Why Catholics Are Right ..... but too small

So I’m reading a book called Why Catholics Are Right.
Just wondering. Always good to check.

The author Michael Coren (somewhat controversial Canadian TV talk show host) spends most of his introduction defending his strong title. “Sounds a little proud”, some of his critics said; “it might offend people” others suggested – but he decided to stand strong on his audacious title.

And it is audacious.

It is politically incorrect.
It is insulting to all other branches of Christianity let alone other Faiths.
It is offensive to any sense of tolerance.
It is downright arrogant (even if written humbly) as it loudly tells everyone else – they are wrong.

If Coren had used other words such as “better” or “good” or even “more right” which perhaps isn’t the best English but is kinder, people’s charge against him might only have been he is wrong rather than he is insulting/proud/offensive/arrogant.

But all of the above isn’t how I feel about his title.
It’s not offensive, or arrogant sounding, or proud, or insulting to me.

It’s about time someone used the word right.

Surely believing something necessitates that you are convicted, persuaded, convinced that what you believe is right.

Is this not the very nature of truth?

Truth can’t be partially right, partly right, or maybe right.
Truth has to be right – or it’s not truth.

So, thank you Cohen for defining the nature of truth.
Right is right even when it’s politically incorrect, arrogant, offensive, or proud sounding.

As Cohen himself writes “to believe something is, self-evidently, not to believe something that is its contrary.”
Therefore to be a Catholic necessitates believing that Catholicism is right.

The remainder of Cohen’s book is him detailing the views of the Catholic Church – and he is right about these views.
BUT is truth about views, about propositional statements, about a set of beliefs?
You can be right about views – but right about views does not equal right about truth.

Enter another book I am reading as I prepare to preach through Mark’s Gospel in 2012.

The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited @ Scot McKnight.

Its early days in my reading (only page 48) but already McKnight is challenging static rightness. He redefines the Gospel to the fullness of what it is and that fullness is not defined by a list of views or the rightness of beliefs.

Jesus is not a right to be believed, he is a way to be lived. You do the Gospel rather than believe the Gospel.

Here emerges the problem with Cohen’s rightness – and everyone else’s rightness (mine included). Rightness implies we can arrive at it. We can complete it. We can hold it all in a book, a list, a box.
Rightness shrinks.

So, if Catholics are right ….. or Protestants, or Baptists, or Evangelicals, or Pentecostals, or Emergents ….. its too small being right.

There’s something bigger than right. There’s Jesus.