A caller asks how to respond to an Anabaptist who claims that they were the original Christians and that Catholics cannot be the true Church due to how Catholics acted during the Reformation. Karlo Broussard, author of Meeting the Protestant Challenge, explains why the Catholic Church is the true Church.
Transcript:
Caller:
I have a sister-in-law who is Baptist, and she talks about her faith and the doctrines of the Baptist church, they sound very Protestant, but she indicates that they are not Protestant. They actually trace their roots all the way back to the apostles, and they believe that they’re the one true church that Jesus founded. And during the Protestant Reformation, it was the Catholics who participated in the killing of people of other religions, and it was the Anabaptists who did not participate in that. I was just hoping you could maybe fill in some blanks.
Karlo Broussard:
All right. So let’s think through this, Dee. Thank you very much for your call. So notice how the conclusion Catholic Church is not the original church is based on the premise, right, the reason that she’s giving for this is that the Catholic Church had sinners in its ranks and committed atrocities. Okay. Well, if committing atrocities and sinful leaders of your church precludes or excludes your church from being the one true church established by Jesus, well, then we’re going to have to exclude Peter and the Apostles in the first century from being the leaders and the originators of the original Church of Jesus Christ.
Why? Because they committed atrocities as well. Peter denied our Lord. Yes, he repented, but he denied our Lord. A leader, of one of the 12, Judas denied our Lord betrayed Him, and from the looks of it, he despaired. The other apostles – Matthew tells us of Matthew Chapter 27 – that all of them in some way betrayed our Lord and they fled and were not associated with our Lord during His passion and death.
So if we’re going to make holiness of leaders of the church the condition for being the original true church, then we’re going to have to say that the early apostles were not the true church established by Jesus. But of course, that’s absurd. That’s false. So once we expose that flawed reasoning there that they’re using holiness as a condition for determining which is the true church, like the holiness of the members of the church as a condition for which is the true church.
Well, then we ask the question, okay, well, how would we identify the true Church of Jesus Christ? Well Dee, when we look at the early Christian writings in the second century, for example, and even in the first century, if we look at Clement’s letter to the Corinthians in the first century, some dated to A.D. 70, some dated to A.D. 90, Clement talks about bishops being the successors to the apostles.
And in Clement’s mind, in the way that he’s writing, that is one of the ways in which we can identify the true Church of Jesus by looking to the succession of the apostles in the bishops. And then we see this confirmed again and again in the second century St.Irenaeus, when he’s talking about how to refute heretics, like how to know these guys are teaching things contrary to the orthodox faith of Christianity, what do we do? Irenaeus tells us we look to the succession of the apostles and the succession of the apostles in the bishops, because therein lies the preservation of the apostolic tradition, of the truth of God’s revelation given to us through Jesus as taught by the Apostles.
So in your conversation with your friend here, you could sort of carve this path or pave this path or articulate this way of going about it and saying, “listen, for these early Christians, they were looking to the succession of the apostles and the bishops for determining which was the true church of Jesus Christ and who had the true faith. Does your community have ministers who have been ordained by men who can be traced back all the way to the Apostles?” And of course, within the Anabaptist tradition, the answer would be no. So that would be one way of going about it. But then we have to take an extra step forward further and say, well, even though a Christian community might have bishops that can trace their historical lineage through succession all the way back to the apostles, the question becomes, well, do they have the successor to Saint Peter?
And that’s where the essential difference is going to come into play between Catholicism and all other groups of Christianity, even among our Orthodox brethren, because it’s the successor to Saint Peter and the Bishop of Rome, namely the Pope that is the idea defying marker of the original Church of Jesus Christ. Because in Matthew 16:18, our Lord tells Peter Simon, You are the – you are – you shall be called Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church. Peter being the visible foundation of Jesus’s Church – allows – gives us a visible marker for identifying the true Church of Jesus. Because wherever the foundation is, there is the true Church of Christ. And of course, according to historical documentation, Peter died as the Bishop of Rome, so the successors to St. Peter as the Bishop of Rome would continue in that ministry of being the visible foundation of Christ here on Earth, Christ Church here on Earth, the Keeper of the Keys, the Supreme Binder and Looser, the Universal Shepherd of Christ’s flock here on Earth.
And that, Dee, is how we would move forward in articulating how we can determine that the Catholic Church is the original Church established by Jesus, not only by comparing and contrasting teachings like the Catholic Church teaches this, this is what we find in the New Testament, the early Christian testimony, but also by way of the historical succession to the apostles and more specifically to Saint Peter.