Book Review: Reasons to Believe by Scott Hahn
Continuing with my "What I Read on my Summer Vacation" theme, "Reasons to Believe" is the latest book by popular Catholic author Scott Hahn. Subtitled "How to Understand, Explain and Defend the Catholic Faith," it lays out ways to present the Catholic faith to those who are currently part of it.
The first part aims to lay out a path for atheists and agnostics to accept the reality of the existence of God. Using arguments from science and philosophy, Hahn lays out the rationality of believing in God in a way that most who are open to it should find acceptable. He also offers proofs of the truth of Christianity using such methods as the proofs from prophecy (so much the Old Testament foretold happened that it had to be divinely inspired) and C.S. Lewis' famous "Lord, liar or lunatic" argument.
In the second part, Hahn, a former Protestant minister, turns to evangelizing to our fallen-away Protestant brethren, providing proofs of the truth of Catholicism in the areas of the the structure of the Church, the papacy, and the Eucharist.
Finally, in the third section, Hahn presents the Catholic Church as the fulfillment of the Davidic Kingdom. He begins by showing the structure and purpose of the Kingdom of David (and his successors) and how that prefigures Jesus and the Catholic Church he founded while here on Earth. This was my favorite part of the book as it presented an argument I was vaguely aware of in a clear and concise way that I hadn't seen before.
It was an interesting read, but too short, I think to be ultimately persuasive. It might have been helpful to divide it into two volumes: one focusing on the members of AA (Atheists and Agnostics) and then a volume dealing more fully with reaching out to Protestants. There's so much Protestants "know" about the Catholic Church that just isn't so that while this book's portion focusing on them was good, it needs more before a Catholic can really hope to reach out to Protestants.
Hahn has laid out good arguments on some of those topics. In Hail, Holy Queen, he deals with Mary and how, as a "Bible Christian," he came to recognize that the devotion Catholics have to her it fitting and proper. In The Lamb's Supper, he describes the Biblical basis for the Catholic Mass, and how it ties in with the Passover Meal and truly unites Heaven and Earth, so that, in the Mass, we pray along with those in Heaven.