Thanks for starting this thread and for trying to keep it on track. Sometimes it’s best to ignore posts from annoying “de-railers” that have some irrelevant side agenda (“don’t feed the trolls” as they say), but unless everyone else does it too, the tactic doesn’t work.
As I said in the other thread, I don’t think the label itself is all that problematic, except when coupled “And Protestants believe that…” which will result in an erroneous generalization 99% of the time.
I liked what you had to say about media. If people (for example, cradle Catholics) don’t know much about Protestant groups, they will likely gravitate to what they’ve seen on TV (maybe Billy Graham if they are older or maybe the Crouches or the Tim LaHaye types.) And as you observed as well, part of Catholic “insider” knowledge comes from Catholic converts. Since most, though certainly not all, of the popular apologists are converts, this can create severe distortions.
I think it’s safe to say that most Catholic converts in the U.S. are former Evangelicals/Fundamentalists. I have often wondered if there is some sort of similarity between Catholics and Evangelicals that creates this phenomenon (strict definitions of beliefs maybe?) or whether this is just a matter of the raw numbers and chance. I think most ex-Catholics that remain religious typically become Evangelicals in turn, so it seems like there is some two-way street exchange there for some reason.
Many Evangelicals construct their own religious history beginning with Martin Luther. In a way that’s not 100% incorrect, but it does tend to muddy the the waters considerably. And if particular Evangelicals are from a “Great Apostasy” group, they might even say that there were no real Christians from a time shortly after the death of the apostles until Luther–that way you don’t have to deal with all that messy Church history
Martin Luther is seen by Evangelicals as a champion of the Reformation, and associating the history of one’s group with him is more “glamorous” in a way because people have probably heard of Luther. At least the story of the Reformation is more attractive and interesting than portraying one’s group history going back to, say, a disputes surrounding the U.S. Civil War.
The problem is that many Evangelics imagine that Martin Luther was just like them. They imagine Luther accepting Jesus Christ as his personal savior once he realized how “awful” the Catholic Church was–just like that ex-Catholic Evangelical convert down the street they know. When they hear “sola scriptura” they imagine Luther thought about the Bible theologically just like they do. When someone points out something about Luther that sounds “Catholic” (he baptized infants, you know) they assume that he just hadn’t gotten all the “Catholic” out of his system yet.
Now that Evangelical converts to Catholicism and he becomes a Catholic apologist. Because he (most apologists are “he”) sees Evangelicalism as somehow equivalent to a reconstructed generic Reformation Christianity, the apologist rails against “Protestantism” and what “Protestants believe.” Catholics listen to him and assume that he must know what he’s talking about because he was “on the inside” or maybe even has a claim to being a “former pastor.” But the truth is that he probably never really understood much of anything about the Reformation or Luther to begin with, and now that he’s a Catholic he has even less reason to learn about Luther’s theology or history–or Luther’s relationship to modern Lutheranism for that matter.
In a way that’s fine too; no one knows everything. I just wish Catholic apologists wouldn’t set themselves up as false experts on non-Catholic theology, because doing so results in gross misunderstandings. To me it’s both dishonest and harmful to Christianity. If you can’t even properly translate
sola scriptura and don’t understand Martin Luther’s biblical theology, you have no business writing or speaking about
sola scriptura or its history. If you want to talk about how Evangelicals understand the Bible and know something about that–then that’s perfectly fine.
In all seriousness, an ad antiquitatem argument is unconvincing to me (particularly when the source is a phone book). Same for a telephone company’s lack of understanding.
Is this a misprint?