The Biblical Case for Infallibility

Catholics (and Orthodox) believe that the Church is infallible, whereas Protestants tend to believe that only the Bible is unerring in this way. But which of these approaches looks more like what we see in the Bible itself? Here’s how Jesus’ teachings only work with Infallibility.

 

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I want to do a two-week series this week and next week on the theme of Christian Unity, and I’m purposely syncing this up to tie with next week being holy Thursday in which we have the last Supper because it’s at the last Supper that Jesus gives a really remarkable prayer for us. Now that for us is really important. When you’re reading the Bible, you’re reading things that are meant for us but are not said to us. Hopefully that’s clear what I mean. You’re reading, for instance, St. Paul writing to the Galatians. Well, you’re not a Galatian probably, so there’s something in there for you, but it’s not written to you. But there are a couple exceptions and they’re really important when they happen. It’s almost like in a TV show when a character turns and looks to the camera and breaks the fourth wall.

That’s what’s going on. There’s a couple of these moments in the New Testament, for instance in Luke when Mary prays at Magnificat, she prays that about how all generations will call her blessed. In other words, the Holy Spirit who inspired this prayer knew that future generations of Christians were going to have to figure out what do we do with Mary and we’re told in pretty uncertain terms to honor her, to call her blessed. That’s one of those cut to the camera kind of thing because it’s not just talking about first generation Christians, it’s explicitly about future generations. Well, likewise at the last Supper in John 17, Jesus explicitly prays in his words, “Not for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word.” Okay, so he’s explicitly praying for us in John 17 verse 20. And what is his prayer for future Christians?

What is this thing that we need so much that Jesus wants both to pray for us and to let us know that he’s praying for us by having John record it so that we the future generations will read about how this was so important that Jesus prayed for this in his last meal before the crucifixion? Well, it’s this, that they may all be one, that we will all be one. “Even as thou father art in me and I am thee, they all so may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” Okay, so the first thing to notice is exactly the thing I said that this is a prayer for us. This is not some optional part of Christianity. Jesus wants to make it really clear that his desire is that we all be one. And second, he tells us why?

Because he wants the whole world to believe in the Gospel and the world is not going to believe in the Gospel when Christians are constantly tearing each other down. So that line about so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me is really crucially important. Unity among Christians isn’t just good for its own sake, although that is also true. It’s also good for the sake of the gospel. You cannot both be passionate about evangelization and indifferent to Christian unity because Christian unity is key to evangelization in terms of its success. Jesus tells us as much. Let’s go onto verse 22, he says, “The glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou and me, that they may become perfectly one.” And then he says again, why.

So that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me. That is the Trinity is the model of Christian unity. The perfect love of Father, son and Holy Spirit is the model for what it should look like for Christians to love one another and to be completely unified. The will of father, son and Holy Spirit is entirely one. The Father is not at cross purposes with the Son. The Spirit is not trying to do some different mission than that of the father and the son. No, they’re completely united in heart and mind as it were, and that’s what we’re told we need to be like and why again, so the world will convert to Christianity. Okay, now I want to unpack a commentary on this by Ben Witherington III. You may be familiar with him.

He’s a theologian. He’s New Testament. Excuse me, professor of New Testament for doctoral studies, an Asbury Theological Seminary in relevant part here. He’s the author of a commentary on the Gospel of John called John’s Wisdom, a commentary in the fourth Gospel. He’s also a pastor of the United Methodist Church. And I want to engage with what Witherington has to say on this passage because I found it very thought-provoking. There are parts that I think are right on the money and I’m going to agree with them, but a little later on I’m going to show where we disagree and how I think he shows the inadequacy of Protestantism to fulfill Jesus’s prayer. In other words, I think Witherington for all of his brilliance and insight is going to show us that it’s impossible for Protestants to live out this prayer of Jesus, not for lack of faith, not for lack of effort, but because of the inadequacies of Protestantism itself.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll show along the way how Jesus’s prayer only makes sense if there’s some infallibility within the church. But before we get there, here’s Witherington talking about the passage. He says, “It is being noticed that Christ prays for the spiritual unity of believers. It is something God-given and spirit sustained, but it can be put asunder by divisions, rivalries, factionalism caucuses and church splits. That’s the first thing that Christian unity is not something simply taken for granted, but nor is it something that’s simply the result of human effort. Now, we can certainly impede it. We’ve seen that in our own lives, but true Christian unity is going to be something divinely ordained and divinely instituted.” And then Witherington points out that sometimes the first law of American Protestant, ecclesiology, ecclesiology is study of the church, seems to have been thou shalt divide and multiply, right?

There’s no shortage of Protestants out there forming new denominations, new churches, new non-denominational churches that are just denominations unto themselves, new structures that are independent of the old structures and creating more and more and more division. And Ben Witherington says this is not by any means necessarily a good thing. Then he says a little later, it is indeed a poor witness to the truth when the churches cannot even get their act together enough to agree on the fundamentals of what the truth in and about Christ amounts to. Now, this is a really important point. It’s not just, “Oh, they have these independent bodies that are all agreed on all of the major doctrines and they’re just operating independently of one another.” That’s not the problem. The problem is much deeper that within Protestantism, this is a pretty little problem than I have as a non-Protestant.

As Catholic if I say, “Hey, Protestants believe in X.” Invariably someone will say, “I’m a Protestant and I don’t believe in X.” Fair enough. There is no set of doctrines, no matter how important that all Protestants agree to, unless you just define it tautologically. If you say, “Well, we only accept believers in the Trinity as true Protestants,” then fine. If you make that part of the definition, then you can say, all Protestants agree on the Trinity. If you don’t make that part of the definition, then you count like oneness, Pentecostals, and those who deny the Trinity, well then you can’t even say that there’s an agreement on the Trinity. Hopefully you get the idea that there’s a whole theological free for all within Protestantism. And as Ben Witherington points out, this is not helping evangelization efforts. Someone who is not a Christian who asked five different Protestants, leave Catholics, Orthodox, etc out of the picture and just ask five different types of Protestants, what’s Christianity all about?

They might well get five different answers that aren’t just different emphases but are actually contradictory, that can’t both be or all be true. And if you think that hinders the gospel, you’re right. Okay, but then Ben Witherington points out another problem that if one finds one particular denominational version of the gospel too unsettling, one may choose from a smorgasbord of other interpretations and approaches. See how this undermines the gospel? Hey, if you don’t like this teaching is hard. Hey, this teaching about the Eucharist is hard. That teaching about marriage is hard. You can find another body calling itself Protestant, calling itself Christian, that’ll give you what you want to hear, and that’s a problem as well. So not only are the non-Christian unchurched people unlikely to be persuaded, but this creates a huge problem of watering down the Gospel when Christians are contradicting each other about what it even means to be Christian.

And so looking at this passage in John 17, he says, “The material in the farewell discourses,” that’s what we’re looking at right now, “Encourages us to wrestle once more with what really amounts to truth in unity in Christ.” What do we mean when we talk about truth and unity in Christ? What does that mean? And what we as the people of God who must bear witness to the world with one accord and one voice should say. In other words, one thing that’s abundantly clear from the New Testament is that we should be speaking together with one voice as Christians. What’s equally clear is that we’re not. So how do we get on the same page and what does that look like? He’s asking all the right questions here, but he’s going to ask one more, even more profound question. He says, these discourses also raise disturbing questions of whether the theology of denominationalism, which after all is a late invention caused originally by the Protestant Reformation is biblically valid and whether the modern ecumenical movement is the way to bring about church unity.

So he’s asked two hard hitting questions there. Number one, most Christians today, at least most Protestant Christians take for granted that denominations are just a thing, but historically this is not true. For three quarters of the church’s history, you don’t have these denominations just floating around as independent bodies. And the idea that you could just go and create your own denomination basically at will is completely novel in the history of the church. For about 75% of the church’s history, you don’t have that even when there was a major fight, it was a major fight over who got to control the direction of the church or what theology was preached in the church. So you might have to take one example, a controversy over whether the bishop should be a Catholic or a Donatist, but neither side was saying, “Well, maybe there should be two bishops and they’re both valid. We’re just going to have separate denominations and go our separate way.”

It doesn’t work like that until the Reformation and then it does. And Witherington’s question is should it be like that? I mean if Jesus is really emphatic on there being one church, should there be a bunch of different independent, even contradictory Protestant denominations or why are we just assuming denominationalism is acceptable? And then the second question he has is the problems that we’ve seen in terms of Christian infighting, the solutions have been with the ecumenical movement, is that really going to be the solution to this problem? And I think he’s asking again exactly the right questions. Okay, now I want to make four points based on this. Number one truth is non-negotiable. In other words, we can’t have a unity at the expense of truth. Point number two, unity is non-negotiable. So we can’t say because of our commitment to truth, we just can’t have unity.

That’s not acceptable either. Number three, Protestantism, as I already alluded to, is incapable of providing both truth and unity. And here Witherington is going to be, I think right on the money in one way and miss the mark in another. We’ll get to there. And then fourth and finally, Catholicism can and does provide truth and unity. Or I could put the question another way. If the infallibility of the church is true, then you can have truth and unity. If the infallibility of the church isn’t true, you can’t have both truth and unity for reasons that will become very clear very quickly, and that’s going to be a problem because we need to have truth and unity. So let’s unpack this step by step. First step one, truth is non-negotiable, that we need to be in the truth. We need to be believing true things. We need orthodoxy, right belief, right glory for God.

Why is this? Well, one way to look at it is John 14 verse six, when Jesus says, “I’m the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father but by me.” See, you can’t abandon the truth without abandoning the way of the Father because it’s ultimately abandoning Jesus. And St. Peter says exactly this. In second Peter two, he warns about false prophets rising up and bringing in destructive heresies and he talks about how they will bring upon themselves with destruction. And he warns that many will follow them and because of them the way of truth will be reviled. So if you accept a bunch of destructive heresies, you’re both bringing spiritual destruction upon yourself and wandering away from the way the truth and the life. Obviously that’s not an acceptable outcome. I don’t think there’s going to be a big debate on that.

So I’m keeping this part pretty simple. So truth is non-negotiable. Step two, unity is also non-negotiable. For some reason this gets downplayed by many Christians, but it shouldn’t. Now, on the one hand you have all the verses praising the beauty and goodness of unity. Psalm 133 for instance says how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. Describes it as like the precious oil upon the head running down upon the beard of Aaron, just glorious anointing. Psalm 133 is literally just all about how good unity among believers is. But it’s not just that. St. Paul in Philippians two prays for this and he encourages us. He says, “If there’s any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the spirit, any affection in sympathy complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love being in full of cord and of one mind.”

Now that gives us a little clearer sense of what unity looks like. It is both a unity of affection and a unity of belief. That is we actually believe the same things. We’re united on the issues of the truth. We don’t just, “Hey, agree to disagree.” That’s not unity, not in the Christian sense, not in the biblical sense, but it’s also a unity of heart. We’re not tearing each other down, we’re caring about each other, we’re building each other up. There’s a true affinity there. It’s both things. We need both the unity of heart and unity of mind, and people often will emphasize one to the exclusion of the other or we’ll just ignore both. So you have those verses pointing to these as positives, but it’s not just sad. You also have the verses warning what happens if you don’t do this? So one of the clearest examples of this is in Galatians five when St. Paul is listing the works of the flesh.

Now you might think of the flesh as like sexual sin or something like that, but for Paul, the flesh just means following yourself rather than following God. And so he gives plenty of examples like enmity, strife, dissension, party spirit, in other words, all those times where we become really proud and headstrong and we have the infighting and the tearing apart of the church and the working against one another. All of those things he describes as works of the flesh and then he warns that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. So hopefully this abundantly clear, you should care about Christian unity both because it makes life good and because Jesus prays for it and Paul begs for it and also because if you work against it, you can ruin your own salvation. And so those are reasons to care about unity. It’s not a negotiable, it’s not if you happen to be unified, great. No, Jesus could have done any number of things at the last Supper.

He does precious few and one of the things he does is praise for us and the only thing he prays for us is for unity. We can add one more issue to why this matters though, because it’s not just that we’ll bring about spiritual destruction upon ourselves is that without unity, the church is destroyed. Now, we already saw this in one way, John 17, Jesus talks about how we need this unity for the spread of the gospel. But you can also think about it in this way, one Timothy 3, st. Paul is describing what does it look like to be a Christian and he says, “If I’m delayed, I’m giving you these instructions so you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God.” Well, what’s the household of God? It’s the church, the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Now, I want you to think about this for a second. This is an issue I think a lot of people get wrong.

If you were to ask an ordinary Christian what’s the pillar and bulwark of the truth, they might say Jesus, they might say the Bible, think many of them would not say the church. But in the biblical view, the church is precisely that. It is the household of God and it is the pillar and bulwark of the truth. But here’s the danger, as Jesus says in Mark chapter three, A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, and if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. That’s true of the household of God. If the household of God is not one, it collapses. This is one of the reasons we believe that there is one holy Catholic and apostolic church because if there were two and they taught different things, the household of God would collapse. So there’s only one true church if we’re to believe everything Jesus has taught there that again, I think will become more obvious as we go and we see Jesus talking about establishing one church and him having one body, but this is important.

The Christian unity is important for the survival of the church. Now I’ve been referring to unity and scripture has been referring to unity in this being one, but as we already saw from Ben Witherington’s comments, this is something Jesus prays for. The true unity we might say is divine and sacramental. Now Witherington doesn’t say sacramental, I’m saying that, but he does point out that it’s divine. This is not just again people getting in a room and singing kumbaya. They’re not just saying agree to disagree. They’re not even just saying agree to agree. This is not primarily a human effort. It’s something we collaborate with, but this is something that requires divine effort. Again, as Witherington says, Christ prays for the spiritual unity of believers. This is something God-given and spirit sustained. Now, this ties in neatly to Jesus’s own words. In Matthew 16 verse 18, Jesus tells Peter, “You are Peter Rock and on this rock I will build my church.” And we can become so obsessed with questions like what does it mean to call Simon Peter Rock?

What’s the rock upon which Jesus will build his church that we can lose sight of those crucial words, I will build my church? That Jesus is the author of the church, he’s the creator of the church and he has one. He doesn’t say, “I will build my churches.” Even less does he say, “You will build my churches.” He says, “I will build my church,” singular. And so the true church is of divine origin because Jesus Christ who is divine established it and there’s one. St. Paul describes it in Ephesians two by saying that we are no longer strangers and sojourners but are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. What’s the household of God? The church, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. But then he says in verse 21, in whom, that is in Jesus, the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In whom you are also being built into it for a dwelling place of God in the spirit.

So you’ve got these Christians who are obsessed with the temple. Oh, we need to destroy the dome of the rock to build a temple so we can have the third temple. Guys the third temple is the church. St. Paul says that in Ephesians two, the true church of the Lord is the body of Christ. In John two, Jesus describes his body as the temple because what is the temple? The temple is the dwelling place of God, and just as the Shekinah glory of God overshadowed the Ark of the Covenant. So you’ve got the entire dwelling of God in the person of Jesus Christ, God and man joined together, one divine person, two natures. Something even more glorious in the Ark, even more glorious in the temple, more glorious in the holy of Holies, the body of Jesus. And the body of Jesus, both in his historic presence on earth, but also in his continued incarnation through the body of Christ, the church that is the temple of the Lord.

It’s the presence of God on earth is there in the church. So Ephesians two tells us the unity we’re talking about, what’s joining us together, what’s helping us to grow together is not mere human effort. It’s Jesus and it’s the Holy Spirit. And all of this is both divine and as I said, sacramental because the body of Christ, the Eucharist forms the body of Christ, the church in some mysterious way. Now, that’s a much deeper topic. I’m going to point to it without really doing a deep job of explaining it, but in 1st Corinthians, 10 St. Paul talks about this. He says, “The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ, the bread which we break is it not a participation and the body of Christ?” Because there is one bread or literally because there’s one loaf, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread.

Now, as I always point out, this does not mean there’s one big loaf of bread that he and the Corinthians are mailing back and forth to each other to share a meal. No, the one loaf is the same one loaf mentioned in the Gospels, it’s Jesus. When the disciples have one loaf among them, it’s Jesus. He is the bread from heaven, and so it’s his Eucharistic presence, the cup of blessing, the participation in the bread of Christ. That is what makes us one. So notice in St. Paul, it’s not this human activity, the Eucharist where we as fellow believers have decided to have this fellowship to memorialize Jesus and that because we’re one, we’re having the Eucharist. No, he says the opposite, because we all partake of the one loaf, we become the one body, that the Eucharist makes the church more than the other way around.

Okay, so unity understood in that way is necessary. We need this divinely instituted sacramental unity and a unity of heart and mind. We need to love each other, we need to believe the same things. We need to be one body. We also need to be rooted in the truth so this unity cannot come at the expense of the truth. This gets to the third point. This creates an impossible situation for Protestantism in which there’s always a balancing act between truth and unity. Now you might say that’s an unfair characterization and I assure you it’s not. Ben Witherington puts it like this. He says, “There is always a tension between unity among believers and truth as it is understood and held by believers.” Protestantism has tended to hold up truth with a capital T while intoning unity with a lowercase U, with the end result that Protestant churches and denominations have proved endlessly divisive and factious.

So everyone is trying to get just right the tenets of the gospel and because your read of the Bible isn’t quite the same as the read of somebody else and it’s on some important doctrine, you say, “Well, we can’t be in fellowship. We need to form our own church.” For 500 years, that has been the pattern of Protestantism, particularly in places like America. On the other hand, Ben Witherington says, “Catholicism and orthodoxy have upheld unity with the capital U,” meaning they acknowledge this, we take unity much more seriously. But he says, “At least from a Protestant viewpoint, this has been at the expense of truth.” What that line is going to be really crucial that at least from a Protestant viewpoint, because if we’re not teaching error, then we’ve actually solved the unity and truth problem because we have the unity. Now next week we’ll look at the question are Catholics more divided than Protestants?

But for now the kind of unity we’re talking about, the sacramental divine unity created by Christ, we have that. Whatever you may say about Catholics fighting with one another, you can point to what the Catholic Church believes about ABC. You can’t point to what the Protestant church believes about ABC because there’s no body with the authority to teach any unified doctrine that anyone else is bound to adhere to. You can have someone who descends from being Catholic, they’re Catholic, but they don’t believe what the Catholic church believes. You don’t really have the same thing in Protestantism. Someone who’s Protestant but doesn’t believe what the Protestant church believes. It doesn’t mean anything. A Lutheran doesn’t believe what a Presbyterian believes and vice versa, but that doesn’t make either one a bad Protestant. It just makes them different kinds of Protestants. A Catholic who denies the Eucharist is a bad Catholic.

They don’t believe the things their church believes and teaches. So there is an actual substantive difference. Again, we’re going to get into all of that next week, but right now I want to agree with the first half of what Ben Witherington is saying here. Protestantism has emphasized truth and really downplayed unity, and so you have denominationalism. And Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been really big on unity and Protestants believe that this is coming at the expense of truth, and so he says, in other words, no part of the church has adequately gotten the balance between truth and unity right, it would seem. All right. What should be glaringly obvious if you’ve made it this far is you don’t have permission to balance truth and unity. You don’t have permission to balance any of the commands of God. You don’t say, “I’m going to follow Jesus 60% and then gratify the flesh 40%.”

It doesn’t work like that. You don’t say, “I want to love my neighbor, but I also want to get rich, so I’ll follow that far and I’ll do this over here.” No, it doesn’t work like that. You have to completely love the Lord your God with of all your heart, mind, and soul. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is not a matter of apportioning how much you’re going to love God compared to loving neighbor. And so if you’re pitting those things against each other, if you’re pitting following God against following God, you’re not following him correctly. If your love of neighbor interferes with your love of God, then you’re not loving your neighbor properly. Likewise, if your conception of truth and unity pits the two against each other where you have to choose between truth and unity or you have to balance between truth and unity, then you don’t understand truth or you don’t understand unity or both.

Now I’m going to point to an answer where it’s not truth verse unity, but unity in the truth is what the Bible actually teaches, and I’ll show how we can get there. But right now I just want to point out this has not been Witherington just being some crazy renegade or despairing of the state of Protestantism. He’s pointing out something glaringly obvious if you just take a step back that Protestants have to constantly choose between truth and unity. Why? Two reasons, more than two, but I’m going to point out two. First, Sola scriptura, the idea of going to scripture alone to adjudicate doctrinal questions doesn’t solve misinterpretations of scripture. In other words, there’s no authority outside of scripture that all Protestants can appeal to and expect other Protestants to accept and agree to, and that creates a problem. If you’re going to scripture alone and you are misreading a passage of scripture or two people are reading scripture in different ways, how you know who’s right?

And Augustine points out in one of his commentaries on John that all the heresies we have arise from basically one of two causes. Number one, when good scriptures are not rightly understood, and number two, when that in them which is not rightly understood, is rashly and boldly asserted. So it’s you’ve misunderstood scripture and then you’ve been rash and bold in asserting what you think scripture teaches. See the problem there. If you are just completely convinced scripture teaches a certain doctrine, someone else reads the exact same scripture and interprets it a different way and is equally rash and bold in declaring the opposite interpretation, how do you know who’s right? It can’t just be, “Well, let’s go to scripture,” because that’s what the entire dispute is about. That’s the heart of the dispute. It’s not the judge of the dispute. You can read the same words. You have two opposite meanings. You can read other passages and have two opposite meanings. And look, there’s no end to the number of examples you can point out within Protestantism about this, right, Calvinism and Arminianism.

What does predestination look like? What does free will look like? Creationism? How do we interpret these early chapters of Genesis? Any number of these questions, dispensationalism, it’s a whole system of how to read the Bible that other Protestants don’t take. You can go all the way down the list and find one issue after another after another where it’s not, group A says we should listen to the Bible and group B says we shouldn’t. It’s group A says the Bible means A, and group B says, the Bible means B. And so if all you have to go on is the Bible alone with no interpretive authority, how do you know which interpretation is right? Which then leads to the second problem.

There’s no infallible interpreter of scripture. If your denomination isn’t infallible, if your church isn’t infallible, if your ruling bodies, your theological treatises, your favorite theologians, they’re not infallible, then even if you read scripture in one way and your favorite theologian reads it another way or your pastor reads it a different way or your denomination reads it a different way, you don’t know which of you is right, could be you, could be them. And according to Protestantism, not only could it be you, but there are times when it is meaning this, for 1500 years, Christians interpreted the Bible in a certain way. The time of the Reformation Martin Luther says, “I think it should be this way instead.” And so there’s plenty of issues in which you can’t find anyone before the Reformation who interprets it the way Luther and his contemporaries interpret it.

But from the Protestant perspective, you say, “Well, the church authorities were all wrong. 1500 years of interpretation was all wrong. These guys got it right.” Well, how do you know you’re not the modern day Luther? How do you know you’re not the modern day Calvin or fill in the blank? And so this creates an impossible situation. You will never get Christian unity along Sola scriptura lines. If you don’t believe me, look at the number of denominations and ask yourself or look into the history and explore, is the number of denominations going up or down? And the answer is up and up and up and up. Meaning Protestantism is moving away from unity every year, not moving towards unity. There were in the 70s and 80s these idealized visions of the future in which everybody was just going to give up denominationalism and get back together.

I think few Christians believe that anymore because the problem of denominationalism has gotten bigger and you have within denominations major infighting, but then Methodism within Anglicanism within all sorts of these different bodies where there are schisms forming as we speak over things like sexual issues. So you can’t have any kind of resolution on Sola scriptura grounds because how do you know your interpretation is right and other one is wrong? So what if there was an answer to these problems? All I want to say here is Protestantism cannot obey Jesus. It cannot obey Jesus, both in the call to unity and the call to truth.

It has to balance obedience against disobedience. The Catholic and biblical answer is something else entirely. It is unity in the truth in the church. I want to go back to 1st Timothy 3, because I glossed over it just the church is the household of God and the pillar and bulwark of the truth, meaning think about that, if you want the truth and you want unity, be in the church. That’s what St. Paul is showing you there. If the church is reliable, if it’s the pillar in bulwark of the truth, which sounds like it’s reliable, then if you want true Christianity, go be part of the church. This becomes really clear In another of St. Paul’s writings, his letter to the Ephesians. This is really all over Ephesians. Ephesians one talks about the church being the fullness of Christ, that Jesus the head with the church, his body is the full Christ.

Ephesians four though is what I want to focus on. Ephesians five is really good too. It talks about the church is the body of Christ and the bride of Christ and being one flesh with Christ. That one flesh union where the two become one, it’s a really incredible vision of the church, but Ephesians four is where we’re going to go. In Ephesians four St. Paul’s says that he’s begging us to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you’ve been called. So again, you have the begging, the pleading of Paul with all lowliness and meekness, with patience for bearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. So how does that look? Well, Paul goes on in verse four to say there is one body and one spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all who is above all and through all and in all, meaning there’s only one church just as there’s only one true faith and only one true baptism. When you get baptized, you are entering in some way into the church. If you’re validly baptized, you’re not baptized into some separate church, some separate body. Jesus has one body. To imagine that Christ becomes incarnate as two bodies would be an abomination, not an incarnation. And so there’s one body and one spirit. The Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not contradicting himself. It isn’t as if the Holy Spirit is leading one group of believers to say that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus and then leading another group of believers to say it’s not the body and blood of Jesus. One of those is not being led by the Spirit in that.

That’s just as simple as it unless the Holy Spirit is contradicting himself or lying, or unless there’s two spirits, one good and one evil, then if we say there’s one Holy Spirit, then you’re only going to have one true faith, right? One true creed because only when two different churches are going different directions or two bodies or two denominations are going different directions. They can’t both be led by the spirit in opposite directions. And so you can’t believe that this plurality of different teachings and creeds and customs is desired of God. There’s one body and one spirit. There’s one faith because there’s one Lord. Hopefully it’s clear. Paul is very clear about that.

And so what does it look like? Well, jumping down a little bit in Ephesians four, he explains how God maintains this unity through his gifts and his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Let’s pause right there because what Paul has just said is God has given his gifts to the church for what? He’s given these church offices and roles within the church in the body to create unity. That the institutional church exists not for its own glorification, but to allow us all, notice that it’s not me collectively trying to maintain orthodoxy. It’s that we will all be united in the unity of the faith that we’re united in truth. We’re not balancing unity against truth.

We’re united in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. And in this way, the body of Christ grows up as it were to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. And Paul says in verse 14, “So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” In other words, if you don’t have the church, the pillar in bulwark of truth, if you’re trying to go it alone, you don’t have the gift of the church, which is God’s gift for us all, then you’re going to be tossed to and fro with different doctrines. So it isn’t that you are going to successfully achieve truth at the expense of unity. If you give up unity, Paul is saying you’re going to give up truth because you’ve put yourself in a position where you are susceptible to being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles.

Just as if you decide to separate from the flock, you become vulnerable to wolves. So here, if you decide to go your own way from the church, the institutional apostolic church with these offices that are God-given and you decide to do your own thing or form your own body, start following some non-divinely ordained institution, some human organization that calls itself a church, you have not given up unity for the truth. You have given up unity and truth. Because you were called to truth and unity in the church, the unity of faith. Now, we can see this really clearly in scripture with a case study. If you’re not familiar, case studies, just like an example that illustrates a point, and the case study is a heresy that sometimes called the judaizer controversy. Sometimes you’ll see it called the party of circumcision, and it just means this. One of the first heresies that the early Christians faced were folks who said you needed to follow the mosaic ritual law, things like circumcision to be able to be saved.

And this was, as you might imagine, a big deterrent to evangelization. If you’d tell a bunch of adult men, “You thought you were saved following Jesus Christ, but you also have to get circumcised.” Now that is creating a bit of an obstacle for evangelization efforts. And so it’s worth looking at how the apostles respond to this, including the apostle Paul. Paul in his letter to Titus in Titus 1 verse 7 says, “For a bishop, as God’s steward must be blameless,” then he gives a lot of criteria for what a bishop ought to look like. But I want to focus particularly on verse nine where he says that he, the bishop must hold firm to the sure word has taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to confute those who contradict it. So the bishop divinely instituted, Jesus creates the apostles, they ordain the bishops, and the bishop has this role not only to give instruction and sound doctrine, but also to confound those who contradict it.

And then he gives an example. He says, “For there are many insubordinate men,” notice that. Paul does not say, “Hey, look at this. These guys over here have really taken initiative in following their interpretation of the Bible. Isn’t that great?” No, he doesn’t say that at all. He calls him insubordinate men, empty talkers and deceivers, and he says, “Especially the circumcision party.” And what does he say to do? He says they must be silenced. He does not say, “Free expression. Everybody’s got ideas. Your ideas are as good as mine. Your interpretation is as good as mine.” No, he says, “A bishop has got to know how to shut up these guys because they don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re insubordinate and they’re upsetting whole families by teaching for base gain what they have no right to teach.” This is flatly contrary to I think a lot of our western ideas where we don’t seem to have a deep understanding of authority at all.

So there’s very much this idea that if you feel like you’re spirit led, which might just be that you’re really convinced of your ideas, then you can get up and preach whatever, and you should. That is totally unbiblical. That’s the kind of insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers that St. Paul warns against. Elsewhere in Romans 10, he just takes it for granted. In verse 15, he says, “How can men preach unless they’re sent?” If you go out there preaching without divine authority being sent either directly from a divine apparition, God has appeared to you and given you authority to preach like he did with Paul or through the ministry of the church, the institutional church set up by Christ has given you authority to preach, you don’t have that authority, then you’re insubordinate, empty talker and deceiver. So Paul points to this circumcision party, these Judaizers as an example of the people who just ignore this authority, they don’t worry about the fact that they haven’t been sent. They just decide to preach anyway.

We can see this really clearly in Acts chapter 15 because we see these Judaizers in action. We’re told that some men came down from Judea. Now, as we go through Acts 15, I want to notice how often the idea of sending and going is used because Luke mentions this constantly. He’s obsessed with the fact that these men have come down on their own authority and we’re not sent by the church. Some men came down from Judea. Notice they were not sent down from Judea. They just came down and were teaching the brethren, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. That’s the Judaizer controversy in a nutshell, and this leads to big controversy, Paul and Barnabas. And so it says in verse two, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question. They don’t just go, they’re appointed to go. There’s ascending by the church.

Verse three, so being sent on their way by the church, they go through. Verse four, when they get to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles, and the elders and they declared all that God had done with them. So notice in four verses, there have been four references to sending and receiving by the church or in the case of the Judaizers, the lack of sending by the church and then verse five. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up. They weren’t sent. They just rose up and said, “It is necessary to circumcise and to charge them to keep the law of Moses.” Verse six, the apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. So notice is an institutional, organizational, hierarchical response to these insubordinate men. Now, what follows then is the Council of Jerusalem, which is clearly the church acting as a church.

I’m actually going to skip over that part for the sake of time, but it’s very clear also in terms of sending that this is the church acting as the church. The visible church is adjudicating the doctrinal question. In verse 22, we get the results of this. It seemed good to the apostles and the elders with the whole church to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas and Silas leading men among the brethren with the following letter. That’s just a verse and a half, and you have that this is the conclusion of the whole church. This involves them choosing men, it involves them sending men, and here are the men that they sent. That’s four references to the church acting as the visible church in this authoritative kind of way. And then you get to the letter that they sent, and the letter they sent is really remarkable. The brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles and Antioch and Syria and Cilicia greetings. So it’s institutional letter.

Verse 24, they explain the controversy. They say, “Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions.” Let’s pause on that. What is that presuppose? That the Judaizers had no right to go preach without instruction. That is a teaching I think a lot of Christians have lost and would do well to cover. If you can’t show apostolic authority and you’re sitting, if you don’t have apostolic succession, you just think you have some really good ideas and interpretations of scripture, you don’t have authority to go and teach that. You’ve not been sent. So that’s the problem, right? These men have gone out, although we’ve given them no instruction. “Therefore,” verse 25, “It has seemed good to us in assembly to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul.” Do you see how often choosing and sending is mentioned in Acts 15?

And then says verse 27, “We have therefore sent Judas and Silas who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth.” And then just wrapping this up in Acts 15, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.” And then it explains which things the Gentiles have to hold to. Okay, what can we learn from Acts 15? What can we learn from the Judaizer controversy? That your pursuit of truth at the expense of unity is not holy and good. If you are pursuing truth in such a way that you’re breaking off from the visible church, that is not pleasing to God, you may be trying to please God and that is good. It’s good that you’re trying. But if you are disobeying him in the process and he has called you to unity, and he’s called you to be part of the church that he himself established, that is the household of God, that is the temple of God, that is the pillar in the bulwark of the truth, that is not good.

See where infallibility comes in here. If the church really is infallible, if it really is the pillar and bulwark of truth, then I know that if I am a member in good standing of the church, that I am in the truth and united with my fellow Christians. Now, there’s still an obligation on me to live charitably towards them. I can still impede the unity of the church somewhat through my own sin, through my lack of love for my neighbor, that sort of thing. But I can be united in the truth. Truth and unity are pulling in the same direction in the Catholic vision. And the Protestant vision, truth and unity are pulling in opposite directions. And so I have to balance how much I obey Jesus about truth and how much I obey Jesus about unity and balancing obedience is disobedience. And so the two options are this. Either Christ has given us an infallible church, the pillar and bulwark of truth as the Bible says, or He’s given us two impossible commands and forced us to sin against him.

Which of those is a more coherent vision of the church? Which of those is a more coherent vision of the gospel? Which of those looks more like everything we read about the role of the church in Ephesians four, the way the church plays out in Acts 15 or in Titus? You can see over and over again, the church has this really vital role of clarifying the truth and keeping people united. The last thing here, there’s a strange position that many mainstream Protestants find themselves in, and I mean this. You’ll find some really out there Protestants recently, like yesterday actually, a guy asked me what to do with his Sola Scriptura friend who wouldn’t believe in the Trinity because the Trinity is not explicitly in the Bible. Following the principle is its wildest conclusion, but most Protestants would say the early church successfully perfectly navigated christology and Trinitarian theology, meaning the idea that the Father, son, and Holy Spirit are three persons in one divine substance, the early church nailed it, got it just right.

That was either human wisdom or divine guidance. Either the one temple is led by the one spirit in the one faith as St. Paul describes, or the church just got super lucky one time. But then on Christology, that Christ is both fully divine, fully human. He has two wills. He has two natures, but he is only one person. These really subtle distinctions that even a lot of well-meaning Christians screw up, the church nailed it on christology. It just got super lucky again, or else the one spirit was leading the one temple, the one Lord, the one faith. So you’re in this strange position of saying yes throughout the early days of the church without question, if you are a mainstream Christian, Protestant or Catholic, you have to say unity was preserved in the church. It was unity in the truth over and over and over and over again until at some point in history you decide, “Well, I no longer follow the church on XYZ issue.”

Wherever that is, whether it’s Reformation or some other point, you just say, “I no longer believe in unity in the truth. Now I have to choose between unity and the truth.” That is an inconsistent incoherent vision of history and theology, I would argue, and it certainly doesn’t look like obedience to Jesus. And I say this without condemnation because I am convinced people trying to balance unity and truth are trying to figure out how to obey Jesus, but they’ve misinterpreted him in such a way that it becomes literally impossible to obey him about Christian unity and truth. And you need something like the church being the pillar and bulwark of truth, something like the church being trustworthy to be able to say, “Okay, now I know where to find truth and unity, and I no longer have to pick and choose or try to chart my own course to create unity on my own or create truth on my own.”

So hopefully that’s clear. I obviously have not gotten into a lot of the particulars. What does infallibility look like in the church? Is the Pope infallible? When and under what conditions does infallibility work? I’m not trying to settle all of those questions. I’m simply trying to say, if you don’t have some kind of infallibility in the church, if the church is not capable of settling doctrinal disputes infallibly, then there is no hope of being able to follow Jesus faithfully because we’re always having to choose when and how we’re going to disobey him.

Next week, I’m going to turn from looking at Protestants to looking more at Catholics and pose the question, as I alluded to before, are Catholics more divided than Protestants? Because that is an objection that I’ve heard recently, and it’s a question that St. John Henry Newman heard in the 19th century, and I think there’s a good answer to that, but you’re going to have to wait and see what that is. From Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.