The Protestant's Dilemma (3 page)

Similarly, the Church is a visible unity that can be seen acting in history, with Christ’s authority, to exclude from the Mystical Body those members who persisted in teaching false doctrines. Vincent of Lerins demonstrated the visibility of the Church when he wrote in the year 434:

What then will a Catholic Christian do if a small portion of the Church has cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member.
³

If the true Church is invisible, it becomes impossible to determine who has authority to excommunicate another. Christ directed the apostles on how and when to excommunicate someone from the Church (see Matt. 18:17), but what does this mean when the Church is invisible and spread out across numerous denominations? A Christian “excommunicated” from one church just goes to another down the street, both a part of the “invisible Church,” rendering these biblical passages meaningless. Being excommunicated from the Church makes sense only if the Church is a visible unity that one can be cut off from.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true, then either Christ revoked the authority he had given his Church or the Church changed in its essentials from being a unified, visible, and hierarchically organized body to an invisible and purely spiritual association. There is no scriptural evidence for the former and much against it, and in the latter case it becomes impossible to know to whom God has given the rightful authority to lead the Church. Protestants may like to speak of “the Church,” but in truth all they can point to are individual believers who may or may not meet in some local congregation.

2: THE PAPACY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

After centuries of its existence, God decided to eradicate the office of the papacy.

The Church had a pope, a visible head, from the beginning. In fact, we know the names and approximate dates of all of the popes, all the way back to the first century: Peter first, then Linus, Anacletus, and Clement I. But sometime between the first centuries of the Church and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the papacy as an office must have become corrupted, and God revoked his authority from it.

No Pope Needed, Thank You Very Much

Protestants diverge on myriad doctrines, but on one issue they stand fully unified: They reject the notion that the pope has any authority from God. They don’t need a pope; they don’t want a pope, and, they say, neither does God.

The pope is not needed because Protestants have the Bible. They would rather trust in an unchanging written document than the vicissitudes and caprice of human personalities. For them it seems more plausible that God would ordain such a standard. As one commenter put it to me:

Man cannot be trusted; man will corrupt what he touches. The survival of the scriptures is the survival of a touchstone to the apostles that serve[s] as an unchanging standard. This is a necessity; this is preservation; this is God’s will.
⁴

The pope is a mere man and thus fallible. God wouldn’t have relied on a string of such men to lead his Church. Instead, he providentially had the apostles record divine truth in the Bible, where all Christians could find it and know that it is a “touchstone” to the apostles themselves (and therefore to Christ). A touchstone is something used to test the veracity or purity of a substance. Protestants believe that this is exactly what God gave us as our sole infallible rule of faith. No pope necessary.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The papacy was established by Christ, has endured, and retains the authority entrusted to it by Christ, even to this day.

The historical fact of the papacy throughout every Christian century makes a compelling case that it was intended to be a perpetual office within the institution that Christ built.
⁵
The pope presided over or sent his legates to ecumenical councils and confirmed (or refused confirmation) of their decisions, and members of the Church accepted these decrees as binding.

But what is the evidence that Peter was in Rome and established a church there? First, while the Bible does not explicitly say “Peter was the bishop of Rome,” in Peter’s first epistle he ends by saying, “She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings; and so does my son Mark” (1 Pet. 5:13). We know from its usage in the book of Revelation that Babylon was a code word for Rome. Peter chose to be subtle here, since the Christians were being persecuted in Rome, and he, its leader, had to be careful. While this does not prove Peter was in Rome, it is biblical evidence for the claim.

Several early Christians testify to the existence of the bishop of Rome, from Peter onward. In the 100s, Irenaeus spoke of the church in Rome founded by the apostles Peter and Paul and went on to describe the succession of bishops from there:

The blessed apostles, then, having founded and built up the Church, committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. Of this Linus, Paul makes mention in the Epistles to Timothy. To him succeeded Anacletus; and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric.
⁶

The Clement mentioned at the end of this passage is the author of a first-century letter to the church in Corinth. Clement begins the letter by stating that he writes from the church in Rome, strengthening the claim that this line of bishops dwelled in Rome and was begun by Peter. Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, and John Chrysostom, among others, testify to the historical reality of Peter’s sojourn and martyrdom in Rome. An unbiased examination of the historical evidence, coupled with Peter’s words in his first epistle, make an overwhelming case for the first bishop of Rome being Peter and the line continuing in unbroken succession.

But what about Scripture being a touchstone to the apostles? A Catholic can happily agree that it is indeed that. But that does not mean that Scripture is the
sole
touchstone to the apostles. St. Paul tells us in his letter to the church in Ephesus that God built his Church on human beings:

So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.
⁷

Christ is the ultimate foundation, and he chose the apostles as the foundational layer for the Church. These are men and therefore, it is true, open to corruption. But God by his power protected these men from error in their teachings, which even Protestants believe—for they accept the scriptures written by these men.

God provided us multiple touchstones to Christ: the apostles and their successors (the magisterium), the Apostolic Tradition, and Sacred Scripture.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true, then after 1,500 years of having a bishop of Rome called the prince of the apostles, the successor of Peter to whom Christ gave the keys to the kingdom of heaven (cf. Matt. 16:19), God eradicated the office of the papacy. No longer would his Church have a leader, a “servant of the servants of God.”
⁸
Instead, God left his Church to follow whatever leaders declared themselves to be so in whatever churches they founded on the basis of their own authority or personal revelations.

3: ECUMENICAL COUNCILS

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

Ecumenical councils somehow no longer have the authority they used to have.

For the first several centuries of the Church’s existence, bishops gathered in councils to define true doctrines and condemn heresies, issuing decrees that were recognized as binding upon all the faithful. But at a certain point in history, these councils must somehow have ceased to carry that universal teaching authority. Instead they became mere ceremonial gatherings of the Church’s bishops—or worse, cabals of an apostate church taken over by traditions of men.

The Protestant Conception of Ecumenical Councils

Protestants contend that no council of the Church, even the ones traditionally deemed ecumenical (universal), carry any authority—except insofar as they accurately interpret Scripture, in which case the authority is the Bible’s, not theirs. Thus the first four councils of the Church, which largely answered trinitarian and christological questions, are considered “authoritative” only insofar as they are accurate deductions from the words of God in the Bible. Most Protestants allege, however, that even these early councils contained errors. For example, few are willing to accept that Mary is the “mother of God,” as the third ecumenical council in Ephesus declared. Even Martin Luther, who had no problem with this title, contended that Church councils in general contained errors, as he revealed in his famous concluding remarks at the Diet of Worms:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scripture or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by Scripture I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God.

Luther here presents the accepted Protestant belief that ecumenical councils have erred and “contradicted themselves” by deviating from the true meaning of God’s word as found in the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the most important confessional document of Calvinist (or Reformed) Protestantism, echoes Luther’s distrust of Church councils:

All synods or councils since the apostles’ times, whether general [ecumenical] or particular, may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.
⁹

Instead, the Bible alone is to be the sole authoritative rule of faith within Protestantism. This is the doctrine known as
sola scriptura
, which we will explore in greater depth later.

More traditional Protestants of the Anglican or Reformed communities, however, do view the first four councils as authoritative. They contend that for a
council to be considered an ecumenical (and therefore authoritative) one, it had to have been attended by all five major patriarchs (bishops of important cities or areas): those of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. They claim that the first four councils met this criterion. But, they argue, due to the divisions that have occurred in the Church since—notably the Coptic and Eastern Orthodox schisms—it has become impossible for these five patriarchs to be present at a council, making ecumenical councils a practical impossibility to this day.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

Church councils have the same binding authority today that they did in the early centuries.

The Church has held ecumenical councils since the apostolic age (first century). We see the precedent and pattern for these councils in Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem. The Church was posed with the question of whether Gentile converts to the Christian faith needed to be circumcised in order to be saved. In preparation for the council, Paul and Barnabas “had no small dissension and debate with them [Judaizers],” and so they were “appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question [of circumcision]” (Acts 15:2).

After much debate among the apostles and elders, Peter stood and explained how God gave the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles, and that salvation comes by grace through faith—not by following the Mosaic Law. The apostles then drafted a letter, to be sent out to the churches, in which the men making these challenges were rebuked as having gone out
without the authority of the apostles
. The decisions made by the council were decreed, beginning with the authoritative formula, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” Protestants recognize the authority of this council because the apostles themselves led it. Also, the council is recorded in the Bible, so its prescriptions are authoritative for that reason.

The first ecumenical council to be convened was at Nicaea in the year 325. It was attended by more than 300 bishops, including Hosius, bishop of Cordova and Pope Sylvester’s representative (or “legate”). The primary purpose of the council was to determine whether the teachings of Arius, a deacon from Alexandria who denied the divinity of Christ and his consubstantial relationship with God the Father, were heresy. The truths of Christ’s divinity and of his consubstantiality (“same substance” or “one in being”) with the Father were consequently confirmed as dogmas. Protestants accept the decrees of this council and even point to it as being
the
standard for Trinitarian orthodoxy. Most Protestants today still recite the Nicene Creed, the first part of which was formulated at Nicaea.