Dialogue With a Catholic Bishop

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, your meeting with Bishop Barron was like two Baptists getting together and talking, I thought! It was so congenial, and there was a lot of agreement. Talk about this event and who Bishop Robert Barron is.

DR. CRAIG: A couple of years ago I was invited to deliver a pair of lectures at St. Mary's on the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, which is the largest Catholic seminary in North America. It is just north of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I was a student and then later a professor. I was delighted to have the invitation to deliver these two lectures. While there I met one of the administrators at St Mary’s named Robert Barron. They told me at that time that he was about to be made an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. I later learned that an auxiliary bishop is an assistant to the Chief Bishop of Los Angeles. It is such a big metropolitan area that they divide it up into different districts, as it were. His area is the northern area of Los Angeles extending on up into Santa Barbara where he actually lives. When he was assigned out there the folks at Claremont College where Steve Davis is a professor decided that they wanted to have an event that would feature a dialogue between a prominent Catholic and a prominent Evangelical. They were familiar with Robert Barron. He has a ministry called Word on Fire which is extremely popular among Catholics. It has an international reach. I was told that their largest audience is actually in the Philippines followed by the United States and then after that Nigeria. So his ministry has an international scope. He is very popular. He uses the media effectively.

KEVIN HARRIS: He is very down-to-earth and a good communicator.

DR. CRAIG: He is, and he seems to be a sincere, devout brother in Christ from my interactions with him. I enjoyed very much being with him.

KEVIN HARRIS: He is very Christ-centered.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I was very happy to participate in this dialogue because, as you know, Reasonable Faith emphasizes “mere Christianity,” that is to say the common cardinal beliefs that are held by all of the great confessions of Christendom whether Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, or even Coptic. So, though a committed Protestant Evangelical myself, I am happy when I hear that the work of Reasonable Faith is being used by people in these other confessions in defense of the Christian faith and that it is helping them to have a closer walk with Christ and a more confident faith in Christ. So this was a chance to reach out to Roman Catholics because I suspected the audience who would be tuning in would be largely Roman Catholic because of Bishop Barron's popularity with Word on Fire.

The event was held at Claremont. In the afternoon preceding the evening dialogue we had a private session with about twenty or so faculty from not only Claremont but other Catholic colleges or universities in the area. We each presented a more academic paper at that session, and then responded to each other, and then opened it for dialogue. This was supposed to be a sort of friendly meeting so the paper that I read was called, “Why Protestants and Catholics Should Unite in Affirming Penal Substitution.” What I wanted to show is there is nothing in Roman Catholicism that would preclude a faithful Roman Catholic from believing in penal substitution with respect to the atonement – that Christ bore the penalty or the punishment for our sins. Bishop Barron, however, picked a much more controversial subject – divine simplicity.[1] He wanted to defend the importance of affirming the doctrine of divine simplicity in its most radical formulation, namely that of St. Thomas Aquinas. He knew and mentioned in his paper that I had opposed this formulation and was skeptical but nevertheless he wanted to defend the doctrine against objections. I thought, How in the world am I going to handle this? I thought this was going to be emphasizing common ground. Instead I find myself at complete loggerheads. I thought, Well, just deal with it seriously as you would an academic paper at a philosophy conference. So I defended the objections to divine simplicity along Thomistic lines that Bishop Barron mentioned and attempted to show why his responses were inadequate. This provoked a very lively conversation especially with all the Thomists from these Catholic universities in the area and has since occasioned some debate and controversy among Evangelical Thomists such as our colleagues at Southern Evangelical Seminary. This dialogue in the afternoon on divine simplicity was just as interesting in some ways as the evening dialogue which was emphasizing more the common themes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Also on the platform were Steven Davis and Edward Feser. They asked questions of the two of you.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Davis is an Evangelical Christian at Claremont. Ed Feser is a very committed Catholic Thomist. What was really interesting to me was that in meeting Feser for the first time he shared with me that we had actually met before. He said that years ago I had given a guest lecture in his philosophy class at the University of California Santa Barbara when he was a young professor there. He said, At that time I was not a Christian. Since then he has become a Christian and now is very committed. But I thought, Isn't that remarkable that we go all the way back to this guest lecture that I had completely forgotten about over the years that I gave in this young atheist professor’s philosophy course at Santa Barbara? It just shows you never know how God might use something.

KEVIN HARRIS: One of the first questions that the two of you were asked to comment on was: how should we evangelize? You gave a couple of points there – the four spiritual laws, know them. You are really old school!

DR. CRAIG: I know! I tried to be extremely practical. I thought Bishop Barron was more theoretical talking about appeals to beauty and things of that sort. But I thought, I want to help these people in a very practical way, so I suggested, as you say, learning how to use the four spiritual laws. You may have noticed that I emphasized right at the beginning that you need to be sure that you have a personal relationship with Christ as well, that he dwells in your heart and you are a regenerate Christian. I say that because I knew the audience would be largely Roman Catholic, and as even Catholics themselves will tell you, the Catholic Church is in dire need of being evangelized. There are lots of nominal Catholics who don't really know Christ. They aren't regenerate Christians. So right off the bat I wanted to emphasize: be sure that you have a personal relationship with Christ yourself before you try to engage in evangelism. But then if you do, here are some very practical tips, and I basically gave them some Campus Crusade for Christ training.

KEVIN HARRIS: The four spiritual laws, and have your testimony memorized.

DR. CRAIG: Memorized! Right! Ready to share.

KEVIN HARRIS: You emphasized as well changing the culture so that Christianity gets a hearing.

DR. CRAIG: Right. I wanted to say that there are two elements in effective evangelization. One was your self-preparation which we just talked about, but then the other is cultivating the field that you are trying to reach. We need to cultivate the field by impacting our culture to make it more sympathetic to the Gospel. Our American culture is still fundamentally theistic – In God We Trust. There is still a sort of civil religion.[2] But it has become politically incorrect to believe in Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation. That makes the Gospel very difficult for people to hear and accept in our culture. So we need to do everything we can to shape American culture in such a way that the Christian Gospel can be heard as a viable option for thinking men and women.

KEVIN HARRIS: You know I am a real champion of this and I loved your emphasis on this. You said, Folks, the entertainment industry and the judicial system. How much impact do those two things have? Activist judges in the judicial system. The way that is being used for activist legislation today. Then the impact of the entertainment industry. We need to infuse those.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, we’ve talked about this before. It is a very strange but I think undeniable phenomenon that once the Supreme Court rules on a particular issue and it becomes the law of the land then people just seem to accommodate themselves to it and come to accept that this is the right view. The huge exception to this would be abortion-on-demand. Thanks to Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants they have kept this issue alive and refused to accommodate themselves to our secular culture and have insisted upon the intrinsic value and human rights of the unborn. Now attitudes are changing among millennials so that they are becoming increasingly pro-life. That is encouraging. But in many of these other areas it seems that once the judicial system rules on an issue people just come to accept it unthinkingly as being the right view rather than to think the Court has made a mistake.

KEVIN HARRIS: Obviously, my area is the entertainment industry so I see huge progress among the body of Christ in the entertainment industry. It is really something to see. I hope that this continues. There are dedicated followers of Jesus who are in the music industry – in the mainstream music industry – in some of the big studios, studio sessions in the music industry. There is still a long way to go. The judicial system that is very important as well.

DR. CRAIG: Right. We need to have Evangelicals who are first-rate practitioners of the law and can get judgeships and be appointed to these high court positions. Antonin Scalia once remarked on how extraordinary it is that while 40% of the US population claims to be Evangelical, there is no Supreme Court justice who is an Evangelical. There are quite a number of Roman Catholics. They have done much better in this area than we have. We need to do better in getting Evangelicals into these judgeships.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bishop Barron brought up something I think pretty much in response in the same area. He said, We need to learn when to hunker down and when to move forward. He has got to be talking about the so-called Benedict option. Maybe we need to withdraw from society because the culture is so antagonistic against the Christian faith. Learn what we believe and strengthen ourselves in our communities so we can go back out like the Benedictine monks did and then heal the society. He says he is trying to juggle; we need to learn when to kind of hunker down and when to be progressive and move forward.

DR. CRAIG: I was very surprised at that. To me, that kind of fortress mentality may be something that might have been required in Eastern Europe during the days of communist domination, but that is not the sort of attitude that we in the West and especially the United States need to have. We need to be reaching out and aggressively penetrating our culture. We need to be difference makers in our culture, not hunkering down as though we are defeated. I suspect here that there may be a kind of different perspective between Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism with respect to this in North America. Roman Catholicism, as a percentage of the population, as you know, in North America is declining.[3] The Pew Research study showed that the percentage of Americans who are Roman Catholic is going down. Bishop Barron himself told me that one out of every six members of the Roman Catholic Church leaves. So this is a church that is really bleeding membership. By contrast, the percentage of the American population that is Evangelical is maintaining itself. It is stable. Now, we want it to grow, but at least it is keeping pace with the population growth. It is stable. It is the only religious group that is so. I suspect that this hunker-down mentality is more a reflection of what he must feel as a Roman Catholic in North America as opposed to how I, as an Evangelical, feel who am buoyant and ebullient and optimistic and want to reach out and impact our culture as much as we can.

KEVIN HARRIS: The author of the book, The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher, is Roman Catholic as well. So they must really be feeling this, and they are looking to the past. While we have the opportunity, while we have the day, as the Scripture says, work while we have daylight. We have freedom. We have opportunity in America to change the culture and to not hunker down. I see it the way you do.

He was just like a big old kid in a way. They presented the chance for the two of you to ask some questions of each other, and he is just like so many people I run into. He says, Tell me about those debates of yours. What about so-and-so? What was the hardest one? What was the most difficult debate? Did anybody ever get you? Things like that. You asked him about his view on beauty in evangelism. Would that be some kind of an aesthetic argument for God?

DR. CRAIG: I took him to be saying that this wasn't really an argument per se but that somehow the contemplation of beautiful things will awaken within you a kind of longing for transcendence and for something more than just the physical world and will open the gateway to God. For some people, that is true. They have found that some who worship, for example, in a beautiful liturgical service in a cathedral find their spirits lifted by the beauty of the liturgy and the ornamentation and the statuary and all of the rest. But I think, honestly, that is a precious few. I don't see that this is a particularly effective means of evangelism that is working in our culture. As much as I appreciate the appeal to beauty, I am not sure how it would work. One is tempted to be facetious here and say, When I share the Gospel with somebody should I show them picture postcards of Israel or something? What is this, this appeal to beauty? It is just very fuzzy.

KEVIN HARRIS: Architecture. Music. How the music can transform when you say, Boy, there is something about this that defies naturalism. Transcendental aspects of life.

DR. CRAIG: Absolutely. All of that is true. I think that is right. But I am not sure . . .

KEVIN HARRIS: How do you do it practically though?

DR. CRAIG: How do you do it practically? Look at where people attend worship these days. They are not going to the big cathedrals where you have symphony orchestras and beautiful classical music. Instead they go to these contemporary worship services featuring a garage band and a praise group up front. That seems to be what people gravitate toward. Maybe the fact is that the average person doesn't have a very cultivated aesthetic sense.

KEVIN HARRIS: There is also a lot of avant-garde in our culture. There has been the celebration of the ugly purposefully, even among artists who know that there are standards of beauty and believe that. Just to be radical sometimes they will go the opposite way and present ugliness. But, again, I think your point stands. This is kind of heady, and it is very philosophical.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you foresee other opportunities to interact?[4]

DR. CRAIG: There could be. The people who organized this at Claremont were just over the moon afterwards. They were so excited about how it went. A couple of them said to me, We ought to do this every other year and bring you and Bishop Barron back again. I didn't commit myself, but they were obviously very enthusiastic about doing something again.

KEVIN HARRIS: There was one rather cringe-worthy moment when he asked you point-blank, Why aren't you Catholic?

DR. CRAIG: I know! I couldn't believe when he said that because I thought, Well, now I am going to have to do what I didn't want to do and that is criticize Roman Catholicism. I thought, Just be honest. So I said I just don't believe the things that Roman Catholics believe like the immaculate conception of Mary, that is to say that Mary was born without original sin, or that Mary was assumed into heaven, or that justification is not a forensic declaration by God. I was going to go on to say that I don't think that we merit eternal life by the good works that we perform as the Council of Trent says and Roman Catholics believe. But I bit my tongue at that point because I thought, No, no, you've already said enough of what you disagree with. Don't get in any deeper. So many people, so many Catholics, have wondered why I am not a Catholic simply because I affirm things like the deity of Christ and arguments for God's existence and the traditional Christian doctrines that all Protestants and Orthodox as well as Catholics affirm. They must not be used to meeting conservative Protestants because their reaction is, Why don't you become a Catholic? when in fact being a Catholic involves believing a whole host of doctrines that go beyond mere Christianity and that I think don't have solid biblical foundations.

KEVIN HARRIS: This was a very cordial, and I think in many ways groundbreaking and much-needed dialogue because in the apologetics community, especially among our Reformed friends, there is a lot of Catholic bashing. There is a lot of contentiousness because of the doctrines where we would disagree. It can get really contentious and irate. I think a lot of that is counterproductive and unnecessary, so you showed a lot of grace.

DR. CRAIG: Certainly the attitude is counterproductive. I felt that I was firm and uncompromising on those Protestant essentials that we just mentioned a moment ago. It is just that I wasn't going to bring them up until he did. But there are so many other areas where we have common beliefs and concerns that we can work together and encourage each other. Those were the areas that I wanted to focus on insofar as Reasonable Faith is committed to the defense and proclamation of mere Christianity.[5]