Why I am a Catholic Part 2: The Church

The flaw with Sola Scriptura

            This blog is the second of 4 blogs about Why I am a Catholic. Over the past two years I have been studying and searching for the truth in Christianity. I have been praying for Jesus to guide and direct my paths and lead me to the truth and a deep relationship with him. I was born and raised a Catholic but decided that I was not going to just be Catholic because that's how I was brought up, I need to find the truth and own it for myself. I started reading the writings of Early Christians, the reformers, Catholic apologetics, Protestant apologetics, and visiting/attending different Christian Church's. With that being said I think my search is over, I think the Catholic faith is the true Church founded by Jesus himself, and below is why.

            The great writer and Christian apologetic GK Chesterton (convert to the Catholic faith) once said "The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true." I will not cover here all the beliefs and doctrine of the Catholic faith, that would take forever. But I will tackle four of the biggest issues, The Eucharist (is it symbolic or is it Christ's actual flesh and blood), the protestant belief of Sola-Scriptura (that the bible alone is our sole authority), protestant belief in Sola-fide (Faith Alone) and Church’s teaching on Mary.  I will use scripture, the writings of the first Christians, and quotes from converts to the Catholic faith to make my case.

            After studying and researching what the Catholic Church truly teaches I have come to see that Archbishop Fulton Sheen was completely correct when he said "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be."  I saw a blog titled “Almost not Catholic” and laughed because I came very close to buying into some of the anti-catholic beliefs and propaganda and was myself “almost not Catholic.” Even more so, after reading in depth about why the Church teaches what it teaches I have realized that Sheen was also speaking truly when he said "The Catholic Church is like a lion in a cage. You don't need to defend it; you simply need to open the door." With all this being said I would like to be very clear here, I am not trying to attack or be negative towards any Christian denominations, I am simply stating why it is that I have come to believe in the Catholic faith. I have a great respect for my brothers and sisters in Christ that are not a part of the Catholic Church. I just think there are a lot of misconstrued views of Catholicism and many people don't understand why we believe what we believe. It is my prayer that this will at least allow those who are not Catholic to come to a better understanding and respect for the Catholic faith. This, being the second blog is about Sola Scriptura.                                          

            After spending a lot of time researching the protestant/non-denominational belief of Sola Scriptura (Bible alone) I have found that it just A. Does not make sense and B. that Jesus did not teach it. I will begin with an analogy. Imagine if the founding fathers of the United States of America said that our sole authority would be the Constitution of the United States. We would have complete anarchy because the document is not completely clear on certain issues, cannot speak for itself, and can be interpreted in different ways. The founding fathers realized this and so left us with a government and Supreme Court to interpret the document. If they did not we would not be a united country.  This is exactly the same case with the Bible; the belief in Sola-Scriptura makes every man his own Pope. If you go to a church and do not like what you hear and disagree with the pastor's interpretation of scripture you simply leave that church and go to another one. This is precisely why we have 33,000 protestant denominations and thousands of more non-denominational churches.  These churches differ on a wide variety of beliefs, each basing their beliefs in scripture...but their own interpretation and philosophy of scripture. This is why GK Chesterton said this about his Catholic faith; "I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me."

 Is this what Jesus wanted? Did he simply leave us with the Bible and say figure it out? I just don't believe that a loving God who is all good, all knowing, and all powerful would want that. In John Chapter 17 verse 11 Jesus is praying to our father and says "Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are." Then again in verse 21 "so that they may all be one."  These were the very prayers of the Messiah, Savior, and son of God; would God not answer his prayers? And if he did then why is Christianity so divided and separated.

            I believe Jesus left us with a Church and leader to guide and direct us when he told Peter in Matthew chapter 16 verses 18-19 "You are Peter and upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Notice he didn't say you are Peter and on this rock I will write 1st and 2nd Peter. In fact Jesus hardly ever mentions to His apostles anything about writing. Also notice that our Lord did not say, "I will build My Churches." The Church is His body. Christ can't have many bodies or He would be a physical monstrosity. I believe Peter was the first Pope and that the power granted to him has been passed down through apostolic succession to Pope Benedict, the 265^th.  Many Converts are quick to object and say but Peter was not the first Pope or that Catholics take that verse out of context. However, when I read letters and writings of the first Christians I simply found that they believed he was and that Jesus founded a single Church. (I will list a few quotes below, there are MANY more.) 

"Was anything withheld from the knowledge of Peter, who is called ‘the rock on which the Church would be built’ [Matt. 16:18] with the power of ‘loosing and binding in heaven and on earth’ [Matt. 16:19]?" (Demurrer Against the Heretics 22 [A.D. 200]).

“The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ he says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. And to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever things you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, they shall be loosed also in heaven’ [Matt. 16:18–19]). … On him he builds the Church, and to him he gives the command to feed the sheep [John 21:17], and although he assigns a like power to all the apostles, yet he founded a single chair, and he established by his own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were also what Peter was, but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?”
251 A.D. St. Cyprian of Carthage

"There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord. It is not possible to set up another altar or for there to be another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever has gathered elsewhere is scattering"

(Letters 43[40]:5 [A.D. 253]

      Another Reason why I don't accept Sola Scriptura is that well, it contradicts itself. The Bible does not teach that the Bible by itself is our sole authority. The Bible says to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Furthermore, the Bible says the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Also the first Christians could not have practiced Sola Scriptura since the New Testament was not compiled for decades after Jesus ascended into heaven, some of the letters were written as late as 80 or 90 AD. Finally, there was no printing press and the majority of people were illiterate. Sola Scriptura was not a practice of the first Christians.       

      Finally there were many other Gospels and letters written that did not make it into the Bible.  How do you know what constitutes the New Testament canon? How do you know for certain that these 27 books here in your New Testament are in fact inspired and should be in the New Testament? And how do you know for certain that maybe some inspired books haven’t been left out of the canon? There is no divinely inspired table of contents that says which books are divinely inspired. While some books and were unanimously supported as the written word of God others were debated, such as Revelations and Jude.  Some books that were kept out some people argued should have been placed in such as Acts of Paul, Shepherd of Hermas and Epistle of Barnabas. The Bible did not just magically appear nor was it magically placed together. As Scott Hahn, the former Presbyterian minister and Catholic Convert stated "Church historians all agree that we got the New Testament from the Council of Hippo in 393 and the Council of Carthage in 397, both of which sent off their judgments to Rome for the Pope's approval" (Hahn). If Church councils and popes do not have the ability to speak infallibly we are left with a fallible list of infallible books. Many Protestants who realized this either have converted or faced with that fact have now stated that the Bible is a fallible list of infallible books (RC Sproul and Dr. John Gerstner are two big name Protestant theologians who hold this belief). This is why the Catholic convert and former Presbyterian minister, Scott Hahn stated that it has to be the Church and the Bible, both, or neither.

            Another Convert to the Catholic faith, Peter Kreeft, who is a Yale graduate and PhD. Professor stated; “I was impressed by the argument that "the Church wrote the Bible:" Christianity was preached by the Church before the New Testament was written—that is simply a historical fact. It is also a fact that the apostles wrote the New Testament and the Church canonized it, deciding which books were divinely inspired. I knew, from logic and common sense, that a cause can never be less than its effect. You can't give what you don't have. If the Church has no divine inspiration and no infallibility, no divine authority, then neither can the New Testament. Protestantism logically entails Modernism. I had to be either a Catholic or a Modernist. That decided it; that was like saying I had to be either a patriot or a traitor.” (Kreeft)

             GK Chesterton put it best when discussing Sola-Scriptura and the Catholic Church. "It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church... It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God."

          These 33,000 different Protestant denominations differ on a wide variety of theological beliefs. And some of them are starting to allow homosexual pastors, abortions; some churches are going as far as to deny the Trinity. This last point I believe is the most important. That, since the reformation Christianity and Protestantism has yet to stop reforming and changing. Christianity is now a movement. The reformers themselves accepted and defended the belief of Mary's perpetual virginity (Ill talk more about this in the blog about Mary). Now all Christian denominations believe Mary had other sons. The reformer Martin Luther stated this several years after the reformation; "This one will not hear of Baptism, and that one denies the sacrament, another puts a world between this and the last day: some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some say that: there are as many sects and creeds as there are heads. No yokel is so rude but when he has dreams and fancies, he thinks himself inspired by the Holy Ghost and must be a prophet." This is what I mean that there are no longer any absolutes that Christianity is now a movement and nothing is safe. This is what happens when you take away a governing body to interpret scripture.

           

( I know I am long winded, the 4 paragraphs below written are by GK Chesterton and end this blog perfectly)

"It is this: that at the moment when religion lost touch with Rome, it changed instantly and internally, from top to bottom, in its very substance and the stuff of which it was made. It changed in substance; it did not necessarily change in form or features or externals. It might do the same things; but it could not be the same thing. It might go on saying the same things; but it was not the same thing that was saying them. And in that instant of refusal, his religion became a different religion; a different sort of religion; a different sort of thing. In that instant it began to change; and it has not stopped changing yet. We are all somewhat wearily aware that some modern churchmen call such continuous change progress; as when we remark that a corpse crawling with worms has an increased vitality; or that a snow man slowly turning into a puddle is purifying itself of its accretions. But I am not concerned with this argument here. The point is that a dead man may look like a sleeping man a moment after he is dead, but decomposition has actually begun. The point is that the snow man may in theory be made in the real image of man. Michelangelo made a statue in snow; and it might quite easily have been an exact replica of one of his statues in marble; but it was not in marble. Most probably the snow man has begun to melt almost as soon as it is made. But even if the frost holds, it is still a stuff capable of melting when the frost goes. It seemed to many that Protestantism would long continue to be, in the popular phrase, a perfect frost. But that does not alter the difference between ice and marble; and marble does not melt."

"Now a Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is. And the most striking and outstanding illustration is perhaps to be found in the Catholic view of marriage as compared with the modern theory of divorce; not, it must be noted, the very modern theory of divorce, which is the mere negation of marriage; but even more the slightly less modern and more moderate theory of divorce, which was generally accepted even when I was a boy.

This is the very vital point or test of the question; for it explains the Church's rejection of the moderate as well as the immoderate theory. It illustrates the very fact I am pointing out, that divorce has already turned into something totally different from what was intended, even by those who first proposed it. Already we must think ourselves back into a different world of thought, in order to understand how anybody ever thought it was compatible with Victorian virtue; and many very virtuous Victorians did. But they only tolerated this social solution as an exception; and many other modern social solutions they would not have tolerated at all. But about divorce such liberal Protestants did hold an intermediate view, which was substantially this. They thought the normal necessity and duty of all married people was to remain faithful to their marriage; that this could be demanded of them, like common honesty or any other virtue. But they thought that in some very extreme and extraordinary cases a divorce was allowable. Now, putting aside our own mystical and sacramental doctrine, this was not on the face of it an unreasonable position. It certainly was not meant to be anarchical. But the Catholic Church, standing almost alone, declared that it would in fact lead to an anarchical position; and the Catholic Church was right....The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule."

"But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. Just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world."

Citations:

Below is the article that I cited by Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft is a convert to Catholicism from Calvinism. He is a Yale graduate and a PH.D Professor. The article "Hauled Aboard The Ark" is his conversion story to the Catholic faith. Well worth the read!
Hauled Aboard The Ark


The other citation is from Scott Hahn's Book Rome Sweet Home
The GK Chesterton Excerpts are from a collection of his essays that can be found in "The collected Works of GK Chesterton Volume III"