By Mark P. Shea
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139 of 146 people found the following review helpful:
Small, friendly book with a powerful punch,
This is a fairly small book, but it packs a powerful punch. At the same time, Shea's writing style is always lucid and friendly, and manages to be humorous without making Protestants feel like they're the enemy (as unfortunately too many Catholic Apologetics books do at times). Shea manages to keep things friendly without pulling back from his main and very well constructed argument that Sacred Scripture makes no sense without the support of Sacred Tradition. I personally know many people who have found the argument the book presents compelling enough to bring them into the Catholic Church, or to solidly buttress questions they had about their Catholic faith. And the number of lengthy, and very defensive reviews here on amazon should give an idea about how agitated it makes some Protestant apologetics with its success. These reviewers wouldn't be so worried about it unless it were in fact making a real impact.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?
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66 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
Highly readable, always enjoyable,
A former Evangelical, Shea sets out to disprove reliance on Catholic Sacred Tradition for authority. He is unable to. His research and well-reasoned arguments make a solid case against the Evangelical argument of Scripture alone, and a solid case for Sacred Tradition as expressed by the Catholic Church. This book is short and easy to read. It is meant for the lay person, not the theologian. Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?
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45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
Question Authority?,
In By What Authority?, Mark P. Shea shares his face-to-face encounter with this problem as he sought to counter scholarship questioning the truthfulness of the New Testament accounts of Jesus Christ. As he delved deeper into the issues raised, he came to realize the Evangelical Protestantism he sought to defend employed the same flawed deconstructionist principles as the modernist critics of the Gospel. The only difference between the two was in the degree these principles were followed to their logical conclusions. Scurrying for an answer to this challenge, he began to seek the wisdom of the early Christians in the writings of the Church Fathers and in the process discovered the rudder the Church has always used to steer its way clear of Scriptural misinterpretations: the Tradition of the Church. In this engrossing account, Shea lays out for the reader his thought process as he began to appropriate the Tradition of the Church as a necessary component in the preservation of doctrinal integrity. Intertwining issues facing the Church today with past controversies, a context is provided in which the writings of the early Church come to life and the reader can see through a patristic lens the inseparability of Holy Scripture and Apostolic Tradition. One common criticism for books of this sort is their failure to prove the case for Apostolic Tradition to the satisfaction of many advocates of sola sciptura. This usually means they have not engaged in listing "proof texts" from Holy Scripture and given a systematic development from those texts. Such criticisms are erroneous from the start as they presuppose the a use of a scriptural passage to develop an explicit proposition devoid of the historical, cultural, and theological presuppositions shared within the Church to whom it was addressed. Holy Scripture was given as an infallible witness to attest to the truthfulness of the Faith already given and present in the Church. It was never intended as a source of deductive theorems without recourse to the shared life of the Church. Furthermore, in assuming a restriction to scriptural passages, the critics assumes their conclusion. One must look to all evidence of the context in which the Holy Scriptures were used to understand how early Christians would have viewed the competing claims. As Shea and many others from Evangelicalism have discovered, you cannot truly understand the Bible until you understand the Church. Furthermore, you cannot understand the Church until you understand Tradition. Many things not explicitly mentioned in Holy Scripture are nonetheless contained in traditional presuppositions shared by the New Testament writers and their intended audience. For example, the early Church that worshipped liturgically, baptized, and offered the Eucharist in union with the bishop and his presbyters might read things in passages mentioning work (the Greek word for liturgy translates roughly as "work of the people"), worship, water, bread, wine, order, and authority that would be missed by those Evangelicals who worship casually, have a quasi-gnostic view of matter as "evil" (hence grace can not come from material means such as Sacraments), and share a uniquely American paranoia concerning all expressions of authority. These contextual readings, obvious to any properly catechized Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican Christian, would never even occur to many Evangelicals. However, there is one theme in this book needing further development. While making a compelling case for Tradition and skillfully handling many common objections, he without much explanation assumes the Tradition of the early Church to be the Tradition of the Roman Church. Shea can at points leave one with the view that the Catholic Church alone uses Tradition. This is certainly not the case - the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox have as high a view as Rome and the Anglican appeal is less but certainly not inconsequential. Many traditionalist Lutherans and Reformed Christians also appeal to tradition for their distinctives (even though they may never use the word). Furthermore, the historical evidence concerning distinctively Roman developments of Tradition (e.g., papal infallibility, specifically Roman doctrines on Mary) casts serious doubts on the veracity of Shea's claims. Thus the case for Rome as holding fast to the pure undefiled Tradition of the early Church must be viewed as suspect without further supporting evidence. Despite this one drawback, Shea has still given a clear and powerful testimony to the necessity of Tradition in the Church. All Christians attracted to the beliefs and practices of historic Christianity will find much to contemplate in its pages. By What Authority? successfully calls the bluff of contemporary Evangelicalism and leaves its modernist foundations bare for all to see. Comments (3) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?
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