"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Over the last couple of days I’ve been posting (with permission, of course) some of my exchange with a Protestant called Jerry. The final portion of his email took a wide tour of Catholic teaching and contained lots of assertions and various accusations tangential to our main conversation. For the sake of providing him with some basic answers, I responded to each of them briefly…
I know I’ve made two posts today and generally try and keep to that limit, but this one is just too good not to share. Here is a post my one of my all-time favourite bloggers, Dr. Thomas Neal, on his blog Neal Obstat. It is entitled “Saint-making marriage”:
You may have been hearing recently about a guy called Joseph Atwill who is going around saying that he has proof that Jesus was a piece of Roman fiction. If any of your friends post about this on Facebook, I’d invite you to post in response a link to the following article by Catholic Answers apologist, Jimmy Akin.
Jimmy decimates Atwill’s hypothesis. Jimmy can do this because, quite frankly, Atwill’s assertions are utterly ridiculous and probably the worst “mythist” theory I’ve ever heard…
Continuing my exchange with Jerry, we moved onto the subject of Scripture itself. As you’ll see, I spent a lot of time asking questions about Jerry’s various assertions and trying to get at his underlying assumptions…
I recently devoted several posts to an exchange I had with a sedevacantist called Mike in the hope that, if you ever encounter a sedevacantist like him, you’ll have some idea as to what to expect.
Well, a little while ago I had some correspondence with a non-Catholic Christian named Jerry and I thought it would also be helpful if I posted some of that exchange here as well.
As often happens, we began our discussion by focussing on the Reformation doctrine of “Sola Scriptura” (“Scripture Alone”), the subject of my recent four-part series. As you can see from our exchange below, Jerry was a little confused as to the meaning of this Latin phrase…
Music: Moonlight Hall Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
My dear Bogwash,
It is indeed an interesting twist of fate, that on the eve of being assigned your human, the Patient makes a decision to embrace with renewed vigor his dormant childhood faith. It is standard policy here at the Training College to assign to our undergraduates (due to their inexperience) those humans who are generally weak in faith, so this recent development is indeed unfortunate.
But while you received the misfortune to be assigned this particular Patient, you have also been extremely fortunate to receive me as your Tutor. We have been rather short-staffed at the College recently and, as such, I have been told to instruct some of you undergraduates personally. This task is, quite frankly, beneath me…but you and I both know that Our Father Below is unaccustomed to being denied. Regardless, if you follow my expert tutelage, we will swiftly crush your Patient’s newfound devotion to the Enemy. If you do as I say and handle him rightly, we will soon have him returning to his former trajectory towards Our Father’s House Below.
In these preliminary stages of temptation you must concentrate your efforts on coming to understand the Patient. What kind of man is he? What are his weaknesses? And more importantly, is he aware of these weaknesses? The less he knows of them the better! I expect a full report in your next letter.
Although the situation is of some concern, we should not panic. Many Catholics have, at some point, renewed the practice of their faith, but ultimately lasted only for but a brief season.
Your Patient has woken up. It is your job to gently lull him back to sleep.
Your affectionate mentor,
Professor Slubgob.
It has been well-known for some time that written exchanges between demons may, on occasion, be intercepted. A well-known collection of such communications was previously compiled and made available to the public back in the 1940’s. A new series of writings has recently come into my own possession. How this came about is not important, but I will be publishing them here over the coming months.
If you are familiar with the previously-released correspondence between Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, you will no doubt recognize the author’s name on these new letters. They were penned by Screwtape’s “friend”, Slubgob, the head of Hell’s Training College for Demons.
In the years since the publishing of Screwtape’s letters, things in Hell have changed somewhat. Following some “anonymous” complaints about the operation of the Training College, the institution’s study program has received something of shake up. Would-be tempters are now sent “into the field” as part of their final year of training. Under the watchful eye of an experienced Tempter, the students are now assigned a “patient”, a human to tempt, in order to put into practice what they have learnt in the classroom. If a demon is successful, and secures the soul in his charge, he then qualifies for graduation and attains the sought-after rank of “Junior Tempter”. The letters which will be published here are Slubgob’s instructions to such a trainee, the undergraduate tempter named “Bogwash”.
The collection of Screwtape’s letters was prefixed with a warning and I would like to repeat that same warning here. Please remember that Satan has always been a liar and a deceiver. Likewise, not everything Slubgob says is true, even from his own twisted, upside-down perspective. Even demons are susceptible to self-deception and they can often be blinded by their hate of all that is good, true and beautiful.
David Bates, San Diego, October 2013.