Time Travel

Given Christ’s promise to preserve the Church, examine the historical timeline of Christianity and ask, “Where was Christ’s Church in between the time of the apostles and the Protestant Reformation?”  The popes, the bishops, and those peculiarly Catholic doctrines, such as the Eucharist, can be seen in an unbroken line tracing all the way back to Christ.

Think of the movie The Time Machine and how, as the machine carries you backward in time, the surroundings change, artifacts come and go.  Realize that, as you move back through time, all other Christian groups that now exist begin to disappear. While, century by century, as you travel back to the time of Christ, the Catholic Church is there —usually in its seemingly perpetual state of internal difficulties and external challenges, but there it is.  Arriving in the first century, what you don’t find is “nondenominational” Christianity; there are no Calvinists, no Baptists, no Jehovah’s Witnesses, no Mormons.

Certainly the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century was in need of reform. However, unlike Saint Francis of Assisi, whose wise and brilliantly successful approach ultimately reformed the Church; Martin Luther chose a path of rebellion that failed to reform the Church he once loved while initiating a never-ending cycle of bitter divisionin the Body of Christ.  Consequently, at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church did undertake the urgently needed ecclesiastical reforms that Luther had identified. Meanwhile, for the five hundred years since Luther’s rise to prominence, an endless splitting off of denominations has plagued the rest of Christianity, and continues today.