An Attack on Apologetics, of Sorts

An Attack on Apologetics, of Sorts · Biblical Inerrancy is Patristic

Christian Apologetics is Dangerous #deconstruction
C. J. Cornthwaite | 23 April 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QGCMOsruE0

15:24 He didn't say "total crap" he said "straw" ...

I'm with Chesterton on this one. He was certainly granted a vision compared to which his Summa and Bible commentaries were very inadequate. This doesn't mean we, who have not seen that vision should also find the Summa inadequate for us.

It especially doesn't mean some other school of Christianity, whether Protestantism, ex-Catholic Neo-Protestantism (I recall one man in particular whom I knew some years of my childhood) or simply your "Christianity isn't intellectual" ... should be considered more adequate. He didn't say "burn it and enthrone the Schmalkaldic Confession" and he also didn't say "burn it and enthrone some Bible scholar who says Christianity isn't consistent intellectually, but still true for other reasons" ... he just said "burn it" ...

God knows what we would have had instead of the Summa if he had been obeyed, but I have a hunch, we would have sth pretty close to the Summa. By the way, the comment certainly didn't include Tantum Ergo, which was already authorised by the Church and was out of his own hands.

16:09 Can you prove Heliocentrism?

I don't mean, can you prove it in very big detail, citing exact protocol, but simply, can you, in principle prove it? I mean on the level you can prove curvature of Earth from geography, from watching ships approaching and parting on seas from the shore, from wider and narrower horison depending on how high you look from.

Because apart from spectrography, most of modern cosmology is dependent on Heliocentrism. If you can't prove Heliocentrism, you can't prove alpha Centauri is 4 light years away, for instance.

16:14 Biblical studies ... exactly what prevents, in Hebrew, which I suppose you know better than I, that a) Genesis 2 shows a closeup on day VI in Genesis 1, and b) a certain phrase be translated "and God having created beasts brought them forth to Adam" (which is the LXX and Vulgate interpretation)?

18:28 In c. 1500 BC, slavery was a universal given, and massacring or enslaving enemies who had resisted was also a universal given.

The Hebrews engaged in that under certain conditions, with certain limitations.

Are you saying that the Hebrews were not God's people? Or are you saying that God didn't ensure justice among His people?

And, by the way, the reasons that you gave earlier for early Christians "obviously" not believing in inerrancy, how about they simply didn't believe in Evangelicalism? The guys you probably have been used to calling proto-Orthodox certainly believed in inerrancy. Just look up City of God. An admission "I may be wrong on which text is the right one," St. Augustine certainly being aware of LXX vs Hebrew text, doesn't add up to abandoning there being a right one and that one being inerrant.

20:05 "real scholars were infinitely smarter"

Infinitely sounds like a prerogative of God.

Smarter, in principle possible. Infinitely. Definitely impossible.

20:49 So, Matthew wrote his Gospel in the 40's. Luke independently wrote his in the 50's. In the Holy Land, they carefully hid the Gospel of Matthew from him, so he couldn't sneak peek on that one. One of those who he spoke to was the Mother of God. He also on this occasion made the painting that's in copies known as Hodegetria, not least Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He then went to Rome to get this authorised by Peter. The first Pope read variously from Matthew and from Luke, and his secretary Mark wasn't looking up, he just took notes, he thought Peter was dictating a Gospel. Peter also added things from own memory. He then decided that the work of Mark should be published before that of Luke. This much we have from the Stromatist, at least on the Synoptic Question. I probably added more on St. Luke than Clement actually said in the passage. I'll add one more thing on Mark, I find it difficult to believe all of the Gospel was dictated at one reading, I find it more reasonable that the Stromatist was describing only the first batch of the Gospel. Then Mark went to Alexandria, where the Stromatist was raised in the faith by his successors. So, the Stromatist should know.

Are you genuinely interested in this solution for the Synoptics? Or do you have a confirmation bias for Markan priority which got its big boost during the Kulturkampf from people who wanted to stamp for instance Matthew 16 as a "later accretion"?

21:10 The evidence for Gospels being eyewitness accounts (first hand or one remote) is Church tradition.

I take tradition as the main key to authorship questions. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, that's from Allen & Unwin. It is a proposition which has been handed down since 1954 and 1955. Handed down as in tradition.

Just because centuries after the fact the tradition has lost lots of details, like first manuscripts and first copyists and so on, doesn't mean it inherently ceases to be reliable.

21:58 No. The Deformation dumbed the Christian faith down. The Apologists didn't.

Then again. In a sense, it depends on what kind of Apologist. Often, the Apologist has the run of the mill audience in mind, and doesn't show up as a geek because he doesn't expect his reader to be one. On the other hand, there are geekier readers and geekier Apologists. While CSL made some disastrous choices in theology, notably accepting Evolution, the trilogy Miracles, the Problem of Pain and the Abolition of Man are a very great and somewhat geeky apologetic ... if you know to watch out for the pitfalls. No, the pitfall isn't "CSL lost the Anscombe debate" but the chapter on the fall of man in The Problem of Pain.

St. Thomas is even geekier.

22:58 I believe you, at your word, not all of the Oxyrrhynchus Gospels are Gnostic ones.

I look up Oxyrrynchus Gospels on the wikipedia, and I find this on the description of Oxyrrhynchus 840:

The fragment begins with the end of a warning to an evildoer who plans ahead, yet fails to take the next life into account. There follows sections of a narrative unparalleled in any other known gospel tradition, about Jesus' encounter with "a Pharisee, a leading priest" who tries to order Jesus and the disciples out of the Temple as ritually unclean. Jesus responds by contrasting ritual cleanliness — gotten by bathing like a harlot in the water used by dogs and pigs — against the life-giving (metaphorical) water that comes down from heaven in baptism.

I would say, it could be one of the Gospels that Luke mentions, Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a narration of the things that have been accomplished among us According as they have delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word but it wasn't exactly accepted as canonical, because it adds this piece of fan fiction, or a misunderstood digression by the one preaching, to the actual Gospel events. Or, it could be a later thing in the same genre. Perhaps after AD 70, in a situation of Christian Hebrews getting poorly treated by Christ-rejecting Jews and responding with less charity than John did (and John really did respond to that sort of situation, if you ask me).

I don't know exactly why you thought that it would in any way be a kind of threat to the canonic Gospels. Perhaps you thought Christians wouldn't use this tone about Jews ... well, those rejecting Christ were pretty quick to ask for this tone.

23:56 I'm for exploring theology. I'm not for Barth or Balthasar.

Mind you, Hans Urs von Balthasar at least has some decent Mariology, I think.