Toward a solution. Part five: The Roman mistake


In the medieval era, Roman Catholicism became fascinated by elaborate reasoned arguments and took them to be the gold standard of theological truth.

When the Protestant Reformation happened, the Protestant sects carried forward this tendency. Now there were several strands of argument, each claiming superiority. There is an underlying assumption in all of this that having the better argument means you have the better truth.

I see this as an error of the Roman church, inherited by her Protestant daughter churches. Or, to put it another way, Protestants felt that in answering Rome they needed to be sophisticated in their arguments. It was, in their understanding, the way that theology needed to be done, with lots of complicated details worked out. The result? Root and branch, Western Christianity is obsessed with the intellect.

Where this becomes a problem is at the point where intellectual justification supports unloving attitudes and actions. In the name of reasoned arguments, Christians have made war on Christians. We have rejected and despised one another. We have used one another's views on abstract points to categorize, and categorically reject, one another. We stumble into the sin our Lord warned us about, of saying raca and fool to one another.

We make reason the arbiter of truth when it should be truth's servant. When a servant rules over his betters no good comes of it; so too we should be wary when our reasoning leads us astray from our foundations in revealed truth.

Today's secular academic world, descended from the Christian universities of old, uses reason to overturn holy truths, and sometimes as the justification of emotional conclusions where reason should be emotion's restraint. Today some academics assert things that no one but an intellectual could believe. They have utterly misused reason, over-rated it, under-rated it, used it as their god and their whore.

I think reasoned argument is a good thing in its place. Reasoning has gone wrong, though, when it leads us astray from better virtues such as peace, love, joy and hope. "Argue rationally" will never be a higher good than "act lovingly."

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