I read Gaillardetz’s article recently too, and thought it had many valid points. It is fine to be able to argue about the Catholic faith from a Biblical perspective, but I worry too that the approach of relying so much on the Bible makes a brand of Catholic evangelizers who are just as obnoxious as the “are you saved” people. Part of Catholicism’s beauty is that its traditions are what led to the compilation of the Bible. We need more encouragement to say that not everything need be in the Bible.
I personally, could benefit form learning more about the people who claim the early church fathers were not catholic and how to refute those claims. The whole theory that is being propogated that the real church was underground all the years, and that Baptists and other denominations are earlier than the dates of their recognized founders. These seem to be arguments linked in basic history and facts, and less Bible-based.
I think the mainstream Catholic apolgetics journals such as the Rock and Envoy, are great for helping us understand and defend our faith, but I think they have some severe shortcomings when they analyze non-Catholic religions (and even worse job with non-Christian faiths), which make the information they provide unhelpful for constructing dialogues with different believers. Emphasizing similiarities is more helpful when initiating a dialogue that might eventually lead to converison. And dialogues over a period of time are also an effective way to evangelize; Keeting’s response seemed to imply the opposite.
I suppose that the modern approach to Catholic apologetics is fairly recent, and is bound to expand and improve in this respect, and many other aspects.
