Why They Reject The Church
It Is Time For A New Apologetics
June 11, 2007
"Apologetics? What's that?"
Now, there's an unfamiliar term, "apologetics." People often wonder what it means, so let me help with that.
In short, 'apologetics' is both a concept, and a process, whereby one defends the Catholic Faith.
It can be applied to any defense of Christianity, but it has developed specifically from within the Church, and that is how I am using it.
It stems from a Greek word that means to DEFEND and promote - not to make apologies in our modern sense. So when I use the term here, it is to develop a defense FOR the Catholic Faith, not to make excuses for it.
Apologetics generally takes one of two forms:
1. It offers convincing arguments to show the truth of various doctrinal propositions
2. It offers persuasive demonstrations that the Catholic Christian faith is the best way to fulfill legitimate human aspirations.
Both approaches have been around since the beginning, and each has its place.
But I believe a third approach is also needed...especially nowadays.
Can You Hear Me?
I don’t offer anything new with this 3rd approach. Instead, it is a response to the spirit of the times, where I focus on...
The Impediments To Faith.
In the past, these impediments to faith were just precursor to more meaty apologetics. The existence of impedients was taken for granted and mostly glossed over, because people want to go straight to hammering home their message.
But, that is backwards. The modern world is so tilted against faith, and in so many different ways, that addressing the impediments must come first..., because the message is wasted if we don't first understand WHY people don't listen.
So what are the impediments?
In a nutshell, they are the intellectual, emotional, cultural and psychological factors, both conscious and subconscious, which make it impossible for one to genuinely consider the Catholic Christian message.
That's quite a moutful, so we must simplify and learn why a person or group doesn’t take the arguments for the truth of the Catholic Faith seriously.
Reasons and Reasoning
Most of the impediments to faith start with US.
Maybe people aren’t interested, or it makes them feel awkward or uncomfortable.
Perhaps, they have convinced themselves through training or indoctrination that anything Catholic is wrong, absurd, or even to be hated.
This one arguably accounts for a majority of the impedients to the Faith.
Sometimes, they just can’t relate to concepts like the soul, Jesus, sin, truth and God.
Whatever the reasons, we must acknowledge these impediments and answer the follwing questions:
"Why do the impediments exist?"
"How can we use these impediments to help people hear the message?"
We Have Issues
What are the impediments, then?
Luckily, some of them are familiar, and universal in every age.
- Human pride.
We have an innate refusal to submit and serve, and this undermines the virtue of faith and religion.
- Our mortality
“The last things of life” impede Christian faith and its focus on life after death, because we are conditioned to live for today and not think about dying.
- The Easy Road.
This is the constant temptation to prefer the easy path over truth, because veritable truth challenges our, "comfort zone."
- Lack of humility
We prefer not to seriously admit our limitations. We might give lip-service to them, but pride stops us from really acknowledge our own personal peculiarities and deficiencies.
It is hard to be open to God when we’re in denial about ourselves.
Other impediments to faith arise from attachments and are similarly universal....
- We have a great devotion to material pleasures, which blocks our sense of the divine.
- If we do think about turning toward God, we feel we've lost "control"; there is an element of risk which deters us.
- Worse, we give ourselves up to vices (sin), and become enslaved by these vices. Our own bad habits make it very hard to open ourselves to God.
Zeitgeist - The Spirit of the Times
While these impediments are universal, modern culture makes nearly every one of them worse - by specifically reinforcing the wrong attitudes, feelings and attachments.
For example, there has never been another time in history as obsessed with the tangible as this one... we love to deny the existence of anything that cannot be measured in some way.
- The “modern” outlook convinces us that whatever we come up with as, "new," is better than the old, which creates disdain for traditional beliefs and values.
In many cultures, tradition has been a chief means of creating a healthy regard for the supernatural... but that has been tossed in the waste bin, today.
- The modern era also boasts a false idea of freedom, defining it as an absence of restraint, rather than perfecting ourselves internally.
- Also, our modern culture is immersed in the idea that ethical truth is in the eye of the beholder. That is, as long as YOU call something, "truth" or fact, then thats just fine and everyone else must embrace it with you. This inability to grasp absolutes beyond our own self-ish notions is certainly an impediment to faith.
And That’s Not All
You may think that’s a lot of impediments, but we’re just getting started.
Consider the prejudices most people grow up with in the modern world.
- Many are taught by their parents, the mass media, social media, etc., that religion is silly, weak, or dangerous. It is very common to hear people blaming religion for the ills of the world, rather than blaming the evil that men do in the name of their religions. These two are very different things... and it is a huge impedimant.
- Nearly all of us grow up infected by the prejudice of liberalism. This is the notion that legitimate authority is either untrustworthy, or non-existent.
- Politically, and culturally, we’re committed to the idea of "democracy..." which has created a warped sense of prideful individualism.
Democracy is not really about the individual, at all. Rather, it establishes a hiearchy of the majority which demands obedience and squelches individualism. Yet, our desire to play with words has twisted it to mean that everyone’s ideas are equal.
All of this creates a tremendous peer pressure AGAINST committing oneself to any higher power or belief system.
Even when we accept a religious belief, we may not want to be seen embracing it for fear of looking foolish to the world.
Then there are all the distractions common to humankind which we’ve raised to new heights in modern times.
- Consider the tremendous press of modern affairs. The unrelenting rush of the pace of life is boggling, and it makes it difficult to find a quiet space. And because this "rat race" is also awash in attractive entertainment and material wants, we may not even know what a "quiet space" looks like.
We are so full of busy commotion, and "getting," that we hardly know how to act without it....and we may actually be afraid to be without it.
Under these circumstances, it is very hard to, “be still and know God!”
The Final Mystery
And as if all this didn't make the apologist’s already difficult task harder, we know from Scripture that God wisely refrains from making Himself known to those who don't want Him. A passage from the Book of Wisdom says this well:
"Love righteousness, you rulers of the earth, think of the Lord with uprightness, and seek him with sincerity of heart; because he is found by those who do not put him to the test, and manifests himself to those who do not distrust him.
For perverse thoughts separate men from God, and when his power is tested, it convicts the foolish; because wisdom will not enter a deceitful soul, nor dwell in a body enslaved to sin."
- Wis 1:1-4
For all these reasons, it is time to defend The Catholic Faith by addressing the impediments to it. We have to clear away the intellectual, social, cultural, psychological and personal debris which prevents people from seeing things as they are.
Archibishop Fulton Sheen once observed...
There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church - which is, of course, quite a different thing."
Therefore, instead of bustung down doors with arguments for the Catholic Faith, we should take the words from the modernists own mouth and... "challenge people to question the things they take for granted."
There is an important opportunity here to help the modern world understand its own blindness. So to get the complete picture, I recently asked readers to think of other impediments besides these - and they delivered.
In part 2, I will share the impediments to faith others like yourself have seen. This will give us an even better picture of what The Catholic Faith is up against.
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