Listening as part of apologetics.

I remember being totaly renewed in my Catholic faith, firm in my conviction and ready to share the beauty of Catholicism with the world. Armed with my basic apologetics book, I entered into my first AOL discussion/debate board and immediately found myself swimming frantically over my head! I participated on a number of boards there between 1998 and 2002 and perhaps the most important thing I learned there as far as sharing the Catholic faith and becoming a skilled apologist was the importance of really listening to (or reading, depending on the forum) what my opposition had to say! In other words, learning when NOT to say anything and just absorb information is almost as important for the Catholic amateur apologist as knowing all of your information well!

One thing really “listening” to other non-Catholic Christians, particularly American Evanglical types, taught me that we are not necessarily even working with the same vocabulary. Terms such as “born again” or keeping our sins “under the blood” have very particular sets of ideas to them that the Catholic has to be able to understnad before attempting to address them. In my own experience, not being able to understand my opponant’s vocabulary and vernacular lead to a lot of wasted time and energy. How much more fruitful and satisfying could those discussions have gone if I had taken the time to actually try to listen and understand what was being said to me instead of trying to think ahead for my own argumentation.

An opportunity is presenting itself over the next few weeks over on this blog. (yes, THAT blog!!) They will be reading through An Understandable History of the Bible, written by Samuel Gipp. On click will take the reader into the heart of Chick Publications for this e-book. Still I intend to follow the series along for my own understanding. It’s not enough for me to know and believe my Catholic faith, but I think it is also important to understand how other Christian’s, particularly anti-Catholic Chrisitians view that faith and what points they bring to the table.

Interestingly, I found this clip on YouTube to be quite enlightening as to why folks like Dr. Gipp find the KJV to be the most authoritative.

“The King James Version has been used far more by God than any of these others. Sales is success.”

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