Catholicsm and Fundamentalism

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Hey peoples,

Just finished Karl Keating’s book Catholicsm and Fundamentalism and I thought I’d start a thread to chat about the book: likes, dislikes, good points, favorite chapters, etc. Hopefully this is the right forum to do it since it is the apologetics one.

In addition, I have a couple of questions about what I read but I’m going to hold off on those - I may need to make separate threads or even pose them on the Ask an Apologist board.

So I’ll start us out. I was surprised to find that what I liked best about the book was not necessarily the “apologetics” portion - even though they were well written, you know, the stuff on Mary and calling priests “Father” and such. I found that what I really liked best was the first 2 or 3 opening chapters about anti-Catholic sloppiness and the difference between “dogma” and “discipline”. Very good.

So you people that have read the book toss in your 2 or 3 or 4 or 500 cents! Church Militant told me in a pm that this thread might even entice Karl Keating himself to make a comment or two!! :bounce:
 
Narked out by my own friend…LOL 😃 it WOULD be kinda cool to get Karl in here for a few questions and maybe some commentary.

Anyway…I read this after having to field a lot of really nasty A/C attacks and it wasn’t until then that I had any idea that there were really folks out in the world who intentionally said ludicrous things about the Church and even got paid for it. (Hmmm…I’m a fair sort of writer…wonder if I could get rich by attacking all the n-Cs out there? Naw! just get me labled a humanist, papist, dirty rotten so and so. And they’d be right…)

Off the top of my head I can recall that many of the folks I interacted with had indeed accessed Boettner’s book “Roman Catholicism” and accepted it all as gospel. Those folks have proved to be a waste of time to talk to. They’ve made up their mind and no facts are gonna change it…

There are two other books that really make my teeth ache, thoughthey are really the same book under different covers.
“America in Prophecy” and “The Great Controversy”, both are by an SDA guy named White (if i recall correctly) and the last copy of it that I saw was the one I tossed in the trash after filling the 1st 5 ot 6 chapters of it’s margins with red ink notes of all the historical and Biblical errors that I came accross. It was insane! There are allegations in that book so far from reality that it is more fiction than fact. A/C…you betcha!

C & F is one of the best books that I’ve ever read and should be in the church library of every Catholic church on this planet. If you wanna know who they are what you are gonna hear before they open their mouth. This book will do it for ya.
Pax vobiscum,
 
I started studying Catholicism late last November/ early December. I have had an entirely Protestant upbringing. The people around me had views somewhere between believing that Cahtolicism is another – but slightly false – Christian denomination, to believing that Catholicism is the religion of the Antichrist. (Thankfully, most by far were toward the former end). So, when I started studying Catholicism, my first question was “Is Catholicism even Christian?”

This question was satisfactorily answered by the book Catholic and Christian and a few articles on NewAdvent. I was surprised to realise that once I had ascertained that Catholicism is Christian, I had begun to feel that I should enter the Catholic Church. So, my next question was, “Should I enter the Catholic Church?”

This question was satisfactorily answered by Catholicism and Fundamentalism. I am now attending an RCIA class at the small Catholic Church next door (which I had never set foot in for the seven years I have lived at my present location).

Needless to say, then, I liked the book tremendously and found it very compelling. A couple months ago I loaned it to a friend (my Protestant youth pastor). Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s reading it. I may get it back someday, and read it again.
 
Needless to say, then, I liked the book tremendously and found it very compelling. A couple months ago I loaned it to a friend (my Protestant youth pastor). Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s reading it. I may get it back someday, and read it again.
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Pity he’s not reading it. I think I’m going to shove my copy at mom. I think she’d like it.

I’m going to give it a bit…and if nerdy bookworms like myself don’t respond, I may go ahead and post my questions on the book, if there’s room.
Off the top of my head I can recall that many of the folks I interacted with had indeed accessed Boettner’s book “Roman Catholicism” and accepted it all as gospel. Those folks have proved to be a waste of time to talk to. They’ve made up their mind and no facts are gonna change it…
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I’d never heard of this Boettner person until I read the book. He sounds sloppy, manipulative, and dorky. On a side note, it’s amazing how things can change in such a short amount of time. In all honesty, I’m probably one of those people that could read those tracts, verse slinging in the face of Catholicsm, and scratch my head and think “YEAH! How do they explain THAT??” Now when I read such things, they look sad, pitiful, shallow, and laughable.
LOL…so when I was reading about Boettner, I thought, “What an idiot. How could people really swallow all that?” But the answer is: I probably could have and not too long ago.
It’s amazing what happens when you get the whole story from the real source. 😉
 
I wish it would be updated. I read it in high school, and it wasn’t very recent then. I only vaguely could recall who Jimmy Swagart was.

My parents moved to the Bible belt my senior year of high school. An absolute nightmare. There was an organization at the high school called "Fellowship of Christian Athletes, where one need not be an athlete to attend, and they distributed anti-Catholic tracts and preached about Catholics going to hell in the halls. The “government course” at that horrible palce was taught by a pe coach, who was a Baptist (as were most). He thought that before teaching government, he shoudlt each a history of the world’s religions. Baptists being the original Christians, Catholics not being Christians…I complained about the inaccuracy of the lectures…almost half of the years based dervied form his notes alone, and the inappropriateness of the the topic in a public school. No response.

Oh the great government lessons we learned…“The US needs to support Israle so we can rebuild a new Temple to hasten the second coming…Gulf War was good becuase it allowed us greater access to people who knew little about Christianity…sanctions are good becuase they make people more ripe for conversion because the will be more desperate for aid form missionaries.” I now believe that separation of Church and state is a good thing. I did not think that when I attended a Catholic school :o .

At any rate, even though the book was dated, I enjoyed it immensely at the time. I was hearing so many arguments and attacks against my religion that I did not know how to defend because they seemed so illogical and I never had been confronted with that before. My mother who was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools most of her life (much of which was pre Vatican II), had no apologetic background what-so-ever. For her religion was (and to a large extent still seems to be), “I don’t know or care why we Catholcis believe what we do, I just know my famly has always been this religion so I will be too.”
 
I bought that book plus Catholic and Christian around the time when I was confronted by some anti-Catholic videos (Mike Gendron and Jacob Prasch) by a well meaning friend (I was a lapsed Catholic for 10 years and very poorly catechized). I found them both helpful introductions (which is not to say that they are inadequate, but that that appears to be their purpose and they do it well).

I gave them to my friend and they ended up with his pastor who seemed to claim that he saw a video where Karl Keating was stupified by a question by some person in an audience. I wondered how, even if that were true, it would be relevant to the content of the arguments presented in the book.

I enjoyed the book and have since purchased a whole bunch of others. Scipture Alone by James White to get a bit of a perspective on the Protestant view (I should have bought The Shape of Sola Scriptura and probably will eventually), Theology and Sanity (half way through), The Faith of the Early Fathers (unread so far), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (unread so far), all of the so-far published Ignatious Bible Study series (I’ve finished Matthew so far), and Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution. I have a bit of reading to do!
 
I have bible christians living next door to me. In fact they are my in-laws. Several years ago I was pulled right out of the CC by these well meaning people. A couple years later I was thankfully pushed back in. It was a difficult road however and Karl Keating’s book Catholicism and Fundamentalism was a huge help. I had very few people to talk to about the truths of the CC so I relied heavely on resources. In addition, Catholic Answers has increased my awareness of the truths of the CC.

The first few chapters were my favorite part of the book because they included for me many of the stories I had been told about the falsehoods of the CC. I was able to begin to see the origins of some of these thoughts. It was a relief to read about Bart Brewer and gain an understanding of where much of his understanding of the CC comes from: namely Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism. Before reading Karl Keatings book my sister-in-law handed me a printout of Bart Brewer’s testimony. She wanted to show me how Catholics are leaving the Church and decide to use his testimony. After reading C&F I was surprised that of all testimony’s she could have given me she chose this one. My thoughts were that if he is relying on Boettner for his information then he can’t be all that reliable.

I’ve come a long way since then and truly believe that the CC is the one true church, but at that time my faith was a little shaky. I am thankful for people like Karl Keating who dedicate so much time to apologetics. Without these resources I would be one frustrated Catholic living next door to fundamentalists who believe the CC is an apostate church.
 
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KGM:
It was a relief to read about Bart Brewer and gain an understanding of where much of his understanding of the CC comes from: namely Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism.
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This guy distresses me so much. Didn’t he use to be a priest? So why did he not know fallacies when he read them? He should know the truth.

Not just a priest, but a Carmelite priest, and the Carmelites have inspired me so much, through their writings and through the Carmelites I have met. I have had some of my most intense conversion process visiting a Carmelite monastery.

I can’t help but think that deep down he feels guilty about leaving his position to marry, and that some how the guilt clouds his judgement.
 
I’m reading this book right now, and have been for a couple months now. I’d hoped to have finished it, but I’m reading about 10 different books (Catholic, specifically)!

Anyway, I’m finding the information to be enlightening and informative. I’ve actually been reminded of a tract I found on my car a long time ago and threw away, disgusted with the rhetoric. The thing was written by an “ex-priest” and I believe I recognized his name in the book.

Anyway, the critique I do have is that sometimes he is a bit unclear when refuting what the Fundamentalists believe. At times he has discussed their views with a citation that they don’t consider the Catholic viewpoint. I’ve read on expecting the Catholic viewpoint to be discussed, but instead end up reading about another Fundamentalist doctrine.

I took a theology class in college, “Fundamentalists and the Religious Right”, and I think this would be a great book and far more interesting than the one in my class, but without instruction, for some I think it requires a bit more direction (personally) or at least a re-read to really understand all the points.

I have to say, though…after several years of reading “fluff” it’s nice to read something hard-core!
 
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JCPhoenix:
Anyway, the critique I do have is that sometimes he is a bit unclear when refuting what the Fundamentalists believe. At times he has discussed their views with a citation that they don’t consider the Catholic viewpoint. I’ve read on expecting the Catholic viewpoint to be discussed, but instead end up reading about another Fundamentalist doctrine.
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I do think the book was more helpful in presenting an idea of why Fundamentalists think what they do, and how they are misinformed, than it was in addressing how to correct misconceptions and support Catholic apologetics with use of scripture.

But then again, it covered so much territory, that I almost think the best way to think of it is as a survey text, that presents many ideas to be researched with deeper focus in the future.
 
I am in the middle of the book and it is very good. It is about the eighth book on Catholic apologetics that I have read. His reference to Jimmy Saggart’s book *The Mass *(I read it and passed it on to a family member when I was first “saved”) was enlightening to say the least. It just adds more support to the argument that ex-Catholics (?) are more argumentative than are those who have converted or reverted to the Church.

The references to Fundamentalists “once saved always saved” do not embrace all of Protestantism. In fact, the Arminianists position probably lines more with the Catholic church than does the reformed.

The development of doctrine chapter is some of the best apologetic work that I have read on the subject. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is thinking of going back to the RCC. It shatters many of the positions that I was given some time ago.

Have a good day all.
 
This is a good book for Catholics to better understand all the misconceptions about us.

I would love to pass it on to a “Bible Christian” friend of mine, but hesitate because I fear she won’t read it out of spite. I think a lot of Protestants/Fundamentalists have no desire to be corrected. I don’t know why since they seem to be such dedicated Christians.

Has anyone ever gotten a Protestant’s feedback on the book? Please share.
 
Has anyone ever gotten a Protestant’s feedback on the book? Please share.
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Well I’m a Protestant, if I count. If I don’t count, I’ll let you know what my mother thinks of it. She’s Protestant too, and I’ll be visiting her next weekend and am going to take it to her…and if she says she’ll read it, she’ll read.

To be honest, I’m extremely interested in what she has to say about the book. She explored Catholicism when she was about my age or a little younger, but nothing came of it.
 
I just thought of something.

Another thing I appreciated in Catholicism and Fundamentalism is that Karl Keating pointed out that just because something is…oh…what was the word he used? I dunno…I’ll just say “made official.” Or something. For example…some contend that the doctrine of real presence didn’t come about till way way after the early christians. Karl Keating contends that this is not so, that it was only dealt with and “made official” (for horrid lack of a better phrase, I feel like I’m missing something here) until that date.

Does that make sense? In essence, what he was saying was that just because something is mentioned in 1990 doesn’t mean that that is the first time it came to being. It could have been around since 600 b.c. You know?

So I liked that. I don’t like to think of myself as gullible…but perhaps a little too easily satisfied sometimes. I would be one of those people that would have pointed and shouted “YEAH! THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE CATHOLIC CHURCH EVER MENTIONED TRANSUB!! YOU PEOPLE MADE IT UP!!” or some such nonsense.

He did a great job at de-bunking in those first few chapters. But I wish he would have gone even more in depth with the mary stuff, purgatory stuff, etc. I guess if he would have, the book would have been 5000 pages long. 😃
 
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