Victor R. Clavesu, MJ
As soon as Martin Luther and his radical contemporaries had repudiated the ancient Faith, they found themselves centers of applauding factions of materialists and skeptics. They were considered leaders of new religious groups and were expected to provide new and reformed articles of faith, even new creeds. They had no choice; substitutes were demanded in place of the old system — platforms upon which the turbulent and factious men of the period could stand with at least a little pretense to Christianity.
In this emergency, each innovator brought to the fore his inventive faculties, produced a novel creed and then constituted himself the prophet, the Messiah, the principal object of his religion. The watchwords were Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anabaptism and the like, not Christianity. When the Sacred writings opposed the newly conceived hypotheses, they were deliberately perverted or summarily rejected.
As might have been expected from such a policy, its legitimate results were speedily manifested in the introduction of an almost endless variety of theological hypotheses and creeds, and a very general prevalence of rationalism and atheism.
Christianity is, therefore, divided. According to all Protestant denominations, there is no other authentic way to know the word of God but from the Scriptures. For the Protestant, Scripture is the only Rule and the only Judge. No living visible authority has any right to pass judgment on an article of faith. To expect that Christians should abide by such judgment is an imposition on them.
According to the 16th century Protestant reformers John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), and Martin Luther, the individual is the sole and all-sufficient judge in religious matters, answerable to no authority and quite competent to pass judgment upon the law of God, to interpret or preach it, to hold or to reject portions of it, according to his human reason.
Their theories of private judgment destroyed the unity of the Church. Thus, the starting point and justification of the Reformation consisted in the rejection of all human authority in matters of faith. Carried to the logical conclusion, it excludes the need of a creed and allows each individual to become founder of his own church. If a church is to exist, the members must subordinate themselves to the body as a whole. However, there can be no unity of faith when one person is as good as another in interpreting Scripture, Tradition, or history.
The resulting lack of unity in the Christian churches of today is scandalous. On every side, the variations of Protestantism contradict each other — minister against minister, individual against individual and denomination against denomination. In contrast, Catholic doctrines have remained, and will remain, eternally the same.
Church is Authority in Rule of Faith
Saint Augustine said that he would not believe in the Scriptures except for the authority of the Church. He would first go to the Scriptures for guidance, but if a particular interpretation was in doubt, he would go into the early writings of the Fathers, which is something that Catholics have been doing for almost 2000 years. The false doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible and the Bible Alone is our only rule of faith, and the false doctrine of sola fide, which means that faith and faith alone is all that is necessary for salvation, demonstrates a decided lack of biblical understanding.
Those who rely on the Bible alone do not have all the information that they need to realize truth. As a result, we now have thousands of Christian denominations, each of them using the same foundation of Scriptures alone. All claim the authority of the One Holy Spirit and cannot come to agreement except on the very basics of Christianity. As there is only One Holy Spirit, there can be only one truth. Jesus established a visible Church, and this Church had bishops, priests, and deacons.[1] There are thousands of Christian groups each claiming their authority comes from the Bible.
Long before the Bible ever existed there was the Church. “The Church is the pillar land bulwark of the truth.”[2] It is important for us as Catholics, to understand that the Bible is a Catholic book. It was written by Catholics for Catholics. In a sense, we could say that we own the copyright. It is our book and we need to be familiar with it; both the New Testament and the Old Testament as well. This is the book of the Church. But it is not all we have to guide us. We also have the authority of the Church and the Sacred Tradition of the Church Fathers and ecumenical councils.
The characteristic note of Protestantism, then, is the negation of outside authority. Yet, one of the most remarkable things about dissenters is their seemingly total absence of self-criticism. The Catholic Faith, on the other hand, declares that the Church and the Scriptures are the Rule of Faith. While the Protestant claims he is the only judge, the Catholic believes the Church is the judge — she proclaims what doctrines are to be believed and what practices are to be observed, and whether such doctrines and practices are found in the Scriptures or not.
Some of the more prominent denominations among Protestants, especially the Episcopalians, have indeed approved of and adopted the Symbols of Faith and the definitions of the first four General Councils of the Church — which, considered in themselves, are traditions. These, however, are accepted not as traditional truths — which would be against their fundamental principle — but because and insofar as they are conformable to the Scriptures.
All Protestants, in order to justify their separation from the Catholic Church, deny the fact that Christ established such a living authority in addition to the Scriptures. By this denial, they have committed so many errors, denied so many Christian principles and fallen into so many contradictions, that, if Martin Luther and the other so-called reformers of the 16th century could come to life today, they would hardly recognize either their creed or their progeny.
The present leaders of Protestantism know if they admit to the general principle of Tradition, it would carry them to that very same divine Tradition that was rejected by their forefathers in the 16th century. Divine Tradition is nothing else than the apostolic succession of an ever living, immaculate and infallible Church. If Protestants admit it, they also must confess their mistake and culpable rebellion.
When Protestants appeal to Scripture against the Church, they forget it is from this very Church and on her authority that Scripture was received. Protestants, in the words of the famous Protestant biblical scholar Karl August Credner, “have built a new Church on the foundation of Scripture, first without understanding, then without the will to understand, that Scripture itself rests on nothing but tradition.”[3]
This is illustrated by the fact that only two of the gospels were written by Apostles (Matthew and John). Why, then, were the gospels of Mark and Luke accepted as Sacred Scripture, when Apostles did not write them?
Mark was the traveling companion and interpreter of Peter, and Luke, the only non-Jew to have written a New Testament book, was a companion of Paul.[4] Mark and Luke simply passed on in writing what they received orally from these Apostles.
The inclusion of their gospels in the canon is a prime example of Sacred or Divine Tradition. These gospels were oral teachings of the Apostles written down by others. If a teaching or doctrine can be traced to the mouths of Jesus or his Apostles, it is considered to be truth or divine revelation. Most lay Protestants are not aware it was Catholic bishops meeting in ancient councils who decided these books merited inclusion in the canon of Scripture.
The religious revolutionists of the sixteenth century professed to be Reformers — proposing to banish error and to substitute in its place truth — to restore to the world a lost Church, lost doctrines and lost ordinances, as they were first given to the Apostles.
[1] See 1 Timothy 3, which outlines the qualifications for bishops, and deacons. One can assume that the same qualifications existed for the “Elders”, (priests).
[2] 1 Timothy 3:15.
[3] John Laux, Introduction to the Bible (Rockford: TAN Books and Publishers, 1990) 17-18.
[4] 2 Timothy 4:11.