The Visible Church

"Theology for Beginners" by Frank Sheed has the subtitle of, "A Modern Classic." I feel the title, which appears a little self-serving, becomes a good descriptor of the book. Sheed writes in a way that is easy to understand and conversational, almost in the stylings of C.S. Lewis himself. Further, several gems pop out at you from his writings. I'd like to write a few quotes from one chapter in particular, "The Visible Church" that were "Aha" moments for me.

"There is a feeling that one who makes all his own decisions in religion is freer and more natural. But if a man joins, or remains in, the church because he believes Christ founded it to give us truth and life and union with Him, then it is mere sanity to accept the doctrines and the moral laws it tells us Christ has given it, and the means of life and union. It is not as if we could discover these things for ourselves. We know them on God's revelation or not at all. We must find the teacher authorized by God to teach and accept his authority. The alternative is to go without. And freedom is not served by ignorance."

I feel this is what many people say about "religion" or any kind of structured church. But we all accept teaching from somewhere, even from ourselves. Ultimately it is the Holy Spirit that guides us to truth, but then how can so many people be guided to different truths? It is because we are not looking to the correct teacher. Perhaps we are not able to discern on our own the truth we hear or believe. That is why he says we are not able to discover these things on our own - because even if we searched and studied, we would not be able to discern the truth between different messages without the Holy Spirit.

"She [the church] has had popes who made no fetish of personal holiness, but not one of them has ever tried to reword the law of God to allow for the indulgence of his own temptations."

This is a wonderful apologetic statement for those who use the failures of the popes to reject the Catholic church, and Sheed is absolutely right. There have been popes with mistresses, it is unfortunately true. But none of these popes has come out and said that mistresses are a good thing, a holy thing, or not a sin. Instead, they have had to personally take on the burden and shame of living a double life, but the teachings of the church have remained intact.

In addition, a similar thought really helped me on my road to determining if I should convert. Many people will accuse Catholic teachings of not being biblical, or even being anti-biblical. But the Catholics use the same Bible as Protestants. In fact, it was early Catholics who wrote the Bible we all use today - although the "Catholic Church" did not write individual letters in the New Testament (the apostles did), it chose which letters to include in the canon we now know as the Bible. If the church thought its teachings were anti-biblical, would it not be easier for it to change the Bible itself than to defend its actions? I speak in a general sense here, but specific doctrines do hold up against the Bible, and many hold up better than their Protestant counterparts.

"A medicine must be judged not by those who buy it but by those who actually take it. A Church must be judged by those who hear and obey, not by those who half-hear and disobey when obedience is difficult."

Like the quote above, this quote emphasizes that we are not to say the teachings of the church of a whole are invalid because of the lack of holiness of its members. In fact, we are all less than holy, although some are more holy or unholy than others. Still, any church would agree that they want to be judged by the message they are teaching rather than the actions its members do with the message. And though members of the Catholic Church can fail miserably, but it saints have been inspirations for the entire world.

"It seems so strange that so many Christians think the Apostles fulfilled their commission by writing the New Testament, leaving behind them no successors, nor any need for successors, with the authority the Lord had given themselves. It seems strange, for one reason, that it would mean only five of the twelve had obeyed their Master - Matthew writing a gospel, John a gospel and three brief letters, Peter two letters, James and Jude one each. Not a word written from Thomas, for instance, so ready with his tongue...
It would seem strange for another reason - that the Church Christ founded would be a teaching church only for a half-century or so, in all the centuries since merely a library. Circumstances change and someone must have the authority to apply the teachings to the new circumstances; otherwise they would end up as frustrations rather than teachings. Even in the doctrines themselves there are depths which the believing mind can explore, with all the danger of error but all the rich possibilities of development. With every operation of the unstagnant mind of man upon the truth, the question must arise, "What did Christ mean?"
So it has proved. There is not a word uttered by Christ that has not met a great number of diverse interpretations, some of them intelligent, some immensely attractive, but contradicting each other. How are we to know? Without a teacher - to tell us, beyond the possibility of error, which of the various meanings is Christ's - we should have no revelation but only an ever growing pile of conundrums."

This is a beautiful, clear way of explaining some of the thoughts that went through my head before I decided to become Catholic. There were too many people running around interpreting things differently, and even though some interpretations were very intelligent, they could also be contradictory. I knew that God would no have left us to live in a world of chaos! There had to be A truth out there to find.