One True Church

 

 

What is the pillar and foundation of truth? As a Protestant I would have said the Bible is the pillar of truth. But according to the Bible itself, I would be wrong. Do not get me wrong. The Bible is the inerrant Word of God. But it is not the pillar and ground of truth. But according to the Bible, the CHURCH is the pillar and foundation of truth!

 But if I should be delayed, you should know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth

1 Tim 3:15 

This was hard for me to understand as a Protestant. In Protestantism, you have so many different churches saying conflicting things. One would say that you must accept Jesus as your Savior and Lord to be saved. Another said that you must accept Jesus as your savior only. Baptists usually say that a true Christian can never lose his salvation. But then there are Free-Will Baptists who say that a Christian can lose his salvation. Lutherans believe in baptismal regeneration. Baptist do not. First-Reformed Church believe in predestination. Methodists believe in free will.

 

Since they all say things that are conflicting, they cannot all be true churches, if a church is the pillar and foundation of truth. According to 1 Timothy  3:15, all that we call churches cannot in God’s eyes be actually a church. The true church is a pillar and foundation of truth. Truth cannot contradict itself. That means that not every denomination can be the true church of God. Only one church can actually be the church of God.

 

This does not automatically make that true church to be the Catholic Church, but at least the Catholic Church is defining the issue correctly.  All the other “churches” like to say that all of them are part of the church of God, and they resent the Catholic Church saying that it is the only true church. But you are cannot have churches with conflicting beliefs to all be the pillars and foundations of truth. If the Lutheran Church has the full truth, then it is the true church and the other churches are not true churches. If the Baptist Church has the truth, then other churches are not really churches. If the Lutheran church has some of the truth, and the Baptist church has only some of the truth, then neither of them can be true churches. For a church to be the pillar and foundation of truth, the church has to be COMPLETELY right. And for the church to be completely right, that church would have to be infallible.

 

As far as I know, there is only one church that even claims for itself to be infallible, and that is the Catholic Church. All the other churches admit that they are fallible. So if they are admitting they are not infallible, they are admitting that they are not the pillar and foundation of truth, so they cannot be the church of the living God.

 

Please do not misunderstand me. Just because the Catholic Church teaches that it is the only true church of God, it does not mean that only those who are Catholics will go to heaven. In fact, sometimes I think that there may be more Protestants  going to heaven than Catholics. The Catholic Church teaches the “invincibility of ignorance”. God will have mercy on someone, whether he be Protestant, Jew, Mormon, Muslim, etc, who may sincerely not believe the Catholic Church is the true church, but tries to love God and others. The Catholic Church teaches that many of these people will go to heaven. But a Catholic is far less able to plead invinciblity of ignorance, he has no excuse. God will be much harder on this person who chooses to disobey the teachings of the Church. So actually, by me being a Catholic, I will be judged more strictly than my Protestant friends.

 

So the issue is not which church will have its members go to heaven. The issue is truth. For a church to be the pillar and foundation of truth, the church must infallible. And if a church is to be infallible, then all other churches that disagree with it must be fallible, and if fallible then they are not the pillar and foundation of truth. It does not mean that the are completely wrong, it is just that they are not completely right.

 

We are living in a sea of relativism, where everybody is right and nobody is wrong. Something can be true to you, and something else can be true to me. College professors tell their students that there is no such thing as absolute truth. People laugh at you when you say there is an objective right and wrong. The only thing that is wrong is to impose your values on others. How did we get into this mess? I contend that it happened with the Reformation.

 

Before the Reformation, everybody believed in absolute truth. Everybody believed in objective right and wrong. They may have fallen short, but at least they understood in a right and wrong that applied to everyone.  They would agree with St Paul when he wrote:

 

4 There is one body, and one Spirit, even as also ye were called in one hope of your calling

5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,

6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all.

Ephesians 4:4-6

 

There is only one body, only one church. There is only one Lord, one faith, baptism, one baptism. There were not many different ways to think of the Lord. There was only one way, the Catholic way. There were not different beliefs and modes for baptism. There was only one faith, and it applied to all. The word “Catholic” means universal. Truth applies to everyone. You did not have a Lutheran faith for some, and a Baptist faith for others. Truth was an absolute. The same right and wrong applied to everyone. 

But Martin Luther changed all that. Each person can read the Bible for himself and find the truth for himself. The Enlightenment took that one step further. Why bother with the Bible at all? Let’s just have everyone find the truth for himself. It was soon realized, whether with the Bible or without it, that people came up with different ideas of truth. Instead of realizing their mistake about finding truth on their own and come home to the Catholic Church, they just thought to themselves that maybe having different ideas of the truth was not such a bad idea. I once heard a Protestant preacher  say that it was actually good to have so many Protestant denominations. And so you have the birth of relativism – whether it be within a religious or secular context. There is no longer any absolute truth. There are a few Protestant churches that try to still hold onto absolute truth, but they do this by isolating themselves from other Christians, hiding from conflicting beliefs that will threaten their faith. But aside from sticking their heads in the ground, Protestants were exposed to other Protestants who used the same Bible for different beliefs. This leads to an attitude that is does not matter what you believe, as long as you can support it from the Bible. The non-Christian world takes it one step farther, and say that the Bible itself does not matter.

For us to get back to absolute truth, we need to come back to the Catholic Church. The Bible is not enough. There are so many different interpretations of the Bible. True, it is the word of truth. But the Bible is not the pillar and foundation of truth. We need the true Church, the Pillar and Foundation of Truth, to correctly interpret the written Word of truth.

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