By Dr. Scott Hahn
There was a bestselling book out a few years back called “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” That book didn’t sound too Catholic and I never read it.
But I liked the concept. In fact, you could describe my new book as “the three kinds of people a Catholic meets here on earth.”
We all know these types. We see them in the media. We meet them in our neighborhoods, at work, and a lot of times in our own families.
The first kind of person is the atheist or agnostic. This is the anguished soul who is wrestling with whether God really exists or not.
The second type is the anti-Catholic who has an axe to grind with the Church or is working hard to turn Catholics into Protestants.
In the final category are our fellow Catholics who haven’t yet recognized or experienced the deeper mystery of the Church. For these people, “Church” is something you do on Sundays, but not much more.
In my new book—Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith (Doubleday $22)—I try to help us find ways to talk about the faith with each of these three kinds of people we meet.
As Catholics, we want to be able to evangelize atheists, agnostics, anyone at all. And we want to do that in a positive, constructive way—not tearing down but building up. We have the truth. But we have to propose that truth with modesty, gentleness, reverence, and love.
We can’t return the bitter fire of the “in-your-face” atheists. But as I show in this new book, we can calmly and convincingly demonstrate that the world is filled with signs of God. We can show them that, based on these signs, it’s “reasonable” to conclude not only that God exists, but that we can know him, love him, and discover his purpose for our lives.
Similarly, we’re not going to win our anti-Catholic brethern over by some kind of proof-text wrestling match. We can, however, offer straightforward corrections to common objections and misunderstandings.
But ultimately what’s more convincing is to show people the truth of the entire Bible. That’s why Reasons to Believe culminates in biblical theology.
Revealing the Church as the Bride of Christ is the goal of salvation history. The Church is not an institution that celebrates sacraments but a sacrament that has an institutional form in and through the sacraments. And the Church is the kingdom of heaven on earth in the here and now.
This is the biblical worldview unfolded in Scripture and experienced in every liturgy. It’s the great truth that only Catholics can know and experience in its fullness.
These are the reasons to believe that God wants us to share with the three kinds of people we meet here on earth.
Always with gentleness and reverence. And full of hope.
May 2007
