s not to say Jerome held an identical set of beliefs to those I hold, or that Dr. White holds. What it does say is that the entire pre-Reformation body of those who claimed the title “Christian” is not “owned” by modern Roman Catholicism, just as it is not “owned” by the Reformation.

Mr. Shea says that the moral of the story is “test everything and hold on to what is good,” citing Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians. This is, of course, the Achilles heel of Catholic apologetics. How can the claims of Roman Catholicism be tested to see what is good? How can a person test the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent to see what is good? We all know what the answer is: the answer is that we turn to the standard of truth found in the written and uncorrupted Word of God.

Men err. God’s Word, which is to be found authentically in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, does not err. Jerome erred and even the Apostle Peter erred. The sixty-six canonical books that Jerome recognized as the authoritative Scriptures do not err. The two general epistles of Peter, which were inspired by the Holy Spirit, do not err.

Ultimately, it is the errors of men that make apologetics so important. Apologetics is the fulfillment of the church’s duty to serve as the support (στυλος and εδραιωμα) of the truth. It is a defense of the faith, and part of the duty of Christian brethren as laid out by Paul in Ephesians 6:10-20. Scripture is our sword, and with it we quench the fiery darts.

At the end of day, Roman Catholic apologetics cannot say the same thing. Instead, Roman Catholic apologetics must adopt blackwhite, which has been defined this way:

...this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that white is black, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. (1984 George Orwell)

Lest you think that description too harsh, consider the words of the founder of the so-called Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, "I will believe that the white that I see is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it."

It is that attitude that renders much of Catholic apologetics moot, and permits Mr. Shea to have the nonchalant attitude toward it that he does. It’s what permits him to respond to Dr. White’s critique of his mockery with yet more mockery, “The Hindenburg of anti-Catholic apologetics blows up because ‘The prowde spirite . . cannot endure to be mock'd.’” (link)

And yet, despite the seeming nonchalance, hollow mockery, and studied dismissal of apologetic failures, one can sense that Mr. Shea is concerned about the strength of his positions. The reader notices that Mr. Swan is called not by his own name but “Mr. X.” Meanwhile, Dr. White is referred to by another pseudonym (a handle Dr. White never used, but which is rather the current name of the general purpose Christian fellowship IRC chat channel that he runs).

Ultimately, apologetics in the Internet age is as important as ever. There are fresh attacks and regurgitations of old attacks, even some of the same that were given long ago by the Jesuit counter-reformers. Apologetic teams and individuals, as long as the keep their eyes on God’s word, can contribute to this defense. The building of the church sometimes progresses one way, sometimes another, but we can model our role along the lines of Nehemiah 4:18, “For the builders, every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.” Even so let us joyfully edify the church, with the Sword of the Spirit as our defense against error.

James White,
A while ago I listened to the debate that you had with Lou Rugg. I was thoroughly surprised over Lou's compelling argumentation, which I thought demolished your Kalvinististic diatribe. Let me tell you why I don't find Kalvinism compelling. Much of what I've heard about Kalvinism is from the chat program Pal Talk. Now, there are knowledgeable brothers on Pal Talk, and they have attempted to explain the basic teachings espoused by Jon Kalvine and his 10 statutes, and I am not impressed sir. BTW, his 95 theses nailed to the door of the catholic headquarters is admirable, but he went downhill from there. And as an aside, I find it interesting that you briefly signed up for Pal Talk but left as fast as you came. Is this because you couldn't stand up to the Biblical knowledge that is permeating Pal Talk? Perhaps you didn't want be backed into a corner and refuted? Are you courageous enough to debate my friends on pal talk? We shall see.

You've spent mulitple Dividing lines now resting your entire argument on assuming that whatCatholics now call dulia must be judged by what a 2nd century BC translation might think it means. To rest all your argument on the dictionary would be to concede that if only the word say "appreciate" was used instead of "dulia", (or maybesupercalifragilisticexpialidocious), then your entire thesis would fall apart. Similarly with "prayer". Apparently if the word "talk" or some other word were used, your entire argument would fall apart.

How does it even begin to be a valid argument to compare the lexical meaning of words across completely different centuries and cultural settings, to be a valid argument? As far as I see, almost your entire debate was based on the worst kind of lexical fallacy.

Sacros etiam libros et apocryphos, hoc modo manifesto fecit. In domo enim Dei, inferiore loco juxta divinam mensam omnibus colloctis, Dominum invocans oravit: ut qui divinitus inspirati essent, superius; qui autem adulterini, inferius (quod et factum est) invenirentur.

The council made manifest the canonical and apocryphal books in the following manner: Placing them by the side of the divine table in the house of God, they prayed, entreating the Lord that the divinely inspired books might be found upon the table, and the spurious ones underneath; and it so happened.

If the various Byzantine positions represent the extreme documentary approach to textual criticism, relying mainly on external evidence, and the Thoroughgoing Eclectic position represents the extreme evidential approach with regard to the text contained within those manuscripts, relying mainly on internal evidence, then the Reasoned Eclectic position, at least as it claims, sits somewhere in the middle. This position, while having a distinct bias toward internal evidence, does acknowledge the importance of external evidence to determine a particular reading.

As with Thoroughgoing Eclecticism, Reasoned Eclecticism has its roots in the work of Westcott and Hort. However, many of those who hold to Reasoned Eclecticism have departed from some of Westcott and Hort's views, or have modified them to accommodate more recent evidence. For example, Westcott and Hort placed a lot of faith in codices B and Aleph, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. For them, those were the manuscripts that were closest to the autographs, and were the standard by which all other readings were judged. This is why these manuscripts were the main targets of Burgon's attacks in the late nineteenth century, and why those who still cling to Burgon's views (for the most part, those who represent the Majority Text and Ecclesiastical Text positions) spend their time attacking these same two manuscripts. Modern Eclectic scholars, however, recognize that at the time Westcott and Hort wrote, these manuscripts were the best they had. Apart from these and one papyrus fragment, the rest of their manuscript evidence was relatively late. While recognizing the importance of B and Aleph to the textual tradition, modern Eclectic scholars weigh the evidence from across the entire spectrum of manuscripts, including both Byzantine text types and minuscules.

One of the major differences between the Reasoned Eclectic position and the Byzantine Priority position with regard to the history of the text is the Reasoned Eclectic position does not start with the presumption that the original text was of a particular text family. Granted, they will say that they believe the Alexandrian type to be closest to the original, but, for the most part, they do not claim that the original was an Alexandrian manuscript. For example, in his book The King James Only Controversy, Dr. James White states, "Most scholars today...would see the Alexandrian text-type as representing an earlier, and hence more accurate form of text than the Byzantine text-type" (p. 43). Also, note the words of Dr. Bruce Metzger: "Though most scholars have abandoned Hort's optimistic view that codex Vaticanus (B) contains the original text almost unchanged except for slips of the pen, they are still inclined to regard the Alexandrian text as on the whole the best ancient recension and the one most nearly approximating the original" (Text of the New Testament, p. 216).

From this perspective, one can understand how Robinson's objection that Eclectics produce readings unknown in the textual tradition causes no problem to the Eclectic viewpoint. They acknowledge that the original is not extant, and they also acknowledge that not one text type is in itself totally representative of the autographs. It is only reasonable to expect, therefore, that the autograph will not look precisely like anything in the extant textual tradition, given agreed upon assumptions about the early corruption of the text and the small amount of manuscript evidence from the earliest days of the church.

There is agreement, though, that the various text-types were generated from the work of the many (mostly non-professional) scribes that copied the various books of the New Testament over the first two hundred years of the church. According to the Reasoned Eclectics, the Alexandrian text type represents the earliest and most accurate form of the text, noted by its conciseness, while the Byzantine text type is a later creation due to scribal conflation of readings into one text. In other words, there is a greater tendency within the Byzantine text type to include textual evidence rather than to exclude, and to harmonize rather than support a single reading. It must be noted that these are tendencies. The Reasoned Eclectic position is often criticized for claiming that the Byzantine text contains conflations while the Alexandrian does not. Such critics go on to posit examples of conflation within the Alexandrian text type. However, modern Reasoned Eclectics will not deny that such scribal tendencies exist within the Alexandrian tradition. However, while these kinds of phenomena exist in the Alexandrian text, they are not the overall tendency of this text type.

Aland sees the difference in the Alexandrian and Byzantine text types as stemming from the churches in which they flourished. In his view, a more uniform church structure within a diocese will produce a more uniform text type as the various New Testament books are copied from church to church. While the churches of Egypt were very loose-knit, the churches of the Byzantium region were more united. Over time, this more homogeneous text would exert its influence over the texts of Egypt to become a standard text (Aland, Text of the New Testament, pp. 55-56).

The various forms of the text were stabilized within the first five centuries of the church. There is evidence (contrary to the claims of the Byzantine text proponents--whether Textus Receptus, Ecclesiastical Text, Majority Text, or Byzantine Priority) that shows that the early Alexandrian texts were used, possibly more so than many of their Byzantine counterparts. One example of this is the fact that a number of extant manuscripts--including codex Sinaiticus (Aleph)--have scribal emendations written upon the text by later hands. If, as Byzantine text supporters like to suppose, Byzantine texts wore out from use in the first three centuries of the church, why do many extant Byzantine texts fail to show the same kind of scribal activity and, instead, show clean, unchallenged pages? This argument was put forward by Daniel Wallace in his article "Majority Text Theory: History, Methods and Critique," published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (June 1994; page 206). In the same place Wallace also capitalizes on the lack of evidence for the Byzantine text type in the first few centuries of the church by asking the question: "Are we to suppose that every single 'good' NT somehow wasted away--that no historical accident could have preserved even one for the first 350 years?" Rather, the texts of the first few centuries of the church were generally undisciplined and, while some were distinctly Alexandrian in text type, they displayed a mixture of text types and readings.

As much as widespread persecution of the church influenced the means by which copies of the New Testament was made, in the view of the Reasoned Eclectics, this same persecution, along with other events and factors of church history, influenced which manuscripts survived the first five centuries of the church and became dominant. Holmes notes that Diocletian's first edict contained specific instructions regarding the confiscation and burning of copies of the Scriptures (see his article "The Case for Reasoned Eclecticism" in Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, p. 95, n. 51). This would help to account for the relative lack of manuscripts from this period, and the general paucity of Alexandrian manuscripts.

After Constantine's rise to power and the legalization of Christianity, the various text types were copied more carefully and propagated more extensively. The solidifying of the text types could be said to begin here. However, the Islamic invasions of the seventh century brought Islam into Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. These places either succumbed to conquest and the Christians were forced to live under Muslim rule, or the Christian communities disappeared completely. This situation would at the very least curtail the transmission of New Testament texts, and, inasmuch as the Muslims destroyed Christian literature (a disputed point, but Holmes notes that the 30,000 volume library in Caesarea was destroyed by the Muslims in 638 B.C, which would at least make such activity possible), would prove devastating for the survival of biblical manuscripts. It is of great interest, then, that the only region where Christendom held firm against the Muslims for close to 1,000 years was the region around Byzantium. Greek-speaking Christians in this area managed to fend off the invaders and preserve their churches, their language, and their Scriptures until the fall of Byzantium in 1453.

For the Reasoned Eclectic, the foregoing briefly but adequately explains why only a few manuscripts of distinctly Alexandrian text type remain, why there are no manuscripts of distinctly Byzantine text type until the fourth century, and why the Byzantine text type became so dominant later.

As mentioned earlier, the Reasoned Eclectic viewpoint is one that, while acknowledging a bias toward internal evidence, does pay close regard to external evidence. In light of this, the approach to a variant reading taken by such a scholar would be to first evaluate the various possible readings presented by the critical text (i.e., either NA²⁷ or UBS⁴) in light of external evidence: geographical spread, age, and text types. While the use of versions and early church fathers has been of great influence to the Byzantine school, these are only of secondary (if that) importance to the Reasoned Eclectic. Sufficient evidence should be found within the Greek manuscript tradition (see Aland, p. 280). Arguments against the use of the fathers and versions include the fact that, unless the father is commenting on a passage of Scripture, they can rarely be trusted to quote a passage verbatim such that the Greek text known to him can be determined. Also, since the extant writings of the fathers are themselves copies, one cannot know for certain how much scribal activity has entered into the reproduction of the father's text. At best, the fathers are good for ascertaining whether a particular passage was known to them at that time. There is still no evidence that any church father used a Byzantine text type in his quotation of Scripture.

After this, the scholar can begin the examination of the text in terms of internal evidence: difficult readings, influence of contemporary church or theological issues, harmonization, and the author's style. Internal evidence, however, can never be solely determinative. In other words, the correct reading will have the support of both internal and external evidence. For a more detailed analysis of this process with illustrative passages, see Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, pp. 216-246. See also Aland, The Text of the New Testament, pp. 280-316.

Part 13: Concluding Thoughts--coming soon...

Pseudopodeo has doctored the recording. I have come to expect such tactics from him and other anti-Catholic Protestants. It is more about egoism than about the truth. Sorry. That is the way it is.

Luther suffered from bipolar manic-depressant illness and Calvin was a classic paranoid personality and was convicted of sodomy. They were both unstable. Their errors led to their excommunication. They died outside the Church of Jesus Christ. Everything Pope St. Peter prophesied in his 2nd Encyclical has come to pass in these two backsliders.

Mr. White is an ignorant bigot who has no academic credentials. He was raised by bigots to be a bigot and would parade around in a white sheet burning crosses on people's lawns if there was any money in it. In a strange bizarro parody of Christian discipleship, he hates his enemies and does bad things to people whom he doesn't like. He also is a big whopping LIAR and likes to slander anyone who has the temerity not to kowtow to him. He is known affectionately as Pseudopodeo by those who know him best.

Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.

14. The Panel finds, and the Panel orders as follows:

a. That Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about Dr. Lund or Dr. Lund's witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc.

8. The Panel agrees also with Dr. Lund's submission that hate propaganda remedies should have a symbolic and educational value as stated in the Citron case:

Any remedy awarded by this, or any Tribunal, will inevitably serve a number of purposes: prevention and elimination of discriminatory practices is only one of the outcomes flowing from an Order issued as a consequence of these proceedings. There is also a significant symbolic value in the public denunciation of the actions that are the subject of this complaint. Similarly, there is the potential educative and ultimately larger preventative benefit that can be achieved by open discussion of the principles enunciated in this or any Tribunal decision."