This is intended to be a positive, brotherly study and not “anti,” whether in reference to Roman Catholicism or Church of Christism. Both of these churches are making remarkable changes, and I applaud that. While the old Catholicism is still a part of the modern church, many Roman Catholics today are as devoted to a renewal of the Christian faith as any of the rest of us. The old party-line of the Church of Christ is also being challenged by many within that church.

This means that the statements made herein do not apply to everyone in these churches. But change and renewal will be hastened if we better understand our problems. To solve any problem we must first understand it. So I am referring to the “Roman Catholic” Church of Christ in an attempt to identify the source of some of our doctrines and practices. This is not to imply necessarily that we “got them from the Catholics,” but that we and the Roman Catholics may be misled by the same mentality, whatever be its source.

When we in Churches of Christ come to see that we are much like the old Catholicism, it may help us both to understand ourselves better, to be more charitable toward the errors of others, and to make some mid-course corrections.

1. The infallible church.

The traditional Roman Catholic sees his church as the only true church, and he refers to “the Church” in the same exclusive way traditional Church of Christ members do. The mind-set for the “true church” fallacy is the same, based on a presumed infallible source. While Roman Catholicism finds the true church in the Holy See that is traceable to St. Peter, the Church of Christ finds the infallible church in exact detail in the New Testament, which it presumes to have “restored.” While Roman Catholicism has an infallible succession of popes for its authentic posture, the Church of Christ has an infallible “marks of the true church” for its claim, such as the right name, the right organization, the right doctrine and practice, and the right worship. One names popes all the way back to Peter; the other names doctrines back to Pentecost. Neither is Christ-centered in its emphasis. Neither says anything like “the church is where Christ is in the hearts of people.” They are both authoritarian in their view of the church (that is, authority is in the Church), only in different ways.

2. An infallible interpretation of Scripture.

While both of these churches have areas of latitude where differences are allowed, they nonetheless assume an infallible posture in areas where they are unique in their claims. One cannot be “a devout Catholic” who questions the authority of the pope or the sacraments of the church. Nor is one a faithful Church of Christ member if he is not anti-instrumental music, and the “five acts of worship” in the Church of Christ are treated with an intensity similar to the sacraments in the Roman church.

The Church of Christ often assumes an infallibility of interpretation that rivals anything in the Roman church. Whether it be a question about baptism or the divorce and remarriage issue, the proof texts all mean what they say they mean, and anyone who differs is branded a false teacher. The defenders of the faith are as infallible and absolute as any pope ever was, and anyone who questions them is often treated with scorn. Fortunately there are many exceptions to this overbearing attitude, but our people generally have a reputation of believing themselves to be right and everyone else wrong. We are infallible interpreters of the Bible!

3. The confessional and the Father Confessor.

Since we do virtually the same thing, we should apologize to our Roman Catholic friends for criticizing their confessional. What is the difference between doing penance before one priest in a booth and before two hundred priests (We say each member is a priest) “down front.” One confesses in a booth and the other before a congregation. Priests will sometimes tell a penitent to go to the altar and do 12 “Hail Marys” and 12 “Our Fathers,” and we think that is awful. But we send our penitents “down the aisle” and “up front” in order to make things right. While the priest says “I absolve you,” our congregations, with the minister presiding, says in effect “We forgive you.” Again it is the authority of the church at work.

Since I am truly Protestant and one who looks to the Scriptures and to Jesus Christ as the authority, I do not believe in either of the confessionals. I confess my sins to the heavenly Father and not to any man or group of men, for only God can forgive sins. If I have sinned against someone, yes, of course, I should seek his forgiveness when this is possible, and if I have sinned against an entire church, which would be unlikely, then I might go before the entire church. But our churches make the “down front confessional” regular procedure. This is how we “restore” folk! It is one more example of how we have institutionalized the church, making the minister and the congregation a Father Confessor.

If we are critical of women whispering their most secret sins into the ears of a young priest, we might question the same thing when it takes place in the minister’s study in a Church of Christ. In a Roman Catholic church she at least has the protection of a partition —and sworn secrecy! Not a few of our preachers have succumbed to sin in this unnatural and dangerous practice. The New Testament would have the older women in the church to help the younger in such matters (Tit. 2:3-5).

4. Gospel of works.

While the most spiritual minds in both churches have sought to correct this, a doctrine of salvation by works pervade the Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of Christ alike. And a works-oriented religion builds more fear than joy in the hearts of its people, along with guilt feelings and uncertainty of one’s salvation. The churches are similar in their demand for compliance and conformity. Only the details differ. This results in a joyless faith, all too evident in these churches. I watched as a dear Roman Catholic made her way on her knees for hundreds of yards to a shrine in Mexico City, convinced that this would have atoning power, a practice repeated around the world in Roman churches.

But Church of Christ folk often reflect the same neglect of the grace of God in their attitude toward what they call “acts of worship” or being baptized. It is the ancient error that we are saved by doing good, penitential things, “works of righteousness,” which the gospel of the grace of God clearly denies (Titus 3:5). Those victimized by a salvation by works are always uncertain and uneasy about their relation to the heavenly Father, for they can never work hard enough or be right enough to gain assurance.

Works-oriented religion will not draw upon the power of the Holy Spirit. To be Spirit-filled and to be taught by the Spirit are terribly neglected by these churches. Even though “led by the Spirit” is biblical terminology, it is almost an unknown reality. Much of Church of Christism and Roman Catholicism “holds a form of godliness but denies the power thereof” (2 Tim. 3:5). Jesus Christ is lost in forms and systems and isms, even in his own church. Sermons may be preached but not necessarily Jesus Christ and him crucified. It is a tragedy that so many professed Christians hear so little and learn so little about Jesus Christ in their own churches. “I stand at the door and knock,” said Jesus to one of his churches (Rev. 3:20), and it must still be true that the Lord is on the outside of many of his churches, seeking entrance. People today are hungry for reality and meaning. We will find receptive hearts when we give them the only ultimate reality there is, Jesus Christ.

5. An elder-priest-pope hierarchy.

There is a striking similarity between the Church of Christ system of “eldership” and the Roman Catholic institution of priesthood, especially in reference to authority in the church. No Roman Catholic priest or bishop rules his church or diocese with any more arbitrary power than the eldership in a typical Church of Christ. In both instances there is no semblance of democracy. Decision-making is completely out of the hands of the people. Not only do the people have no say, but they have no recourse in reference to the decisions made for them. The people are expected to pay and perhaps pray, but not to think, at least not in reference to the affairs of the church.

Furthermore, criticism is not welcomed. Indeed, to question either a priest or an elder is unthinkable. If a Roman Catholic places himself under the authority of the pope, the Church of Christ member places himself under the authority of the eldership. That very language is used among Churches of Christ. Since this is so foreign to the spirit of freedom in the Scriptures, we can account for this development in these two churches only in terms of the institutionalization of the Christian faith, which always moves away from freedom to power structures. When our Lord spoke of such power he insisted that “It shall not be so among you” (Lk. 22:25-26). Both of these churches have moved too far from that ideal.

6. Heresy and heretics.

In 1616 Galileo was summoned to the inquisition in Rome where his scientific findings were condemned as “foolish, absurd, false in theology, and heretical.” He was forced to renounce “the heresy of the movement of the earth,” which he had learned from Copernicus, who died before he could be condemned. Galileo remained silent for years, but when a new pope took the throne he again spoke out, supposing the new pope would be more open to scientific progress. He was mistaken. Recantation saved him from torture and death but not from prison. As a heretic he was not allowed burial in his family’s tomb. He was a heretic because he believed it was the earth that moved instead of the sun.

While the Church of Christ in its brief history has no such impressive heretics as Copernicus and Galileo, it has nonetheless brought dreadful judgement upon its “heretics” who are of the same kind even if of a lesser order. Deviation from the party line, whether in terms of such prophetic views as premillennialism or even refusing to make instrumental music a test of fellowship, has been equated with heresy. Pat and Shirley Boone, in a celebrated case in California, were “withdrawn from” for speaking in tongues. One church “withdraws” from another, an odd development in the history of polity, because it is “liberal” or because it “fellowships the denominations.”

Both churches have, therefore, made heresy a matter of nonconformity, a breach from “what the church believes,” and not the New Testament concept which makes the heretic one who is factious. The most peace-loving, Christlike people have been tortured, burned at the stake, imprisoned, shamefully charged, “written up” and excommunicated or withdrawn from only because they would not conform to orthodoxy. We have been guilty of skimming off the cream by driving away our very best minds, only because they question the status quo or plead for change. Both churches have a history of making it a sin to think. Members are expected to accept what they are told.

7. Obscurantism

This is the besetting sin of both of these churches, if not of religion in general, for obscurantism is opposition to free and liberal thinking and to human progress and enlightenment. It is a grievous sin in that it is intentional. The obscurantist is deliberately obscure and vague, using jargon or a special vocabulary that the common man cannot understand. In churches generally all through history much of the service, particularly creedal statements, have been nonsense. Sermons are often irrelevant and boring, far removed from people’s real needs. Members of churches have become spectators to a “service” that they presume is supposed to be above their heads. They “go to church” with no real expectation of getting anything out of it; they are going more but enjoying it less. But obscurantism is so grievous that it builds fear rather than love in people’s hearts.

I know a family whose son has become a Church of Christ minister. Being more open than they, he sometimes preaches in other churches, and once he was the guest speaker in a church near his parent’s home. Of course, they wanted to go hear him, but they dare not. Since he was their own son, they might have gotten by with attending a “denominational church” (other than for a funeral or wedding!), but obscurantism was so built into their way of life that they could do nothing but conform.

Obscurant priests and preachers are often so caught up in doing the “right” thing that they can’t do the loving thing. I dream of our people becoming so free in Christ that an elder or preacher would call the parents of that young minister and say, “I notice your son is to speak at the Baptist church tonight. My wife and I were just saying that we would like to go along with you to hear him.” And there are priests who would surprise the young lady in their church who is getting serious about a Protestant young man if they should say, “That fellow you are dating seems to be a fine chap. How are things going?”

Our high school kids are embarrassed when they hear some of our preachers rave and rant about evolution and the “atheists” who teach such “rot” in our schools when their own biology teacher, who teaches what he believes about the origin of things with more forbearance and Christian grace than those who impugn his motives and call him names. The kids are not any less turned off when their own church leaders make a big deal about “evolution in the textbooks” and make a march on Austin with a view of banning books. Book burning and book banning and book censoring are the “causes” of the obscurantists. This journal has received some of that kind of attention. Our best advertising comes from those who tell their people not to read us.

Dear old Copernicus was brighter than he was courageous. Once he discovered scientific truths that were destined to change man’s view of the universe he dared not reveal his findings, and so for 30 years he remained silent. He feared the church. Finally when he was too old to be reproached by the church he persuaded a frightened printer to publish his findings to the world. Galileo took up where Copernicus left off and we have seen what happened to him. Obscurantism! If we in the Church of Christ are critical of such bondage, we need to ask what we have done to our people when they are uneasy about speaking up in a Bible class and saying what they really think. How many of our folk are free to share something beautiful they heard on TV from Pat Robertson or read from Chuck Swindoll?

Both of these churches have been oppressive in their obscurant attitude toward divorce and the divorced. Again, they are so “right” and “doctrinal” that they know too little of mercy and tenderness. The divorced are often driven from the church. Divorce is treated as the unforgivable sin. We even resort to “forbidding to marry” which the Scriptures treat as a sign of apostasy, in dealing with the divorced, for we tell them that they must remain unmarried. Oddly enough, the Scriptures never forbid a divorced person from marrying. We do have an injunction in 1 Cor. 7:11 that if mates separate they are not to marry but to be reconciled to each other, but this refers to separated couples and not divorced. Any divorced person is free to marry and “forbidding to marry” is the doctrine of an obscurant clergy. This does not mean that divorce may not be and often is wrong, but once a union is absolved through divorce another marriage is lawful, even if not always best.

Repressive measures toward the divorced among Churches of Christ is in part tempered these days by the fact that divorce has invaded the homes of our elders and preachers. While unmarried priests do not learn forbearance in this way, they too are having to face the reality that divorce is here to stay and that the church must deal with it in a more positive way. Divorce is often the lesser of two evils, and we have no reason to suppose that God intends for his children to live a hell on earth in an impossible marriage. Divorce is sometimes a blessing, just as surgery is, and much for the same reason.

Obscurantism is willing for the church to remain divided rather for traditions to be threatened. Through the centuries the clergy has preserved division rather than to promote unity. It is serious to charge church leaders. with keeping their own people in darkness, but such is obscurantism.

When I heard of a woman being arrested for attempting to perform priestly service in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, I realized before I criticized that she probably would have fared no better in a Church of Christ. Both churches have been less than magnanimous in their attitude toward the ministry of women. Obscurantism has blurred our vision of the great principle laid down by the apostle Paul, In Christ there is neither male nor female.

The essence of all this is that these two churches have lost the Christ in the morass of systems and obscurities. When Luther called for reform in his church, his superiors, convinced that the people found security in rosaries, candles, and penances, asked Luther what he would give the people in their stead. I’ll give them Jesus Christ, he insisted. Even yet we have not learned Luther’s lesson, for we still give the people anything and everything except Jesus Christ. It is the grace of God that is obscured. We have not persuaded our own people nor the world around us that we really believe that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

But I will close in the same spirit in which I began and say that I have confidence that Roman Catholics and Churches of Christ, perhaps more than any other denominations, have much to contribute to the renewal of the church at large. It may be for the same reason that Saul of Tarsus, a legalistic Pharisee, has so much to offer once he discovered the grace of God as manifested in the cross of Christ, for which he was willing to suffer the loss of all things, as if they were refuse. But also because these two churches have an uncommon zeal. It seems to be those that “go from one extreme to the other” (so goes the criticism) that make a difference in our world.

Moreover, these two churches are demonstrating that hard-line strongholds of absolutism can be invaded by the grace of God and the freedom that is in Christ, and that by their own people. Beachheads for the grace of God are being won, and so long as these churches have to cope with their own “heretics” we can have hope for tomorrow. —the Editor.