Mother and Mistress

The Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Church

One, holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman · the visible society under the successor of Peter · the Reformers’ church gathered by the Word.


Every historic Christian confession says, “I believe one holy catholic church.” Rome and the Reformers both said it, and both meant it. The quarrel of the sixteenth century was over what that church is, where she is found, and how she stands in relation to salvation. For Rome the church is a visible, hierarchical society governed by the bishop of Rome, the continuation of Christ’s presence on earth, through whose sacraments grace is given and outside of which there is no salvation. For the Reformers the church is the company of believers called and gathered by the Word of God, Christ’s body and bride, but never His substitute.

Background

The Roman doctrine grew from older roots. In the third century Cyprian of Carthage, facing schism, coined the formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus, “outside the church there is no salvation,” and compared the church to Noah’s ark. “He can no longer have God for his Father,” he wrote, “who has not the Church for his mother.”1 A century later, in his struggle with the Donatists, Augustine taught that the visible church is a mixed body of wheat and tares and that the sacraments do not depend on the holiness of the minister. He also set out the four marks of the church, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which Rome would later bind to communion with the see of Rome.2 As the bishop of Rome claimed primacy over the West (see The Papacy), unity with the church came to mean unity with the pope.

History and Development

The medieval claim reached its height in Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (November 18, 1302): “We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” The Council of Florence (1442) declared that “all those who are outside the catholic church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life.”3

After the Reformation, Rome restated the doctrine against the Protestants. The Creed of Pius IV (1564), which every bishop and pastor was required to swear, confessed “the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the mother and mistress of all churches,” promised “true obedience to the Roman pontiff,” and called this “true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved.”4 The Roman Catechism (1566) taught that the church has an invisible head, Christ, and a visible one, “he, who, the legitimate successor of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, occupies the See of Rome,” and that she “cannot err in delivering the discipline of faith and morals,” while all other bodies calling themselves churches “are necessarily sunk in the most pernicious errors.”5 Robert Bellarmine defined the church as a society as “visible and palpable” as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice.6

Later centuries softened the tone but not the claim. Vatican I (1870) defined the pope’s universal jurisdiction and infallibility. Pius IX allowed that those in “invincible ignorance” might be saved, while warning that salvation “cannot be obtained by those who oppose the authority and statements of the same Church.”7 Vatican II (1962–65) called Protestants “separated brethren” and spoke of “elements of sanctification and of truth” outside Rome’s visible structure, yet it did not withdraw the earlier definitions.

What Rome Teaches

The present doctrine is set out in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium and repeated in the Catechism:

This Church constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.8 Second Vatican CouncilLumen Gentium 8, 1964

Four claims follow. First, the church is the “whole Christ”: “Christ and his Church thus together make up the ‘whole Christ’ (Christus totus)” (§ 795). Gregg Allison calls this the “Christ-Church interconnection,” an ecclesiology “that views the Catholic Church as the ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ.”9 Second, the church is hierarchical. The bishops “by divine institution have taken the place of the apostles” (§ 862), and the pope, “by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ,” has “full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church” (§ 882). Third, the fullness of the means of salvation is found only in her. Other Christian bodies may be used by the Spirit, but their power “derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church” (§ 819); in Rome’s terms they are “ecclesial communities,” “not Churches in the proper sense.”10 Fourth, the church is necessary for salvation. “Outside the Church there is no salvation,” which the Catechism explains to mean that “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body” (§ 846). Those who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel may be saved (§ 847), but Lumen Gentium 14 warns that whoever, “knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.”

As Sproul observes, the heart of the matter is sacerdotal: if salvation comes through the sacraments dispensed by the priesthood, then the institution that controls the priesthood controls the means of grace.11

The Reformers’ Response

The Reformers did not invent a new church; they asked what made the church the church. Luther answered in the Smalcald Articles:

Why, a seven-year-old child knows what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the voice of their Shepherd.12 Martin Luther

“The sure mark by which the Christian congregation can be recognized,” Luther wrote, “is that the pure gospel is preached there.”13 The Augsburg Confession (1530) defined the church as “the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered” (Article VII). When Cardinal Sadolet urged Geneva to return to Rome, Calvin replied that Sadolet’s definition had left out “the Word of the Lord, that clearest of all marks,” and offered a truer one:

The society of all the saints, a society which, spread over the whole world, and existing in all ages, yet bound together by the one doctrine, and the one Spirit of Christ, cultivates and observes unity of faith and brotherly concord. With this Church we deny that we have any disagreement. Nay, rather, as we revere her as our mother, so we desire to remain in her bosom.14 John CalvinReply to Sadolet, 1539

Calvin could still call the church “mother.” He could even agree that there is no salvation outside her, rightly understood. But he located her by her marks: “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”15 The Reformers had not left the church; Rome had left the gospel. As Reeves and Chester put it, “You are not saved by being part of the church. You are part of the church by being saved.”16

Rome’s Teaching and Scripture

The church is built on apostolic doctrine, not apostolic office. The household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20). That foundation is the word they delivered, now written in Scripture, and it was laid once. Paul placed even himself under it: “even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). A church is apostolic when it holds the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42), not when it traces a line of bishops.

Christ alone is Head and Mediator. God “put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body” (Ephesians 1:22–23). “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Scripture never names a visible head on earth or a vicar in Christ’s place; the Spirit is the One He sent to be with His people (John 14:16–18). The body is united to the Head, but it does not share His work as Redeemer. On Peter and the rock of Matthew 16:18, see The Papacy.

The church is made by the Word. “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27). At Pentecost “those who received his word were baptized,” and “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:41, 47). The church is “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15); she holds up the truth that God has spoken, but she does not author it or stand over it.

Churches can fall. The risen Christ warned Ephesus that He would remove its lampstand unless it repented (Revelation 2:5). No church is promised that it cannot err; every church is commanded to test all things by the Word (1 Thessalonians 5:21; Acts 17:11).

Conclusion

The doctrine of the church decides where a sinner goes to meet God. If the church is the continuing incarnation of Christ and the dispenser of His grace, then the sinner must come to Christ through Rome, her priests, and her sacraments. If the church is the people Christ has gathered by His Word, then the sinner comes to Christ directly by faith and finds himself, by that very coming, a member of His body. The Reformers loved the church too much to let her stand in the place of her Lord. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). She is His bride, beloved and redeemed, and she is most truly the church when she points away from herself to Him.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.


Comparison Table

Notes

  1. Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 6, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1886), 5:423. ↩
  2. R. C. Sproul, Are We Together? A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism (Orlando: Reformation Trust, 2012), 54–57. ↩
  3. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam (1302); Council of Florence, Cantate Domino (1442), quoted in Sproul, Are We Together?, 57. ↩
  4. Pius IV, Injunctum nobis (November 13, 1564), the Profession of the Tridentine Faith, in The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. Theodore Alois Buckley (London: George Routledge and Co., 1851), supplement. ↩
  5. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. Theodore Alois Buckley (London: George Routledge and Co., 1852), pt. 1, ch. 10, qq. 10, 16. ↩
  6. Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei, “De ecclesia militante,” bk. 3, ch. 2. ↩
  7. Pius IX, Quanto conficiamur moerore (August 10, 1863), quoted in Sproul, Are We Together?, 58–60. ↩
  8. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (November 21, 1964), §§ 8, 14; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), § 816. ↩
  9. Gregg R. Allison, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 31, 42. ↩
  10. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus (August 6, 2000), § 17. ↩
  11. Sproul, Are We Together?, 51–52. ↩
  12. Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles (1537), III.12, in The Book of Concord, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 315, quoted in Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), ch. 9. ↩
  13. Martin Luther, quoted in Reeves and Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters, ch. 9. ↩
  14. John Calvin, “Reply by John Calvin to Letter by Cardinal Sadolet,” in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), vol. 1. ↩
  15. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.i.9, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960). ↩
  16. Reeves and Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters, ch. 9. ↩