Thursday, June 25, 2015

Tips for apologetics -- Say what the Church says, but nothing more

It's been said that a lot of heresies were founded in the process of refuting another heresy.  Someone may say that Jesus wasn't fully man, and in the process of rebutting that argument someone else says Jesus wasn't fully Divine.  Someone may say that Jesus didn't have a human will, and in rebuttal someone else will say He had only a human will, not a Divine will.  Someone will say that Mary wasn't the mother of God and someone else will say she's not only the mother of God (Jesus) but also God's (The Father's) wife.  And on it goes.

We get carried away with analogies and can get so attached to them that we start believing our analogy instead of what the analogy was supposed to point to.  That's bad, but it probably won't lead to heresy in everyday conversation.  However analogies can cause misunderstanding, hurt feelings and alienation.

As an example when discussing the male-only priesthood, sometimes people use analogies like "Jesus is the bridegroom of the Church so it's fitting that a priest be a man" or "There's something fatherly about the role of a priest so it's natural that man are priests" (I confess I've used those and similar arguments in the past).  I don't know that these are wrong, but they are probably easily misinterpreted.  You're saying that men and women are different, which is controversial enough today, but it's easy to misconstrue that to mean that men are better than women.  Now you have two arguments to deal with: a charge of male chauvinism and reserving the priesthood to men.  People often associate the male-only priesthood to discrimination so you haven't really helped yourself here.

Again, I don't know that these are wrong.  There's a similar argument that "Jesus was a man, so it's more fitting that the priest is a man when standing in persona Christi."  That's a little better in my opinion, but only just.  Then I heard a priest say that ordaining women would hurt our relationship with the Orthodox which is elitist nonsense and I won't comment further on it here (it angry's-up the blood as Grandpa Simpson would say).

The thing is, the Church doesn't make any argument similar to that. The Church's argument for reserving the priesthood to men alone is that Jesus chose men to be His apostles. In light of the tradition in Judaism and in the early Church it's clear that Jesus did that deliberately and the Church doesn't have the authority to change that practice.  Women are awesome, but they can't be priests because Jesus chose who He wanted and He chose men.  That's all the Church says.  For that matter most men aren't called to be priests either.

The thing is, someone may not like that argument either, but it's not your argument.  If someone says that's a crazy idea, you don't have to take it personally because you didn't think of it.  Apologetics is not about saying something (anything) to get people in the Church, it's about presenting the Truth.  What happens next is up to God.  If the person you're talking to doesn't accept the message, that's the way it is. But make sure that he's rejecting the Church's message, and not your clever analogy.

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