Are all one Church? 208. Your preceding replies are based upon a misapprehension. There is no real lack of essential unity in the Christian Churches at all. All together form the one true Church. However nice that looks on paper, it is impossible. We cannot hold that hundreds of conflicting churches, even those disowning each other, are all one united church. The good Wesleyan who says that Rome is idolatrous would have to admit that the idolatrous Catholic belongs to the same church as himself, and is equally a Christian. The notion demands not a little suppression of reason. Again, if the Catholic Church ex-communicates a man, almost any Protestant Church will promptly receive him. If the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church which receives him are one and the same, you will have the same Christ accepting and rejecting the same man at one and the same time! 209. Did not St. Paul acknowledge the various individual churches of his time? The churches to which St. Paul wrote were as much united as Catholics in London today are united in one Church with the Catholics in New York, Berlin, Italy, and Australia. Non-Catholics, however, are not united, have not held fast to the traditions, believe practically as they please, and have made shipwreck of the faith as well as of disciplinary unity. 210. Tertullian says that, as in the ocean there are many seas and ports, so in the Catholic Church there are many churches. How can the Roman branch exclude the other branches? Tertullian had in mind the expansion of the one Catholic Church to many centres, each branch remaining united to the same legitimate authority. 211. To my mind the whole of Christianity is like a wheel. Christ is the centre, whilst the various churches are the spokes. Christ forms the complete wheel, and as He identifies the Church with Himself as his mystical body, the Catholic Church is the complete wheel, hub, spokes, and all, of Christianity in this world. And Christ prayed to His Father that the Church might be one as He and His Father are one. All non-Catholic forms of professing Christianity are broken and discarded spokes, no longer in the wheel at all as churches, whilst most of the members of these churches disown all connection with the wheel which they abandoned at the Reformation. 212. Could we not call Christs Church a garden? The Roman Catholic Church is the original tree—the others slips cut off, and growing in the same garden, and producing the same fruit, but with a slightly different flavor? That is not possible. These analogies may be suitable to wrong ideas, but they do not prove those wrong ideas correct. Christ said that His Church would be one Church, not a garden of churches. As for the same fruit, the Catholic Church forbids divorce—non-Catholic churches allow it. There is more than a difference of flavor here! One fruit of the tree is unity and obedience, a fruit which the Catholic Church alone produces. That the non-Catholic churches bear some fruit I admit, but they do not produce all the fruit Christ intended. The explanation of such fruit as they seem to produce we shall see later on. Meantime your attempts to maintain the unity of all the conflicting churches are opposed both to revelation and to reason. Christ said, If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen. Your system would leave him baffled. Hear which Church? he would cry. If you replied, Any Church, for all churches constitute the one Church of Christ, he would complain, But the Catholic Church forbids this, and the Anglican Church permits it! Again, you say that the Catholic Church is as much part of the true Church as any others. But she solemnly declares that the others do not belong to the true Church. If she is truly speaking with the authority of Christ, they do not. If she is wrong, she forfeits any claims to be part of the true teaching Church. No, they cannot all be true, and the Catholic Church is the only one that is really certain that she is right. 213. I admit that it is impossible to maintain that all the churches are really united into one Church; but I deny that lack of unity really matters. After all, go into any Christian church, and you will hear Christ preached, and the Word of God spoken. On that score, the Seventh Day Adventists who teach that the Pope is Anti-Christ, and the Catholic Church which teaches that he is the very Vicar of Christ would both be teaching doctrines equally pleasing to God! As a matter of fact you will not hear Christ preached in any Christian church, for in all non-Catholic churches you will hear now one, now another distorted aspect of Christian doctrine. Even did you hear the uncorrupted Word of God in some non-Catholic church, that would not make you a member of Christs true Church. •••
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 02:19:54 +0000
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