ONLY ONE CHURCH FOLLOWS THE BIBLICAL BLUEPRINT
Which Church Is the Real 'Bible Church'?
June 2018
By Frederick W. Marks
Frederick W. Marks is the author of 10 books, including, most recently, Confessions of a Catholic Street Evangelist and Pro-Life Champion: The Untold Story of Monsignor Philip J. Reilly and His Helpers of God’s Precious Infants.
The opening of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., last fall was a happy moment in our nation’s history. But it also set me to thinking. Many of our separated brethren — evangelicals in particular, who call themselves “Bible Christians†— pay so much attention to Bible study that almost any apologetic appeal to Scripture is likely to appear “Protestant†in the eyes of Catholics. This despite the fact that Catholicism, in both practice and teaching, has a rock-solid claim to being “Bible based.†St. Teresa of Ãvila, who was as Catholic as anyone, is on record as having said that “all the evils of the world come from ignorance of the truths of Scripture in all their clarity, of which not one jot or tittle shall fail.â€
The Catholic Church, because she meets all the specifications laid down by Christ for His Church, is the “Bible Church†par excellence! Twenty-four instances of Catholic conformity to the imperatives of Scripture prove this to be so.
1. A good place to begin is with Leviticus 23:3, read in conjunction with Hebrews 10:25. Both of these passages, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, require attendance at weekly assembly, and so does the Church of Rome.
2. Bishops, as well as priests and deacons, figure in the hierarchy of early Christianity (Phil. 1:1), and the Catholic Church has retained all three levels of ordination.
3. The first Christians anointed with oil those who were seriously ill and prayed over them (Jas. 5:14-15), and this, of course, is what Catholic priests do when they administer the Last Rites.
4. The Church of the Apostles was a Church of miracles, with a promise of miracles to come (Jn. 14:12). Again, the pattern holds. In every century, Catholic saints have worked cures that defy scientific explanation. Marian apparitions at such places as Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima are also well documented.
5. Jesus urged His disciples to strive for perfection (Mt. 5:48), and the Catholic Church has produced more souls that answer to this description — i.e., more saints — than any other Christian body.
6. Even the practice of kneeling during Mass is firmly rooted in Scripture. Only once is the praying posture of Jesus described in the Gospels, and He is kneeling (Lk. 22:41). Likewise, both Peter and Paul are depicted as on their knees when they pray (Acts 9:40; 20:36; 21:5).
7. Still another case of Catholic conformity: Jesus sent His followers out to evangelize the entire world (Mk. 16:15). The Church of Rome has done more along this line than any other organization, dispatching missionaries to the far reaches of the globe. Even today, Sunday Mass in Los Angeles is celebrated in 42 different languages.
The list goes on.
8. Catholics believe in the power of relics; so did Christ’s disciples. Cures were obtained by touching a saint’s clothing (Acts 19:12), much the way a corpse was restored to life in Old Testament times by contact with the bones of the prophet Elisha (2 Kgs. 13:21).
9. Jesus not only prayed for unity in His Church (Jn. 17:20-23), He predicted it, telling His Apostles, “There shall be one fold and one shepherd†(Jn. 10:16). He likewise sent the Holy Spirit to dwell with His Church forever as a guardian of truth (Jn. 14:16-17, 26). Notwithstanding the canker sore of dissent that is bound to plague any organization run by human beings, especially one that is powerful, the Catholic Church is peerless when it comes to consensus. Her adoption of a universal Catechism, coupled with the firmness of her belief in papal teaching authority, is extraordinary. Over the centuries, enormous pressure has been brought to bear on pontiffs to teach error in matters of faith and morals. They have been bullied by kings and emperors, tortured for their orthodoxy, even put to death. But, to a man, they have stood their ground.
10. Another instance of conformity to the biblical blueprint is the Catholic practice of pilgrimage. Jesus and His family traveled to Jerusalem every year to celebrate Passover, just as Elkanah and Hannah went to Shiloh to pray before the Ark of the Covenant. When Catholics make their way to such places as Fatima and Santiago de Compostela, they are simply following suit.
11. One can go further. The most widely read and up-to-date version of Hebrew Scripture at the time of Christ was a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. It was the one favored by Jesus’ followers, and it included the deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) books that are found in Catholic Bibles, but not in most editions published under Protestant auspices. How do we know the Septuagint was a Christian favorite? Because 80 percent of the Old Testament references found in the New Testament are taken from it.
12. One of the deuterocanonical books supports Catholic teaching on Purgatory (2 Macc. 12:42-46), and in the New Testament Matthew and Luke throw additional light on the afterlife. It is true that the word Purgatory (like the word Trinity) is absent from Scripture, but the idea is unmistakably present. The rich man who suffers the pain of fire for having ignored the destitution of Lazarus begs Father Abraham to send a heavenly warning to his brothers, still on earth, to keep them from going to Hell (Lk. 16:19-31). One can assume that such an appeal was made from Purgatory, rather than Hell, because souls in the netherworld under the aegis of the Devil are not bent on doing good. Augustine and Jerome took Luke 12:59 (“until you have paid the last pennyâ€) as a reference to Purgatory, and one can do the same with the parable about the unmerciful servant handed over to the torturers until he has paid all that he owes (Mt. 18:21-33).
Some have argued that Luke 12 and Matthew 18 refer to punishment in this world. But Matthew 18:35 is clear about the intent of Jesus’ words: “So, too, will your heavenly father do to you if you do not each forgive your brothers from your hearts.†What if a man dies painlessly after failing to make just restitution or after acting mercilessly? In 2 Samuel 12:13-14, we read that David underwent punishment for adultery and murder, even after he was forgiven. What if he had died suddenly in the immediate aftermath of repenting? Finally, we have Matthew 12:36: “On the day of judgment, men will render account for every careless word they utter†— the requirement of an account for every idle word implies the passing of judgment, and judgment implies punishment, but not punishment as severe as Hell.
13. Moving on, Jesus excluded women from the priesthood, and so does the Church of Rome. The Nazarene infuriated Jewish leaders by curing on the Sabbath, endorsing foods regarded as unclean, and dispensing with the ritual washing of hands. He talked with a Samaritan, and a woman at that, marking Himself, once again, as a maverick. Clearly, He was countercultural when He chose to be and hence could easily have ordained the kind of priestesses that were common in Greece, Rome, and Egypt. But this was not His choice.
14. Another characteristic of the Catholic Church in support of her being the “Bible Church†par excellence is her social mix. We know from Paul’s description of early Christianity that “not many wise according to the flesh†were believers, “not many mighty, not many noble.†Rather, God chose the “foolish things of the world to put to shame the [so-called] wise†(1 Cor. 1:26-27). Enter a Catholic church on Sunday anywhere in the world and you will find minimum-wage earners and the unemployed rubbing shoulders with attorneys and physicians.
15. Luke 23 contains another passage worth noting. Jesus, the most persecuted of all religious founders, is quoted as foretelling similar, if not worse, persecution for His followers: “If in the case of the green wood they do these things what is to happen in the case of the dry?†(v. 31). Compare Christ’s augury with what has actually happened. The persecution visited upon the Church of Rome over the centuries is unparalleled. She has been targeted for extinction not only by Roman emperors, Protestant monarchs, and communist rulers, but also by powerful elites in Catholic countries such as Spain, Portugal, France, and Mexico.
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Pausing for a moment to take stock of where we are in our tour d’horizon, it is fair to say that the degree of Catholic conformity to the biblical blueprint is remarkable. Still to come, though, are nine more illustrations of the parallelism that exists between what Catholics believe and what is written in Scripture, each one as noteworthy as anything covered thus far.
16. The first of these concerns Church teaching on the sinfulness of artificial birth control. We have, first of all, St. Paul’s insistence on “the natural use of the woman†(Rom. 1:27), and second, God’s summary punishment of Onan for wasting his seed (Gen. 38:9-10). There are scholars who hold that Onan was punished for refusing to raise up issue to the widow of his dead brother. But St. Augustine would not agree, nor would any of the classical Jewish commentators, because the penalty for such conduct under the Mosaic Law (Deut. 25:5-9) was trivial by comparison with what befell Onan.
Third, and still on the same subject, Scripture prohibits the use of pharmakeia, an ancient code word for contraception, often translated from the Greek as “witchcraft†or “sorcery†(Gal. 5:20; Rev. 9:21). In most cases, pharmakeia meant the mixing of potions for secret purposes, and we know that such potions were used to prevent or terminate a pregnancy at a time when people spoke of contraception as “using magic†or “using drugs.†The earliest book of Christian conduct, the Didache, which dates to the first century, couldn’t be more forthright: “You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure abortion.â€
Three centuries later, St. Jerome, translator of the Bible into the Latin vernacular, wrote that “some go so far as to take potions that they may ensure barrenness and thus murder human beings almost before their conception.†Augustine didn’t always agree with Jerome, but in this case he did, maintaining that “cruel lust resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness.â€
17. Next in our catalogue of Catholic conformity comes the “one man in charge†paradigm that undergirds the papacy. Jesus gave Peter, and Peter alone, the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt. 16:18-19). He singled him out to feed His sheep (Jn. 21:15). And it is important to bear in mind, in this connection, that Jesus was merely affirming a principle divinely ordained at the time of Moses and Aaron: For close to 1,500 years, the Jewish high priest wielded power akin to that which is now wielded by the Holy Father.
18. One of the first things Our Lord did after rising from the dead was to give His Apostles the power to forgive sins. “Whose sins you forgive,†He told them, “they are forgiven. Whose sins you retain [i.e., refuse to absolve] they are retained†(Jn. 20:22-23). According to the Gospel of John, Christ breathed this power on them, making His commission all the more stunning. The only other time this happens in Scripture is when God breathes life into Adam through his nostrils. Which is why Catholics continue to believe in the life-giving nature of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
19. Next up are the clerical vows of poverty and celibacy that have been under fierce attack since the 1960s. Christ’s followers lived a voluntary form of communism, donating all their possessions to a common fund (Acts 4:32). Moreover, the Apostles, along with John the Baptist and Paul, renounced family life in response to Jesus’ plea for celibacy: “Let him accept it who can†(Mt. 19:12). In short, the leaders of the apostolic band inaugurated a tradition that has been faithfully carried on by Catholic clergy, monks, and nuns to this day.
20. Another Catholic practice under perennial attack is that of “praying to the saints,†or, to put it colloquially, carrying on a conversation with those who have reached Heaven after leading an exemplary life on earth. Is this not what Jesus did on the Mount of Transfiguration when He conversed with Moses and Elijah (Mt. 17:3)? Is it not what the rich man, mentioned above, did when he begged Abraham to send his still-living brothers a heavenly warning (Lk. 16:27-28)? Abraham couldn’t accede to the rich man’s request, but what counts is the man’s choice of intercessor. He addressed his petition to a long-deceased mortal when he could have gone directly to God (who would have responded the same way). Does Scripture not enjoin us to pray for one another (1 Tim. 2:1)? And is it not customary for Christians who find themselves in deep trouble to call on their friends for spiritual support? What, then, is wrong with lobbying saints who have connections?
21. Also on the list of Catholic practices and beliefs that are based on God’s Word is transubstantiation, the changing of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord. According to the Gospel of John, Christ told His followers that they must eat His body and drink His blood if they were to have eternal life (Jn. 6:54). Many of them, taking this to be “a hard saying,†parted company with Him. Are we to believe that the greatest teacher the world has ever known was indifferent to the loss of a large part of His congregation? He might well have said, “Hold on, folks, don’t take me literally.†But He didn’t. Instead, He insisted that His words be taken at face value. Note that the problem with the naysayers was one of disbelief rather than misunderstanding (Jn. 6:65, 70), and Paul explains why: “The sensual man does not understand the things of the spirit†(1 Cor. 2:14). Jesus Himself told His disciples the same thing when He said that “the spirit saves; the flesh profits nothing†(Jn. 6:63).
22. The Church’s teaching on divorce, like that on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, requires faith, but faith backed by reason. This teaching can be defended, by inference, on the basis of Petrine teaching authority (Mt. 16:18-19). But Mark (10:5-12), Luke (16:18), and Paul (1 Cor. 7:11) give it explicit support. As for John, he makes no reference whatever to the principle of marital indissolubility, suggesting that, by the time he took up his pen, all doubt in regard to Church teaching on the matter had been laid to rest.
Some cite Matthew’s account of an exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees (19:9, the so-called escape clause) as proof that His rule on indissolubility was not ironclad. But such an interpretation is predicated on a mistranslation of the Greek word porneia. Jesus did indeed make an exception to His no-divorce rule in cases of porneia. But porneia, literally translated, means “fornication,†and this is how it appears in the King James Bible, along with Catholic editions such as Douay Rheims (1582) and First Jerusalem (1961). It does not mean “adultery,†“unchastity,†or “immorality,†as found elsewhere. Under the Mosaic Law, if an unmarried couple engaged in sexual intercourse and were found out, the man was bound to marry the woman and remain with her for life (divorce, legal for Jews at the time of Christ, was not permitted under these circumstances; cf. Deut. 22:28-29). What Our Lord did, in other words, was to soften the law governing fornication while insisting on marital indissolubility. Mark’s account of what Jesus told His disciples after His exchange with the Pharisees couldn’t be more telling: The Master was unequivocal (Mk. 10:7-12).
23. We come, finally, to the practice of Marian veneration, something, once again, quintessentially Catholic and Bible-based. We know that the crucified Lord instructed John to regard Mary as his mother: “Son, behold your mother†(Jn. 19:26-27). We also know that John’s biological mother, Salome, was looking on when these words were spoken, making them all the more striking (Mk. 15:40). If Mary was John’s mother spiritually, she was, by extension, the mother of all the Apostles and, indeed, of all Christians. In the Book of Revelation, John himself says so, stating that Mary (whom he calls “the woman†in a throwback to Gen. 3:15) is the mother of all who witness to Jesus and keep the commandments (12:17). Skeptics have taken John’s “woman†as a reference to the Church. But the woman of Revelation is credited with the birth of a son destined to “rule all nations with a rod of iron†— clearly Jesus (Rev. 12:5) — and it was not the Church that gave birth to Him; rather, it was He who gave birth to the Church!
Equally to the point, John describes Mary as our Queen. The woman of Revelation is wearing a “crown of twelve stars,†suggesting a role for her similar to that of the Jewish queen mother, who was regarded as an intercessor second only to the king in power. And not only this. John goes so far as to depict the Virgin as “clothed with the sun†(Rev. 12:1). There is only one other person in the Bible robed in such radiance: God Himself!
24. We turn now to our concluding instance of Catholic conformity to biblical specification, one that pertains to clerical sex abuse. Jesus predicted scandal and, in so doing, used language that sounds remarkably current: “It is impossible that scandals should not come; but woe to him through whom they come! It were better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck and he were thrown into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin†(Lk. 17:1-2). We know, in addition, that Our Lord kept Judas on as treasurer of the apostolic band even though He knew him to be a traitor and a thief (Jn. 12:6). Incredibly, He was still calling Judas “friend†on the night of his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26:50). Church scandal is nothing new.
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At times during the writing of this article, I was tempted to make more frequent use of non-biblical history. There is no known instance, for example, of remarriage after divorce during the first centuries of Christendom. We also have a letter written by Ignatius, the third bishop of Antioch (d. ca. A.D. 107), that is crystal clear on the meaning of Holy Communion. The man for whom St. Ignatius of Loyola is named told his flock of Smyrneans to shun anyone who doubted the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
The collected writings of the Church Fathers, the Patrologia, are heavily freighted with such ammunition, all of it free for the taking by Catholic apologists. As John Henry Newman so aptly remarked, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.â€
In all fairness, it should be said that many of our separated brethren belong to congregations that conform to some of the above-mentioned specifications. This is not surprising. Those who seek the truth with a sincere heart are, by definition, close to God. But Catholics who take their faith seriously are blessed to have it all. The completeness of Catholic conformity to the biblical blueprint is nothing less than astounding. The time has come to make full use of what St. Paul called “the sword of the spirit†(Eph. 6:17). Scriptural witness to the truth of the Catholic faith should be preached from the pulpit and proclaimed with confidence on street corners around the world.
ONLY ONE CHURCH FOLLOWS THE BIBLICAL BLUEPRINT
ONLY ONE CHURCH FOLLOWS THE BIBLICAL BLUEPRINT
Devotion to the souls in Purgatory contains in itself all the works of mercy, which supernaturalized by a spirit of faith, should merit us Heaven. de Sales