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 l... Read more on Catholic.com