C.S. Lewis (the man whom God used to save my
faith) famously argued that given what Jesus claimed about Himself, He was
either Lord, liar, or lunatic — that if He wasn’t God, He couldn’t be
considered merely a good man or a moral teacher. Lewis explained in "Mere
Christianity" (the book that changed my life) why this argument is
important:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone
saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to
accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claims to be
God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and
said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would
either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or
else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man
was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut
Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall
at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing
nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to
us. He did not intend to."
While Lewis’ trillema (as this argument has
come to be called) has come in for a fair amount of criticism, it strikes me
that a very similar argument may be used within Christianity by Catholics.
Specifically, the Catholic Church is either the Divinely Instituted Bride of
Christ, or an utterly delusional Church invented by mad men, or something of
satanic origin.
The Catholic Church’s Trilemma: Like Her Lord,
the the Catholic Church makes some incredibly bold claims. For example, She
claims to be of Divine origin: to be that Church Christ spoke of establishing
in Matthew 16:17-19, and that St. Paul called the pillar and foundation of
Truth in I Timothy 3:15. She claims to be the Body of Christ, the Bride of
Christ, and the Temple of the Holy Spirit (CCC 807-809). She even claims to be
absolutely necessary for salvation, and says things like this (CCC 869):
"The Church is apostolic. She is built on
a lasting foundation: “the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev 21:14). She is
indestructible (cf. Mt 16:18). She is upheld infallibly in the truth: Christ
governs her through Peter and the other apostles, who are present in their
successors, the Pope and the college of bishops."
Repeatedly throughout Her history, the Church
has claimed to speak on behalf of the Holy Spirit in settling a particular
dispute or defining a specific dogma. So the Catholic Church emphatically
denies being just another denomination — in fact, She denies being a
denomination or sect at all. She claims to be the sole Bride of Christ. And as
we noted above, She believes that “ Christ governs her through Peter and the
other apostles, who are present in their successors, the Pope and the college
of bishops.” Thus, She is led either by the Lord (acting through the visible
leaders of the Church), or by a bunch of liars or lunatics or Satan. This is
because if the Catholic Church’s claims about Herself are false, Her leaders
are either dangerously delusional, or manipulative to a breath-taking degree.
And She’s not a good-but-imperfect denomination, as something like Methodism
might be; She’s either the one true Church, or a danger to our souls.
So to paraphrase Lewis, let us not come with
any patronizing nonsense about Her being a great human charitable institution.
She has not left that open to us. She did not intend to.
Is the Church led by the Lord, or by Liars and
Lunatics; Given what we just said, the question then becomes: well, which is
She? And how can we know? And I think that this is one of those instances in
which the evidence is right there for any thoughtful Protestant to recognize.
Let us consider just two major ways that we can know this: first, by the fact
that the Catholic Church has saved Christianity repeatedly; and second, that
She has proclaimed the same Gospel consistently. To see this, let us look at
three different areas: the Trinity, Christology, and the Bible. All three of
these are complex issues on which it’s easy to get things wrong. And yet on all
three of them, even Protestants have to concede their utter dependency upon the
Catholic Church.
First, The Catholic Church Preserved the
Doctrine of the Trinity
Almost every Protestant denomination believes
in the Trinity: that there is One God who is Three Persons; that each of these
Three Persons are fully God, and yet not separate gods; that Each of these
Three Persons have existed for all eternity; and that Each are of equal glory
and majesty. There were countless heresies that arose, often quite popular or
supported by powerful factions or by the State, yet each time the Catholic Church
won out. And each time, the Catholic Church won out by defending (without
compromise) the curious notion of the Trinity. From a Protestant perspective,
the shocking thing ought to be that the Catholic Church was right every time.
When the Assyrian Church of the East broke off from the Catholic Church, the
mainstream Protestant sides with the Catholic Church. Same with the Oriental
Orthodox Church, or a myriad more heresies or schisms. In fact, when some
element of Trinitarian doctrine was denied, no matter how small, it always was
the visible, institutional Church that finally laid the heresy to rest. Had the
Catholic Church budged, and given in to any of the shifting winds of
non-Trinitarian heresies, the doctrine of the Trinity would almost certainly have
been lost forever. What Christian, after all, has ever deduced the full
doctrine of the Trinity from private reading of Scripture?
Second, The Catholic Church Preserved the
Doctrine of the Dual Natures of Christ
Again, almost every Protestant denomination
professes faith in the Dual Natures of Christ: that Jesus is fully God and
fully man; that He has two Natures, one Divine and one Human; yet that He is
only One Person. This is the hypostatic union. Once again, there were countless
heresies (including Docetism, Adoptionism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism), and
many of them seemed quite convincing. Yet the Catholic Church stuck to Her
guns, defending the curious notion of the hypostatic union, and consistently
won at. Once again, it was the visible, institutional Church that laid heresy
after heresy to rest, and each time, the Catholic Church was right. Again, it’s
astonishing enough that the Catholic Church was right every time, but recognize
also that had the Catholic Church not been around, it’s exceedingly unlikely
that an ordinary layman reading the Bible would ever have figured out the
hypostatic union all by his Holy-Spirit-filled self.
Third, The Catholic Church Compiled, Selected
and Saved the Bible
Finally, every Protestant denomination (that I
know of) believes in at least 66 of the Books of the Catholic Bible. What is
striking isn’t that they reject the Deuterocanon (the 7 "extra" books
in our Bible). What’s striking is that from their own viewpoint, the Catholic
Church didn’t lose a single Divinely-inspired Book over the course of well over
a millennium. All Sixty-Six Books of the Protestant Bible were preserved whole
and inviolate for countless centuries by the Catholic Church. This is more
incredible when you consider that some of the earliest heresies that the Church
faced (including Gnosticism and Marcionism, and later, Manichaeism) taught the
same thing: that the God of the Old Testament was different than the God of the
New Testament, and that the Old Testament God was evil. They, obviously, wanted
the Old Testament destroyed, or at the least, not included in the canon of
Scripture.
If Catholicism had lost, and something like
Marcionism had won out, imagine the resultant Bible. That’s easy to do,
actually, since Marcion was clear that he thought only Eleven Books belonged in
the Christian canon: a version of the Gospel of Luke that he edited, and ten of
Paul’s Epistles. Had he had his way, the rest of the Bible would have been
immediately lost to history. That is, you can’t get Luther’s Bible, or the
modern Protestant Bible, without inheriting the Bible from the Church first.
Add to this that the Catholic Church remained incredibly consistent, and
incredibly evangelical: She has proclaimed the same Gospel for centuries, and
to the ends of the Earth.
So on the most critical issues facing
Christianity, the Catholic Church was (a) consistent, and (b) correct. I don’t
know of any Church or denomination that comes close to this kind of track
record. There are a few possibilities for why this could be.
One, God worked through the Catholic Church,
in spite of Her being a false Church: this option doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Why would He repeatedly vindicate the Catholic Church’s claim to be the Bride
of Christ if She wasn’t? If Catholicism isn’t the true Church, why wouldn’t He
preserve the Gospel through some other institution? At the least, why not
permit the Catholic Church to fall at least once so obviously that any
fair-minded Christian could see that the Church was full of contradictions and
heresies? The idea that God would repeatedly present the true Gospel through a
false Church seems incomprehensible, and even deceptive.
Two, the Devil propped up the Catholic Church
by permitting Her to get core doctrines right: this option basically supposes
that a good lie contains a little truth. But it’s even less convincing than the
first idea, since it would involve the devil preserving the very Gospel that
defeats him. All he would have had to have done to triumph over Christianity
would be to let Her go astray on any of these core doctrines. So it doesn’t
make sense to claim that the Catholic Church is demonic in origin, since She’s
been responsible for both preserving the Gospel, and spreading it to the ends
of the Earth.
Three, mere men just got lucky, repeatedly:
this is the idea that the theologians of the Catholic Church were just
consistently that good, and that consistent (for centuries!), without Divine
aid. But the odds of this are staggering. If the Church wasn’t being led by God
or the devil, but was a merely human institution, we should see the sort of
abrupt reversals in statements of belief that we see elsewhere. For example,
the Anglican Communion affirmed one set of beliefs under Henry VIII, another
under Edward and Cranmer (which quite intentionally contradicted the first),
and has no clear cohesive set of beliefs today: their primate has denied the
orthodox Christian understanding of both the Incarnation and the hypostatic
union, affirming something like Nestorianism instead. To say that Cranmer’s
Anglicanism was true, you’d have to say Henry’s Anglicanism was wrong, and vice
versa: to affirm the Anglicanism proclaimed by Williams, you’d have to deny
teachings Henry and Cranmer affirmed. Nothing of the sort is required within
Catholicism: right or wrong, She proclaims the same Gospel consistently. This
doesn’t appear to be merely human in origin.
The Church is therefore who She says She is.
Ultimately, this would strike us as the only really credible theory of
Christian history. The visible institutional Church has always claimed to be
led by the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:28), and has consistently acted in such a way
that this claim appears to be true. And it’s nonsensical to think that God
would work through Her if She wasn’t the true Church, since He would be leading
His people into heresy. Obviously, there’s much more that can be said. But I
think that in the end, the argument boils down to this. The Catholic Church
cannot be treated as simply one good denomination among many, any more than
Christ can be treated as simply one moral Teacher among many. She’s either of
God, of deluded men, or of the devil. And Her continual defense of orthodoxy
throughout history, Her incredible ability to always be on the right side of
the major controversies of the day, doesn’t credibly lend to the explanation
that She’s run by deluded men or controlled by the devil. Which leaves us,
quite simply with this: the Catholic Church really is Who She says She is. And
we, as Christians, need to respond to that in faith. In obedience. In wonder!
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