Response to a Friend Concerning the Church of Rome

So, I got involved with a friend in a facebook discussion concerning the question of whether or not the Church of Rome is indeed a part of the true Church.  He was arguing for the negative while I was maintaining the positive.  My comments became too many for the comment box so I am writing my final response to him here.  Though I believe he entered a hiatus, he has a personal blog on which he pursues matters of doctrine like I do.

It started with his status that stated,

“For the Record: Roman Catholicism is not Christianity.”

Now, being as it may, I usually react to such statuses with at least some comment which, in this case, stated,

“In my opinion, if the Church of Rome is not a part of Christendom, then I must also exclude pretty much all of Protestantism by the same token.  As long as they hold to the Ecumenical Creeds and administer baptism in the name of the Trinity, they are indeed a true Church, flawed as they are.  There’s my two cents, for what they’re worth.”

To which he replied,

“Caleb: That comment sorta befuddles.  (1) I do exclude pretty much all of Protestantism by that “same token.”  (2) What about the Gospel? The one about grace through faith apart from works. Is it necessary for a true church? Or is it kind of a back-burner issue?  Also, for any Protestant commenting on this and disagreeing. One question: Was the Reformation necessary or not? If the RCC is a true church then why did most of the reformers believe that the church needed to be rebuilt, with Scripture as the guide?”

Ok, Jon, rather than try to address every possible angle contained in your questions, I will focus on only one, your claim that the Reformers sought to rebuild the Church.

Firstly, I hope I’m correct in stating that the hope of the Reformers was not a rebuilding of the Church.  Otherwise, it wouldn’t be known as the “Reformation” but rather as the “Reconstruction” or something.  It is an impossibility for the Church to ever be in need of rebuilding in the literal sense.  It will always be in need of reformation, but reformation is completely different than reconstruction.  To declare something as being in need of rebuilding is to imply that it had completely disintegrated, or in this discussion, fallen away beforehand.  Now, to make this claim, that the Church prior to the Reformation indeed was utterly apostate on an institutional level (not saying that there weren’t individual believers within Rome) and had fallen away is to run into two serious obstacles.

First off, you are initially left asserting a kind of “ecclesial deism” because it appears as though Christ founded the Church with the Apostles but at some point after his Ascension, left the Church thereby allowing it to succumb to apostasizing error.  Now, this obviously is contrary to the Scriptures in which Christ promises that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it [the Church].”  Again, initially, this is a big problem for the idea that the Church had fallen away prior to the Reformation for Scripture declares that Christ himself is the Cornerstone of the Church who will prevent hell from prevailing against it.  So you are forbidden from holding an ecclesiologically deist view of the Church in which Christ abandoned His Body (an a priori impossibility) such that the gates of hell prevailed against it and it fell away.  Given these truths, how do we Protestants deal with the church, both in East and West, that encompassed all of Christendom for almost 1500 years before Luther?  The classic Protestant way of maneuvering around this is to claim that the  promise that the Cornerstone Christ will always guard His Church only applies to the invisible church (since it is assumed that the Church in its truest essence is invisible) and the visible church, which is merely the accidental expression of the invisible church at a given moment in history, is not given this promise and can fall away.

Now, on a logical level, this leads to some rather interesting ramifications.  If it is true that the Church is essentially invisible, and any Scriptural promise concerning “the Church” only applies to it in its invisible reality, then it is a logical possibility that tomorrow every living Christian on earth could be murdered and it still be consistently affirmed that the gates of hell had not prevailed against the Church (since there would be thousands of Christians who have passed away in previous eras who would constitute the still in tact “invisible” church which is the true Church anyway).  Combine this with your rather flippant anathema against the very salvation of a whole sector of Christendom in your comments (on the grounds that if they were really Christians, they’d think just like you do) and you’re left with the real possibility that there was perhaps a period of history in which there were no real Christians who understood the Gospel (as understood by you).  This assertion would essentially be the same as asserting that all Christians were wiped out for a period of time.  And yet, Scripture tells us that the Church cannot fail because Christ is her Cornerstone.  Well, I guess if we gnosticize the Church rendering its existence independent of a perpetual presence on earth, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Unfortunately, you now have ending up asserting a sort of ecclesiological Nestorianism.  As you are probably aware, the Nestorian heresy denied that the two natures of Christ, divine and human, were entirely incarnated together as to be substantially infused together in the person of Christ.  Rather, his two natures remained always distinct and separate yet loosely connected.  This is why he, Nestorius, rejected the title of “Theotokos” (God-Bearer) being applied to Mary preferring instead that her title be “Christotokos” (Christ-Bearer) implying that Mary was the mother of Jesus Christ the human, but not Jesus Christ the second member of the Godhead.  What’s all this talk about Christology have to do with our present discussion?  Well, the Church is always spoken of as the very Body of Christ that is united to him in his death and resurrection through baptism and reconstituted and sustained as His Body through its Eucharistic participation in His Body and Blood.  The Church, as defined by the late Alexander Schmemann, is “the sacrament of Christ’s presence and action” on earth.  If the Church’s existence is not contigent upon a perpetual presence and action visibly on earth, then what are we saying about the Incarnation?  I don’t want to get too off track, but I merely say this to show that we cannot divide the natures of the Church anymore than we can divide the natures of Christ.  Therefore, when Christ proclaims that he will always guard the Church, he means the visible one.

Am I saying that Rome or Constantinople is therefore infallible?  No, for I am still a Protestant.  I am merely arguing that they cannot be false churches because they were the only churches for 1500 years after the Apostles and I hope to have shown the utter impossibility of the apostasy of the Church because the promises concerning it must apply to its visible reality.  To be quite honest, I think this whole distinction between the visible and invisible church is a Protestant innovation constructed to deal with this issue and others.  It isn’t what emerges directly from Scripture and it doesn’t fit within the orthodox framework of Christology, etc.  If anything, it is the invisible church that is the accidental expression of the visible church that possesses invisible faith, not the other way around.

Believe me, I am fully aware of how many issues arise from this ranging from questions of authority, interpretation, ecclesiology, etc.  But there it is, my argument that Rome and/or Eastern Orthodoxy, though in grevious error (as we all are sure to be in), are still true churches by virtue of the fact that they were the only institutional churches existing for 1500 years and therefore were protected by the promise of Christ.  I won’t get in to all the nuances of the Great Schism’s effect on this and what could be said about the truly unified, pre-schism Church but I understand that complexities exist.

Now, if you are one of those Landmark Baptist types that believes that there has always been a tiny remnant of the true Church that can be traced back through the so-called heretical groups that the big, bad Catholic Church oppressed, then you can refute all this on your premises.  However, in that case, I wouldn’t have much else to say to you concerning this issue.

Pax Christi,

Caleb

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