Everyone agrees that the True Church was the Church founded by Jesus and the Apostles. It received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The Apostles founded Christian Communities throughout the Roman world, and particularly in Rome, where both Peter and Paul settled and were martyred.
According to Catholics and the Orthodox Churches, this Church grew and developed, through the Roman martyrs, the Church Fathers and Ancient Councils, to become the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church of today, always holding to the same the doctrines handed down from the Apostles by word of mouth and in writing.
According to some Protestants, the early Church Apostatised at some point, usually declared to be around 300 - 400 AD, and from then on followed false doctrines, ceasing to be the true Church. In the 1500s Protestant Reformers rediscovered the original doctrines taught by the Apostles and revived the True Church as protestantism.
BUT FOR THE PROTESTANT VIEW TO BE RIGHT, TWO MAJOR QUESTIONS HAVE TO BE ANSWERED.
1. WHEN DID THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TURN FALSE?
If you ask a fundamentalist Protestant this, you will be hard-pressed to receive a precise answer. If pushed, most will say that this happened some time around 300 AD, when Christianity became a legalised religion in the Roman Empire.
Protestant fundamentalists have a whole list of doctrines which they claim are false, and which they claim suddenly entered the Church at this time: These include, good works needed for salvation, devotion to the Virgin Mary, tradition given equal weight with scripture, and the Papacy. Other beliefs that they claim entered the Church later, include specific Marian doctrines, Purgatory and Transubstantiation. See highlighted links for details of these issues.
Catholics would state that all the above doctrines were part of the original teaching of the Church, and point to the historical record, and the writings of the early Church fathers to prove:
1. That none of these doctrines was new in 300 AD. And that all were accepted and taught by the Church from the earliest times.
2. That there is no proof whatsoever of any major changes in Church doctrine in 300 AD or at any other time, and
3. That the major Protestant doctrines, such as Faith Alone for Salvation, Scripture Alone for Doctrine, or a disbelief in the real presence of Jesus's body and blood in communion, were not taught in the early church, nor by any church at any time before 1520 AD.
2. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TRUE CHURCH BETWEEN 300 AD AND 1520 AD - DID IT DISAPPEAR?
This second question is the one Protestants find hardest to answer, and they try to evade it whenever possible. If Protestantism is true Christianity, where was the True Church for the one thousand two hundred years between 300 AD and 1500 AD?
A) Did God just let the True Church and its teachings die?
Some Protestants would argue this. For although churches split away from the Catholic Church before 1520, these fell into two groups.
1. Churches like the Orthodox, Coptic and Armenian Churches, which split from Catholicism largely for political reasons. There are small doctrinal differences with Catholicism, but otherwise all hold very similar doctrines. They believe in Apostolic Succession, Faith and Works for Salvation, the equal validity of both Scripture AND Tradition, the veneration of Mary and the Saints, and prayer for the dead. None of them share protestant distinctive doctrines.
2. Blatantly heretical groups such as the Gnostics and Cathars, who believed that matter was evil; Arians and Nestorians who challenged the Divinity or manhood of Christ; Anti-Trinitarians, and holders of similarly non-Christian opinions.
Neither of these groups held to the key Protestant teachings. Therefore, if Protestantism is the teaching of the True Church, the True Church clearly did not exist between biblical times and 1520 AD.
A lot of protestants blithely accept this. But this raises one very major problem. If Catholicism is false religion, and Protestantism is the true faith that leads to Salvation, and Protestantism was not taught until 1520 then everyone who lived before 1520 COULD NOT HAVE BEEN SAVED.
Did no-one who lived in that period go to heaven? Scripture seems clearly to deny this:
Matthew 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS, even to the end of the age."
So again, for this Protestant argument to be true, Jesus's promise must have been false, for the world was abandoned to the "errors" of Catholicism for the greater part of 1500 years!
Therefore if Jesus's promise has been kept, THE TRUE CHURCH CANNOT BE PROTESTANT, since Protestantism has NOT been taught from the Crucifixion to the "end of the Age". Only Catholicism has.
B) Then did the Protestant Church exist as a "Remnant" for 1500 years?
This is the fall-back position of some Protestant fundamentalists. They argue that there has always been a "hidden remnant" of Christians, holding to "true" Protestant doctrines, who survived from Apostolic times until the Reformation, largely in secret, and persecuted by the official church.
However the problem is, that there is absolutely no reputable academic evidence for this.
Attempts have been made by various apologists and fantasists to construct a "Baptist succession" from the time of Christ to the present. This generally requires trying to link pre-1500 heretical movements into some sort of chain, claiming that these were the hidden Protestants. The groups most favoured are the Albigensians, the Waldenses and the Lollards.
However none of these groups existed before the 12th century, and, even more devastatingly for this argument, none of them shared the key Protestant teaching of Salvation by Faith Alone. The Albigensians were in fact Gnostics, who believed matter was evil, and that there were two gods, one good, one evil!
Protestantism cannot have come to us by these means. Nor did Luther and Calvin claim to have received their teachings from such groups.
Were the pre-1500 Protestants perhaps so savagely persecuted that all trace of them has been lost?
Again, this argument has no merit. Could 1500 years of Protestantism have left absolutely no trace? We know of, and have solid written evidence of, the beliefs of even tiny heretical groups from the first century to the present. These include:
Gnostics - Who believed matter was evil
Montanists - Who forbade marriage and anything worldly
Marcionites - Who rejected the Gospels as false
Monarchianists - Who denied the reality of the Trinity
Arians, - Who said Jesus was not fully God but a creation.
Pelagians - Who denied Original Sin and the need for Salvation
Donatists - Who refused to readmit Apostate Christians
Collyridians - Who sacrificed to Mary
Nestorians - Who said Christ had two personhoods.
Apollinarians - Who said Jesus was not truly human.
And many, many more. But of any group holding Protestant beliefs we have no trace whatsoever.
What Must we Conclude?
As far as I can see, there is one chain of conclusions:
1. Jesus founded One Church, and said that it should remain One. He did not want a divided and constantly splitting Church.
2. Jesus promised that the Church would be preserved in truth by the Holy Spirit and that He would remain with it until the "end of the age."
3. The Church Jesus founded was led by Apostles, who passed their Authority on to Bishops.
4. The earliest writings of the Church confirm that it took a Catholic view of Authority, the Sacraments, Church Order, Real Presence in Communion, Regenerative Baptism, Prayer for the Dead, the significance of Mary, the means of Salvation, and other doctrines.
5. There is no evidence of ANY group of Christians holding to the main Protestant teachings before 1520. Protestant teachings are therefore New to Christianity, even though they claim to be derived from Scripture.
6. New teachings, beyond those held by the Church are condemned in scripture.
7. The Protestant justification for the truth of their belief demands that Jesus's promises that He would remain with His Church forever, and that the Holy Spirit would guide it in truth, were false, since according to them, God abandoned the Church to error before 1520. This is not consistent with God's promises.
8. Since Protestant teachings have not been preached through all ages, as demanded by Scripture, Protestant teachings must, on this count alone, be false.
9. Only one Church was founded on the Apostles, remains in communion with the See of Peter, maintains Apostolic Succession, and has fulfilled the warrant of Scripture by preaching the SAME DOCTRINE to ALL GENERATIONS, for 2,000 years from Pentecost to the Present. The CATHOLIC CHURCH.
Summarized from a sermon given by Matthew Kelly in Erie, PA last Spring -- certain sections have been copied exactly to preserve the original meaning of the author.