Two Clear Descriptions of the Body of Christ Present Today

The second letter of Peter provides the most vivid, precise, and yet simple description of the shattered fragments of the Christian Faith that many today choose to believe are all that remains of the Body of Christ now present in the world.

You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves.  Even so, many will follow their licentious ways, and because of these teachers the way of truth will be maligned.  And in their greed they will exploit you with deceptive words. Their condemnation, pronounced against them long ago, has not been idle, and their destruction is not asleep (2 Peter 1: 20- 2:3).

An analogy about six blind men and their encounter with an elephant is an incredibly precise illustration of the practical/pragmatic cause and its effect, that is described in this prophecy by Peter. 

The internet attributes a poem, “The Blind Men and the Elephant” to John G. Saxe as the best modern version of a much older story.

The poem describes six blind Indostan men, who in their quest for knowledge, each touch one spot on an elephant. All six are firmly convinced that they know and have expressed everything that needs to be known about an elephant. There are, of course, six conflicting descriptions that are the result of where each blind man touched the elephant.

The end result is a shouting match over whether the elephant is like a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope.   And while each blind man had a valid reason for his opinion, not one of the opinions expressed the full and true essence of the elephant or its body, trunk, tusk, leg, ear, or tail.

For years, I was concerned by clearly sincere Protestant individuals who professed to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, who insisted that was all that the Lord required of them to absolutely assure their salvation. Their opinion was based upon the Scriptural statement:

if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ (Romans 10:9-13).

Examined in isolation, and separated from other Scriptural statements, the assumption of those Protestants appears to be what that passage means.  Except that opinion is dominated by the unvoiced word “ALONE”, which has been unconsciously added to the text.  I never had any doubt that they were wrong, but for years I could not see why they were wrong.  That “problem” existed for more than 60 years. before I would be able to use Scripture to identify and present this explanation of their error.  (I.e., See Paul’s explanation of the correct use of Scripture in 2 Tim 3: 14 through 4: 5 and Our Lord’s description in John 14: 21–24 of the true key essential for our salvation. This is Our Lord’s teaching of who is saved; as Jesus clearly and unambiguously states it: 

‘They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’

And again:

Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.’  ( John 14:21–24 ).         

Jesus expressed this truth again in slightly different words:

‘My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ….’

 ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.  You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.’ ( John 15: 8–17).

Do seriously, prayerfully, and carefully read what Jesus said in John 6: 47-51 and 53-58:

 ‘Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.  I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

So Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;  for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.  This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.’ 

The error that we all make to one tiny degree for some or a devastatingly huge degree for others, is carelessly assuming that one or more tiny details — that appeal to us –are everything we need to know about God and His revelation!  One of the “weeds” that Matthew warns about is the deadly poison in the word “alone” with its exclusion of everything else of importance. Everyone is tempted to add the idea of “alone” to what is only a partial tidbit of God’s glorious plan, whether found in Scripture or the teaching of the Church. While the individual statement is true; it’s just never complete!  No single, isolated, individual, separated statement of Scripture contains every important detail in God’s revelation to man, not even on a single subject.  Human language is too finite to achieve that.

Recall that in the parable of a sower, some of the seed fell among thorns, which are one kind of weed.

The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand’  (See Matt 13: 3-23).

Matthew immediately follows the above by presenting Christ’s parable of the Weeds among the Wheat in Matthew 13: 24-30, which expands the weeds lesson from one kind of weed to every kind of weed.

We can see these weeds in the world today, Christ’s revelation overlaid with the human limitations introduced as subtle additions to what Scripture actually states and the Church actually teaches. People everywhere focus on this or that important truth to the exclusion of other vitally important truths.

This parable of the weeds is an example of the point I am making because Jesus first identifies the weeds as “the children of the evil one”. In my experience, everyone seems to ignore Christ’s other crucially important statement:

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers ( Matt 13: 41).

There is a vital blind spot that permeates the presentation of the Catholic Faith as I have experienced it.  The factual details are presented in the table below for those who are interested enough to examine the issue and verify the truth for themselves.

This defined dogma, produced by the first Vatican Council in 1869-1870, was promulgated at the closing session of that Council by Pope Pius IX. Pope Pius IX concluded the promulgation of this irreformable defined Catholic doctrine with the admonition:

If anyone should presume to contradict this definition of ours – may God prevent that happening – anathema sit.

For the information of those interested, one translation of this irreformable dogma that partially identifies the means that God uses to protect His revelation through the Catholic Church reads:

with the approval of the sacred council, we teach and define that it is a divinely revealed dogma that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, i.e., when exercising his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians he defines, by his supreme apostolic authority, a doctrine of faith or morals which must be held by the universal Church, enjoys, through the divine assistance, that infallibility promised to him in blessed Peter and with which the divine Redeemer wanted His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith or morals; and therefore that the definitions of the same Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church (“The Gift of Infallibility” by Rev James T. O’Connor).

The subtitle of Reverend O’Connor’s book is:  “The Official Relatio on Infallibility of Bishop Vincent Gasser at Vatican Council I”.

This disparity between the actual defined dogma and the opinion that theologians never stopped teaching is visibly present even in the statements by two Cardinals at Vatican Council I itself:

The definition is infallible and irreformable, not the person, though to the person is given the assistance whereby he has the authority to issue such definitions (Cardinal Guidi, page 353).

In this definition the subject of the infallibility, i.e. the person who exercises it, is the Roman Pontiff as Pontiff, as a public person in relation with the universal Church (Bishop Gasser, page 393).“The Vatican Council 1869-1870 by Dom Cuthbert Butler).

There is a Youtube video with the optimistic title of:  “All Christian Denominations explained in 12 minutes” that is inadvertently an example of this error of excessively focusing on one detail of Revelation to the exclusion of other vital information (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzLS4O7YaUg).

This bit of wisdom from Mr. Sheed’s book, “Theology and Sanity” is offered as food for further thought:

Given that there is immense difference of opinion upon the meaning of every teaching Christ gave,  there is no way of knowing with certainty what Christ means, unless there is here upon earth a living teacher who can settle it without the possibility of error.  No other way is even suggested for attaining certainty as to what Christ meant.  And what He meant is what matters.

I add my belief that by the gift of Jesus, Mr. Sheed’s living teacher is the Catholic Church through a dogmatic definition of faith or morals, by an Ecumenical Council, by the Pope in the full but infrequent exercise of the authority conferred individually upon Peter and his successors by Jesus, or by:

the entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, …. when, they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals          (Chapter 1, paragraph 12 , of the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”, The Second Vatican Council). 

I have omitted important details to briefly identify the heart of this key doctrine of the Catholic Faith. It seems self-evident that anyone who attacks the pope and bishops is not “faithful” to the continued presence of Jesus in His Body, the Church.

I found it shocking and sad that with the exception of Mr. Frank Sheed, every outstanding defender of the Catholic faith that I am aware of who was still actively engaged since I converted to the Catholic Faith, had replaced the defined doctrine’s “defines a doctrine of faith or morals” with the words “the Pope teaches …faith or morals”.