Of Cabbages and Kings

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

A note on terminology: in this post I use the words denomination and church (lower case) more or less interchangably. I mean to refer to those groups of Christians that hold to a common set of teachings and are in communion with each other, e.g. Catholics, Southern Baptists, Lutherans, the Russian Orthodox Church or Eastern Orthodoxy taken as a whole, etc. A more precise system of categorization is not necessary for my purposes here.

There are quite a few Christian denominations and churches in the world, all of which profess to follow Christ and hold the Bible in high regard as the Word of God. Meanwhile, in the Bible we see Jesus founding a single Church and promising that it will never fall, even when attacked by the full fury of Hell:

I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.

—Matthew 16:18

One of the most important questions a Christian can ask is, where is this Church that was founded by Jesus? Everywhere you look there is another local congregation with its own brand of Christianity. Are all of these part of this one true Church? Some of them? How can you tell the difference between a local church that teaches the truth and one that teaches error?

Few Protestant denominations claim to have exclusive ownership of the truth, that their denomination forms the entirety of the true Church founded by Jesus. This, I imagine, is because most Protestants recognize that their particular brand of Christianity can be traced back to the sixteenth century at the earliest, well over a thousand years after the original Christian church formed in Jerusalem. (The Landmark Baptists, and perhaps other Protesant groups, hold that their denomination has been in existence continuously from the time of Jesus, but they frankly don’t have a leg to stand on.) So, there are a few options:

1. The true Church that Jesus founded has been on earth visibly since the beginning of Christianity, around the year A.D. 40. In this case, the true Church must certainly be wider than Protestantism, or at least it was prior to the Reformation.
2. The true Church disappeared or went underground sometime in its first few centuries, and has resurfaced. This, as I understand it, is the Mormon view.
3. The true Church disappeared and has not resurfaced. In this case, there’s little point in reading the rest of this series of posts; we’re just out of luck if we want to join the Church founded by Jesus.

I don’t know of any groups that hold to the third option above. I would argue that the second option requires the Church to fail, at least temporarily, which contradicts the promise of Jesus that “the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” The Church may well suffer setbacks, or have revivals or reformations from time to time, but there must nevertheless be some continuity in Church lineage all the way from Jesus’ day. If there was a period in history, however short, where there was no true Church on Earth, then the gates of Hell (or Hades) did in fact overcome the Church. If this were the case, then it would call not for a re-founding of the Church, but for an abandonment of Christianity as a failure.

So what remains is the first option, that Jesus founded a Church which has never failed. For this to be the case, there must be an unbroken lineage, however thin, of Christians in the true Church that stretches back to the first century. Until the sixteenth century, the true Church could not possibly have had Protestants in it, since that particular movement started in 1517 with Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. A typical Protestant understanding of the true Church is that the various Protestant denominations, along with other Christian churches such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, form branches of one Church. Opinions vary on how important it is to choose the “correct” branch, i.e. the one closest to the truth and most faithful to the Bible, but ultimately everyone who is a Christian is part of the same Church.

This is an appealing idea, but I believe it has some flaws. For one thing, in John 17:20–21, Jesus prayed for unity in the Church: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” However, there is little apparent unity among the major branches of this hypothesised tree, e.g. between Catholics and Protestants. I will discuss this topic in a later post.

Another problem with claiming that all of the major Christian traditions form a single Church is that every denomination teaches different doctrines. In some cases, these doctrinal differences are substantial, indeed fundamental to the Christian faith. Consider this passage from Isaiah, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 15:8–9 (ESV):

This people honors me with their lips,
    but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
    teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

To teach false doctrines and present them as the teachings of the one true Church is not only a matter of being correct or mistaken in some point of theology; it is to risk teaching something that takes our attempt to worship God and reduces it to vanity, something that threatens to separate our hearts from God and to turn them toward ourselves. It is of central importance to discover any and all truth that has been revealed to us by God, and to hold to it unswervingly. This is our best chance of knowing the heart of God, to the extent that we can understand it, and of knowing how God has called us to live.

In the Protestant view, God has given us all the revelation we need in the 66 books that make up the Protestant Bible, and we are to some extent on our own from there. Certainly the Holy Spirit can guide us into all truth (c.f. John 16:13), but in practice, study of the Bible with illumination by the Holy Spirit is no guaranteed path to doctrinal unity among Protestant denominations. Sincere followers of Christ have come to widely varying views on all sorts of theological questions. What are we to think of this?

One possibility is that the answers to many of these theological questions cannot be known, because God has not definitively revealed them to us. The answers to many questions may well be in the Bible, but given the variety of interpretations of virtually every Bible passage, it would seem in this view that the Holy Spirit does not see fit to lead everyone into the correct interpretation. This leaves only the fundamentals of the faith, those doctrines held by virtually every Christian everywhere. (See Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.) The problem here is that this list of common beliefs is quite short, compared to the list of beliefs almost any given denomination will present as a fundamental component of the Christian faith. But “mere Christianity” cannot contain the entirety of beliefs that can be held as doctrine, because it is not complete enough to base a denomination on it. At minimum, you have to decide who has the authority to make decisions in questions that cannot be answered by appealing to a universal consensus of Christians, and you have to decide which of the early Ecumenical Councils to hold to, if any. Upon making a choice on either of those issues, you have already contradicted the doctrines of at least a few major groups of Christians around the world.

Again, to make the wrong decision regarding these fundamental questions about the Church is tantamount to “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” But how can we know the correct doctrine? Independent Bible study isn’t enough, because it’s plain to see that well-meaning people have interpreted the Bible in all sorts of ways. But consider again the words of Jesus: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” Jesus appointed Apostles to be leaders of his Church, and taught them personally before ascending to Heaven. If any group of Christians throughout history has had at least a kernel of truth and has had the protection promised by Jesus, that they would not be overcome by the gates of Hell, it was the early Church in the time of the Apostles.

Therefore, if the early Church led by the Apostles held a particular teaching to be doctrine, then we must embrace it still today. To teach false doctrines is to risk worshipping God in vain, as stated in the passage above. If the early Church had already fallen prey to “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men,” if the Apostles themselves passed on what was contrary to God’s plan of salvation, then Christianity as the world has always known it is a stillborn religion, and Jesus was either powerless or unwilling to fulfill his promise: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Those Evangelical Protestants uncomfortable with the word religion may wish to consider how non-evangelicals use the term.)

So choosing correct doctrines is largely a matter of finding the church or denomination that has held to the doctrines of the early Church continuously since the first century. It will do little good to decide in advance what you believe and find a church that matches your doctrines; instead, we must discover what the early Church believed and hold to that, regardless of what our personal beliefs were previously. It is my intention in the following posts to show that the Catholic Church is the Church that has best held to these ancient beliefs, the doctrines given to us by Jesus and his Apostles. Stay tuned.

All verses are from the NIV except where indicated otherwise.

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

I was raised mainly in American Baptist churches. In high school and college, I attended non-denominational Evangelical churches, including Calvary Chapel. The teachings of all these churches were largely compatible, but the non-denominational churches tended to be less formally organized. That is, there was no particular oversight of the church or the pastor that influenced the churches’ teachings, and the order of the service was structured according to practical considerations and the leadership’s preference. Some of the Baptist churches I attended were more traditional in the structure of their services (robes for the pastor and choir, hymns rather than modern worship songs, etc.), but none of the churches had a formal liturgy.

In 2006, I moved to Newport News, Virginia to go to grad school and started attending Calvary Chapel Newport News. Sometime in 2008, I started looking into other forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mostly unrelated to this, near the end of 2008 I began to be more and more dissatisfied with the Calvary Chapel I attended. (See this post for my view of that church from a year ago.)

In July of last year, I left the local Calvary Chapel because of my growing list of objections to that particular church. (My specific reasons for leaving this church are beyond the scope of this series.) Given what I had been learning about the various forms of Christianity and my unwillingness to remain at Calvary Chapel, I was essentially forced into a decision about what sort of church I wanted to attend. My decision was based on what I had been learning about various Christian denominations and churches rather than simply choosing a church that was like the ones I had attended before.

In this series, I will describe how I decided where I fit within Christendom. I have definite reasons for believing in Christianity, but I will not list my reasons or discuss any non-Christian religions in this series. A defense of Christianity will have to wait for a later time.

Those of you who know me personally most likely know by now that I have decided to become a Catholic. I was confirmed as a full member of the Catholic Church on April 3, the day before Easter. This decision has come with its share of challenges. For one thing, I have had to completely reevaluate my religious beliefs; for another, my choice has strained my relationships with many of my friends and family. But in this series of posts I hope to demonstrate that I have important reasons for my choosing Catholicism, and that it wasn’t done on a whim or for any reason other than sincerely seeking the truth about God and our relationship with him.

Confronted with the things I learned about Catholicism, with my growing conviction that it was the truth, I had to make a decision. It would have been easier in some ways to stay as a Protestant, but what could I say other than to echo the words of Peter in the prologue to this series? “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68–69) So come what may, I have acted on my convictions and joined what I believe to be the Church founded by Jesus, who is the only one who can say, “Take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

This post leads into a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days. For background on my situation, see the post titled Mere Christianity. For my viewpoint from around a year ago, see A Calvary Chapel heretic.

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

—John 6:53–69

“Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

—Matthew 10:34–39

“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

—John 16:33

All verses are from the NIV.