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Second of Four 7-Minute Rebuttals
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Gerry Matatics
When the quotations are flying, it's tough to keep track of
all of this, and I hope that you will bear with both of us. But,
I'm very glad that Mr. White is bringing before us, in his
presentations this evening, the quotations of the early Church
Fathers. I will admit that it is impossible for a person
presenting either side on this or any other issue, to selectively
take citations from the fathers which seem to make the father's
support one's own position and not the other one. But I would
encourage Mr. White, as I encourage myself, to make sure we do
not descend to that particular level. In particular, I'm very sad
that Mr. White, and I don't want to misunderstand or misrepresent
you, Mr. White, are you saying, are you asserting that St.
Augustine, as a bishop of the Church, never appealed to sacred
tradition that was anything other than what is actually explicit
statements in Scripture? Okay, we're going to have to see,
tomorrow evening, for the second debate, whether, in fact, St.
Augustine said that or not. He has all kinds of references to the
importance of tradition. As a matter of fact, all of the church
fathers, while saying all the marvelous things they said about
sacred Scripture, which Mr. White read--all of those citations
are absolutely correct--never taught that Scripture alone was the
only thing that they could appeal to for one simple reason: The
people they are seeking to refute appeal to Scripture.
Mr. White began, actually, by talking about the Arian
controversy. Arius was a priest, a presbyter in the church at
Alexandria, who was denying the full deity of Jesus Christ and
was claiming that the Scripture was on his side. It's kind of the
same, frustrating response that you deal with a Jehovah's
Witness, a modern-day Arian, as Mr. White indicated today, who
will say, "Look, I reject the teaching that Jesus is God and
I do so because the Bible teaches that God is greater than Jesus
and that Jesus isn't God." In other words, they will appeal
to Scripture alone. And many of the early church fathers think
Vincent of Loren, in his famous ----- (Tape Switch) and making
the statement that from time in memorial, every heretic who has
departed from the teaching of the Church has always claimed that
the Scripture was on his side. An appeal to Scripture to back up
your position is in and of itself insufficient to demonstrate
that you are in line with Scripture. Why? Because you and I are
fallible human beings. And we might think that Scripture is on
our side, as Arius did, as Jehovah's Witnesses do, but the
Scripture is not a living being, a person, although it is the
Word of God and is that powerful thing at work in our lives,
nonetheless, it cannot sort of get up on the table and say,
"Wait a minute. You're misrepresenting me." It cannot
jump out of your hands when you're quoting it if you're a
Jehovah's Witness or a this or a that and you are, in fact,
misunderstanding the Scripture.
It is possible to abuse the Word of God, and as a matter of
fact, Peter reminds us and warns them solemnly about that in II
Peter 3:16-17 when it refers to the Scriptures that Paul has
written. He calls them Scriptures. But he says in these
Scriptures there are many things which are hard to understand,
which the unstable can misunderstand and can twist to their own
spiritual harm. There is a very real possibility, and Mr. White
and I would both agree, that the history of the Church is
littered with the spiritual carcasses of those who have thought
the Word of God was on their side, when, in fact, it was not.
It is the case that Athanasius met people on their own terms
as I said I would today. The fact that I said I will prove the
Catholic position from Scripture...I will not "take
encyclicals" as a way of demonstrating to Mr. White since he
doesn't accept their authority that my position is right. But it
would be a foolish person if there was someone out there taking
notes on this debate who would say, "Oh, Mr. Matatics must
agree with sola scriptura, too, because he's only going to quote
from Scripture and that's all that he I heard him quote from
basically to prove his points." You see, I'm meeting Mr.
White on his own grounds. And so, all of those quotes--and if you
listen to them very carefully as I did, and if you didn't, then I
would encourage you to ask Mr. White to let you look at them
again during the break or to tell you where they are so you could
get them yourself and read them carefully--all of them are
agreeing to meet the heretics on their own terms. That is what
Athanasius was saying. That is what Basil was saying. That is
what Augustine is saying, It's not that he explicitly says it. He
says, "Because I will not appeal to the Council of Nicaea
because you do not accept it as I do not accept your
extra-scriptural authority." And so I will quote what you do
and at least formally acknowledge the Scriptures. And the fact
that he restricts it to Scripture does not mean that for
Augustine that was the only authority around. As a matter of
fact, this same Augustine said all kinds of things about the
teaching authority of the infallible Church and the importance of
the tradition in making sure we understand the Scriptures
correctly. And he himself said, "I would not believe the
holy Gospels if it were not for the authority of the Holy
Catholic Church." St. Augustine realized what many
Protestants, despite their intelligence and their sincerity, seem
to have difficulty realizing. And, as I say, maybe its the
weakness of we Catholic apologists that we're not presenting this
with the clarity that we ought to.
Now I have to rise, I think, to the defense of Mr. Lewis. Not
that this is a debate about the merits of Vincent Lewis, but I
honestly do believe that he is. . . I don't buy this worshiping
of academic degrees that says just because he never went to
college that he's therefore not an intelligent or learned man.
Jesus Christ never went to college. The Apostles were unlearned
fishermen, and yet they were men of God who taught the truth and
transformed the world. And I think it would be a very superficial
reason to reject a debate with someone who--I've listened to his
tapes I mean, he's my competition. I mean I would have a vested
interest in saying this guy is not good. To find in someone of
Mr. Vincent Lewis, of his virtues, an able and worthy articulator
of Catholic faith, I think he is a very well-read and a very
intelligent and a very effective apologist for the Catholic
faith.
But St. Augustine, in that famous statement of his, that he
accepts the authority of the Gospels because of the authority of
the Catholic Church, is admitting something that everyone here,
if they stopped to think about it, has to admit, that you and I
were not handed the Bible directly and immediately from God. It
was the Church, the successors of the Apostles, meeting in
councils, authoritative councils, guided by the Holy Spirit, the
Church acting as a pillar and foundation of the truth as Paul
said in I Timothy 3:15, which separated the wheat from the chaff,
separated the written. . . You know, what we have in the New
Testament is a tiny fraction of all the things that were
circulating in the early centuries which purported to come from
the Apostles. There were dozens of Gospel, not only these four.
There were dozens and dozens of books with the titles of Acts and
Epistles of Paul, and Apocalypses. And the Church, because it had
been graced with this gift of the Holy Spirit, transmitted from
the Apostles to the successors, was enabled by Jesus Christ to be
able to identify true literary deposits of apostolic teaching
from those that were spurious, that were not genuine.
And the same confidence they had to separate the written wheat
from the chaff they used likewise to separate the oral wheat from
the chaff. The very councils which give Mr. White the New
Testament--the Council of Hippo, for example, in 393, and the
Council of Carthage in 397, meeting in North Africa--these very
councils which give him the canon of the New Testament and
without which he would not be able to know which books, in fact,
were inspired, and which were not, which came down from the
Apostles and which were not, these very councils teach Catholic
doctrine.
And I hope that Mr. White will admit that, even if that
provides some sort of inconsistency to his position. That they
teach things that are in line with what the Catholic Church
teaches about, for example, legitimacy of prayers for the dead,
or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even if the
term, transubstantiation is not used. It is wrong to say that
transubstantiation was not believed for centuries and centuries
when in the 2nd Century you have Justin Martyr saying that when
we consecrate the bread and the wine they cease to be natural
bread and wine and become, instead, the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. He doesn't use the term "transubstantiation" to
explain why the substance changes while the external appearances
remain the same. That term arrives later on in the Middle Ages.
But the concept is there. And there are no Protestants in the
early Church, there are no people on the doctrine of the
Eucharist saying it is merely a sign, it is pure bread and wine
that remains bread and wine and only reminds us of the body and
blood of Christ. There is not a single Church Father which
teaches that. And I defy Mr. White to come up with an example of
the one who does. The early Church was teaching Catholic
doctrines. And that early Church gives us the New Testament. And
the early Church was either competent or incompetent to pass onto
you what the Apostles taught. If it's incompetent, as the
Protestant would say, then as I say, he bites the hand that feeds
it. How does he know that it has given us the correct books? If,
on the other hand, it is competent, then it is simply because,
not because of any special promise from Jesus that the Holy
Spirit would guide the Church to collect a canon but that it
would be guided in general in passing on the faith. And you must
accept all that it teaches and not pick and choose.
Jesus says a tree is known by its fruit and a good tree can
only produce good fruit and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit.
If the New Testament is a good fruit, as Mr. White believes it
does, then he cannot believe it comes from a bad tree, that the
Magesterium of the Church, the original bishops of the Church,
the Apostles, that is, wrote these books and that their
successors collected them and canonized them.
The Scriptures are self-interpreting and self-authenticating,
Mr. White says. Please, Mr. White, give us a Scripture for that.
Don't make statements to this audience or to me that the Bible
itself does not back up. Give us one verse in the Bible which
says that the Scriptures are self-authenticating or
self-interpreting as opposed to the need for a church to help
explain and help us understand, since we are fallible as
individuals, what, in fact, the Scriptures say. Most of the
negative verses that he quoted about the Word of God spoke about
speaking from God, I Peter 1:23 and others. And we'll see that as
we continue.
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