Transcription
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This is a question that gets asked of Catholics all the time. Sometimes it's of genuine curiosity from non-Catholics, but just as often by people who want to challenge the claims of the Catholic Church. Like, "Why are you Catholic instead of Christian, like I am?"
And to be perfectly honest, this is a question that I labored over at length myself prior to entering into the Catholic Church. And before I go on to provide a response to that, I need to point out the category error, the fallacy in the question. Because I know a lot of my audience members will be eager to have that clarified before I say anything else.
Saying, "Why be Catholic instead of Christian?" is like saying, "Why be a fruit instead of an apple?" It assumes the incompatibility of the two things that's comparing from the outset. And of course, as a Catholic Christian myself, I'm going to argue that Catholicism isn't just one form of Christianity, but that it is the whole of Christianity itself. In the same way that fruit has a species or a category is the whole of what all other specific fruits like apple and orange portray some portion of.
Which is to say that there is something called the Christian faith that we all have to adhere to. This, this thing that Jesus instantiated through his life and teachings. But in the modern era, we have like denominations, right? So if we analogize the faith to a category like fruit, then we can say that fruit is to apple what the faith is to a particular denomination.
So in denominations, we've got Baptist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Methodist, and on and on and on. These are all different species that portray some aspect of the Christian faith, in the same way that in the category of fruit, we've got bananas, peaches, apples, and oranges, etc., which all communicate something about what a fruit is, but not the whole of what fruit is.
So all denominations, I can confidently say as a Catholic, to whatever degree they are right, portray some aspect of the true nature of the Christian faith that Jesus revealed to us. And people tend to think of Catholicism, if they're not Catholic, but even a few Catholics do this as well, as just one species among a variety of perfectly valid examples of the genus Christianity, or it's just one denomination among all the rest. But that's not what Catholicism is, or how it defines itself. Catholicism is the whole of which all the others, to whatever degree they are true, portray some aspect of.
I realize that's a provocative statement, and I'm going to have to start to back that up here. So to start, let me offer a bit of an analogy that could be helpful. Imagine if there was such a thing as like an omniscient AI, like artificial intelligence, or maybe an infallible AI would be a better way to think of this. Someone built an AI model that will answer any question with infallible certainty, doesn't make any mistakes whatsoever, and then they offer this to the public to start experimenting with.
Well, that would obviously be quite thrilling. But I can tell you exactly what would happen in that scenario. People who approach it with their previously conceived ideologies perfectly intact will expect to have those beliefs affirmed by their interactions with this infallible artificial intelligence. Which wouldn't be all that hard to do, because there are probably true beliefs within their particular ideology. In which case, uh, they will start to claim that the infallible AI supports their particular beliefs.
You'll get Republicans saying, "Look, it sympathizes with, uh, with the free market commerce." And then you'll get Democrats saying, "Look, it agrees with our policies on this, that, or the other. Therefore, it supports the Democratic Party." You'll get people saying it supports Islam, or Buddhism, or Christianity. And others who will say, "Ah, it supports agrarian society, or or urbanism, or globalism." To whatever degree any of those things have something valid to say, it will support and encourage those things.
"Oh, it supports Marxism." "Oh, no, it supports liberalism." "It supports monarchy." "It supports republicanism." And if that happened, and I'm confident it would, it would be extreme, extremely revealing of something. It would tell us that portions of the truth can be found in a lot of places and systems of understanding, but never narrowed and summarized by any particular system or ideology.
Just because some sample of truth can be found in Marxism, let's say, doesn't mean that Marxism encompasses the truth. And further, that it also doesn't have any errors within it. Because that's the grave mistake that always gets made by anybody attempting to capture or or corral truth itself in some narrow portion or expression of the truth. All heresies are an attempt to reduce the truth into some easy-to-digest portion, something easily packaged in something like a slogan like "faith alone." But truth itself is far too big to have definite borders placed around it, as if we can reduce the eternal truth into a portion size fit for our finite systems of thought.
G.K. Chesterton said it this way: "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head, and it is his head that splits."
Well, the word "Catholic" in the history of Christianity is a very, very old term. In fact, uh, it was coined by a disciple of one of the twelve Apostles. That's how central it is to the story of the faith. St. Ignatius of Antioch was a direct disciple of St. John the Beloved Apostle, who was the only one who witnessed the crucifixion. So already, we have on pretty good authority that this particular Church Father had some pretty good exposure to what it means to be a Christian, as he was trained by someone who wrote scripture and knew Jesus intimately in his earthly life.
Well, St. Ignatius described in a letter where to find the true church and what the defining feature of the church is. He said, "Wherever the bishop is, there is the Catholic Church." When I first came across that quote in a text by St. Ignatius, I was trying to make sense of like denominationalism and trying to find which church I should join as a newly minted Christian. And this blew my mind as such an early, authoritative exclamation that bishops are indispensable as an ingredient of the true church founded by Jesus himself.
So already, if a church you're evaluating, or maybe your particular church, doesn't have bishops who can trace some kind of meaningful pedigree to the Apostles, you might be outside the bounds of the fullness of the faith. And then furthermore, he used this word "Catholic" to describe the church, which means Universal, or more accurately, "according to the whole." The church that preserves all doctrines, mysteries, and all, and doesn't leave anything out in order to make it easier to digest.
And this eventually became what has been considered one of the marks of the church in the Nicene Creed, which are one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. We get this from the Council of Nicaea, which also gave us the doctrine of the Trinity. So within those four marks, it immediately disqualifies most denominations.
One means oriented towards unity, which according to John 17 was Christ's dying prayer. If your denomination is habitually splintering, or the progeny of several steps of division, then it isn't oriented towards unity.
Holiness means to be set apart from the world. Does your church do everything it can to be relevant, which is just a catchy way of trying to distort itself so that it can better fit the mold of the secular world, or is there something peculiarly sacred about it and its unwillingness to take on the flavor of the world?
Catholic, or Universal, is it found in every nation? Does it preach the whole of the faith? And is it Apostolic? Does it retain the authority that the Apostles possessed themselves? Most churches don't even believe such an authority exists, so you can pretty much strike them off the list right away.
Again, in denominational Christianity, you'll get portrayals of portions of the whole church, but never quite the whole. You'll get some who want to emphasize the nature of faith, others who want to emphasize the gifts of the Holy Spirit, some that are very liturgical, some who want to emphasize the necessity of evangelistic missionary work, some who focus their attention on miracles and the supernatural, and others who want to make it all about social justice and concern for the poor. And they'll often emphasize these aspects of Christ's message to the exclusion of all the others.
But the thing about the whole of the faith is that all of those things can be found in the whole, and none of them should be excluded. But in Catholicism, you get the whole. None of those things are left out to the exclusion of the others.
But in the eyes of most Protestants and non-Catholics, the Catholic Church admits too much to its practices and teachings. There are things included that aren't in the Bible, they'll say. And therefore, it's claimed that these are aberrations or or like pagan accretions that exclude the Catholic Church from a standing within legitimate Christianity.
And this brings us down to the fundamental question that every Christian should ask themselves, and it's a question I asked myself before I joined a church: How do you know what the Christian faith is? That was a question that was so important to me because as a newly minted Christian, I wanted to know what the Christian faith was, and I was getting different perspectives from all these different churches I was attending.
How do you know what doctrines and practices are admissible and which should be excluded? Did Jesus appoint you and I with the authority needed to to make those kinds of decisions, or did he set you under a particular authority to reveal that to you? Almost all Christians that I know of will say the latter. He put us under some kind of authority. Tell us what it is that we are supposed to believe and adhere to.
What is the whole true faith? Or what is the Catholic Church? And if you're descended from the Protestant tradition, you will usually say scripture is that authority. The Bible is that authority. If you are from an Apostolic Church, like say the Greek Orthodox, or the Oriental, or Ethiopian Orthodox, or Catholic like me, you will say something like, "The church is a binding authority over the faithful." As a Catholic, we say the Magisterium and the Apostolic Tradition handed down through the ages and protected by the church, as well as Holy Scripture.
Now notice that in the case of the Apostolic Churches, they say both. They don't narrow authority down to one thing. They adhere to the authority of scripture, but they also adhere to the authority of the church. And why do they do that? Because the Bible does that. And also because the Bible doesn't ever say that it is the only authority, or even the highest authority. Do you know how I know that? It's because the Bible never even refers to itself. Never once in scripture does it say anything about the Bible. And a thing can't define, uh, any attributes about itself, like its place as an authority, if it never even refers to itself to begin with.
Yes, it does talk about scripture. It assumes that there is this, this thing known as scripture, which, which is the written revelation of God. But it never talks about this thing called the Bible, which is a specific understanding of scripture based on a canon or an index of books that are considered scriptural.
So I just got handed my, my newborn son. This is John Albert. Um, so sorry for the distraction, but maybe we'll just finish the, the video with him here. I don't know. He seems pretty happy at the moment. So anyways, we were talking about, um, scripture, um, and and the canon of scripture. So like the Apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Peter, uh, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, or the First Letter of Clement. These were all widely circulated and authoritative early Christian writings that some considered to be scriptural.
If the Bible is your highest authority for settling questions you might have about the faith, where does the Bible tell you that the Epistle of James is scriptural and the Didache is not? The answer is, it doesn't. The canon of scripture is not itself part of scripture. It's a doctrine of the church, without which you don't have a Bible. And yet, almost all Christians agree that the Didache is not scripture. The problem with Protestants is that they inconsistently hold to the canon with infallible certainty while refusing to recognize that they have to accept an infallible church doctrine not found in scripture to give them that certainty. Whether they know it or not, there's a middleman between them and their highest authority, and it's the Catholic Church.
Simultaneously, the Bible never describes itself as the ultimate authority because it never describes itself at all, like I said. But it also does describe the church as an ultimate authority that can bind and loose the consciences of the faithful. Jesus said to Peter, "You are rock, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it." He then told him that he will give him the keys to the kingdom and and said that whatever you bind and loose on Earth will be bound and loosed in Heaven, which depicts an indisputable Apostolic Authority.
Then in John 20:23, he gives them the authority to forgive sins, something only God could do. This is a uniquely divine authority. When Jesus forgave the sins of those he healed, like, uh, in Matthew 9:5, his hearers accused him of blasphemy because they knew only God can do that. And here we are in John's Gospel with Jesus giving the unique authority of God to the church.
Furthermore, he gave them the authority to write new scripture, which is what they did. They started writing new revelation. In the case of the New Testament, the New Testament is a collection of texts written by the church. How can we claim that the church does not have an indisputable, infallible authority, but that they could exercise infallibility in writing scripture? The writing of scripture, which we all agree is infallible, proves that God can use human beings to be his mouthpiece and preserve them from error in doing so. It proves that the church, at least in that instance, had infallible authority to teach.
So the only option you're left with to claim that the church today does not have infallible authority is to claim that this authority existed within the early church, but doesn't exist today. Aside from the fact that this claim isn't in the Bible at all, it's just made up whole cloth. Why not ask yourself, why would God do that? Why would God establish such an authority in a living church, but not allow it to be available for, like, every generation? Like, what would be better for the unity of the church, a unity Jesus earnestly prayed for in John chapter 17, for God to establish a living authority who can always clarify, uh, interpretations of revelation and resolve any new controversy that arises within the passage of time, or for God to establish a closed text that the church then has to interpret and apply to different contexts for thousands of years to come? A church, by the way, that is majority illiterate for most of its history. Obviously, a recognized living authority is going to be much better for the unity than a document that is thousands of years old and written in a language only scholars can interpret.
Anyone who picks up a Bible and thinks they have direct access to God's revelation, I mean, let's be honest, you're, they're kidding themselves. Again, they only know it's scripture because the church told them it is, and they only know how to read it because someone translated the ancient Greek and Hebrew for them. There are several degrees of separation between the everyday reader of the Bible and the authority of its content.
So I hope we can all agree that the better way of establishing a governing authority for the unity of the church is by transmitting that authority to every generation. An authority that we know he gave the Apostles because scripture records it, and they themselves exercised in the preaching and writing of scripture. We know that God can give that kind of authority to the church. If we use our reason just a little, we can be confident that he would give that kind of authority to the church. And if we look at the fact of the writing and compiling of scripture, which came after and through the church, we can conclude that God did give that authority to the church, which succeeded down multiple generations.
And the testimony of church history confirms that this authority was recognized from generation to generation. The Church Fathers all recognized the authority of bishops to bind and loose, as well as the supreme authority of the Pope as the successor of Peter. I already mentioned, uh, Ignatius of Antioch, who said that the Church of Rome holds the presidency over the rest, and that whatever it teaches should remain in force. Irenaeus, uh, said that all the faithful have to recognize Rome for its superior ancient origin, and that in her is maintained the Apostolic Tradition in a unique way. There are many others, but I'll name one more, which is Cyprian of Carthage, who details the authority given to the Apostles in Matthew 16 and how it succeeds through time, but then says that, uh, with Peter, he established a single chair, that is a principle of unity, with a primacy over the entire church.
Now, whenever I hear the case against Catholicism from non-Catholics, there are always things like, "Oh, the Bible says, 'Call no man father,' or it's wrong to pray to the dead, or where is the Immaculate Conception in the Bible? Or where are the seven sacraments in the Bible?" And here's the thing: once you realize the church has infallible authority to teach and give doctrines, you don't need to compare those doctrines to your own faulty exegesis of scripture. The question becomes redundant. "Where does the church teach that?" "Oh, right, it's right there. Case closed."
And a document like the Didache, again, which I referred to earlier, is indispensable to this question. It is one of the oldest non-canonical writings describing what Christians believed and practiced in the first and second centuries. It depicts a hierarchical church with bishops, priests, and deacons. It describes sacraments like baptism and says that the Eucharist is the central act of worship in the church. Some of these things you may find in particular denominations, but the only place you will find a church that is one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic is in the Catholic Church, with its strong principle of unity and the successor of Peter, the Pope. Uh, the holiness of the church, that has sacred practices and consecrated people set apart from the interests of the world. A universality that transcends transcends any one particular culture or nation, like, like Russia or Greece. And an authority that can be traced historically all the way back to the Apostles.
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