Why I’m Catholic (Reason 25)
From Dave Armstrong’s list:
Protestantism has no way of settling doctrinal issues definitively. At best, the individual Protestant can only take a head count of how many Protestant scholars, commentators, etc. take such-and-such a view on Doctrine X, Y, or Z. There is no unified Protestant Tradition.
I’ve taken more than a bit of flack from a couple of atheists on twitter recently over precisely this issue: that Christians — or, at least, Christians that these atheists have evidently observed and interacted with — can’t agree on various doctrinal issues…even basic ones like the Holy Trinity, unfortunately!
(When you dismiss the Trinity as a mere “teaching of man,” you really have wandered too far into the wilderness of sola scriptura.)
Which, I suppose, goes to show that these atheists have principally debated Protestants, rather than Catholics.
But anyhow…the ability to resolve doctrinal disputes in a way that is both centralized and binding is one of the hidden strengths of the Church, and is a powerful tool for evangelism and witness.
(I’ve been in debates where two or three Catholics have been able to mop up handily, against atheists and evangelicals alike*, simply because we were uniform in our arguments, despite having never met before.)
If you’re an atheist, you jump from evangelical to evangelical, asking for a theological opinion about a certain issue, and you can make quite the game (and no end of fun) of the myriad responses you receive. You can’t play that game with Catholics, typically.
And as an added bonus, Catholics — for the same reason as the above — don’t usually care if atheists try play that game with both Catholics and Protestants, nor are we likely to find it particularly convincing.
Because at that point, the atheists would basically be arguing against the validity of all fruit based on the difference(s) between apples and kumquats.
* of course, as someone once observed, what is an atheist except a fundamentalist Calvinist who has rejected all the usual Catholic trappings…and the remaining three as well (by which I mean: the Trinity)?
