The Church must have authority

The One True Church is anointed by God and speaks with authority. It is the solemn duty of The Church to overrule false teachers and scholars who twist the scriptures, and to preserve the deposit of faith entrusted to her once for all. However, false teachers cannot be overruled except by a higher authority. This authority cannot be man’s opinion or scholarship, which is of merely equal authority to that of the liars. There is no final authority in mere scholarship, for books cannot speak for themselves, and the minds of scholars are the minds of men. Mere men, I say, unless they are anointed by the Spirit of Christ. For the Church asserts, and must assert, an ultimate authority to interpret the Scripture and Tradition given to her by God. The Church must be able to answer a false teacher wearing the robes of her apostolic anointing, to pronounce a judgment that bears weight, so that the faithful will not be led astray.

Who is this Church? Protestants say it is all the true Christians in all the denominations of the world. But the voice of the ethereal “global church” is silent; the voice of “all baptized Christians” cannot speak, for they have no body. There is no courtroom in Protestantism, for no man submits to the judgment of another. There is no judge who can do more than ridicule the Joel Osteens and the Rob Bells, so they shout at one another like an unruly parliament, each with his piece of the truth.

The voice of the Church comes from a body incarnate, for it is the voice of the Incarnate Christ. She speaks as one with authority, saying, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” She asserts the exclusive authority to proclaim doctrine, not because her exegesis is based on good reasons, but because the Spirit of the Lord is upon her. She speaks “not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,so that her faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

Where is the Church who speaks with such a voice? Where is she who proclaims with the prophetic zeal, “I will not share my glory”? She stands in tattered robes of bloody history, but it is a history that leads all the way back to the Cross, and the Fire of Jesus is still in her eyes.

The word of God and the Bible

In my post from last year, I claimed that the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, which forms the epistemological basis for all of Protestant thought, does not have a scriptural basis. I concluded that it is contradictory to its own standard, and therefore must be false. The claim that the Bible does not support sola scriptura will seem a foreign, if not hostile, thought to many who like me were raised in Evangelical Christianity, and so I would like to elaborate and substantiate my claim here.

If we look for the doctrine of sola scriptura in the Bible, it is quickly apparent that nothing close to an explicit declaration of such an idea exists anywhere within it. Rather most attempts to establish biblical precedent for the doctrine do so by equating it with the word of God; indeed, in my own Protestant mind the Bible and the word of God were pure synonyms. This works to justify sola scriptura because the Bible establishes the word of God in various places and in various ways as the authoritative impetus that brought the Church into being, which also continually defines and sustains it; thus, a strong case can be made that it is appropriate to attribute to the word of God alone the position of prime authority in matters of doctrine. Therefore, if the word of God could be understood to refer specifically and exclusively to the Bible, then sola scriptura could be established. However, despite the widespread assumption among Protestants that the scriptural references to “the word of God” refer precisely to the Bible, it is impossible to draw the equivalency.

1) The Bible never calls any book of the New Testament “the word of God.”

It is true that there are many places in the Old Testament where the phrase “the word of God” refers to the Old Testament scriptures, and two places in the New Testament as well: Jesus refers to the Ten Commandments as “the word of God” in Matthew 15:6 (with its parallel in Mark) and uses the phrase again in John 10:35 in reference to a Psalm. However, it is not enough to establish the Old Testament as the word of God: the Christian claims the New Testament as well, and it cannot be argued that the New Testament asserts itself to be the word of God simply because it accepts the Old Testament as the word of God. So, does the Bible establish the books of the New Testament as the word of God? According to my research of the Bible, there is no place therein where the phrase “the word of God” is used to refer to any written document that would later become canonized in the New Testament.

2) The Bible never even implies that most of the New Testament, including the Gospels, are “the word of God.”

Despite the fact above, we can call the New Testament scriptures “the word of God” if we can only establish them as scripture, because 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all scripture is breathed out by God. Very well, but in only one case does the New Testament confer scriptural status to any part of itself (2 Peter 3:16), and then only the writings of Paul are affirmed, leaving the Four Gospels (the core of the Bible!), Acts, Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, and Revelation without any Biblical affirmation of their status as scripture, and therefore, without even being able to be inferred as the “word of God.” It cannot be argued that, simply because Peter acknowledged Paul’s writings as scripture, he must have also meant those of James, Jude, and the rest.

3) New Testament references to the “word of God” are almost always to things apart from its own contents.

Instead, what we find throughout the New Testament is that the phrase “the word of God” almost exclusively refers to the Gospel, without any indication of its medium, and that where clues are given as to whether the phrase refers to something spoken or written, they point exclusively to something spoken. The phrase is used to refer to the prophecies of John the Baptist, to the oral teachings of Christ (at Gennesaret, for example), to the message of the apostles at Pentecost, to the message carried by Paul’s evangelistic journeys and delivered to Timothy, etc. In all of these passages, the words that constituted “the word” are not recorded. (For example, we don’t know exactly what words Timothy learned as a child.) It is important to realize that when the authors of the New Testament writings refer to “the word of God” in these passages, they are not referring to their own writings, nor the writings of any contemporary New Testament authors, nor explicitly including in their writings the word of God to which they refer. Rather, they are referring to something outside the texts, something that they expected their audience to know.

Thus, even having accepted that the word of God is the supreme authority in the life of the church, we see that the Bible does not include all of itself in the phrase, and includes other things apart from itself. Therefore, we cannot draw the equivalence from the supreme authority of the word of God to the supreme authority of the Bible. The only legitimate hermeneutical path to biblically justify the concept of sola scriptura fails. It is ironic that the Protestant, in embracing sola scriptura, must doubt whether the Bible is the word of God, while the Catholic, embracing the Bible as the word of God on the testimony of the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church, can justify the belief, and rightly say when the Scriptures are read, “The Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.”

The Real Presence of Christ

Many Protestant denominations, such as the Anglican church, hold that in the Eucharist we experience the “Real Presence of Christ,” desiring for Christ to be really and truly present with us when we do this act of utmost communion with him, yet rejecting the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that Christ is physically present in the elements. They maintain the doctrine that, in the words of the Anglican 39 Articles, “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is [only] Faith.” However, I believe this to be contradictory to the belief that Christ is really present in the Eucharistic meal. Let me explain:

We all know that the real presence of a human person is necessarily both spiritual and physical.

On one hand, a person cannot be said to be really present when their body is present, but their spirit absent. Thus we say to ourselves when we kiss a loved one who has deceased moments before, “They are not really here”: for their body is present, yet their spirit is not. And when two lovers are together, if one senses that, even though the other be physically present, their heart is with another, or their mind daydreaming or preoccupied, they will say to them, “You are not really here.”

Neither can a person be said to be really present when their spirit is present, but their body absent. Thus, when we excuse someone for not really being with us at a gathering, we say that they are “with us in spirit.” And when a lover off at war writes home to his beloved, or sings “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams,” he feels bittersweet longing because his spirit is with those he loves, yet his body is away, so the reality of his presence is unfulfilled. We Christians especially know this because because of our longing while we are separated from our Lord Jesus while he prepares a place for us, for “we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6), even though his Spirit is with us, whom he has sent as a comforter. Therefore, regarding a human person, where either the spirit or the flesh is lacking, there is not the real presence of the person.

Now, we believe that Christ is a human person, for “he came down from heaven and was incarnate and was made man.” From the moment of his incarnation, the person of Christ has possessed a human nature, inextricably joined to his divine nature in hypostatic union; and having resurrected and ascended into heaven, he reigns there now as both God and man, no less incarnate than he was when he was on earth.

Therefore, how can the Real Presence of the Person of Christ be with us in the Eucharist, if this presence is not physical as well as spiritual in nature? If he does not come down into the bread, as much as we ascend into heaven, then in what sense do we call this presence “real”?

I would go even further, and suggest that this Real Presence of Christ is necessary for true Christian life–a life of longing in the absence of Christ’s Real Presence, albeit comforted by his Spiritual presence as a sign, leaves one alone in the bodily work of life; and what what one does alone, one can only do by one’s own power. The failure to have Christ bodily with us leads us into a subtle self-dependence, as God ceases to invigorate our flesh and blood, remaining merely as our inspiration. Christ came as spirit and body so that the whole man, body and soul, might be united to him in faith.

On conversions between Catholicism and Protestantism

Having grown up as a Protestant, I have heard countless testimonies of people who were “raised in the Catholic church,” but never had a real, personal faith until they found Jesus at a Protestant church later in life. It is almost a cliche in churches like mine. All the Catholic church seemed to be able to produce were spiritually dead Christmas-and-Easter Pseudo-Christians. This evidence formed the impression in me and most of my churchmates that the Catholic church was itself spiritually dead.

Recently, I have become aware of the existence of active, practicing Catholics. Their existence creates a rather interesting observation: not once in my years as a Southern Baptist did I ever meet a former Catholic who was an active, practicing Catholic at the time of their conversion to Protestantism. It seems that the only way these once-Catholics entered Protestant churches was by a decay or regression in their faith (or in the facade of supposed faith), passing through a period of non-religion or spiritual inactivity. In other words, these former Catholics became Protestant after a progression in which they became less Christian. I have never met a convert from Catholicism who experienced the opposite path–that of increasing devotion to his Catholic form of the Christian faith leading to the discovering of Protestantism as a purer, better way to practice his faith. Someone may come forward to testify against it, but it seems to me that Catholics who become Protestants are Catholics who have become less Christian, never those who have become more Christian and embraced Protestantism as a higher form of Christianity.

I have far less evidence for the case of Protestants who become Catholics, but the limited cases I have heard would lead me to tentatively suggest that the trend goes in quite the opposite direction: Protestants who become Catholics are almost always active, practicing Protestants at the time of their conversion, and they embrace Catholicism as a higher form of Christianity. Protestants do not experience a period of doubt about the whole foundation of Christianity, a loss of love for or faith in Christ and the gospel and the essence of our faith, and then, at the end of this process, discover Catholicism. Perhaps there are cases to the contrary, but I sense that generally it holds true.

To show another angle of what I mean, the folks at Called to Communion have pointed out that former-Catholic Protestants tend to be hostile towards the Catholicism of their upbringing, rejecting Catholicism as a body that has lost its Christian soul, whereas former-Protestant Catholics tend to extend mercy towards the Protestantism of their upbringing, accepting it as a Christian soul that has lost her body. The attitude of the Catholic who used to be Protestant is towards pity and reconciliation, whereas the attitude of the Protestant who used to be Catholic is towards resentment and refutation.

If these observations prove true, then they may suggest which is the truer form of Christianity, for Christianity itself would seem to instruct us that its truest form will attract the truest and most devout of all Christians, and will have the most charity toward the other forms, while its weakest form will attract the most disenchanted Christians, and be the most hostile toward other forms.