Sweeping Attacks From Presbyterian Polemicist Tim Enloe, on Catholic Converts, Catholic Apologists, and Protestant Charismatics (Like He Used to Be)

These (sadly typical) gems of polemical flatulation from good ole Tim were posted on the fides quarens intellectum blog: (28 November 2008):

In calling Jennifer [a Catholic convert] “ignorant,” I wasn’t saying something untrue or unkind. It’s written all over her story: she literally did not know (the meaning of “ignorant”) anything about historical forms of Christianity. This is a very common condition among Evangelical Protestants. I myself was raised “Protestant” all my life, but no pastor or teacher or anyone else ever told me about the Church Fathers, Luther, Calvin, the Reformation, or any of it, until my early 20s. I was “ignorant” of historical forms of Christianity, same as Jennifer.

In calling Jennifer “unstable” I also wasn’t saying anything untrue or unkind. She was a Pentecostal. I was Charismatic. The essence of these views of Christianity is to bounce around from spiritual experience to experience, always looking for the next “high” to revitalize your relationship with God, to free you from sin (or whatever is ailing you). Combined with ignorance of other forms of Christianity, specifically historical ones, this leads to a terrible instability that makes one very vulnerable to idealistic solutions to problems that often seem spiritually, emotionally, or intellectually apocalyptic. . . .

She had no guidance in any of the deeper things of the Faith, no one to help her sort out theological misgivings, no one to show her what a stable, taught form of the Faith could be like. This too, made her (as so many others, including myself in my early 20s) very vulnerable to idealistic presentations of “Truth” that simply don’t match up to the realities they claim to describe. So that’s what the “unkind” remarks of mine meant. Behind them, of course, was what I think is a justifiable anger at the shallowness of the apologetics culture, which preys on these people and then trumpets their conversions from the rooftops, . . .

The apologists don’t help these people become stable and taught, because they usually aren’t stable and taught themselves. It winds up being this big game of pooled ignorance and prejudice, prosecuted on the Internet with passionate zeal as if Truth Itself will die if this battle on this blog or message board isn’t won, and won decisively, Right Now. It’s a bad enough thing when ignorant, unstable, and untaught apologists prey on their ignorant, unstable, and untaught converts, but it’s worse when intellectuals, who, if they don’t know better already, at least ought to have the tools to do something different, simply increase the foolishness.

And again, on 22 December 2008 Tim pontificated:

The Catholic apologetics subculture, from which much online Catholic interaction with Protestants takes its cues, is driven by unstable converts who church hop because this or that pastor doesn’t say “shibboleth” the way the individual thinks they should. So the individual hops from Baptist to Methodist to Presbyterian to Anglican to Charismatic (or whatever) and, if he finally gets tired of it, makes one more hop to Catholic….only to then pretend he’s done something really mature by “finally coming home.”

And three days earlier:

In effect, the Catholic Church has never gotten over its severe flirtations with skepticism in the later 16th century and 17th century, and the corresponding embrace by many Catholic thinkers then of fideism. Ultimately, today’s Catholics seem to be reduced at the last extreme to saying “Well, this is what works for us, so there.”

And on 3 November 2008 (these few months obviously being a very fruitful period):

One has to wonder what Augustine would say to the impious apologists who dare to treat Holy Scripture like just any other book apart from the infallible oracles of Ye Olde Catholick Magisterium, and who submit grappling with it’s meaning to the vain sophistries of brain-twisting metaphysical speculations and question-begging logical pretzels about development of doctrine.

And 6 November 2008:

. . . contemporary apologetics is in my opinion almost entirely sophistry (in the classical Greek sense of that term) and basically amounts to a bunch of ignorant, scared bullies slugging it out in an endless succession of no-holds barred streetfights. It certainly isn’t a God-honoring thing on either side, and there are times when I just have my fill of it and let it have a broadside.

And 14 October 2008:

You know, I’ve never read [19th century Anglican anti-Catholic controversialist George] Salmon [whom I have read, almost 20 years ago], but I am beginning to understand from these excerpts why he is so viciously vilified by many Catholic apologists. He has them right where it hurts, especially with the analogy of the general who talks loud about his glorious victories while yet making a constant rearward movement. He has them on the gnostic view of tradition, he has them on the hyper-spiritualistic implication that the popes are hypostatically united to the Holy Spirit, and he has them on the implicit contradiction between appealing to development of doctrine in the historical sphere while yet conveniently abandoning the appeal to history whenever it suits the polemical need of the moment.

This last I have personally seen many times, when some blusterer of an apologist claims historical supremacy for the Roman case, but when challenged by numerous lines of historical argument with which he is not familiar and to which he has no intelligent answer, he prefers to issue bombastic charges that I am a “positivist” or that I surrender the claims of Faith to a “magisterium of scholars,” or that I rely too heavily on “liberal” Catholics, and so forth. In all these replies there is the implicit admission that the apologist has no answer to the historical arguments, and so simply abandons the field of historical argument in favor of abstruse metaphysical speculations, near fideistic affirmations in the divine constitution of “the Church,” or, at the very uttermost of need, a mere invocation of what seems “reasonable” to he himself in his own private head relative to his own private experience.

I don’t imagine uncritically that everything Salmon might say should be simply accepted (historical research has advanced quite far beyond where it was in his day), but perhaps it’s time he got a much wider hearing amongst Protestants.

And 15 October 2008:

. . . as an attempted description of your own attitude [Apolonio Latar], Dr. [Michael] Liccione’s attitude, and indeed the attitude of a great many Catholics online, I really don’t think I’ve committed an injustice. I think I described your individual and collective behavior fairly when I said you belong to a tradition that can’t be corrected, can’t recognize its need for repentance, and disdainfully scorns other Christian traditions as pitiful imitations of the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that you take Catholicism alone to possess. This is just the nature of your system of belief. The claim to infallibility is the source of immense mischief, and it blinds all who hold to it to the way that God actually deals with his people in space and time. The passages from Salmon which Iohannes put forward are excellent analyses of the problems Catholicism has because of its extravagant and uncorrectable notions about itself. And, as the popes go, prancing around pretending that nobody on earth can ever hold them accountable, so go ordinary Catholics. An argument against Catholicism from the Bible? Nope, only Catholicism can properly interpret the Bible. An argument against Catholicism from tradition? Nope, only Catholicism has the true Tradition. Hundreds and hundreds of years of experiential falsification of the claim that the papacy is the source and guarantor of Christian unity? Nope, you just don’t look at things with the eye of Faith.

This is how you and Dr. Liccione and indeed most Catholics online behave. As I said in another post, isn’t it interesting how you have a perspective that everything counts in favor of, nothing counts against, and that never has to answer for itself to any standards outside of its own fiat. This is how you guys talk when you are pushed up against the wall. It’s nobody’s fault but your own if eventually those you’re talking to conclude it’s largely a waste of time to talk to you. As I said earlier, all conversation is negotiation, and you can’t have a conversation with someone who isn’t willing to negotiate. With you guys, it’s not the case that we’re all Truth-seekers together, contemplating a common reality that is bigger than us all and, by God’s grace, spiraling in toward better comprehension of it all the time. No, with you guys, Catholicism is the end all, be all of discourse, and if someone doesn’t understand it, well too damn bad – it’s “reasonable enough” for you guys, and you can’t imagine anything else that would make sense out of life, so everyone else can just take a hike. . . .

And so the final answer of even a highly educated man like Dr. Liccione is that, hey, one time there was this bishop, and like, he told Napoleon that the Church would never fall, so like, since it’s all reasonable enough for me, here ends rational discourse.

I may not have a big bad B.A. in philosophy, let alone a Ph.D in it, but I don’t have to read 1500 pages of MacIntyre and pass Apolonio’s tests for proper evaluation of arguments to see that it’s basically a bunch of self-referential, self-serving, unteachable B.S. – yet another instance of general who loudly huffs and puffs and threatens to blow the house down while yet constantly surrendering territory to the other side as he moves toward the rear. If this kind of stuff is what is passing for philosophy in Catholicism these days, Socrates must be spinning in his grave.

And 13 October 2008:

Catholicism is insulated from historical correction via the ever-slippery theory of development (which takes into account only what it wants to at any given time according to shifting apologetic needs), insulated from theological correction by the doctrine of Magisterial infallibility, and insulated from practical correction by its snobbish, sneering attitude toward other Christians who have “imperfect communions” with Christ and so forth.

It’s a very sad situation, but these guys seem to celebrate it like it’s the very definition of Christian virtue.