Unity in the Magisterium - Part One

I must have been around four years old when I was first paraded in front of the church to sing with my sister. The song was “The B-I-B-L-E,” and I belted the words out with all the zeal I could muster. The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me; I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!

I wasn’t sure what the words meant. Was I proclaiming that I would believe in the Bible even if I was completely alone in doing so? Or did it mean that I would believe only in the Bible and nothing else?

Years later, I realized that the song was proclaiming the second of these two possibilities, a little thing Protestant Reformers called Sola Scriptura. But as a small child, I just liked to sing about Jesus, and I had no idea the problems that existed in the theology of Sola Scriptura.

Then my dad switched denominations (Wesleyan to Presbyterian) and everything changed.

I think that is when I first realized that there are many interpretations of Holy Scripture and that just because it is the inspired Word of God, it doesn’t mean all Christians believe the same way. That is a perplexing thing. The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost to lead the Disciples into all Truth; so why didn’t we all believe the same thing? Truth isn’t just a matter of opinion. But some of the denominations had totally different ideas on when one should be baptized, how one is sanctified and justified before God, and if one can ever lose the gift of grace and mercy once he has it. The questions weren’t simply whether Eve ate an apple or pomegranate. These differences concerned key issues of life, death, and salvation.

To complicate matters further, it was about this same time that my cousins began receiving the charismatic Gifts of the Holy Spirit (they were Assembly of God), and neither the Wesleyans nor the Presbyterians talked about that at all. Obviously, there was a problem with “standing alone on the Word of God” because that’s exactly what everyone seemed to be doing. And nobody could agree on anything.

First and Second Peter talked about following sound doctrine. First John warned about being led astray. The Book of Jude said to beware of those who seek to divide. In First Corinthians, St. Paul reminded us to be perfectly united in mind and thought.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how this was possible.

If all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching as it said in Second Timothy, then we should all be teaching the same thing. And that’s just not what I saw happening. Furthermore, if there is a disagreement in the Body of Christ, the Bible says we are to take some of the elders with us to iron out the disagreement. Fine. But which elders? From which church?

Either Pontius Pilate was right when he said, what is truth? Or Truth is a constant. It can be taught. It can be trusted. It can settle quarrels rather than create them.

There was one more problem with “standing alone on the Word of God.” We live in a changing world. The Bible doesn’t directly address issues like abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, or human cloning. Where is the teaching voice that we can trust to interpret Scripture and guide us through the cultural changes? Who can help us to stand on the Word of God without having that same Word tear us apart? Who is the benefactress and keeper of Truth? Yes, the Holy Spirit leads us into all Truth, but which voice speaks for the Holy Spirit on issues that divide? Private inspiration had not inspired unity. It had inspired over 30,000 different denominations.

The Church had always been the pillar and foundation of Truth - not the Bible. And those were the words of Holy Scripture (Timothy 3:15-16). The Church, not the Bible alone.

Part Two in tomorrow's blog

(article by Denise Bossert first published by One Bread Lay Apostolate at http://www.1bread.catholic.org/)

Unity in the Magisterium - Part One

When Jesus Prays, He Prays for Unity

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus Christ said a very important prayer. Many Christians don’t remember it. I didn’t anyway, and as the daughter of a Protestant minister and former wife of a United Methodist minister, it should have been a memorable part of my faith formation. But if someone had asked me what one thing Jesus prayed for on the night of the Last Supper, the night he was betrayed, and the night of his arrest, I would have had to answer, “I don’t know.”

In the Gospel of John chapter 17, Our Lord prays to the Heavenly Father, proclaiming that the hour has come, and then He prays for His fledgling Church, saying:

I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me. John 17: 20-23

What did our Lord pray for on the night of his betrayal? He prayed that we would be one. That the people gathered in that room would be one, and that all who came after them would be one.
When I reread this passage a couple of years ago, I found myself wondering what that kind of unity would look like? If we could fully understand our Lord’s deepest desires as He prayed this prayer, what would the fulfillment of the prayer be?

Is there even a possibility that our Lord would be content with the way things have turned out? I wondered. Could we read between the lines of His prayer and infer that He meant for His Church to be a loosely connected set of people who call themselves Christians – and that it in no way bothered Him that they had divided into more than 33,000 denominations (according to David B. Barett, World Christian Encyclopedia) and had reached a point where they couldn’t seem to agree on any set of spiritual truths?

Is there even a remote possibility that our Lord’s prayer for unity would resemble the state of the “union” as it appears today? I had my doubts.

And if that isn’t quite what He had in mind, I said to myself, what would it look like? By “one” did Jesus mean for all of us to be Methodist? Assembly of God? Congregational? Was it even possible for all the Protestant denominations to abandon their separate branches of the faith and settle on another reformed branch as the one, true Church? Or was there another possibility?

Was it possible that Jesus meant for us to be one Church, with one deposit of faith, and that we were to remain faithful to that Church because Jesus promised to remain faithful to Her? Could it be that the Church our Lord had prayed for still existed somewhere? Was it possible that there was a Church that had stood the test of time, one that could trace Her roots back to that room and to the Apostles and to Peter and his keys to the kingdom? Was there a firm foundation, a core Church, a place of refuge and source of unity for all Christendom?

For the first time in my life, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch. In fact, it was beginning to make sense that our God would want His Church to be one. After all, this is the same Lord who proclaimed, Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your God is One God. The God who is One God would want nothing less than complete unity for his Church.

The beauty, strength, diversity, and historical significance of the Catholic Church called to me. I realized that the Catholic Church effectively and completely fulfills our Lord’s prayer for unity. This was the nagging truth that kept me exploring the Catholic Faith after spending the first forty years of my life in Protestant denominations. When I was ready to turn tail and run, this prayer haunted me, and I couldn’t abandon the call.

Somehow, I had to find out if my suspicions were true. I imagined a world that contained one unified Church, and I realized what kind of impact that would have on non-believers. How could anyone dismiss Christianity if we were truly one visible Church, I asked myself. When I imagined the world’s response at seeing all the churches come back together as one, it made me shiver with delight. And I realized that Jesus had predicted this in that same prayer when He shared the reason He desired unity among believers: “that the world may know that you sent me.” That just breaks my heart. Our lack of unity has given the world a reason to dismiss Jesus Christ as the Messiah, God’s Son. How can any of us ignore the call to unity when we look at it that way?

(article originally written by Denise Bossert and posted on the One Bread Lay Apostolate websitse which can be found at http://www.1bread.catholic.org/)

When Jesus Prays, He Prays for Unity