A QUESTION I WAS ASKED:
'What do you think of all the fanfare on the death of Pope? What part do you think that the Roman Catholic Church plays in the Bible?'
That
is quite a difficult question to answer. Regarding the deceased pope,
first of all he has to be admired, of course, for having the courage
to speak out against abortion when so few other Christian leaders
have done so; also his opposition to homosexuality, in the midst of western liberalism, was admirable.
Yet, doctrinally, as we know, the Roman Catholic
Church is very compromised and they have not maintained the
Apostolic Succession
system which - according to their own
teachings - is supposedly of such great importance. In other words,
they were not all ordained by the laying on of hands of their
predecessors in their own prescribed way (in earlier centuries
some even bought the office of 'pope' for money!). Neither do they
uphold the 'faith of our fathers' in any kind of pure sense
since they claim that their own church traditions are of equal
importance to Scripture (they believe that this authority was
handed to Peter – Matthew 16:18-19; Matthew 18:18-20 - whom
they insist on seeing as 'the first pope'). This, of course, has
traditionally been a big problem for Protestants who traditionally
have taken the 'Sola Scriptura' (Scripture alone) approach.
Catholicism's errors are very serious, and yet, I see errors over
huge swathes of Christianity, quite apart from Roman
Catholicism. The Liberal Protestantism of the 19th century,
for instance, did huge harm to large areas of formerly
Bible-believing Christianity and the major denominations have never
quite recovered from that onslaught in which ministers were trained
in colleges and seminaries which had substituted the true gospel for
another message which was about Jesus but considered Him only
to be a great and inspiring leader but which rejected the vital
doctrine of substitionary
atonement(that is, that
Jesus died upon the cross for our sins, and if He had not done so, we
could never have been reconciled to God).
All one can say is that -
through all the confusion - the Lord knows His own and He has founded
and established His Church made up of people who walk in faith in
Jesus and are led by the Spirit - they are surely to be found
scattered throughout various Christian groupings. The True Church is
a Spiritual Body – not any instituition or
organisation of men (John 4:23-24; John 18:36), sadly a few never
seem to grasp this and spend year after desperate year looking for
the perfect church organisation – there is no such
thing!!
The members of Christ's
Body are necessarily Bible-believing people yet I have little
doubt that there will be doctrinal differences between them. Although
in the New Testament believers are certainly encouraged to hold on to
sound doctrinal teachings (Acts 17:11; 1 Timothy 6:3-5; 2 Peter 3:18;
Jude 3-4), those Scriptures which speak of the saved and redeemed
rarely seem to speak of correct doctrines, but seem to show that
those who continually look to Christ and His kingdom in complete
faith whilst manifesting the love of God in their lives are the
Lord's people (notice the whole of Matthew 25, for instance, just
about every parable, and also Galatians 5:13-25; Revelation 7:9-14;
Revelation 14:4-5.
Robin Brace. Easter, 2005.