Tim Staples discusses how he would explain and defend Canon Law to Protestants, and dispels the common misconception that it is meant to “add to the Bible.”
Transcript:
Host: Alexandria, who’s watching on YouTube Live—hi Alexandria—asks the following, Tim: “How would you explain, or begin to introduce Canon Law to a Protestant?”
Tim: Great question. I know from my own experience, in fact Cy and I were talking off air here just a minute ago, but to me, as a young Baptist, and as a Pentecostal, Canon Law was that evil, dark book that these Catholics created to add to the Bible. “See, the Bible’s not enough! You gotta have…’Canon Law.'”
Actually, the way I like to explain it to folks is—I can tell you, from being a former Protestant youth minister, at my…we would call it an ecclesial community, but in our community, we had what’s called Church bylaws. The Assemblies of God has bylaws. Every organization, I don’t care if it’s a company, if it’s a business, you know what, even families, often you’ll find—we have in my house, we have a poster, up in the rec room, that says, “Staples Household Ten Commandments.”
Host: Oh really?
Tim: Including things like, “NO WHINING.” Okay, things like that.
Host: Oh, come on!
Tim: And just in case my kids are watching right now, NO WHINING! Alright? But anyway, the Code of Canon Law is just that. In a nutshell, it governs what we do as Catholics. And remember, and you discover this as a Protestant minister as well, you know, Scripture does not provide everything. Jesus doesn’t give us all the rules. Even around baptism, okay, yeah, you baptize with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Is that it? What else do you do? Are there any other—yes. There’s all sorts of things that you have to govern. You have to create a liturgy around this.
Now my Protestant friends would say, “Well wait a minute, liturgy, we don’t believe in liturgy.” Yes you do! Your whole church—I can tell you, when I was a minister, how many songs we were gonna sing–although sometimes we would “let the Holy Ghost move.” We’d sing an extra couple songs, right? But you had the worship, then you had pastor get up and preach, then you had altar call, then you had more music, you know, the dismissal—in fact, you have to have rules governing everything that you do. As human beings, we need it.
The Code of Canon Law is such a blessing to the Church, however, because it’s not done just by a group of guys who get together and say, “Hey, this is what we think.” But Canon Law is something that grew organically for centuries, out of the practice—out of—it comes out of Scripture, no doubt. Cause when you look at, for example, the section on the Sacraments, a lot of that comes right out of Sacred Scripture, when it comes to form and matter of what the Sacraments are. But when it comes to the rules and such surrounding the Sacraments, that develops organically over the centuries, and you need these rules in order to have a coherent practice of the faith.
So anyway, that’s a good way to get started in helping people understand, this is not some dark thing that adds to, you know, the revelation that God gave us in the first century, we have—no, it’s not that. But it helps us to be able to formulate what we believe as well as what we do in the Church.
Host: Thanks very much Alexandria, and everybody else watching on YouTube.