When The Pope proposed to visit Britain many ecclesias were uncertain if a special preaching effort was right, and many shied away from the opportunity to challenge the Apostasy forthrightly. Our Canadian brethren seem to be made of stronger stuff. The visit of the pope to Canada was met by a coordinated preaching effort, which included a 163-page paperback preaching book entitled How sure are the foundations? An appeal to Roman Catholics. The book was published by the ASK (Advancement of Scriptural Knowledge), the equivalent of the ALS in the U.K. Brethren and sisters in the U.K. should see and read this book, if only to appreciate what can be done if there is an eagerness to witness faithfully and to take the opportunities the Lord affords us.
The book is written as a narrative describing discussions between a Christadelphian couple and a Roman Catholic couple. My own personal inclination does not lean towards such an approach; but I found that, once having started to read the book, uncomfortableness about the narrative style was soon replaced by enthusiasm for the clear, careful and convincing arguments put forward by the brother and sister in the discussions. The narrative approach was intended to ease the Catholic reader gently into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar consideration of the conflict between the teaching of Scripture and that of the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic couple in the story would be considered middle-class in the U.K., and their American style of conversation, as well as their reasoning approach, will be quite alien to the majority of working-class Catholics in the U.K. But of course such a book could not be written about unreasoning people.
The narrative serves its purpose; but the real test will come from its use in preaching. In Canada it seems to have been very successful. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case in the U.K., but certainly it should be tried.
The book is in 9 chapters, with an epilogue and a “Resource Section and Bibliography”. The latter is referenced by chapters and page numbers in the text: an asterisk raised above a sentence line indicates that further in-depth comment and references are to be found in the Resource Section. The cover is colourful, with a picture of thousands of people standing in St. Peter’s Square, and the question mark of the title placed directly on the Vatican building. The subjects treated in the book are limited to one major and one minor theme. The first is the fundamental topic of authority for belief, and the second is the nature of man. The unpalatable truths about the Apostasy as recounted in Scripture are not referred to—an omission which must be counted as a weakness even though the objective of the book is limited to bringing the reader to accept the Scriptures as the authority for truth.
The Catholic couple in the story do their homework and bring forward a number of Catholic works which are quoted. Each has the Church’s imprimatur mark on it which gives it official approval, so no-one could criticise the author for setting up straw men to knock down. One of the books quoted is The Faith of Millions by J. A. O’Brien (1958). It was written for the non-Catholic reader and was selected because “it has been one of the most comprehensive treatments of common questions asked of the Roman Catholic religion”, O’Brien says: “There is a duty, however, resting upon every one to search for the truth . . . The writer asks but one favour of the non-Catholic reader; that he will examine the evidence with an open mind”; and: “The Catholic Church asks no more and no less. She is convinced of the objective weight and cogency of her credentials when correctly understood. She buttresses with no appeal to emotions. She is perfectly willing to have them stand or fall, be accepted or rejected on their intrinsic merit”.
So far so good. But when looked at further, the contradiction between this reasonable approach and Church dogma soon becomes apparent. The Catholic Study Edition of The New American Bible is referred to as saying that
“only through the Church can the proper interpretation of the Bible be made available. . . the Church produced the Scriptures and is to be the one that interprets the Scriptures”.
Other quotations from The New Catholic Encyclopaedia are added which show the bigotry of the Church. The situation is summarised by Brother ‘Alec’:
“the Church has to approve of persons using private judgement in making the first decision about the authority claimed by the Church or whether one should become a Catholic or not, but such private judgement is not reliable after this first decision has been made in favour of your Church. It suggests that men are competent to form sound judgements on the first major decision (i.e. to accept the Church) but are quite incapable to use the same reasoning powers to help them judge or interpret, on their own, other matters of Catholic teaching” (p. 24).
The answer to the claims of the Catholic Church are to be found in Scripture. There is no Scripture which says that another authority is required to interpret God’s Word. Not even the Apostle Peter, claimed by Catholics to be the founder of their Church, hints at this; but rather, in 2 Peter 1:5,8 he refers to the onus of responsibility on the individual to understand. For the reviewer this use of the Epistle of Peter was a new and powerful approach. The Catholic response is to quote John 14-16 and to claim that the Holy Spirit was to be with the Church for ever to guide it into all truth, including teachings not found in the Bible, that is, Church traditions. The Church claims an unbroken link back to Christ and this promise of the Comforter. How important it is then to have a correct understanding of these chapters! The answer given by Brother Alec in the narrative is clear and accurate. Jesus was, of course, speaking specifically to the apostles. The apostles could prove their authority by miraculous signs and wonders (2 Cor. 12:12). The Scriptures claim to be revelation from God, not teaching derived from the Church. But what about Jesus’s words to Peter about the foundation of the Church in Matthew 16? The writings of the Church Fathers which may be introduced here by Catholics are shown to be contradictory.
The text of Matthew 16 is examined in detail, and Peter himself is brought forward (1 Pet 2:6-8) to show that Jesus, not he, is the foundation of the ecclesia. Other related arguments are presented here in detail which are helpful additions to our armoury.
The discussions move on to the nature of man, a subject which in Catholic theology is directly linked to the seven sacraments. A solid Christadelphian lecture is outlined, and the Catholic listener has to conclude: ” . . . if the Roman Catholic position regarding the soul is clearly in error, then the whole doctrine of the sacraments and grace is also shown to be false” (p. 105). The priest cannot help much at this stage since the only answer to the clear Bible teaching is that revelation about the doctrine of the immortal soul was “progressive”, that is, it was given to the Church after the time of Christ and the apostles. As the Catholic Catechism says:
“The early Christian community did not focus its reflections so much on death as on the awaited triumphal return of Christ. . . Hence in early New Testament times there was no great preoccupation with the death of the individual. In later centuries the Church’s teaching on the condition of the individual after his death and before the final resurrection at the end of time was solemnly defined”.
One Catholic organisation has even published a pamphlet ( with imprimatur) entitled Some Bible beliefs have to be wrong! It admits that the immortality of the soul cannot be proved from the Bible:
“Thus whereas the Bible does not, it is true, speak of the immortality of the human soul— a concept which it does not have in our sense of this word—it does speak of the immortality of the human person. And in our language, this means the immortality of the human soul”.
The final chapter sees the Catholic friend disillusioned with the Church’s position and arguing from Scripture with his priest and well on the road to salvation. Would that all our Catholic neighbours would so earnestly and honestly consider the Scriptures! But even if only a very few will do so, this little book may help them build upon a sure foundation.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)