One of the greatest arguments for the truth of Christianity is the Catholic Church. The existence of the Catholic Church is itself a miracle. This is something that amazed me when I studied the history of the Church. I am not saying that the people within the Church are perfect. Far from that! We had a few popes who were downright scoundrels. We even had a pope who had a mistress and was even involved in a murder controversy! Some popes were more concerned with luxury than spirituality. But all this just amazes me more that the Catholic Church is still standing after 2,000 years. This cannot be because of men, but because of God. The Church does not remain standing because of the people who are running it, but in spite of the people who are running it.
Christendom has had a
series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.
Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the
way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history
is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that
at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found
on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a
new religion...But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old
to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The
consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay,
it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I
find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and
rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the
shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of
shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been
perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal
parallels were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered
and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it
lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in
a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a
bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.
GK Chesterton - The Everlasting Man, Chapter : The Five Deaths of the Faith
It is not that the Catholic Church has never suffered corruption. We Catholics admit that it has! I have read many books on the history of Catholic Church by orthodox Catholic historians. Not only do they admit the corruption of the Church in the past. They seem to actually brag about it! I found this very odd, until I started to read Chesterton. If the Catholic Church was a mere human institution then once it became dead it could not be brought back to life again. Once meat is corrupted, it remains corrupt. But God is a God of Resurrection. If you kill His Son, He will rise Him up again. If you corrupt His Church, He will revive it again. And this has happened over and over again. And no other institution, government, or even any other church can say this of itself. When Roman Empire declined, it remained declined - and gone. When a Protestant Church dies, it can never return back to its glory days. Members of a dying Protestant church can only leave that church and start again in a new denomination. There were several times I was involved in a dying Protestant church where I left it and the returned again a few years later - and the church building was then run by different denomination.
Protestant evangelical churches often have scheduled revival meetings. But theses revivals lack one ingredient for a true revival - the church must be dead. And yet I never saw a dead or a near-dead Protestant church having a revival. Protestant Churches do not experience a resurrection of their spiritual life, but rather a reincarnation of their spiritual life. In reincarnation, the soul leaves the dead body and enters into another. When a Baptist or a Lutheran Church dies, the members who still have life in them leave that church and go to another. But this is not what happens to the Catholic Church. Whenever it starts to die, God raises a saint such as Francis of Assisi, Teresa de Avila, or Francis deSales. These saints are used by God to revive the Church. But this is not so with Protestantism. John Wesley did not cause a revival in the Anglican Church. Rather, he left the Anglican Church and started the Methodist Church.
The Catholic Church is the oldest institution in the world. Not only that, but there is no government that exists today that is older that the Catholic Church. Think about that. The Roman Empire lasted for a few centuries, and then fizzled away. The emperor dynasties in China are gone. The Soviet Union died after 70 years. Our own American government is only 230 years old. Human-controlled governments eventually fall apart. But the Catholic Church is not a human-controlled government. Jesus Christ said that the gates of death and hell shall not prevail against his Church.
Other churches are no longer faithful to the teachings of its founder. This was very discouraging to me when I was a Protestant seminary student. All churches tend to lose the vision of its founders after about 100 to 150 years, and start falling into decay in both spirituality and doctrine. This is one of the reasons we have so many denominations. A person or a group of people is disgusted by how its church has fallen from the vision of its original founder. So that person or persons decides to leave that church and start their own church. Then 100 to 150 years later that church starts to be entirely different. Then other people get disgusted and leave their church and start a new church somewhere else.
Look at the churches that started by the founders of the Reformation. Take the Lutheran church, for example. If Martin Luther could see how the church that is named after him, he would turn over in his grave (sorry for the cliché). First of all, Luther was heavily into predestination. He was against free-will. He taught that God predestined some to heaven and others to hell, and that a person only turns to Christ because he was predestined to. Luther was actually more Calvinistic than Calvin! But today’s Lutheran churches are Arminian. They teach that man has a free will, and he can freely turn to God or reject God. In this area I myself would agree with the Lutheran churches, but in other areas I myself am disappointed with what is happening in Lutheranism. If you want to see how a church is going to be in the future, just look at what their seminaries are teaching. Take, for example, the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Bultmann).
Bultmann took the teachings of Luther to its logical conclusion. Luther taught that Jesus and the apostles preached the simple message of justification by faith alone, but that the Church corrupted this simple gospel into a gospel of works and legalism. Bultmann just took Luther’s idea a step further. If the Church could corrupt the simple message of the gospel of faith, then how do we not know that the Church did not corrupt other things about Christ as well? How do we know that the Church did not corrupt the Bible, and did not impose its own made-up stories about Jesus into the Bible? How do we know that Jesus rose from dead? How do we know that Jesus was not just a man who went around preaching that we should love one another, and that the Church embellished these myths that Jesus was God who died for our sins, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven? Bultmann made a distinction between the Christ of faith and the Historical Jesus. The Christ of faith is the Jesus that the Church made up. The Historical Jesus was what the real Jesus was like. Bultmann taught as a Lutheran in good standing all through his life.
Carl E. Braaten, one of the leading conservative scholars in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, said that the “drift into liberalism is causing a “brain drain” from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America”. He points out that many of his fellow conservative scholars are leaving the Lutheran Church and joining the Catholic Church.
Braaten said his departed colleagues were “convinced that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become just another liberal protestant denomination. Hence, they have decided that they can no longer be a part of that. Especially, they say, they are not willing to raise their children in a church that they believe has lost its moorings in the great tradition of evangelical (small e) and catholic (small c) orthodoxy (small o), which was at the heart of Luther’s reformatory teaching and the Lutheran Confessional Writings. They are saying that the Roman Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed.
www.layman.org/Libraries/The%20Layman%20Print/2005%20October.sflb?download=true
This is not only happening in the Lutheran church. Former member of the Southern Baptist Church has also accused his Church of falling into liberalism (http://www.adherents.com/largecom/baptist_SBC_Dunn.html). The Anglican Church has definitely fallen into liberalism(http://www.wayoflife.org/files/4fa466c4c219ef7377db25265f553ab7-183.html). The United Church of Christ is for same-sex marriage (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/national/05church.html). The Presbyterian Church USA is in the midst of a heated debate over the ordinations of gay and lesbians (http://www.patheos.com/Explore/Additional-Resources/The-Church-and-Homosexuality--Where-Protestants-Stand-in-the-Struggle-.html). The United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Church USA, the Presbyterian Church USA, and United Church of Christ are pro-abortion (http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist1.htm).
It is not that there are no dissident priests and theologians in the Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church does not stand on what they say, but what the pope says. Other churches are defined by their ministers and theologians. So if there are enough theologians who want to change their denomination, that can and will happen.
How many of the main-line denominations today are still faithful to the teachings of its founders? How many still see the Bible is the inerrant Word of God? How many still oppose abortion and homosexuality? How many still teach that the there cannot be a female clergy? Look at how all the churches view birth control now as opposed to the past.
Before 1930, all the churches believed that artificial contraception was a sin. They called it Onanism, because Onan spilled his seed on the ground when he had sex with his wife, and God killed him for that (Gen 38:9, 10). Luther, Calvin, Wesley all preached against Onanism. There was not one preacher before 1930 that accepted birth control! But then in 1930, the Anglicans had a conference called the Lambeth Conference. At this conference, Planned Parenthood used some political pressure to change Anglicans’ views on birth control, and they succeeded. Soon afterwards, ALL other churches followed suit – except one. The only church that stood its ground was the Catholic Church. Morality cannot change, because morality is root on the moral nature of God, who cannot change. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. What was a sin in a past is still a sin now. Only the Catholic Church sees truth as unchanging.
This is not to say that there was never any development of Christian doctrine in the Church. There most certainly has been. Jesus Christ Himself taught that this would happen when he said that it would the kingdom of God is like a small mustard see that grows into a large tree (Luke 15:19). Jesus deposited the seed of truth and Church would through the Holy Spirit develop the full implications of that truth. The truth never changes, but through the Holy Spirit the Church grows in its understanding of the truth. But this is slow evolution, not radical revolution. The Catholic Church has never changed its dogma or its morality. What was sin in the past is a sin now. The Church has never changed its position on homosexuality, abortion, birth control, a male priesthood, and euthanasia. All the other churches have compromised, but the Catholic Church has stood firm.
This does not mean that there have not been priests or even bishops have parted from the truth. But there has been one person who has been always on the side of truth – the pope. This is not to the pope’s credit. As I mention beforehand, we have had some scoundrels as popes (just a few). Even the devout Catholic Dante wrote in his book The Divine Comedy that there was a pope who went to hell. But Christ gave Peter the keys to the kingdom, and that whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven (Mathew 16). No matter how bad a pope may be, God will never allow him to lead His church into heresy.
An example was Vigilius. Vigilious was a deacon who had strong ambition to become a pope. The emporess at that time believed in the heresy called Monophyistism, which is the teaching that denied the humanity of Christ. Vigilius made a deal with the emporess. If she helped him to become pope, he would lead the church into this heresy. So the emporess had the current pope thrown into prison, where he died. Then she pressured the weak-kneed cardinals to make Vigilius the next pope. But after he became pope, a funny thing happened. He just could not lead the Church into this heresy! He refused the emporess. This angered the emporess, and she threw Vigilius into prison, where he eventually died. Vigilius was a scoundrel. He plotted with the emporess to throw the current pope into prison and become pope himself. But God was still in control. God prevented Vigilius from leading His Church into heresy. Christ is ultimately the Head of His Church.
Back in the fourth century, the Church was besought with a heresy called Arianism, a belief that Jesus was not God. Almost everyone in the church hierarchy was Arian, except two men – Athanasius and the pope. Even the emperor was Arian. But no matter how much pressure was put on them, Athanasius and the pope stood firm. Only by the miracle of God did they prevail. If they had failed, would we have believed in the deity of Christ today?
In the Middle Ages, the Muslims were threatening to invade Europe. If they had succeeded, that could have been the end of Christianity. Only one man saw the threat that the Muslim invasion had to Europe. That man was the pope. The kings were more involved with bickering with each other. It was only because of pope that we had people defending Europe from invasion. Even during and after the Reformation, the Protestants were too busy fighting among themselves to notice the Islamic threat towards Western civilization. The Crusades are often maligned today, and there were some atrocities done by them to be sure! But without those Crusades, all of Europe would have been Muslim. That meant that the European settlers in America would have been Muslim. Our Constitution would have been based on Sharia laws. Our separation of church and state would have replaced by a Muslim theocracy. Women would be forced to wear burkas and would be considered property of their husbands. Any other religion would be forced to pay a penalty tax. The country would be run by imans rather than leaders elected by the people. The world’s landscape would have been entirely different if the Crusaders had failed to defend our country’s ancestors.
As C.K. Chesterton pointed out, the Catholic Church has been right where everyone else has been wrong. When our country went through our darkest point of its history by having slavery, the Church opposed it. When Protestants were arguing with each other on whether it is Biblical to own slaves, the popes were writing encyclicals that forced slavery based on race was a grave sin. When everyone in Europe was celebrating the start of World War I, the pope was against it. Before the Nazi’s even came into power, the Pope warned us of its dangers. The pope also warned us of communism, and even of the potential dangers of capitalism. If Pres. George Bush had listened to Pope John Paul II warning about invading Iraq, he may not have left office with such low approval from the people. We ignore the popes are our own peril.
This all gives me more faith not in the popes, but in Jesus Christ. The continuing existence of the Catholic Church, and it always being on the side of truth, gives me more faith in Jesus, who is the true head of His Church.
