Argument from the Saints I: They Just Don't Miss

Another Unorganized Argument

There have been many, many bad Catholics. But somehow none of them get canonized as saints. In two thousand years, it is shocking that no saint has retrospectively turned out to secretly have been a heretic, or abusive, or promiscuous, or something that would similarly have disqualified them had it been known. Now I am against the death penalty in the present day. But assuming there is no more extensive, rigorous legal investigation than that undertaken of someone up for capital punishment, it is sobering to realize that our modern forensic techniques still occasionally lead to the execution of someone later exonerated. For all our learning, we do not seem able to get certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt. And that’s for really egregious crimes like multiple killings or torture. You can imagine how much harder reaching certainty would be if you wanted to include things like, say, blasphemy in one’s heart. Through generations upon generations of saints, the Church has kept up an apparent 100% success rate at sorting out those truly worthy of Christian admiration from those not. It is worth asking why the Church seems to have perfect accuracy where our most thorough secular investigative institutions struggle with an easier task. 

A related point. It began to bother me as a student of theology that so many Protestant theologians had tragic falls from grace, or areas of persistent sin. Luther, embarrassingly, published a incendiary work late in his life entitled On the Jews and Their Lies, which, among other things, urges burning down synagogues. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves. Karl Barth, supposedly the most important theologian of the 20th century, seems to have had (interpreted with maximal charity) a kind of polygamous arrangement. Martin Luther King Jr. was a serial adulterer. Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was secretly running something like a sex cult. More recently, Ravi Zacharias was revealed as deeply corrupt by a shocking post-mortem exposé. Protestants do produce genuinely exemplary Christians, like C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, or William Wilberforce. But the continued veneration of those who would not clear the bar for sainthood, and perhaps more troubling, the theological influence they continue to exert, is a worrying study in contrast.

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