By What Authority

A vital essay from Catholic Education Resource Center:

In Catholic Answers' seminars, we emphasize that you should always demand that a missionary who comes to your door first establish his authority for what he is going to tell you, and only then proceed to discuss the particular issues he has in mind.

By authority, we don't mean his personal or academic credentials. We mean his authority to claim that he can rightly interpret the Bible. The missionary (unless he is a Mormon, of course, in which case his authority is the Book of Mormon) will always claim to fall back on the authority of Scripture. "Scripture says this," or "Scripture proves that," he will tell you.

So before you turn to the verses he brings up, and thus to the topic he brings up, demand that he demonstrate a few things.

First, ask him to prove from the Bible that the Bible is the only rule of faith (if he's an Evangelical or Fundamentalist Protestant, he holds to the Reformation theory of sola scriptura -- the Bible alone).

Second, have him tell you how he knows which books belong in the Bible in the first place.

And third, require that he prove to you both that he has the authority to interpret the Bible for you (remember that his doctrines will almost always be drawn from interpretations of the sacred text rather than the words themselves) and that his interpretations will always be accurate. More>>