Prepared to Answer Gordon Ferguson Round-Up & Final Thoughts

After dozens of pages and a span of multiple months, I’m finally done with the Ferguson project. When I first picked up his book I had a sense of hope, a sense of discovery, a sense of adventure. I began to read it when I was seriously considering the claims of the Catholic Church, and I thought Ferguson, a trusted in name in my old church, would clear up many of my misconceptions, and point out an obvious mistake that I missed. I didn’t think I would end up clearing up Ferguson’s misconceptions and pointing out his obvious mistakes. 

To a reader, someone may dismiss what I have written as an apologists sophistry. But that is not what I have done. If you pay attention, most of what I have written is not, strictly speaking, a defense of Catholicism. All I have done is simply demonstrate that Ferguson does not understand Catholicism, and so his criticisms don’t apply. Someone with a basic catechesis could have done what I have done. All I did really was explain and clarify what the Catholic Church teaches. After that, Ferguson has nothing. The very few apologetic related material I did mention could be found easily. 

And it is easy to find. I recently had a conversation in the car with someone in the ICOC who came out of the Catholic Church. We started talking about Catholicism, and I asked him, “If I were an atheist, and I challenged you and stumped you, what would you do?” He replied by saying he would do research. “Right, you wouldn’t give up so easily, right? So why, when you started to study the Bible, did you, like so many others, give up Catholicism so easily and not look for answers and do research? Don’t you think that’s a bit unfair?” He didn’t want to acknowledge the point, but the point is made. Many former Catholics have been duped into believing that as a Catholic, they believed certain things, like we worship the Pope. The Catholic Church teaches no such thing, but many former Catholics are told Catholics do that, and they leave for these reasons. 

As someone who has given the Catholic Church a fair hearing, I can tell you that many scales have fallen as a result. I think it was Archbishop Fulton Sheen who said, “There are not 100 people in the country who hate what the Catholic Church really teaches.” He was referring to the ignorance on the part of many people, including Catholics, of Catholic teaching. And there is much ignorance of Catholic teaching on Ferguson’s part. 

In part one, we covered the “falling away”, though it doesn’t amount to anything significant, and his incoherence on denominationalism was talked about. 

Part two discusses the sharpest divide between Catholics and Non-Catholics, which is authority. What are we going to accept as authority? Ferguson does nothing to answer objections to his view on Sola Scriptura, except attack logic and reason as methods of discovering truth. 

Part three dealt with the Papacy, but in the middle of writing this post, I stopped for a few months because I actually decided to convert. I picked up in part four with the priesthood and various Marian doctrines. It is here that Ferguson began to go off the rail as scripture began to play a heavier role (and obviously, I have some fun with polemics).  

Part five saw the classic objections contra Catholicism from Protestantism concerning grace, and again, all I really did was explain what the Church really taught. Infant baptism was also touched upon, as was Original Sin. 

Part six dealt with the apocrypha, an area that I have little knowledge in as it deals with history, and so I pushed some a priori arguments. 

Part seven finished off Ferguson’s formal chapters on confirmation and some issues relating to soteriology, like indulgence, penance, purgatory, and extreme unction. 

I do recognize that Ferguson continues to talk a little bit more about Catholicism in the the following chapters that don't deal directly with Catholicism, but I think I’ve done a good enough job to give you a general idea that they are probably erronious as well. 

I will say that I didn’t do the best job either. As I was reading some of my older posts, I realized that sometimes the reader will have no idea what I’m talking about, or at least, to what I’m responding to unless he himself has Ferguson’s book right beside him and is following along, just as I had the book right beside me and was writing along as I read. And honestly, I’m too lazy to go back and fix that up. But I do recognize there is much fixing to be done. 

I’ve thrown around a lot of accusations around, like Ferguson being ungracious. I might be satisfied with one change. In my experience in the ICOC, due to my ignorance of other denominations, I thought perhaps we was in the minority of people who believed baptism was necessary. I know many people in the ICOC felt the same way, and perhaps still do. When I found out that the Catholics basically have the same view towards baptism (that it is necessary for salvation) I felt a great relief. They are an ancient church, and so we know that baptism is probably ancient as well, and because it is ancient, it is probably true as well, and since Catholics make up about half of Christendom, we are in no way in the minority. Why didn’t Ferguson capitalize on this? Here was a great opportunity to be ecumenical, to have peace, and say, “Hey, we do share this in common. Great! What else do we have in common, and where can we go from there?” But he didn’t even mention it. He just says, “They have infant baptism, so they’re wrong.” Man, what a refusal to build bridges! The absence of that spirit is very telling. 

People have asked me, “Adrian, will you email this to Gordon Ferguson?” I don’t know. I’d really rather not. That would seem a bit haughty on my part, to approach someone and say, “Here, I totally incinerated your book. What do you think?” It’s too confrontational. Especially since I enjoyed some polemical liberties in my posts LOL! I think a better way would to have someone forward this roundup to him, saying something like, “Hey, my friend from the ICOC fell away and converted to the Catholic Church. This is a great loss on my part, and he has some things to say about your book. I’d love it if he came back, but he needs good reasons. As your duty as a teacher, I was wondering if you could respond to a thing or two, something that could open his mind and maybe even give him a strong enough doubt about his conversion.” Or something along those lines. 

That would be great for dialogue. That would be something I would welcome.