I remember it as if it was yesterday. That lightning didn't fall from the sky and obliterate my good friend Dennis and the Christian bookstore he managed is still remarkable. But then, God must have known the good that was in Dennis' heart.
To understand the impact of this story, you have to understand how I and many of my Evangelical friends were raised. To us, there was only one thing we could do that would send us straight to hell — commit a sacrilege to a copy of the Bible. There were many ways of doing such a thing — dropping it, letting it get wet, putting another book on top of it, laying it (even reverently) on the floor, or dropping pizza sauce in the binding.
I was browsing at a Christian Bookstore in the suburbs of Detroit. Hiding behind the greeting card kiosk, I peeked around the cassette tape rack toward the checkout counter where Dennis was holding court with an argumentative customer.
Dennis liked to argue, but always in a jovial way. His sport was bookstore banter and debate. His opponent on this particular night was a hardboiled Calvinist. As I recall, their "conversation" dealt with predestination and whether or not a Christian could lose his or her salvation. Dennis's technique was unique and memorable, albeit fallacious.
For Sale: Slightly Used Bible
"So, you're telling me a Christian cannot lose his salvation?" Dennis asked.
Ready, Hardboiled turned up the heat and boiled over with Bible quotations one right after the other, careful to throw in the citation for authoritative emphasis: "'And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.' John 10:28. 'For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son, …who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?' Romans 8:29 and 33. 'I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.' Hebrews chapter 13 verses 5 and — "
"Whoa there!" Denny jovially pulled in the reigns. "Those verses don't guarantee to protect you against yourself. You're still a creature of free will and can walk away from Christ."
"That's not what my church believes," Hardboiled cracked. "You just can't say that."
"Sure, I can, and you can, too," Dennis said.
"But, God is always faithful. You can't!" retorted Hardboiled.
"But man isn't always faithful. Let me show ya somethin' — " at which Dennis reached under the counter and pulled out a well-worn Bible, flipped it open, laid it on the counter facing his opponent and read: "'Not every one who says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven…' Matthew 7:21. What do you do about that?"
Hardboiled paused to read where Dennis's finger was pointing. "Well, I don't believe…"
"You don't believe the Bible?" Dennis's eyebrows jumped.
"No! I don't believe what you're insin — you see…what I mean is…. Dang it, what translation is that? I just don't believe that," Hardboiled confessed.
Dennis suddenly brightened. "You don't? Then, I got the perfect solution for ya."
With that, Dennis leaned forward across the open Bible that lay on the counter between them, grabbed the far corner of the tissue thin page of Scripture, and with a flourish, r-r-ripped out the 7th chapter of Matthew — scrunched it up, and flippantly tossed it into the wastebasket.
"There, you don't have to worry about that verse a n y m o r e." Dennis closed the Bible and offered it the customer. "Wanna buy a slightly used Bible? You're sure to like it more, now that it's been conformed to your personal beliefs."
I can still see the startled look on Hardboiled's face. He didn't know whether to yell or run away. Surely lightning would fall any moment. He left the store abruptly in disbelief (in more ways than one).
A true story, and one that gives a new meaning to the concept of the "holey" Bible. We want to put our trust in the whole Holy Bible, not in a Bible that has been made holey to suit our personal tastes or predispositions. But it's a story, too, that wonderfully illustrates the use of two fallacies of irrelevance.
Evidence must be Relevant
From an earlier article you may remember that good evidence must fulfill four criteria. The evidence must be (1) relevant to the issue; (2) acceptable as true; (3) sufficient in number, kind and weight; and it must (4) rebut a significant counter argument. When evidence is presented that fails one of these criteria of a good argument, then a fallacy is committed and the validity of the argument falls into question.
The story above reveals two fallacies of irrelevance. Now, fallacies of irrelevance fall into two categories: (a) Irrelevant Objective Appeals and (b) Irrelevant Emotional Appeals. There are several fallacies in each of these sub-categories, but we'll deal with only two — one committed by Hardboiled and the other by my friend.
Hardboiled was guilty of an irrelevant objective appeal called Appeal to Questionable Authority, when he explained that the authority of his particular belief was his faith community's teachings that you could not lose your salvation. What made that objectively irrelevant to Dennis is that Dennis was a member of a different faith community that believed doctrinally the opposite — that you could lose your salvation. Dennis wasn't going to accept the same authority, so a fallacy was committed by Hardboiled.
We Catholics make the same mistake when we argue a doctrinal point with a non-Catholic and only back it up by saying, like Hardboiled, "It's our Church's teaching." The magisterium of the Catholic Church is an authority to us, but unless it is also an acceptable authority to our opposition, or we take the time to explain why the church teaches what it does, the evidence becomes logically fallacious to our opponent, although not false in an absolute sense to us. For effective and valid arguments, both the evidence and the source of the evidence must be accepted by both parties.
That is why the Bible (even a Protestant edition of the Bible which is smaller than a Catholic Bible, and may be biased in its translation and editorial content) can work to convince non-Catholics of the truth of the Church's teachings when the Bible is an acceptable authority to both parties.
On the other side of the story, my friend Dennis was guilty of an irrelevant emotional appeal called Appeal to Force or Threat. The ripping out of a page from the Bible demonstrated a force that threatened the destruction of the most sacred icon in Evangelical-Protestant Christianity. Most devout Evangelicals, if given a choice, would rather be beaten to a pulp than to allow the Bible even a minor sacrilege. Tearing a page out of the Bible was an invitation to instantaneous destruction that scrambled Hardboiled and chased him away. Yet, in no way did the threat of violence change the logical truth of Dennis' position. To Dennis' credit he was attempting to use a sometimes effective technique called reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to the absurd"), hoping to convince Hardboiled that isolating verses in the Bible is a poor way to develop doctrine. But reductio ad absurdum works best when presented in a more deliberate manner and without the theatrics.
The result of both men's fallacious use of evidence was the complete cessation of dialogue and neither party, advanced toward any agreement regarding what is true.
But to the guy hiding behind the cassette rack, truth was advanced — although it was slow to sink in. The event reminded me that one person's expert authority might be another person's fool. I began to recognize that if there was a common, universal truth to be grasped, there also had to be a common, universal authority that we could both point to and explain that truth.
I also began to understand that regardless of how clever or dramatic retorts are, they are not the same as clever, effective rebuttals. A clever retort will generate drama and laughs that will make you think you are smarter than your opponent, but will only serve to widen the gulf between you. And actions that divide Christians are sinful, especially those that are motivated by pride and arrogance. What we Christians (and I am one of them) need to learn, is that an inadvertent doctrinal error is not nearly as serious a sin as the one that causes separation, hatred, and bigotry between Christians.
With that in mind, we are challenged to find a way that engages both reason and love in the pursuit of truth. How might we, or in this case Dennis and Hardboiled, do that?
Rather than appealing to his church's teachings, with which he knew Dennis disagreed, Hardboiled would have been better off sticking to the Bible, which Dennis also held in high esteem. Dennis, likewise, would have been wiser to have sidestepped the dramatics, and reasoned with Hardboiled over what the Scriptures were saying when taken as a whole. In so doing both men, while believing the Bible was without error, would also have to guard against believing that their particular interpretation was infallible.
What this event began to reveal to me, therefore, was the need for an infallible judge, an unquestionable authority for how to interpret Scripture rightly and apply it in daily life. It was an infallible authority for which I would search for the next 20 years.
Next time, we'll look at two more fallacies of irrelevance, and how my daughter answered her Christian college essay question: "Why and when did Roman Catholics add seven books to the Bible?"
