Sola Luthera
When I converted to Christianity, I had to select a denomination. “Mere” Christians have no place to go on Sunday.
Naturally, I did not want to re-litigate the theological intricacies of the Albigensian Heresy, the Photian Schism, or Hussite, or Lollard or Lutheran. So I began at a simpler step.
As an atheist, I knew enough to know that Christians have always preached against divorce, contraception, sodomy. I took as an axiom that eternal God does not change His teaching to follow the fashions of the world.
If divorce is against Christian teaching, Anglicans are unfaithful. If contraception, Protestants, including Greek and Russian orthodox. If sodomy, Episcopalians.
This filter eliminates all denominations but one.
Those who doubt the age of the Christian teaching against contraception are invited to read the Didache, the handbook of Apostles, which, as best we know, was written by the Apostles themselves, and is older than some epistles canonized in the New Testament.
As I researched, it became clear that Protestant arguments are strawman arguments: accusations that the Catholics believe and teach matters they simply do not believe and simply do not teach.
All of them.
This includes everything, from the claim that Catholics neglect the Bible for manmade traditions, to the claim of idolatry, to the claim that almsgiving or penance to win indulgences for soul in purgatory is buying entry into heaven.
As a matter of logic, no one can preach sola scriptura — scripture alone has teaching authority — and then rely on the authority of Luther alone to remove seven books from the Old Testament.
Sola Luthera, as it were.
(If Luther relies on the authority of 10th Century rabbinical scholars or Masoretic text editors, to overrule Christ quoting Septuagint text, so much the worse. Sola Scola.)
Without even reaching the issue of whether Catholic teaching is true or false, if one side of the debate continually and shamelessly misrepresents what the other side says, it undermines their credibility.
No one with sound arguments prefers fallacies. No one who has live ammo shoot blanks.
The great claim of all sides of the debate is that they return to the original teaching as understood by the Apostles. The question then becomes what the Ante-Nicene Fathers taught, and which denomination currently teaching the same core message.
The accusation that the Ante-Nicene Fathers are themselves apostate leads to absurdity: many predate the canonization of doctrines and scriptures upheld by all mainstream denominations.
(All mainstream denominations does not include all. One Mormon with whom I spoke said that Church was apostate as of the Assumption of John, since Christ did not intend to have his Apostles to have disciples of their own, nor anoint bishops. As a matter of consistency, he also disbelieved in the precepts of the Nicene Creed, particularly the Incarnation and Trinity.)
But the fact that a close friend of mine, a Protestant, both objected to her non-Catholic daughter not being able to take the host at mass while visiting a church not theirs, and warned me not to read the Early Church Fathers weighed heavily with me.
The argument that the doctrines of the 15th Century reformers where the same as the 1st Century early Church are simply too weak to bear close scrutiny. The few sources we have give evidence that runs always the other way.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
