When Brilliant People Say Stupid Things

Asked for an example of where I profoundly disagree with William Lane Craig on something, I can give any number of examples.  One of the things he said, proving that even the most brilliant of people can say the most ridiculous of things in defense of badly thought out theories was his answer to a question about the Western European - post-apostolic dogma of original sin, the idea that all human beings inherit sin at birth due to the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which is to be washed away with baptism.  His resort to using proxy voting by stock holders in a corporation has to count as one of the dumbest things I've ever heard a brilliant person say. 

Given that WLC notes that Orthodox Christianity by and large doesn't subscribe to the idea it is remarkable to me that his Evangelical commitment leads him to make such a justification of what is, in fact, a libel on the character of God.  I will note that Craig doesn't commit himself to the doctrine, he merely comes up with a defense of it.  Perhaps he intentionally was trying to subvert it by coming up with a really bad justification of it.  Though I think he really wants to defend it.   I would disagree with him that it makes a belief in original sin reasonable, I think it makes it still indefensible. 

David Bentley Hart's point that it those who could read the New Testament in the original Greek as their natural language didn't come up with a lot of these ideas which were more likely to arise among those who relied on an inferior Latin translation makes sense to me.  

I think it's one of the essential tasks of Christianity in the coming decades and, if they come, centuries, to get rid of the baggage heaped on it, much of it in the late classical period but, also, much of it in medieval Western Europe and later, as those distortions of the Gospel and the Epistles became established.  And that means that the Protestant traditions are as much and, in some cases, more in need of getting rid of junk as the Catholic Church is.  The other branches of Christianity have their problems, as well, but I think Karl Rahner was right that that stuff is not sustainable into the future.  Nor should we want to sustain it. I've told the story before, I think, that after he wrote his enormous work, the Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas had a profound mystical experience that led him to stop writing because he saw that even his brilliant arguments were useless.

On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Aquinas was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”

Considering the huge effort it had to have been, over decades, to think out and explain his theology, the product of enormous learning which was, certainly, harder to get then than now, it's clear his vision must have been on an order of the one Paul had that led to his conversion.  

The absurd place given to Aquinas as the official theology of the Catholic Church since the 1870s is something that Catholics have been trying to recover from since even before Vatican II.  Though pretending to read him is fashionable among the fascist neo-integralists.  I doubt even a tenth of one percent have read even summaries of it. They don't seem to read The Bible, after all.