The Catholic Mass, scorned by the devil and his followers.
Back in 2019, the Globe and Mail reported that the satanic temple of Canada planned to perform its first “black mass.” According to the organizer,
“Essentially, it involves using traditional symbols and inverting them to create a ritual that is meant to be the opposite of traditional mass.”1
It may not be as popular as it once was for Protestants to think of Catholicism as the work of the devil. But it’s still plenty popular, as you’d discover if you became Catholic. You’d encounter many people who think that you’ve been tricked by the devil and who believe that the Catholic Church is a showcase of his works.
Within my former Reformed tradition, Zacharius Ursinus, the author of the Heidelberg Catechism, referred to the Eucharist as “nothing more than a magical device of the devil.”2 The Westminster Confession of Faith states that the pope “is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.”3 Many sincere Protestant Christians continue to hold these beliefs today.
But from the above Globe and Mail report, consider what the satanists are out to mock. Their inversion and blasphemy isn’t aimed at Reformed, Presbyterian, or any other Protestant, worship services. Those aren’t the devil’s primary targets. I have no doubt that he hates Christian worship of any stripe. But aping Protestant worship isn’t the highest blasphemy. No, what the satanists aim to “invert” and “oppose” is the Catholic Mass. The devil hates above all the Catholic Mass, and in particular, the Holy Sacrifice on the altar. To mock Our Lord in that way is the highest of all blasphemies. That’s why the satanists turn the Mass upside down, and not Protestant services.
The decisive moment on my journey to the Catholic faith came when I concluded that sola scriptura could not have come from God. The way I concluded this was by judging it by its own standard: was sola scriptura itself biblical?
It is not enough to prove that Scripture is inspired by God, authoritative in all that it teaches, contains what we need for our salvation, or is beyond the possibility of being wrong. The Catholic Church has always believed and taught that. That’s not what makes Reformed teaching different from Catholic teaching.
What makes Reformed teaching different is the word sola, alone. It’s not just that the Bible is an infallible authority, which Catholics believe. It’s that the Bible is the sole infallible authority for the Christian faith.
To prove then that sola scriptura is biblical, you must prove from Scripture that Scripture is alone in the authority that it has.
Here I will look at three passages used to support sola scriptura and argue that none of them teach it.
2 Timothy 3:14-17
The main passage Protestants cite in support of this doctrine is 2 Timothy 3:14-17:
Your phone is keeping you from God. It is designed to fracture your attention, to make you chase after a thousand empty distractions. Meanwhile, the years tick by, and you become habituated to the surface of life, ignoring the mystery beneath. Deep cannot call unto deep because there is simply no deep there.
This is not an accident. There is a spiritual war for your attention. God created you to live a life of focused, yearning memory. He wants you to gaze upon Him, to thirst after a lovingkindess that is better than life. That is not a mere idea or happy thought. That ought to be the most immediately real thing to you.
But that can happen only by attending in silence to God. Your phone, with its constant distractions, creates waves of noise in your soul. Your attention hungers for God, but it stalls amid the endless curiosities your phone offers.
Put away the phone and create zones of silence in your life. Calm and quiet yourself as King David did, and look lovingly upon Christ. This silence, at the very heart of all the Psalms, enables you to have fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. By lifting your mind to God in focused, attentive silence you will no longer be troubled about many things. You will find the good part, the one thing needful, the life that is hidden for you in Christ Jesus.
There is one great question: how can man really be in the image of God? He must enter into silence.
When he drapes himself in silence, as God himself dwells in a great silence, man is close to heaven, or, rather, he allows God to manifest himself in him.
We encounter God only in the eternal silence in which he abides. Have you ever heard the voice of God as you hear mine? God’s voice is silent. Indeed, man, too, must seek to become silence.
At the heart of man there is an innate silence, for God abides in the inmost part of every person. God is silence, and this divine silence dwells in man. In God we are inseparably bound up with silence.
Solitude is the best state in which to hear God’s silence. For someone who wants to find silence, solitude is the mountain that he must climb. If a person isolates himself by going away to a monastery, he comes first to seek silence. And yet, the goal of his search is within him. God’s silent presence already dwells in his heart. The silence that we pursue confusedly is found in our own hearts and reveals God to us.
Alas, the worldly powers that seek to shape modern man systematically do away with silence.
In modern society, silence has come into disrepute; this is the symptom of a serious, worrisome illness. The real questions of life are posed in silence. Our blood flows through our veins without making any noise, and we can hear our heartbeats only in silence.
The artificial spectacles and the screens glowing uninterruptedly try to bewitch the mind and the soul. In the brightly lit prisons of the modern world, man is separated from himself and from God. He is riveted to ephemeral things, farther and farther away from what is essential.
Silence of the heart consists of quieting little by little our miserable human sentiments so as to become capable of having the same sentiments as those of Jesus. Silence of the heart is the silence of the passions. It is necessary to die to self in order to join the Son of God in silence.
Yes, of course Jesus had brothers and sisters. Those are the very words of the Bible:
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3, all quotesESV).
And here:
Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” (Luke 8:19-20).
And here:
Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? (1 Corinthians 9:4-5).
There’s nothing to dispute here. The Bible makes plain reference to Jesus’ brothers and sisters.
The more precise question is: are these brothers and sisters the biological children of Joseph and Mary? Did Mary, contrary to what the Catholic Church teaches, have children other than Jesus?
Scripture gives us no reason to believe that she did. In fact, Scripture tells us that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are not the biological children of Joseph and Mary.
Brothers From Different Fathers
The Bible names four brothers of Jesus: James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon.
We know for sure that the James mentioned here is one of the Twelve. Paul writes, “But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19). It’s possible that Judas, too, is one of the Twelve. The author of the book of Jude identifies himself as the “brother of James” (Jude 1), so historically he has been understood as Judas, the brother of James and Jesus. The Gospel Coalition website (a popular Protestant site) agrees1:
But the Gospel Coalition is mistaken in referring to these two apostles as Mary’s sons. They were brothers of Jesus, yes, but not sons of Joseph and Mary. There were two Jameses among the Twelve apostles. The one James was a son of Zebedee (Mark 10:35), and the other was a son of Alphaeus (Acts 1:13). Neither was a son of Joseph. Whatever it means that James was a brother of the Lord, he was not a biological son of Joseph and Mary. This example alone is proof enough that you cannot draw that conclusion.
We named one of our children after St. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the first bishops of the biblical church of Antioch. St. Ignatius is also “the red pill church father,” according to a Catholic convert, Joshua Charles, whom I follow on social media.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “red pill,” it comes from the movie The Matrix. At one point the main character, Neo, is offered a choice between a blue pill and a red pill. If he chooses the blue pill, he will be plugged back into “the matrix”, blissfully unaware that he’s in a simulated reality created by machines that have enslaved humanity. If he chooses the red pill, he will choose the real world over the matrix, as harsh and bleak as that dystopian real world is.
People use the term “red pill” to refer to something that shocks them out of a false but comfortable way of thinking into a true, but often troubling, way of thinking.
Why is St. Ignatius a red pill for Protestants? For the simple fact that the Christianity described in his letters is not the Christianity of Protestants.
St. Ignatius was the bishop of one of the most important churches in early Christianity. He was born around the time the first New Testament books were being written, and was martyred by wild beasts in Rome a decade or two after the last Apostle died. So, he was born and raised during the era we read about in the New Testament. He very likely knew the Apostle John personally. Many alive during his time would either have known the Apostles or at least remembered their ministry. The fact that these early Christians raised St. Ignatius to one of the most prominent positions in the Church demonstrates that he is a reliable witness to what they believed.
To be clear, St. Ignatius’s writings are not inspired by God. I’m not even arguing here that they are true or that they have any authority over anyone. I’m merely pointing to them as descriptions of what the churches formed by the Apostles believed.
Many Protestants do not understand why some of their members, especially the devout and educated, become Catholic. Protestant scholars Brad Littlejohn and Christ Castaldo attempt to explain why in a new book, Why Do Protestants Convert?
Over at Catholic World Report, Catholic apologist Casey Chalk, responds to the book:
Why do Protestants convert to Catholicism? If you’ve watched even a few episodes of Marcus Grodi’s “Journey Home” on EWTN, or read conversion stories from the likes of Scott Hahn, Francis Beckwith, Thomas Howard, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, or Paul Thigpen (among many others), you’ll know the answer is: for lots of reasons. Prominent Protestant thinkers Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo distill all of them down to three in their new, 100-page book Why Do Protestants Convert?
The results, as one might expect given the complexity of the subject matter, are curious.
Chalk argues that the authors don’t understand basic Catholic teaching, give almost no substantial response to the main theological reasons for conversion, and outright invent their own reasons why people convert. In short, he says, they fail to answer the question posed in the book’s title.
Sometimes it’s helpful to stand back and look at the big picture. Catholic and Reformed disputes often involve careful, detailed exegesis of Scripture, or appeals to this or that historical event or document. The amount of details, and the amount of competing explanations, can make someone stand back, throw up his arms, and declare,
The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him (Proverbs 18:17 ESV).
That’s where big-picture pieces of evidence are very important. They clear the air and put the smaller, more detailed disputes into perspective.
One such piece of evidence is the simple fact that the Catholic Church still exists. She was established while the Roman Empire was still young. But while everything from that ancient world is now dust and ruins, she lives on – and lives on as one of the most powerful forces in the world.
This is evidence that she is not merely a human institution. In fact, it’s a powerful piece of evidence that she is not just one denomination among many, but that she is the Church that she claims to be: the Church that Christ Himself established.
You only need to glance at her history to know it hasn’t been one of competent, faithful governance. I don’t want to downplay the work of the many wise and devout bishops throughout history who carried out their tasks to the glory of God. Nor do I want to detract from the fact that the great majority of popes have been upright and godly men.
But there has been a stunning amount of corruption, immorality, and ineptitude in the government of the Catholic Church. There have been shameful periods in her history. Already back in the fifth century St. John Chrysostom warned, “I do not think there are many among bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish.”1 The history of the Church since then has borne this out in myriad ways. You can see the writings of the Reformers or the latest scandalous headlines for more details.
And yet this very corruption, immorality, and ineptitude raises an important question: how could such an institution have lasted, even flourished, for two thousand years? All around us we see businesses fail due to mismanagement, governments collapse from corruption, organizations riven by internal dissension. How has the Catholic Church, whose had these things in spades, merrily marched her way through history down to the present day without falling apart?
The early twentieth-century Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc argued,
for unbelievers a proof of [the Catholic Church’s] divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.2
This piece of evidence – the Catholic Church’s endurance over two thousand years in spite of inept governance – is on its own a powerful proof of her divine origins. How else could you explain it? The more you study her history the more you see that we are talking here about a miracle.
But that evidence, miraculous as it already is, is not on its own. It also lines up with what Scripture reveals and prophesies about the Church.
From the beginning, the Church was very much a human institution subject to human failings. Of the twelve Apostles, one betrayed Christ and another ten fled when Jesus was arrested. Even after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Paul had to rebuke Peter for cowardly behaviour (Galatians 2:11-14), Paul and Barnabas fought and parted ways (Acts 15:39), and entire congregations were straying from the truth (Revelation 2 and 3). There was personal failure and unfaithfulness from the get-go, even among the top brass.
And yet the Church was equally foretold to steadily grow and flourish over the earth. The prophet Daniel prophesied that “the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:35). Christ says that His kingdom is like a mustard seed, that “when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matthew 13:32). Somehow this very human institution was going to be carried forward by her founder and head to great things.
Both elements – human failure and miraculous endurance – were revealed in Scripture, and both indisputably characterize the Catholic Church.
There are a lot of competing narratives in the world today. There are reasonable, intelligent people on both sides of almost every issue under the sun. The best of us can be tempted to agnosticism, for who can discern the truth among all these voices?
But to be Catholic is to be part of something that isn’t subject to human opinion, something that has weathered two thousand years of opinions and outlasted them all. To be Catholic is to take shelter in something that has risen above the currents of history and the passing fashions of every age. To be Catholic is to participate in the permanent things of the world, the true, awesome, and ever-abiding mysteries of Christ and the fellowship we have through Him with the Father.
People will continue to craft all manner of arguments against the Catholic Church. But long after they and their denunciations have faded, she will have endured, for she testifies to what is now and ever shall be, world without end.
I have a book called The Beauty of Reformed Liturgy, written by a late pastor from my former Reformed circles. In the book, he calls the Catholic Mass “superstitious and idolatrous.”1 He writes, “The Reformers cleansed the liturgy. Their main act in this respect was removing the altar, together with ‘priests’ and all other ‘old testamentic’ elements”2 (italics his). In doing so, he says, the Reformers “returned to the simplicity and beauty of covenantal worship.”3
But is this true? Is the Mass “superstitious and idolatrous,” with “old testamentic elements”?
No, for as I’ll show very briefly here, that would be accusing Scripture itself of being superstitious and idolatrous, and the New Testament of being “old testamentic.” The Mass mirrors the only detailed description of worship in the New Testament – St. John’s vision of the heavenly liturgy in the book of Revelation.
The author of Hebrews explains that worship is an entrance into the heavenly court:
You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel… thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:22-24, 29).
The Mass is a participation in this heavenly reality. While in the West we call the Eucharistic liturgy “Mass,” in the East they call it “Divine Liturgy.” That name better describes what’s really happening. The whole point of the liturgy is to lift up our hearts to participate in the divine, heavenly liturgy, where Christ is seated.
The book of Revelation describes what that heavenly liturgy is like. We see there:
St. James the Less, author of the Epistle of James
In honour of “Reformation Day,” this is your friendly Catholic reminder that “by faith alone” is found only once in the Bible, in the following verse:
You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone (James 2:24, all quotes ESV).
That’s it. You will not find “by faith alone” in Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, or any other letter of Paul. You won’t find those words anywhere else in the Bible at all. The only time the Holy Spirit saw fit to use “by faith alone” was to tell us that a person is not justified by faith alone.
Imagine the Bible said, “You shall not seek the intercession of Mary and the saints,” or, “The Church shall not be headed by a Pope,” or, “The bread and wine are not changed into the Body and Blood of Christ,” or, “A person is not saved by baptism.” Would the Reformed consider these to be contradictions of Catholic teaching? Of course.
And yet Scripture says that “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
Clearly, on the face of it, this is a problem for the Reformed. According to Reformed teaching, a person is not justified by works, and is justified by faith alone. Nor is this a mere side point. In Reformed teaching, by faith alone is the heart of the gospel. According to Martin Luther, it was the very point on which the church stands or falls. And yet Scripture really couldn’t be more on the nose.
Protestants are used to hearing that Catholics believe in salvation by works. That is what makes Catholic teaching a false gospel, many of them say. Because Scripture teaches that we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, the Catholic doctrine of salvation by works is unbiblical.
But what do Catholics believe about salvation and works? And is their belief unbiblical?
In the gospel according to Luke, Christ is asked by a teacher of the law,
What must I do to inherit eternal life?
When Jesus asks him in turn what Scripture says, the man responds,
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
Christ approves of this answer, saying,
You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live (Luke 10:25-28, all quotes ESV).
In the gospel according to Matthew, Christ responds to a similar question,
If you would enter life, keep the commandments
and,
Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life (Matthew 19:17, 29).
According to the Lord, the path to eternal life lies in keeping the commandments. He does not offer any other way. If you want to live forever, you must keep the commandments by loving God and loving your neighbour. Anyone who tells you otherwise contradicts the plain words of Christ.
But doesn’t Paul contradict Christ in saying that we are saved by faith and not by works of the law?
Yet we know that a person is not justified [saved] by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ (Galatians 2:16).
Isn’t “works of the law” exactly what “keeping the commandments” means? How can Christ say we are saved by works of the law and Paul say that we aren’t? Are we saved by keeping the commandments, or not?
There is a straightforward answer to these questions: “being saved” and “going to heaven” are not always interchangeable in Scripture. For example, Paul writes to the Ephesians,
By grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2:5).
Clearly, he’s not writing to people who have gone to heaven. And yet they have been saved. This is also reflected in the popular Evangelical question, “Have you been saved?” The question is not asking whether you are in heaven. The phrases “being saved” and “going to heaven” do not always refer to the same thing in Scripture.
This distinction helps us understand that there is no contradiction between Christ and Paul. Paul is writing about something that happens in this life. He’s writing about being saved in the sense of being made right with God, of being “made alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5). This is something we are called to now, while we yet live on earth, and it is not something we could ever earn by our works. Being saved in this sense is not by works.
But the Bible is equally clear that when it comes to the next life, to inheriting eternal life, our works do matter. In parable after parable, entering the master’s rest is the result of right behaviour. This is also clear in almost every book of the New Testament, including Paul’s letters:
Sixteen Seasons 