Gary Hartenburg

In their book, Roman but Not Catholic, Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls make the case that certain beliefs central to the Roman Catholic faith are unreasonable. This article evaluates, from the point of view of Eastern Orthodoxy, some of the arguments Collins and Walls make. In particular, it argues first that Collins and Walls are correct to criticize John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine as a reason to accept otherwise insufficiently supported Catholic doctrines. Secondly, it offers some points of clarification concerning the matter of sacred tradition and attempts to show the areas of agreement and disagreement between Eastern Orthodoxy and the position that Collins and Walls articulate. Thirdly, it argues that Collins and Walls rely on what is, from an Eastern Orthodox point of view, a questionable view about the interpretation of scripture by assuming without good reason that the clear meaning of scripture is equivalent to the literal interpretation.

In When Athens Met Jerusalem, John Mark Reynolds makes (1) a claim about Plato’s account of the relation between myth and argument, (2) a claim about Plato’s account of knowledge and science, and (3) a claim about the relation between faith and reason. I criticize each of these claims. Regarding the first claim, I show that Reynolds’s explanation of the role of a person’s experience of Platonic forms is unclear. Regarding the second, I indicate some tensions between the antirealist character of Platonic philosophy of science and Reynolds’s insistence that some claims about the empirical world are true. Lastly, I attempt to clarify Reynolds’s explanation of the relation between faith and reason by thinking of them as two parts of a single whole whose goal is to comprehend truths about God.