Open Letter to a Protestant: on the unity of the Church

B---,

Before I try to form a positive argument for the unity of the Church, I should warn you not to be either bored or suspicious if I spend too much time on an accepted point or insufficient time on a point with which you disagree. Not being thoroughly familiar with either your reasons and principles in ecclesiology nor the field of controversy in general, I am arguing at a disadvantage. But if I pass over a point too quickly, let me know and I can try to draw it out more carefully. If by the end of this I have only drawn conclusions from principles you don't accept, tell me which principles (if any) you have in ecclesiology and, if we share them, I will try to argue from there. That being said, I'll make an initial shot at this.

Catholics believe that theirs is the true church of Jesus Christ (1) because theirs is the only Christian church that goes back in history to the time of Christ;* (2) because theirs is the only Christian church which possesses the unity, holiness, universality and the apostolicity which Christ taught would distinguish the true church; and (3) because the Apostles and primitive church fathers, who certainly were members of Christ's true church, all professed membership in this same Catholic Church. The early church martyr Ignatius of Antioch, a contemporary and friend of the Apostles, wrote: "Where the bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be; even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church." (Epi.)

[*Note: I can explain later why I think the Orthodox Church, despite the undeniable fact that they have preserved apostolic succession and valid sacraments, is not evidence against this statement.]

While much can be said for each of these four marks of the Church, I will focus here only on unity.

(A) Evidence in Scripture

Speaking of his church our Saviour calls it a "kingdom," the "kingdom of heaven," and the "kingdom of God" (Mt 13:24, 31, 33; Lk 13:18; Jn 18:36). And he compares it to a city, of which the keys were entrusted to the Apostles (Mt 5:14; 16:19); to a sheepfold to which all his sheep must come and be united under one Shepherd (Jn 10:7-17); to a vine and its branches; and to a house built on a rock against which the powers of hell will never prevail (Mt 16:18).

Furthermore, just before he suffered Jesus prayed for his disciples and for those who were to believe in Him through their word -- that is, he prayed for his church -- that they might all be one as he and the Father are one (Jn 17:20-23). Also, he had already warned us that every kingdom or house divided against itself will fall (Mt 12:25). These words of Christ express the closest kind of unity.

St. Paul likewise insists on the unity of the Church. Schism and disunion he brands as crimes to be classed with murder and debauchery, and declares that those guilty of "dissensions" and "factions" will not obtain the kingdom of God (Gal 5:20-21). Hearing of the schisms among the Corinthians, he asked impatiently: "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" (1 Cor 1:13). And in the same epistle he describes the Church as one body with many members distinct among themselves, but one with Christ their head: "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free" (1 Cor 12:13). And to show the intimate union of the members of the Church with the one God, he asks: "The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord? For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread" (1 Cor 10:16-17). Again in his letter to the Ephesians he teaches the same doctrine by exhorting them to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," and he reminds them that there is but "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all" (Eph 4:3-6). Already, in one of his very first epistles, he warns the faithful of Galatia that if anybody (even an angel from heaven) should preach unto them any other Gospel than that which he had preached, "let him be anathema" or "let him be accursed" (Gal 1:8). Such declarations as these coming from Paul are clear evidence of the essential unity which must be characteristic of the true Christian Church.

The other Apostles also persistently proclaimed this essential and necessary unity of Christ's Church. And although divisions did arise now and then in the early Church, they were speedily put down and the disturbers rejected, so that even from the beginning the Christians could boast that they were of "one heart and one soul" (Acts 4:32).

The objection can be made (and has been made) that the unity of the Church consists in nothing more than a spiritual internal bond. Christians certainly should be of one heart and soul with each other. But against this incomplete idea of unity one can point to the apostolic Church and see that the apostles themselves included in that unity the visible governance of the faithful (Acts 15).

(B) The Continuity of Tradition

On this point historic Christianity is unanimous. Whenever heresy threatened to invade the church, the fathers and leaders of the church rose up against it as an evil which strikes at the heart of the Church of Christ. Except to the church at Rome, in every surviving letter St. Ignatius exhorts the disciples of Christ to unity with the bishop and apostolic episcopate, usually in the same breath as he warns against heretics and schismatics. St. Irenaeus went even further and taught that the test of the one true Church, in which alone was salvation, was its union with Rome ( Adv. haeres. 3.3). Tertullian likewise compared the Church to an ark outside of which there is no salvation, and he maintained that only he who embraced every doctrine handed down by the Apostolic Churches, especially by that of Rome, belonged to the true Church ( De praescript. 21). The same contention was upheld by Clement of Alexandria and by Origen, who said that outside the one visible Church none could be saved. St. Cyprian in his treatise on the unity of the Church says: "God is one, and Christ one, and one the Church of Christ" ( De eccl. unitate 23); and again in his epistles he insists that there is but "One Church founded upon Peter by Christ the Lord" (Epist. 70, ad Jan.).

(C) Arguments from Reason

As I see it, there are two possible positions which, in the abstract, can be held on this point: either (1) there is one true faith and all are measured by their agreement with it, or (2) all Christian denominations have fallen away from the true gospel as it was preached by Christ and his apostles. I maintain the first, you the second. (Though there may be other alternatives which I don't see.)

The implications of the proposition you maintain are this: that although Christ came to gather all men into one fold, although the Apostles affirmed this when they taught that Christians were supposed to belong to "one body" and "one faith" (Eph. 4:4-5; cf. Cor 1:13), although the leaders of the Church throughout the centuries have often repeated and insisted on this same truth, nevertheless, as it turns out, when we come to history we find they were all wrong; it appears Christ did not establish his church firmly enough to prevent it from decaying away, and it appears that the Divine plan failed to take into account the weaknesses of man and the decay of time, so that the religion which was revealed from heaven gradually fell apart and left the world completely, or remains only in fragments.

I could certainly accept this as a bleak pessimist.

Why would the Father, after so much preparation with the Israelites, send His only Son to earth to proclaim a message of salvation if the Omniscient One knew that the saving message He was to bring had no chance of surviving as a whole and no possibility of lasting intact? Why would God give man a revelation from heaven if He knew that man would corrupt it so completely that almost no resemblance between His message and its human distortion would exist beyond the first generation to whom it was given? Why would the All-Powerful Deity deliver to mankind a salvific gospel, command men to believe in it, even inspire one of His disciples to severely warn against those who depart from that revelation, and then (what do you know) allow that message to vanish from the earth?

It is not unreasonable, then, to believe that the religion founded by Christ and the apostolic society to which God's revelation has been given is not only still on earth but may be found whole and intact as well.

And until positive reasons or facts are brought forward to the contrary, the most natural hypothesis is to say that the society of Christians which the Apostles left on earth were of that religion to which the Apostles had converted them. The most immediate position to recommend itself to the mind (and the way historians proceed in other cases) is to believe not only that the external continuity of name, profession, and communion argues a real continuity of doctrine, but also that as Christianity began by manifesting itself in a certain shape to all mankind it went on to manifest itself in the same way and was motivated by the same principles. It is not a violent assumption then to take it for granted, before proof to the contrary, that the Christianity of the second, fourth, seventh, twelfth, sixteenth, and intermediate centuries is in its substance the very religion which Christ and His Apostles taught in the first, whatever the developments of time and changes in circumstances have impressed upon it.

(I should add here that I don't deny the abstract possibility of a substantial change -- the loss of identity without a loss of continuity -- but a mere possibility cannot be assumed without evidence.)

For those reasons given above, I believe that Christ's church is one and that unity is a mark of His church.

Waiting for your rebuttal, etc.