Introduction

I was born in Brazil, the country with the largest Catholic population in the world. My parents, though not Catholic, sent me to Catholic schools for six years. I was about six when my class began reciting the Ave Maria and the Guardian Angel’s prayer, every child joining in as naturally as breathing. My mother’s instruction was simple: do not pray them. For years, I was the only non-Catholic in the class, and the sense of holding convictions the whole school contradicted settled into me early. By eleven, at a Marist school, I had begun to measure what I heard in class against what I read in Scripture, and the discrepancies troubled me. They still do. Decades of study, pastoral ministry, and a PhD in New Testament gave me the tools to defend what that eleven-year-old only sensed.

This book is a reference work for pastors, apologists, students, and serious lay readers who engage Roman Catholic claims. Many would call the perspective Protestant. The name goes back to April 19, 1529. At the Second Diet of Speyer, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, six princes and fourteen imperial cities refused to let the empire repeal the religious toleration it had granted the Lutheran territories three years earlier. Their protestatio, a formal public testimony, declared that no assembly may bind the conscience in what belongs to God, and appealed past the assembly to Scripture. The faith defended here is older than the name; the New Testament calls it “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

I affirm sola Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria: that Jesus is Lord and the one mediator between God and humanity (1 Timothy 2:5), that his atoning work is complete and unrepeatable (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10), that justification is by grace through faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28), and that Scripture is the final authority for Christian faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:16–17). These confessions are fifteen centuries older than the Reformation. Rome has obscured them with purgatory, indulgences, the treasury of merit, papal infallibility, transubstantiation, a sacerdotal priesthood, and the Marian dogmas, and that is the occasion for this book.

From the second century onward, the Roman Catholic Church has progressively departed from the teaching of the New Testament and the earliest post-apostolic churches. The New Testament foresaw the departure (Acts 20:29–30; 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4; 1 Timothy 4:1–3; 2 Timothy 4:3–4), and it amounts to a great apostasy: centuries of accumulated doctrines, practices, and structures that no disciplined exegesis can derive from Scripture and that often contradict its plain teaching. Apostasia at 2 Thessalonians 2:3 is a deliberate turning from what was known and received, a falling away within the church itself.

Each departure from the apostolic faith is tested three ways. First, the biblical texts Rome cites are read closely in the original languages with what I have called a “low presuppositional threshold”: as few assumptions as possible about what a text should mean, and close attention to what it does mean in its own literary and historical setting. Second, each doctrine is tested by its history. If Rome defines a doctrine as apostolic, it should appear in the apostolic church. If purgatory is apostolic, for example, the apostles should mention it in their writings. The later a doctrine first appears, the weaker its claim to be apostolic. Most of the doctrines this book examines appeared late and emerged gradually, often under political pressure, institutional ambition, or the influence of Neoplatonism and later Aristotelianism. Third, contemporary Catholic apologists are quoted accurately and engaged at their strongest. Readers raised in Roman Catholicism may find this difficult reading. I understand that difficulty and respect it; theological convictions are woven into identity, community, and worship. I ask only that every claim, mine included, be measured against the apostolic deposit. Though many Catholics are sincere, doctrines that lack support in Scripture and that the apostles never taught demand an answer. Love “rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6), and silence about untruth is a failure of love.

Chapter 1 traces the covenant story from the garden to the threshold of the New Testament; Chapter 2 crosses the silent centuries between the Testaments; Chapter 3 follows the Messiah in whom every promise converged; Chapter 4 states the faith the apostles delivered once for all; Chapter 5 turns to the Scriptures the apostles read and wrote; Chapter 6, the heart of the book, documents, doctrine by doctrine and date by date, how the church departed from the faith the apostles delivered; Chapter 7 sets the whole against the apostles’ own prophecies, closing with the summons of Revelation 18, “Come out of her, my people.” A Q&A section answers more than a hundred common Catholic claims.

Beneath every chapter lies one issue: the authority of Scripture against human tradition. Suppose Scripture and tradition have equal authority, and the Magisterium, the teaching office of the Catholic Church, interprets both without error. Then the Catholic doctrines examined in Chapter 6 have a certain internal logic. However, if Scripture is the word of God and supreme, it must test every human tradition. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). Some of the doctrines this book examines are found only in Rome: the primacy and infallibility of the bishop of Rome, the Immaculate Conception (defined in 1854), the bodily Assumption of Mary as a dogma (defined in 1950; the Orthodox hold the belief without defining it), and purgatory in its Latin form, together with the indulgences that rest on it. The Orthodox churches still share a larger group of doctrines with Rome: the invocation of the saints and the Virgin, the veneration of images, the immortality of the soul, prayers for the dead, apostolic succession and a sacerdotal priesthood, the eucharistic sacrifice, a wider Old Testament canon, and tradition beside Scripture as its interpreter.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian communion in the world, and its apologetics has made significant inroads among evangelicals. Protestants, confronted with a well-read Catholic apologist armed with patristic quotations and philosophical arguments, find themselves intellectually disarmed. The Reformers set out to return to the church described in the pages of the New Testament with a cry of ad fontes, “back to the sources.” Five centuries later, that call has lost none of its urgency. The inspired apostolic sources still speak with a clarity no amount of doctrinal accretion can obscure. The apostles predicted a departure, and the historical record shows it occurred. The remedy is the recovery of the apostolic faith, and to that recovery this book is devoted. It seems therefore fitting to release this book on the 509th anniversary of the day Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

It is a stock scene of novels, films, and reality television: a woman names a man as the father of her child and demands recognition and financial support. A long-forgotten fling is retold; the child bears a faint resemblance to the accused. He denies it, the families take sides, and in the end, a DNA test settles the matter. Rome names the apostles as the fathers of its doctrines and demands, on pain of anathema, that every Christian acknowledge the doctrines as the apostles’ own. Set them beside the faith the apostles delivered, and the resemblance disappears: the immortal soul, purgatory, the Marian dogmas, the intercession of deceased saints, transubstantiation, the Mass offered for the dead, the bones beneath the altar, an infallible monarch over the flock. None of them carries the apostles’ doctrinal DNA. The test points to the men Rome calls its Church Fathers, the theologians of the second to seventh centuries who first taught many of these doctrines, and the medieval schoolmen and popes who added the rest. Their lineage runs back to the religions of the nations, whose beliefs about the soul, the dead, and their shrines converts carried into the church. The apostles, after all, are not the fathers.

Let us look at what the DNA test reveals.