Skeletons in closets

"For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing... Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?... I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin."

Those are the words of Paul himself, from the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans, which he wrote while pursuing his divinely-appointed goal of spreading the gospel across the world.

Paul was arguably the most important human being in the history of Christianity. Does anybody doubt that he was a true and faithful believer, or that he currently resides in Heaven? Of course not.

Since every last person on Earth has a sinful nature and Paul was writing about how bad he himself was, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the posthumous dam-break of allegations against Ravi Zacharias -- but millions of people are very much surprised and trying to wrap their minds around it.

*     *     *     *     *

Let me begin by stating the obvious: None of us actually know if the sexual abuse allegations against Zacharias are true, and all of us hope they aren't.

Now let me state the equally obvious: The allegations are breathtakingly credible. I have come to believe them with almost 100% certainty. Therefore this post will be worded as if they, or at least their overall gist, are true 

Zacharias's ministry, RZIM, is being transparent and encouraging victims to come forward for restitution via famed victim advocate Rachael Denhollander, while promising to protect their confidentiality.

Finally, let me add this: While it stings that these allegations are coming out after Zacharias died and is no longer here to defend himself, they are not the first to be lodged against him.

In April 2017 a Canadian couple, Brad and Lori Anne Thompson, claimed that he initiated an abusive sexting relationship with Lori Anne. They did not make the claim publicly, but instead wrote to him (via their attorney) and asked that he either inform RZIM's board, insurance carriers, etc. of pending litigation, or pay them $5 million in exchange for their silence.

It should be noted here that RZIM's board is believed to include Zacharias's wife and at least one of their daughters. Board members' names are not pubic, but his wife of 48 years, Margie, is listed as RZIM's vice chairman while their daughter Sarah is listed as its CEO and daughter Naomi as the director of its humanitarian arm. In addition, their son Nathan worked as a video producer/editor at RZIM for years. In other words, the prospect of "informing the board and letting them handle the legalities" would have been even more sensitive for Zacharias than it would normally be for a ministry leader.

The Thompsons are neither poor nor stingy, and it has been reported (by one of their friends) that their purpose was not to get money but to scare Zacharias enough that he would not prey on other women. According to this friend, the reason the Thompsons' letter named a "price" was to ensure that they were taken seriously.

After receiving their letter, Zacharias responded by suing them -- not the other way around -- for extortion. He claimed it was Lori Anne who sent unsolicited sexts.

His suit was filed in August 2017. Three months later it was dropped and a non-disclosure agreement signed after (according to him) the Thompsons requested mediation rather than face the steep costs of a legal defense. Shortly after the suit was dropped, Zacharias released a statement in which he said: "The question is not whether I solicited or sent any illicit photos or messages to another woman -- I did not, and there is no evidence to the contrary -- but rather, whether I should have been a willing participant in any extended communication with a woman not my wife... unfortunately I am legally prevented from answering or even discussing the questions and claims being made by some, other than to say that each side paid for their own legal expenses and no ministry funds were used."

I was more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, I and countless others were eager to give him the benefit of the doubt. His character always seemed impeccable and he had been in the public eye for decades without a whisper of scandal.

It was easy to believe that some friendly texts could be mischaracterized to seem suggestive. It was easy to imagine friendly texts unthinkingly drifting to flirtatious in a way that the famed apologist would find embarrassing, given his standing as a highly respected man of the cloth. It was easy to believe he, being a man, might have have committed some kind of bumbling but non-horrendous slip-up that fell well short of a tryst.

It was much easier to conceive of those things being true than to entertain the thought that Ravi Zacharias, of all people, might be a sexual predator who used his privileged status to exploit women for his personal gratification. So the story quickly faded away and was forgotten by Christmas of that year. It seemed a mere footnote in the biography of a then-71-year-old man who had spent more than 45 years traversing the globe and leading people of all kinds to the Lord.

Zacharias died last May. His passing occasioned a flood of glowing tributes and no mention of the Thompson case or his "I didn't do it statement" from 29 months earlier. Nobody would have imagined that his reputation would be in tatters in less than a year's time.

I am not going to use this post to wade through the sundry details of what Zacharias is claimed to have done, for that is not why I'm here today. A third-party law firm investigated the allegations and presented their findings in a report to RZIM, which -- to its credit -- made the report public. I have read it, and if you want to read it too, it is here. RZIM's web site, which does not hide from the scandal, is here.

I reiterate that I believe the allegations. I've also come to believe the Thompsons were not making things up in 2017. I think Zacharias's subsequent release of his "I didn't do it statement" violates the spirit of any non-disclosure agreement, and therefore I believe the Thompsons should be allowed to speak freely without fear of legal repercussions.

But that barely scratches the surface. At deeper levels, what are we to make of this mess right now?

*     *     *     *     *

Watching clergymen fall from grace, kind of like watching businessmen or artists or athletes fall from grace, is nothing new.

The depravity of human nature -- not this person's nature or that person's nature, but human nature itself -- is bluntly taught throughout all of Scripture.

Contrary to what many non-churchgoers seem to believe, Christianity does not wear rose-colored glasses or put lipstick on pigs. There is a reason why in addition to proclaiming "there is nothing new under the sun," Ecclesiastes also asserts "there is no one on earth who is righteous."

Part of me thinks it is lazy to approach the topic of human depravity by listing bad things done by good guys in the Bible, but another part of me thinks it's important, so let's remember that Lot offered up his daughters to rapists; Moses committed murder; Jonah flat-out disobeyed when God told him to go to Nineveh; David made it easier for himself to commit adultery by orchestrating the death of Bathsheba's husband Uriah; Solomon was a bigamist who had 300 mistresses to boot, and who on top of that turned his back on God by worshiping pagan deities; Peter told Jesus he would never deny knowing him, only to turn around and break his vow that same night; and Paul presided over the slaughter of Stephen, Christianity's first martyr.

When you consider all of that, there is certainly no reason for anybody's faith to be shaken by the Ravi Zacharias scandal, which is in many ways the same old story we've been hearing since time immemorial.

But of course it's not that easy. One does not learn of David without simultaneously learning of Bathsheba, nor does one learn about Solomon without simultaneously learning about his wantonness. When it comes to biblical characters, our knowledge of their ungodly deeds is baked into the cake of our understanding from the very start, and thus we know of their sins but rarely ruminate about them.

Ravi Zacharias is different because he is of our own time and we felt like we knew him personally. We heard him speak on the radio, and watched him speak on TV and YouTube. We read his books and articles. Because we knew his voice and his face and his body language, we thought we knew him.

We heard him counsel to "listen not only to the question, but to the person behind the question," and to address both sides of that complicated coin by responding at the heart level as well as the mind level when talking to a person. We watched Zacharias do that himself countless times, when caringly replying to the toughest queries from the touchiest questioners.

We saw him employ a philosopher's intellect and scientist's analysis and pastor's warmth, seamlessly weaving all three into a rope that felt invincibly strong, capable of pulling any soul out from the deepest of pits.

But now we are hearing things about him that are the diametric opposite of what we always thought to be true, and this is very different than watching the comeuppance of philandering televangelists in the 1980's. Those guys, the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jim Bakkers, always had many detractors among the faithful because they seemed shystery to many. Zacharias, on the other hand, was universally liked.

Further, the comeuppance of the Swaggarts and Bakkers happened while they were alive, so we got to see their reactions and that gave us something tangible to help us judge whether their remorse was real or fake. But with Zacharias we are left wondering what he would say, whether he would be repentant, whether he would deny or divulge -- and the "not knowing" feels like an open wound infected with questions: Did he feel guilty? What would he say to his wife, kids, and grandkids if he were still alive? Did he "just" succumb to sin like so many who came before, or was he an outright fraud? If he was a fraud in his later years, was he ever not a fraud? Did he ever believe any of the things he said about God? Did he ever mean what he said?

With Zacharias, the sense of betrayal sears millions of people who never even met him. We wonder if his actions will harm the effectiveness of Christian apologetics or the reputation of Christian witness, or maybe even the faith of some believers. We struggle to separate the message from the messenger. Some of us wonder if we can ever listen to one of his powerful arguments and still feel the same way about it -- simply because it was from his mouth that the words poured.

*     *     *     *     *

But those questions pale in significance when compared to the gut-wrenching truth that there are genuine, human victims of Zacharias's behavior -- human beings who have not recovered and are unsure if they ever will.

We spend so much time yakking about the perpetrator that we tend to overlook the perpetratees -- and make no mistake, the perpetratees include not only the women Zacharias targeted but also his family, his fellow apologists, and his ministry partners. Everybody who knew him personally (away from the massage parlors at least) must now come to terms with the thought that the man they loved was living a double life they never could have imagined.

Again, however, the direct victims, the young women he manipulated and took advantage of, need to be the ones whose well-being is our central focus. It is they for whom we should pray first, both privately and publicly, and it is they for whom we should express the most concern when we discuss this matter privately and publicly -- especially so when we discuss it publicly, since we are called to model ourselves after a god who is caring and just.

We should commend Lori Anne Thompson for sticking her neck out this month. 

Anyone who previously condemned her and Brad for the way they approached Zacharias in 2017 should now apologize.

If any other victims reveal their identities, we should commend them as well.

We should not criticize victims who seek restitution while choosing to remain anonymous.

If your church has any program or ministry for women who have experienced sexual abuse, it seems that today would be an ideal time to give to it by donating some of your money or time, or both.

As Mike Winger passionately discussed in this almost two-hour-long video, we must denounce Ravi Zacharias's behavior just as vigorously and just as openly as we once praised him.

*     *     *     *     *

The indirect victims, especially Zacharias's family members, are so profoundly affected that I don't like using the word "indirect" to describe them. I just can't think of any other way to succinctly distinguish between the victim categories.

His family is said to be devastated -- and utterly shocked -- and I believe that they are.

He was known for keeping a gruelingly extensive travel schedule to speak in various corners of the earth, especially Asia. It was a travel schedule which had him away from home for long stretches of time over many years. I remember thinking to myself, more than once: "It's a good thing it's Ravi traveling like that and not somebody else, because most men would succumb to temptation." If I am wincing thinking back on that, just imagine what must be going through the minds of his family.

If you watch Naomi's eulogy of her dad, or read Sarah's, you will sense that they believed with all their hearts that he was everything he was cracked up to be.

If you ever saw him talk about his grandson Jude -- like he does near the middle of this six-minute clip, which happens to be one of my all-time favorites of his -- you can't help but feel deeply sad about the cognitive dissonance Jude will be forced to endure.

*     *     *     *     *

Yes, we should grieve and pray for the women Zacharias exploited and for his relatives that he deceived. But we should also grieve and pray for other innocent people whose names have been associated with his.

RZIM bears Zacharias's name and is a high-profile ministry that is international in scope, but as far as I know it never went out and hired newbies to train them up. Instead it hired people who were already proven in the world of ministry and apologetics, people who had honestly earned their reputations as men and women of God, people whose goal in joining RZIM was to use its long reach to faithfully spread the good word of Jesus. 

Off the top of my head, the list of blue chip Christian thinkers and speakers who eventually worked with RZIM includes Os Guinness, Nabeel Qureshi, Abdu Murray, and Vince Vitale. I know there were plenty of others -- the ministry employed 80+ speakers across 15 countries -- but confirming their names is suddenly a challenge because most of its web site has gone into an Internet version of lockdown. Today the web site includes two letters (one explaining why they chose to make the third-party report public, plus another in which the board expresses its dismay and provides a link to the report plus a link by which victims can reach Denhollander) but beyond that there is nothing. No way to access any writings, no way to access any sermons, no way to access the names of any staff, no contact information. Nothing.

RZIM headquarters in Atlanta has stopped accepting donations for the time being. RZIM Canada announced that it will "begin winding down" its operations. RZIM's branch in the UK, officially known as Zacharias Trust, announced that its board reached a "unanimous decision to make a clear separation from the global RZIM organisation" and will "choose a new name" and "must now operate without any link to RZIM US." (emphasis mine)

Given the positive impact that Zacharias's ministry has had for so long, the fallout from the revelations represents a gaping wound whose size should not be understated... but it also should not be overstated, for it's a wound that can be repaired by turning to God.

Or should I say turning back to God? It's safe to say that nobody looked at Zacharias, the India-born immigrant with dual citizenship in the United States and Canada, as if he was God, but it's also safe to say that many people looked at him with more deference than any human being deserves. Granting particularly high esteem to a mere man might be human nature in some instances, but it is unbiblical in all instances -- and relearning that fact might be the most important takeaway from this affair.

When somebody makes profoundly strong arguments that the Bible is true and that Jesus is divine, it is surprisingly easy to overlook the should-be-obvious truth that the speaker's message is zero percent about the speaker and one hundred percent about the Bible and Jesus.

Have you ever met a person, including yourself, who did not disappoint you? Does the Bible teach that people won't disappoint, or does it teach that they inevitably will? Does it tell you to put your trust in men if they happen to be believers, or does it say to put your trust only in God? The questions practically answer themselves.

*     *     *     *     *

Inevitably, however, our brains circle back to wondering what kind of man Ravi Zacharias was at his core. This is partly because he was such an influential figure for so long, and partly because of the fact that, by dying, he managed to get out of Dodge before the bullets really began to fly.

We know that Moses wound up in God's good graces, and that David repented, and that Peter made things spectacularly right after Jesus's resurrection... We know Jim Bakker got humiliated and lost his earthly PTL empire... We know Bernard Law lived his final years not feeling welcome in polite company, and that Theodore McCarrick is now living his final years feeling that way too... But with Ravi Zacharias, all we know is that he never had to face the music while here; and like I said earlier, not knowing how that would have played out feels like an open wound.

My own sense of surprise and disappointment has waned tremendously. On the one hand, over the years I have deliberately told myself never to be caught off-guard by anything that any human being does. On the other hand, some time ago I read an interim report of the third-party firm's then-ongoing investigation of Zacharias, so when its final report came out 17 days ago I was fully expecting it to be a bombshell.

Plus I started writing this post more than a week ago, and writing always helps me organize my thoughts and and put things into perspective.

I am reminded of the great words penned by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1973: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

I'm also reminded of the great words written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850: "No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."

Both of those quotes are accurate. And I am convinced that, for many people who wear two faces, both faces are true. A great deal of bewilderment flows from our unrealistic desire to view humanity in terms of white hats and black hats, of good guys and bad guys, with everything neatly cut-and-dried -- but here, in this material world where we reside, that just ain't the way things are.

Ravi Zacharias was in his 75th year on Earth when he died. He spent much of his twenties traveling through the war-torn backwaters of South Vietnam and Cambodia, putting himself in danger to bring the good news of the gospel to people who had never heard it. That was before he was officially ordained.

At no moment did Zacharias have what we would call a public microphone until he was in his thirties and got invited, much to his surprise, to speak at the first-ever international conference of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Though he felt as though he was out of his league in that venue, he knocked the ball out of the park with this address and then came to be seen as a rising star in the world of Christian witness. That same year, he traveled back to his native India to evangelize.

One year later he started RZIM in Toronto. Five years after that, he traveled to the hostile and officially atheist USSR and evangelized there. One year after that, he published his first book.

Zacharias relocated to Atlanta and made it the international headquarters of RZIM, whose eventual reach and influence I already touched on.

He continued to travel to dangerous corners of the globe to spread the gospel. Across the decades he consistently defended the faith in ways that were insightful, robust, complex, and persuasive. Like I said earlier in this post, he did so by employing a philosopher's intellect and scientist's analysis and pastor's warmth and weaving them expertly together.

I do not think he could have done that without meaning what he said. I don't think he could have done it if he did not believe with conviction that what he said was true.

But a man knowing the truth of Scripture and communicating that truth to others does not separate him from his sinful nature, and the more influential and respected a man becomes, the more dramatic and disastrous any backslide becomes -- especially if after the backsliding begins, he fails to heed the warning of James 5:16 to "confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed."

I cannot know what happened in the mind and heart of Ravi Zacharias. I do believe his Christianity was sincere, but that at some point he permitted himself to indulge the sin which laid within his heart... and then he failed to follow the advice he would have given to everyone else... and as a result, his sinning grew worse and crossed the line into deviance, into outright wickedness that inflicted trauma on the lives of countless others whom he was supposed to be helping instead of harming.

The good Zacharias did on Earth was real, but so was the evil. The latter does not erase the former, but the former certainly does not excuse the latter, nor could it even begin to. Zacharias knew what he was doing was wrong, and he chose to do it anyway, and I suspect (and hope) that this knowledge tortured him somewhere inside.

We can still use the arguments and reasoning he used, because their origin was God, not him, and their purpose was to advance the glory of God, not the glory of Ravi Zacharias. It's just that we must keep the "by God and for God" truth at the forefront of our minds; and if we ever cite Zacharias's name when using one of the arguments he presented, we must simultaneously speak of his moral failings and present him as a cautionary tale.

So let us pray for his victims. And let us not think about the fate of his soul, for that is in God's hands, and we know that Proverbs tells us to "trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."

Note: Like I said earlier in this post, the credibility of the allegations against Zacharias are such that I believe them with almost 100% certainty, and therefore worded this post as if they are true. Nevertheless, I have not forgotten the definition of "almost" and I am aware that only God can really know the truth, so I feel compelled to mention that Zacharias's son Nathan has a blog on which he explains why he is skeptical about the allegations against his dad. That blog is here .

The Shockingly Big (To Me) Divide

My January 26th post was about the adversarial stance many Christians take against one another when discussing the age of the earth.

But hey, if I'm going to rattle about fustian frays within the faith, why stop there?

*     *     *     *     *

It's no secret that at the beginning of Christianity, one church was founded: The one we now call the Catholic Church.

It's also no secret that (if you ignore its significant split into Roman and Eastern branches in the Great Schism of 1054) it was the world's only Christian church for some 15 centuries.

It's neither a secret nor a surprise that because it was run by humans and humans inevitably sin, it was beset by a number of scandals over that arc of time. The scandals obviously did not invalidate the church's teachings and good works, but they were a cumulative blot. Fallout from the scandals eventually resulted in the Protestant Reformation, whose beginning is generally dated to Martin Luther's publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517.

The Reformation led to large numbers of Christians leaving the Catholic Church and creating new ones centered around the Bible. A dizzying array of denominations sprang up -- Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Quaker, Amish, etc. -- that are now said to number more than forty thousand worldwide.

That's an awful lot of differentiation within a single religion whose core, salvational tenets boil down to "simply" attesting that Jesus was/is divine; that he was physically resurrected after suffering death by crucifixion; and that it is through his grace that our sins are forgiven and we gain entry to Heaven. You may think that's an oversimplification on my part, but there is no getting around the fact that the essence of Christianity is distilled in Paul's declaration from Romans 10: "If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved... there is no difference between Jew and Gentile -- the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, 'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'" (that last part, in quotation marks, is Paul quoting from Deuteronomy)

I am 50 years old and have been a believer all my life. Of course I have gone through periods of doubt and questioning, but those periods always shook out with my faith becoming stronger and more comprehending because I was forced to dig deeper and think harder.

Along the way I came to believe that most Christians look upon their fellow Christians as, well, fellow Christians -- as spiritual allies who differ on minor points but are all paddling their canoes down the same stream, in the same direction, with the same goal in mind.

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher and I have been a member of a Methodist congregation since 2007. Therefore, to give two examples, the Catholic notion of priests having authority to forgive sin sounds wrong to my ears and the Seventh-day Adventist insistence that Sabbath be observed on Saturday sounds wonky. But I'm not lying when I say it never would have dawned on me to think of those churches as being anything other than Christian, or of their members as being spiritually inferior to me. We all worship the same God and read the same gospels, do we not?

Recently, however, I have been surprised to learn that my thinking on this has been Pollyannaish.

*     *     *     *     *

I already gave a thumbnail sketch of church history and don't want to ride my pony further down that arroyo today. The only other things I'll say about it for now are that: 1) prior to the Reformation the Bible consisted of 73 books, and to this day the "Catholic Bible" still does whereas "Protestant Bibles" have 66; but 2) this is only because in the wake of Luther Protestants decided to remove seven Old Testament books which had been sourced from the Greek Septuagint translation rather than the Hebrew Tanakh; and 3) in any event, the 66 books that the Catholic and Protestant Bibles have in common are the same, and nothing theology-busting happens in the "other seven."

I remember reading of anti-Catholic bias in history books when I was a kid, and hearing my elders talk about it having been a big deal before my time.

I remember my dad saying that during the run-up to JFK's election, some people talked about the prospect of a Catholic president almost as if it would be like having an alien president. But my dad was 12 when JFK got elected, and he did get elected after all, so I kind of discounted those stories even though I knew they weren't BS.

I remember my grandfather telling me that when he was a youngster in Depression-era North Carolina, his mother -- my Granny Stanton, who lived until I was 12! -- once pointed at a Catholic church in town and warned him that "if they ever get you in there, you'll never get out." But Granddaddy was a bit of a storyteller and he always told that one while laughing, so I was never convinced that it was, shall we say, entirely true. I discounted it as well.

Walking around living my life as a youth, I just didn't witness any anti-Catholic prejudice, and since I was abnormally observant for a youth -- reading newspapers and watching the news and eavesdropping on adult conversations wherever we went -- I think I would have noticed such prejudice.

To put things into perspective, I can tell you with certainty that when Doug Williams was the quarterback of my hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers, lots of people questioned whether he could possibly be smart enough to play that position because he was, you know, black. Don't let any revisionists tell you that Williams's race was only an issue in the minds of one percent of the population, or that most of the doubt concerning him was because the Bucs had a bad O-line and he hadn't played Division I-A college ball. I was there, and yes I was young but I had eyes and ears and a brain, and I know the truth because I witnessed it.

Where was I? Oh yes, if there had been ubiquitous anti-Catholicism where I was when I was growing up in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I would have noticed it. But I didn't see any such thing, despite going to church and always being interested in church stuff and having a preacher for a grandfather.

A friend of mine, whose father came to America from Lebanon, was Catholic. They went to Mass every Sunday and even had a picture of the pope in their house. The only time I have ever attended a Mass was one Sunday morning after I spent the night at their house on Saturday, and nobody in my family minded me going. All the kneeling and heart-crossing seemed rote, but I listened to the priest and it registered that what he said was along the same lines as what I was used to hearing on Sunday mornings.

I did not make it to the age of 50 by living in a bubble. I have encountered people from all walks of faith -- Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jehova's Witnesses, Muslims, Deists, Buddhists, atheists, etc. -- and for most of my life I rarely heard anybody speak with enmity about the totality of the Catholic Church.

Of course I've heard people question things like intercessory prayers... Of course I've heard some people question the propriety of using massive sums of money to build and maintain so many palatial cathedrals... I've met a few individuals who were raised Catholic complain about the use of guilt as a tool for religious rearing... Everybody who is decent gets outraged when clergy members sexually abuse minors, but it has always seemed to me that the people who react most angrily to such abuse in Catholic parishes are Catholics themselves, their anger flowing from love of the church, not loathing of it.

But feverish, consuming antipathy against the whole kit and kaboodle of Catholicism? Against its theology and practices and motivations and sincerity and structure and even against the brains of its followers? Pouring from seemingly every corner of the rest of Christendom? Nope, I don't recall witnessing that from 1971 through 2019, which is why I was stunned to encounter so much of it beginning in 2020.

*     *     *     *     *

"Satanic cult"... "heresy"... "adds its own blasphemous texts"... "false doctrine plain and simple"... "changes the gift of grace into a man-made prison of impossible rules and a Rube Goldberg machine"... "says it has authority over God's word"... "negates the finished work of the cross"..."teaches that Mary was so holy her sex organs defined who she was."

These are a few of the things I have seen written about Catholicism over the past half-year or so, not by atheists or agnostics but by Christians.

It is extremely important for me to point out that remarks like those I included do NOT represent the majority of remarks I have seen from Protestants, and when I think about the way numbers can be skewed -- namely, that people are more likely to pipe up when they are feeling negative than when they are feeling positive -- I find myself realizing that these kinds of remarks probably come from an even tinier minority of Protestants than I first thought.

Still, they are jarringly numerous.

You are probably not surprised to learn that where I have seen them is in online comments sections. After all, comments sections are notorious for being where the lunatic fringe goes to vent its anger.

However I am not talking about "anybody on the planet can comment here" comments sections: Most of these are in closed-group, members-only forums (one in particular) whose memberships consist largely of people who are serious and sincere about "believing the Bible" and "following Christ."

I'm talking about people whose seriousness and sincerity are buttressed by religious knowledge that far exceeds that of the average person; and the groups I'm talking about are not denominational ones, they are Christian ones, groups whose members include both Protestants and Catholics.

In an added dose of irony, the "one in particular" group is designed for apologetics. In other words, its raison d'etre is not to stir the pot between believers, but to help believers make a rational defense of the faith to non-believers.

The whole point of apologetics is to: 1) show non-believers that Christianity has a logical and evidential foundation; 2) eventually persuade non-believers to accept the truth of Christianity; and 3) help Christians themselves to better grasp our faith's rational and empirical bases, in order to counter today's many anti-Christian slanders.

How successful do you think that endeavor will be when members of our faith passionately claim that its largest and most globally recognized church -- the one with more than a billion followers to its name -- is a cesspool of falsehood, deception, and conspiracy?

Even more to the point: How successful do you think the endeavor will be when the people making those accusations seem to be suggesting that their own churches are immune?

Oral Roberts was a United Methodist minister, not a Catholic bishop, when he claimed that God threatened to kill him if he didn't reach an $8 million fundraising goal (equivalent to $18.4 million today) in two months' time.

Jimmy Swaggart and Marvin Gorman were well-known Assemblies of God reverends, not Catholic priests, when Swaggart had Gorman defrocked for committing adultery -- only to have Gorman strike back by hiring his son and son-in-law to surreptitiously take photographs of Swaggart with a prostitute at a seedy motel.

Swaggart also tattled on another famous AOG reverend, the married Jim Bakker, who, it turned out, was having an affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn and using hundreds of thousands of church dollars to pay her off. Bakker was of course keeping two sets of books to conceal the hush money.

The late Jerry Falwell (Southern Baptist) described Bakker as "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history." I am happy that Falwell led a clean and honorable life -- but seeing as how I just mentioned that he was Southern Baptist, I think I should point out that in criminal proceedings between 2008 and 2020, more than 200 leaders and volunteers of Southern Baptist churches in the United States were found guilty of sexual misconduct.

Graham Capill, Presbyterian minister and founder of New Zealand's Christian Heritage Party, was sentenced to nine years in prison for "multiple sexual offenses against girls under 12 years of age."

And how can I possibly write this post, in this year, without achingly typing the words "Ravi" and "Zacharias"?

There is definitely nothing wrong with condemning a pedophile priest who takes advantage of altar boys in a Catholic congregation; or with criticizing a diocese for not taking sufficient steps to investigate that priest and protect those boys after allegations are made; or with demanding that the Vatican Bank be transparent to protect against it being used by criminal depositors to launder money. But if any of my fellow Protestants feel like turning their criticism of specific actions or inactions into an all-out broadside against the Catholic Church writ large, I hope they pause to remember that our own houses are made of glass. I hope they pause to consider that wrongdoings in church are a human failing, not an ecclesiastical one.

*     *     *     *     *

I am not here to pick at the finer points of various doctrines. I think I've made it clear that although I believe Scripture gets things right: 1) we cannot always get Scripture right, because we are fallible and our ability to put ourselves in the minds of the original audiences who spoke the original languages is inherently limited; and 2) as long as we get the big things right (see Romans 10) we won't find ourselves condemned to eternal damnation for misunderstanding some of the smaller things.

However I still have to do some talking about doctrine because a common thread I've noticed in anti-Catholic comments is that people assume their perception of ____ is the reality of ____, and they then use that perception to justify pretty much any criticism of the Catholic Church, even if the criticism has nothing to do with ____.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a Protestant claim that Catholics "worship" Mary, I would be retired and splitting my time between vacation homes in Hawaii, Tahoe, Blowing Rock, and Manhattan. But if my bank account consisted solely of money deposited whenever I've seen a Protestant bother to ask a Catholic if Catholics worship Mary, I would literally be penniless.

The Catholic Church teaches veneration of Jesus's mother, and for centuries it has used that word to describe its position. Modern dictionaries have blurred the distinction between the two words, but, historically speaking, to "venerate" a person or spirit is clearly not the same thing as to "worship" that person or spirit.

If you consult Catholic doctrine itself and hop a little further back in linguistic history, you will find that it explicitly defines how it regards Mary (versus other figures) using a Latin term plus two late middle English terms rooted in Greek.

Specifically, the highest honor is called latria and is "given to God alone" because he is "infinite" and "obviously He is our just judge." (emphasis mine, and please note that "judge" is singular)

Below latria is dulia, which is "honor given to all the good angels and to all the saints," while Mary is granted hyperdulia because she "is so highly blessed and endowed by God that she stands alone in her class." Although hyperdulia outranks dulia, it is indisputably less than latria. 

The level to which the Catholic Church institutionally recognizes Mary exceeds that of every Protestant denomination I know of. And yes, the iconography and open veneration of her can feel abnormal to us at times. But if we Protestants are being honest with ourselves, we know that Mary was indeed "highly blessed and endowed by God" in a way that no other mortal ever has been, and we are aware that our own pastors and deacons don't deny this. Mary was chosen by God himself, from among all the women who would ever live, to be the one to bear his human body in her womb and raise him in one of the most hostile cultural environments imaginable. How is that not worthy of unique veneration?

Another bone of contention I often see is Protestants claiming that Catholics believe in "works-based" salvation rather than salvation "by faith." These claims range from ignorant to disingenuous to outright dishonest, for they suggest that Catholicism ignores the role a person's faith plays in God's granting of salvation.

To the contrary, actual Catholic teaching is that faith and works are both integral. Meanwhile, many if not most Protestants teach the doctrine of sola fide, which means that salvation stems from "faith alone."

I hope I don't come across as being adversarial when I ask my fellow Protestants: Do you really, truly, in your heart of hearts, believe in sola fide?

If you take it to its logical conclusion, sola fide would mean you have a lifetime "get out of jail free card." It would mean you can live your whole life deliberately committing atrocious sins and no good deeds, and do so without repentance, yet feel secure that you will go to Heaven anyway simply because you "had faith" the whole time you lived that way.

I think there is a false dichotomy at play when people go down the road of "faith versus works." The reason I think so (and this is my opinion without consulting Scripture) is I believe that if a person has true faith, properly understood, he or she will perform good works. I believe an absence of good works proves an absence of true faith; hence, no good works equals no faith and thus there is no salvation.

In any event, nobody can accurately claim that the Catholic position is without scriptural basis. James 2:26 says: "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead." Or you can read Matthew 25:31-46, which is very stark in its affirmation about who among us will receive "eternal punishment."

I could go on, but I won't. I have wracked my brain trying to think of any sensible reason that certain anti-Catholic claims continue to cling so stubbornly to existence when they are so easily refuted, and the only reason I can come up with is that lots of people are emotionally comfortable with their prejudices and refuse to rethink what they were told as kids.

*     *     *     *     *

Brevity is not my strength, so how do I wrap up this sprawling post?

Let me start by saying that it is not only Protestants who are guilty of intra-faith sniping. Catholics pull triggers too. All of us who believe that Jesus is Lord must do better.

It's just that in my own observations it is usually Protestants who open fire first, and it is usually Protestants who post the comments that strike me as being the most prejudicial and least thought-out.

Let me also say that I am far from innocent. As long as I can remember I have loved to argue and debate, and it is hard to do that without projecting pride and arrogance. The fact that my most recent post was about the ongoing dust-up between Old Earth Creationism and Young Earth Creationism, and my current post is this one, shows that I enjoy sparring even while preaching against it.

When I peruse through the groups in question, I find myself drawn more to the contentious discussions than the peaceful ones. At least 90 percent of the times I comment I do so in "disagree mode," for even if I am saying that I agree with Person A, I am pointedly saying that I think Person B is wrong. I remind myself of the way George Custer was portrayed by Errol Flynn in the old movie They Died With Their Boots On, when, almost immediately after telling his men they must obey orders, he heard distant gunfire and seamlessly declared: "To the devil with the orders, we ride to the sound of the guns!"

Nevertheless, I think I enter the fray doing my best to get it right and to understand both sides and give them both a fair shake. I spent my previous post as an Old Earth Creationist mostly criticizing the Young Earth Creationist movement, and this one as a Protestant mostly criticizing Protestants. I have written nothing in either post that I do not genuinely believe, nor have I written anything without first thinking long and hard about it.

I hope and pray that I am operating in good faith, and that anyone who reads this will be able to see that.

I will close by basically repeating what I said in my last post: When we Christians attack each other tooth and nail, we dramatically impair our ability to carry out the Great Commission. People are watching us and many of them are the very people to whom we are supposed to be appealing, to whom we are supposed to be testifying about the forgiving and loving grace of Christ.

If we treat each other like enemies, why should anyone believe us when we turn around and call each other "brothers and sisters in Christ"? Why would anyone want to join our ranks?

Whether we are Protestant or Catholic, we are all Christians and we need to act like it. We need to operate in good faith and treat each other with kindness and respect. If we fail to do that, we are, in my opinion, crippling our faith.

Note: The definitions I quoted from when talking about latria, dulia, and hyperdulia came from here.