Lofton’s YouTube straw man (Updated)

There’s apopular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, whichmight be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.”  It involves a talking head riffing, for anhour or so, on something someone has written on a complex philosophical ortheological topic (an article, a book, a lecture, or whatever).  My impatience with this kind of thing is nodoubt partly generational, but there is more to it than that.  The written form is more conducive tointellectual discipline.  A good articleon a philosophical or theological topic, even when written for a popular ratherthan academic audience, requires the careful exposition of ideas and lines ofargument, both the writer’s own and those of anyone he’s responding to.  It also has to be clearly written andwell-organized.  You can’t achieve all thisby simply pouring out on the page whatever pops into your stream ofconsciousness.  It takes time, and as awriter tries to whip a piece into shape, he’s likely to mull over the ideas andcome to see flaws in interpretation and reasoning he would otherwise haveoverlooked.  A video, because it is somuch quicker and easier to make, is for that very reason likelier to be of considerablylower intellectual quality. 

Naturally,I’m not saying that such videos are alwaysof low quality or that written pieces are always of good quality.  Obviously, there’s a lot of good material tobe found at YouTube and similar platforms, and a lot of garbage in writtenform.  The point is just that, all thingsbeing equal, written pieces are likelier than quickly-made videos to be ofintellectual substance. 

There’s alsothe fact that watching a video requires a much higher time commitment.  A book or article is all laid out in front ofthe reader, and typically organized into units – chapters, sections andsub-sections, paragraphs, and so on.  Youcan scan the whole and get a sense of what it covers and where, and thus seerelatively quickly whether it is necessary to read the whole thing, which partsare relevant to your interests, whether certain topics that are not covered inone part are addressed in another, and so on. Videos are not like that.  Youpretty much have to watch the whole thing in order to know exactly what’s init.  And though a video is sometimesbroken into segments, the brief descriptions of these are nowhere near ashelpful as being able to scan ahead in a text and see exactly what is coveredin each section or paragraph.  On top ofthat, if you want to reply to such a video, you have to carefully transcribeany remarks you want to quote and comment on, which requires playing andreplaying the same segments, and this also sucks up time.

Finally,such videos are typically made either by amateurs, or by people who, thoughthey may have some academic training, spend far more time making videos andother online ephemera than doing the much harder work of producing writtenmaterial that is publishable and has to get through the gauntlet of an editoror a referee.  Hence the videos and otheronline ephemera are not popularizationsof their more substantive work.  Thevideos and online ephemera pretty much aretheir work.  Naturally, this work issimply not going to be as substantive as that of someone who has anintellectual day job, as it were.

The bottomline is that engaging with what I am calling “the extended YouTube hot take”requires a high time investment with the promise of a low intellectualreturn.  And I’m just not interested inthat, which is why I don’t watch a lot of this stuff.  That includes material of this type that isdirected at things I’ve written.  Overthe years, readers have often asked me to reply to this or that video commentingon some book or article of mine.  Irarely do it, because I’ve got too much else going on.  There is, for example, always a ton ofwritten material, much of it of high quality, that I need to get through in thecourse of working on whatever book project or academic article I’ve got goingat the moment.  To be sure, theoccasional respite from that is welcome. But even then, it rarely seems to me worthwhile to (for example) spendtwo or three hours watching snarky videos some kid has made about an academicbook that I spent years writing.

Lofton’s libel

All thesame, occasionally I’ll make an exception. That brings me to Michael Lofton, about whom I know very little otherthan that he appears to fancy himself an upholder of Catholic orthodoxy anddevotes a lot of time to making videos of this kind.  This week he posted a YouTube videoresponding to my recent Catholic WorldReport article “CardinalNewman, Archbishop Fernandez, and the ‘suspended Magisterium’ thesis.”  It’s quite bad, in just the ways that“extended YouTube hot takes” tend to be bad. But on top of that, it’s bad in a special way that online Catholiccontent, in particular, tends to be bad these days.  I refer to the kneejerk tendency of a greatmany Catholic commentators of all stripes to approach any topic having to dowith Pope Francis in a Manichean, ideological manner.  Too many of the pope’s critics will acceptnothing but the most negative and apocalyptic interpretations of his every wordand action.  Too many of the pope’sdefenders refuse to consider even the most measured and respectful criticism ofhim.  Everything one side says is foldedby the other side into a simplistic “good guys/bad guys” narrative.  And if you plead for nuance, you will beaccused by each side of “really” aiming subtly to do the work of theother.  It’s tiresome, intellectuallyunserious, and deeply contrary to justice and charity.  And while each side self-righteously thinks ofitself as defending the Church, all they are really accomplishing is tearing itfurther apart.

How doesthis play out in Lofton’s case?  Over thecourse of an hour, he works through my article line by line, suggesting earlyon to his listeners that there is something “weird” or “odd” about it andhinting darkly that it “serves an agenda.” And what agenda is that?  By the endof the video, it is finally revealed that:

To entertain talk about suspense inthe magisterium… I think is to prepare people to reject magisterial teaching…to prepare people to reject papal teaching authority… to use it as an excuse toignore the papal magisterium.

To be sure,he immediately tries to cover his rear end by acknowledging that he “[doesn’t]know what [Feser’s] intentions are, specifically.”  But he insists that “at least… some people” havethis agenda, and is “left scratching [his] head” about exactly what my ownintentions could be.  The obviousinsinuation – especially given all the heavy going throughout the video abouthow “weird” my article is – is that this is my agenda too and that I am beingcagey about it.  Thus does Lofton fold myarticle into the hackneyed narrative of a dark army of bogeymen seeking by hookor crook to undermine Pope Francis.

Theinsinuation is defamatory, and a travesty of what I wrote.  What follows is intended to correct therecord.  I apologize in advance for thelength of this post.  Unfortunately,Lofton has a gift for packing ten pounds of error into a five pound bag, and itall has to be carefully and tediously unpacked. I also apologize in advance if I lose my temper here or there –something that has been very hard to avoid given the many hours I’ve now had towaste on this that could have been devoted to something of greater intrinsicvalue.  I hope not to watch anotherYouTube hot take again for a long time.

My CWR article essentially has two halves,and Lofton badly distorts what I say in each one.  In the first, I explain what some of PopeFrancis’s critics mean when they claim that the Magisterium has been“suspended” during his pontificate up to this point.  Lofton gives the impression that I am atleast somewhat sympathetic with this thesis. But in fact, not only do I not endorse it, I explicitly reject andcriticize it.  In the second half of myarticle, I suggest that the remarks made by Pope Francis and ArchbishopFernandez upon the archbishop’s appointment as prefect of the Dicastery for theDoctrine of the Faith (DDF) imply that the DDF, specifically, will to a largeextent no longer exercise its traditional magisterial function.  Lofton transforms this into the claim that the magisterium of the Church in generalwill from here on out be suspended – something I never said and would not say.  He accomplishes this sleight-of-hand byreading portentous meanings I never intended into innocuous remarks, andespecially into my use of the phrase “organ of the Magisterium.” 

The “suspended Magisterium” thesis

Let’sconsider each half of my article in turn. Those who posit a “suspended Magisterium” claim to get the idea from St.John Henry Newman, so I began my article by rehearsing some of the remarksNewman made about the behavior of the Church’s hierarchy during the Ariancrisis.  Lofton gives the impression thatmy comments somehow make stronger claims than Newman himself did about thefailure of the bishops, and about the temporary lapse of Pope Liberius.  That is false.  I simply report Newman’s own position, and inparticular the position he took on the matter after his conversion toCatholicism in an appendix to hisfamous work on the crisis. 

Loftonclaims that my remark about Liberius’s temporary agreement to an ambiguousformula is “in error,” and cites Bellarmine in his favor.  He makes it sound as if I had flatly made a simplehistorical mistake here and/or gotten Newman’s views about Liberius wrong.  But that is not the case.  Newman himself claims that Liberius “sign[ed]a Eusebian formula at Sirmium,” and approvingly quotes remarks from saintsAthanasius and Jerome to the effect that Liberius had under pressuretemporarily “subscribed” to the heresy, and a claim by another authority that Liberiustemporarily “[gave] up the Nicene formula.” Moreover, Bellarmine is neither infallible nor the final word amongorthodox Catholic historians on the matter. That is not to deny that Bellarmine, Lofton, and others have the rightto defend Liberius against this charge. That is not the point.  The pointis rather that the matter iscontroversial and Catholics are at liberty to take either position.  Hence Lofton has no business claiming that Iflatly made a historical “error” here. The most he is entitled to say is that reasonable people can disagreeabout the issue.

Lofton isalso right to note that Newman’s remark about there being no “firm, unvarying,consistent testimony” for sixty years after Nicaea needs to be qualified.  But Newman himself does qualify it, andnothing in what I said is affected by the qualification.  In any event, I was not trying in my articleto offer a detailed account of what happened during the Arian crisis, to defendNewman’s own account of it, or to draw momentous lessons from it.  I was simply giving a brief summary in orderto let readers know where this notion of a “suspended” Magisterium camefrom.  So, it is misleading for Lofton togo on about it to the extent he does.

In a passingremark about the nature of the Magisterium, Lofton asserts that “there is a protectionand assistance of the Holy Spirit to non-infallibleteachings as well,” and that this is something I ought to address.  If what Lofton has in mind here is the claim,which some have made, that even non-infallible exercises of the papalmagisterium are somehow protected from error, then Ihave in fact argued elsewhere that that thesis is incoherent and nottaught by the Church.  (That is not say that such non-infallibleteachings are not normally owed religious assent.  They are owed it.  But that is a different matter.)

Anyway, themain topic of the first half of my article is the claim that the Magisteriumhas up to now been “suspended” during Pope Francis’s pontificate.  Again, I explicitlyrejected this claim.  Indeed, in thepast, I have defended the authoritative and binding nature of Pope Francis’smagisterial acts even in cases where my fellow traditional Catholics haveresisted it.  For example, Ihave repeatedly defended the CDF’s document (issued at the pope’sdirection) on the moral liceity of Covid-19 vaccines – and, I will add, I tooka considerable amount of grief from some fellow traditional Catholics for doingso.  Ihave defended Pope Francis against the charge that he has departedfrom just war teaching.  Ihave defended him against the charge of heresy.  Ihave repeatedly criticized those who have claimed that his electionwas not valid.  It is true that, likemany others, I have been critical of parts of Amoris Laetitia and of the pope’s revision to the Catechism.  But that is not because I do not regard theseas magisterial acts.  Rather, while they are magisterial acts, they exhibit“deficiencies” of the kind that DonumVeritatis acknowledgescan exist in non-infallible magisterial statements.  Lofton would presumably disagree with thatjudgment, but the point is that my own objections do not rest on the claim that the pope has not exercised magisterialauthority.

Loftonsuggests that it is “weird” or “odd” that, when in my article I gave an exampleof Pope Francis’s magisterial teaching, I cited documents issued by the CDFunder the pope’s authority.  Why, heasks, did I not cite instead a document like Amoris?  He suggests I havean “agenda” and insinuates that there is something suspect about theexample.  In particular, he seems tothink it a ploy to try to reduce the papal magisterium to the CDF.

But there isnothing suspect about the example, and by no means do I reduce the papalmagisterium to the CDF.  For one thing,what I actually wrote is this:

For there clearly are cases where[Pope Francis] has exercised his magisterial authority – such as when, acting under papal authorization, the Congregationfor the Doctrine of the Faith under its current prefect Cardinal Ladaria hasissued various teaching documents.

As the words“such as” show, I was clearly saying that such CDF documents are examples of Pope Francis’smagisterium.  Nowhere do I say or implythat they are the whole of it.  For another thing, there is a reason why Ichose that particular sort of example, and it has nothing to do with what Lofton’sfevered imagination supposes it to be.  Iwanted to pick examples that are as uncontroversial as possible, especially among the pope’s critics.  Citing Amoriswould not do for that purpose, not only because it has been widely criticized,but especially because there are those who (again, wrongly) claim that it isnot magisterial.  By contrast, some ofthe CDF documents issued under Cardinal Ladaria at the pope’s behest could notpossibly be objected to by the pope’s critics – one example being therecent responsum affirmingthat the Church cannot bless same-sex unions. It is clearly intended to be magisterial, and not even the pope’sharshest critics could dispute its orthodoxy. Hence it is an ideal piece of evidence against the thesis that theMagisterium has in recent years been “suspended” under Francis – a thesis which,again, I was criticizing, notsympathizing with. 

It is truethat I also say that “because Pope Francis has persistently refused to answer[the] dubia, he can plausibly be saidat least to that extent to havesuspended the exercise of his Magisterium” (emphasis in the original).  But Lofton reads into this remark exactly the opposite of what it issaying.  He asks, shocked: ““What?!  Pope Francis is teaching constantly!  He hasn’t suspended the magisterium!”  But I did not say that he has; indeed, I hadjust got done saying the opposite, and I immediately go on to say: “Again, though,it doesn’t follow that the ‘suspended Magisterium’ thesis is correct as ageneral description of Pope Francis’s pontificate up to now.”

What I meantby the remark Lofton expresses shock at should be obvious to any fair-mindedreader.  I was saying that even if one could maintain that PopeFrancis has failed to exercise his magisterium in the specific case of notanswering the dubia, it simply would not follow that his magisterium has beensuspended beyond that – and, again, I gave specific examples of acts of PopeFrancis that are magisterial in nature. 

Lofton also,as it happens, goes on to claim that the pope has in fact answered at leastfour of the dubia, but that isirrelevant to the present point.  For thepresent point is that even if he hasfailed to answer any of them, that is no grounds to think his magisterium hassomehow been suspended beyond thatparticular example.  Lofton’s problemis that he completely gets my intentions wrong in interpreting what I say aboutthis example.  He seems to think that Iam citing the dubia controversy to lend plausibility to the “suspendedMagisterium” thesis.  No, what I wasdoing was citing it precisely to denyplausibility to the thesis.  I was not saying: “Consider the dubia controversy – that’s pretty goodevidence for the suspended Magisterium thesis.” Rather, I was saying: “Consider the dubiacontroversy – that’s very weak evidence for the thesis, because it does nothingto show that the pope has failed to exercise his magisterium beyond that onecase.”

Organ of the Magisterium?

But whatLofton tries to make the most hay out of is my reference to the CDF (now theDDF) as an “organ of the Magisterium.”  Hetreats this as if it were a bizarre claim or even a theological howler.  First, he objects that DDF documents have noteaching authority on their own, but only when issued under papal approval – asif this were something I don’t know.  Butin fact I explicitly qualified my claim in just this way when I said that PopeFrancis “has exercised his magisterial authority… when, acting under papal authorization,the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under its current prefectCardinal Ladaria has issued various teaching documents.”  (Indeed, Lofton admits this later on in thevideo.  Here’s a good example of thelimitations of the “YouTube hot take” format. If, instead of his stream-of-consciousness commentary, Lofton had triedto put together a well thought-out written response, he would have caught thisand avoided giving his audience the false impression that I had made somerookie mistake.)

Lofton evenclaims that the CDF/DDF “is not a magisterial organ” at all, and that in factthere are “only two organs of the magisterium, the pope and the college ofbishops.”  This makes it sound as if thephrase “organs of the Magisterium” has some precisely delineated technicalmeaning in Catholic theology, and that I misidentified what these well-defined“organs of the Magisterium” are.  Butneither of those things is true, and in fact it is Lofton who is using the termin an unusual way. 

First ofall, the phrase has no precise technical meaning or doctrinal significance, butis simply an expression that crops up from time to time in writing about theChurch to refer to agencies through which the Church might speak or operate.  And it is in fact often used in thesecontexts to refer to the CDF and other such bodies (as a little Googling willreveal to anyone ignorant of the fact).  Forexample, in a Pontifical Biblical Commission statementon the relationship between the Magisterium and biblical exegetes,then-Cardinal Ratzinger noted that “Paul VI completely restructured theBiblical Commission so that it was no longer an organ of the Magisterium” (emphasis added).  Note that this entails that the BiblicalCommission once was an “organ of theMagisterium” – which suffices to falsify Lofton’s claim that the term is usedto refer only to the pope and collegeof bishops.  (Of course, the CDF/DDF andother such bodies are magisterial only insofar as they operate at the pope’s orbishops’ behest.  But I never deniedthat, and in fact implied it when I spoke of the CDF “acting under papal authorization.”)

Now, in myarticle, I also referred to the CDF/DDF as “the main magisterial organ of the Church,” and Lofton reacts as if thiswere somehow especially suspect.  Indeed,he calls it a “jaw-dropping error” and reiterates his claim that “it’s not anorgan, it’s inappropriate to call it an organ, and… it’s not the primary modeor means by which the pope teaches.”  Butmy remark is only an “error” (jaw-dropping or otherwise) if one understands“organ” in Lofton’s idiosyncratic way. Certainly it is perfectly innocent if one reads “organ” in the sense inwhich I meant it.  The Church is a bodywith the pope as its visible head.  The“organs” of the Church, as I was using the term, are those agencies throughwhich the pope and the Church act, just as a human being acts by using organssuch as the tongue (to speak) and the hand (to manipulate objects).  An office like the Dicastery of DivineWorship is the “organ” or agency through which the pope and the Church he headshandle liturgical matters.  And the DDFis that “organ” or agency through which the pope and the Church he heads handledoctrinal matters, specifically.  As I was using the term, it wouldn’t makesense to call the pope himself an“organ,” because, again, the “organs” I had in mind are the agencies the popeworks through.  It also wouldn’t make sense to call othermodes by which the pope teaches – encyclicals, for example, or sermons –“organs” of the Church, for they are not agenciesin the sense in which the DDF is an agency. Issuing an encyclical or giving a sermon is an action that the pope carries out, not an “organ.”

Whenproperly understood, then, my remark that the DDF is “the main magisterialorgan of the Church” is perfectly innocuous. If Lofton or anyone else wants to argue for using the expression “organ”in some other way, that’s fine.  But hehas no business accusing me of an “error,” jaw-dropping or otherwise.  Again, my use of the expression is in linewith common usage, and the term has, in any event, no precise technical or doctrinalmeaning that would render objectionable my description of the DDF as an “organ”or “the main organ” of the Magisterium. Certainly, Lofton has no business drawing from my remarks an absurdinference to the effect that I am trying to reduce the entire Magisterium ofthe Church to whatever documents the DDF happens to issue.  This is a sheer fantasy on Lofton’s part, andnot anything I either said or implied.

Archbishop Fernandez and the DDF

Let’s turnfinally to what I said in my article about Archbishop Fernandez’s appointmentas Prefect of the DDF.  My claim wasquite precise.  I said that the pope’s and the archbishop’s remarksimplied that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising its traditional magisterialfunctions.  Each of the words and phrasesitalicized here is crucial, and they highlight aspects of my remarks thatLofton ignores in order to make his inflammatory charges.

First, Ispoke only of the DDF.  I did notsay that the remarks in question implied that the pope or the Church as a whole would cease exercising theirmagisterial functions.  It’s true that inthe second to last sentence in my article, I quoted Newman’s phrase “temporarysuspense of the functions of the ‘Ecclesia docens,’” in order to wrap up thediscussion by tying it into the reference to Newman with which the articlebegan.  Read in isolation, one mightsuppose from that one sentence that I was speaking about the Church as awhole.  But the larger context makes itclear that that is not what Imeant.  I was clearly referring to the“temporary suspense” of the exercise of theDDF’s traditional function within the Church, specifically.

Second, Idid not say that the archbishop’s and pope’s remarks implied that the DDF (muchless the pope or Church as a whole) would loseits magisterial function.  I saidexplicitly that what was in question was the exercise of that function. Naturally, even if the DDF did stopexercising that function, it could take up its exercise again immediately anytime the pope wanted it to.  Hence thepoint is not nearly as radical as Lofton implies.  Third, even then I explicitly said that thearchbishop’s and pope’s remarks implied only that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising itstraditional magisterial function – largely,not entirely.  Lofton says that the pope’s and thearchbishop’s remarks make it clear that the DDF would still be teaching, as ifthis were something I denied.  But I didnot deny it.  On the contrary, I quoted those remarks myself, and –again – claimed only that the remarks implied a partial refraining from the exercise of the teaching function, nota complete refraining.

Finally, Iwas not putting forward any bold thesis about the nature of the Magisterium, orfurthering an “agenda” to “prepare people to reject magisterial teaching,” orwhatever else Lofton fantasizes might be my motivation.  I was simply noting the logical implications of what the pope and the archbishop themselveshad said.  And I did so tentatively,explicitly remarking that “it is possible that the remarks will be clarifiedand qualified after Archbishop Fernandez takes office.” 

It is truethat I went on to indicate that I doubted such a qualification would beforthcoming.  I was definitely wrongabout that, because as it happens, the archbishop issued some clarifyingremarks only a few days later, as I noted in afollow-up article.  And hislatest remarks essentially nullify the implications of his earlierremarks.  But as I argue in the follow-uparticle, that makes the significance of the earlier remarks less clear, notmore.  The whole episode amounts to yetanother instance of a pattern of action exhibited by the pope and hissubordinates throughout his pontificate – a tendency to generate needlessconfusion and controversy by failing to speak with precision.

Loftonhimself halfway admits this.  Speaking ofFrancis’s magisterium in general, Lofton says: “I would like to see moreclarification from Pope Francis in some cases.” Of the pope’s letter announcing Archbishop Fernandez’s appointment,Lofton admits: “I have some criticisms of the letter.”  Specifically, with respect to the goals ofupholding orthodoxy while allowing for different ways of expressing the Faith,Lofton acknowledges that the pope regrettably seems “to kind of pit thesethings against each other.”  In thatcase, though, it is intellectually dishonest for Lofton to insinuate that whenI and others have criticized the pope’s and the archbishop’s recent remarks,this criticism must reflect some suspect “agenda.”

There is onemore concession that Lofton makes that is extremely important, and thesignificance of which he and other self-appointed defenders of Pope Francisroutinely overlook.  Commenting onArchbishop Fernandez’s remarks about the “persecution” some theologianssuffered from the CDF around the time of Vatican II, Lofton says:

There were things that the SecondVatican Council taught that ended up vindicating some of the people that…previously… [had] a negative judgment against them [by the Holy Office]…  Over and over and over, the Holy Office didrender negative judgments about people who were later on vindicated… That’s afact, and it’s a fact we see often.

Endquote.  For those unfamiliar with thedetails of this period of Church history, what Lofton is referring to is thesituation of thinkers commonly classified as part of the nouvelle théologie (“new theology”) movement – Henri Bouillard,Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, and manyothers.  These writers were highlycritical of, and engaged in a sustained controversy with, the Neo-ScholasticThomists who represented the mainstream of Catholic theology in the decades priorto Vatican II.  Some of them were consideredsuspect by the CDF at the time, and Pope Pius XII’s HumaniGeneris was in part a correction of nouvelle théologie excesses.  (For example, Pius’s famous criticism of thosewho “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order” is widely understood to bea shot across de Lubac’s bow.)  Thesethinkers had to “fly under the radar,” as it were, until the arrival of a morefriendly pontificate.  With Vatican II,they were rehabilitated.  Some of themeven became cardinals, and Ratzinger, of course, became pope.

The ironyhere is many of these thinkers are heroes to Pope Francis’s most ardentdefenders – who nevertheless condemn the pope’s critics for doing exactly whatthe nouvelle théologie writersdid!  They can’t have it both ways.  If it was legitimate for nouvelle théologie writers respectfully to criticize theshortcomings they claimed to see in the Magisterium of their day, then itcannot be denied that it can be legitimate respectfully to criticize theshortcomings some see in Pope Francis’s magisterium.  If the nouvellethéologie writers shouldn’t be dismissed en masse as “dissenters,” then it is not fair to dismiss PopeFrancis’s critics en masse as“dissenters.” 

More to thepresent point, if Lofton is willing to acknowledge the good will of the nouvelle théologie writers and thesoundness of some of their views, despite their having been at odds with theMagisterium of their day, then justice and charity require him to afford thesame courtesy to the sober and respectful critics of Pope Francis.  For example, he should refrain frominsinuating that they have an “agenda” of “prepar[ing] people to reject papalteaching authority.”

One finalcomment.  Apparently worried that hisvideo was insufficiently condescending, Lofton adds a little trash talk in thecomments section, remarking: “I think [Feser] needs to stick to his lane whichis philosophy.”

Well, as theScholastics and the pre-Vatican II popes who commended Scholasticismemphasized, training in philosophy is a prerequisite to doing theologywell.  The reason is that it disciplinesthe intellect, teaching one to use words precisely, to make careful conceptualdistinctions, to reason with logical exactness, and to evaluate texts andarguments with caution and charity. 

Lofton’sresponse to my article provides evidence that he is lacking in thesecapacities.  Hence I’d suggest that hemight consider sticking to his own lane, which is making facile YouTube videos– but about topics other than theology, which requires levels of rigor andcharity that he appears to lack.

UPDATE 7/25: A follow-up comment on the controversy this article generated on Twitter and YouTube.