"Is Apologetics Pointless?"
My response:
Don’t discount the value of apologetics. It will never be sufficient apart from a lived life of love in Christ, but it can be a powerful tool.
Take it from someone who is coming from the “other side” — as a “fundamentalist” Protestant, I was raised (a) with a profound ignorance of Church history, and (b) impressed with the meme that “Catholicism is un-Biblical”.
So, the viewpoint is that where Protestants differ from each other, it is because we interpret the Bible differently. Where Protestants differ from Catholics, it is because we follow the Bible and they do not. :-/
It can be a worldview-shaking thing, then, when one finally encounters the (too-rare) Catholic who knows, not just the content of the Church’s teaching, but why the Church teaches what she does, and can match with “chapter and verse” (Matthew 16:18! Isaiah 22:15-24! 2 Thess. 3:6!). It’s like meeting a unicorn or gryphon or faerie — such creatures are not supposed to exist!
Writers like Mark Shea, Steve Ray, and Scott Hahn do a tremendous service here — by knowing the “chapter and verse” and being able to translate Catholic teaching into “evangelical-ese” so that it is comprehensible.
And yes, you will find that it is more often than not water off a duck’s back. And even with those who have “ears to hear”, it is likely to be a slow process — I’ve been “apologized” to for lo, these ten to fifteen years now, and I still, though I’ve moved much closer theologically and philosophically to Rome, have not swum the Tiber.
Yet.
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