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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Tags: Christianity
“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.”
This particular point was the cause of reflection for and ultimately the conversion of a good friend of mine. He argued that of all the sects of Christianity, Catholicism alone claimed to hold the fullness of revealed truth and yet to also be universal. To be fair, there are some smaller non-denominational types of church which more-or-less make the same claim to truth (using other words), but these are by no stretch of the imagination universal Churches. They are small and very local, and while they are happy to proselytize, they tend never to grow beyond a particular place.
Then there are the Mormons, who essentially make the same claim for truth and also for universality, but who at the same time are unable to give an account for why revelation stopped for 1800 until the coming of Joseph Smith. Theirs is a fairly unique approach, but they cannot answer the question as to why, if Jesus really is God, He failed to establish a lasting Church–indeed, a Church which lasted beyond the death of the last apostle. How can the Church first established by God fail after less than 100 years, and yet return and grow faithfully for 150 years (and more) when re-established by a mere prophet?
Finally, and perhaps with the most convincing counter-claim to be the true authentic Church, there is the Orthodox Church. Theirs is the hardest claim to refute–they exist in schism and not a a separate Church–so long as we focus on the marks of being one (schism aside), holy, or apostolic. But I think they fail in the mark of being Catholic. To quote from that same friend I mentioned before, “They just sat in their little bubble for a thousand years and did nothing.” To be fair, the converted Russia, but only by nature of winning the Russian Czar; it was not n active attempt at evangelization, as was the early conversion of Constantine the Great by the Church. In the mean time, they more-or-less barred the way against the Catholic missionaries, and lost the southern/eastern-most regions of the Church to the Mohammedans. Nor did they do much to convert the lands to the east–India or China–even after being accepted as the religion of Russia and her provinces. Even today, we hear of missionary successes in Africa by Catholics and Protestants alike–but not by the Orthodox.