"My Christian denomination is the right one because it goes all the way to Jesus himself."
Quote:Why Jesus Could Only Be Catholic
Jesus founds the church, right? Matthew 16, he says, I will build my church. So if we want to be in the one flock, we should find out what church did Jesus found.
But whether you want to call it the Catholic Church or not, it is a visible society led by the apostles here on earth. It is. He compares it to a city on a hill. Why a city? Because it’s organized. Why on a hill? Because it’s visible.
Like the church in the biblical sense doesn’t just mean vaguely all Christians everywhere, it means something more concrete. It means like a visible society with leaders, leaders chosen by God. Leaders who, I don’t know if you heard the conversation about apostolic succession last hour, but leaders who then instruct their followers to choose leaders and they pass on this authority to lead.
And so we can trace through history this leadership all the way down the line, down to Pope Leo and the bishops in union with him. So we can see from history where Jesus’ Church is. We can also see from history where it isn’t. Like, we can trace the various Protestant denominations back to the Reformation. Halloween 1517. Luther has the 95 Theses. There’s no Protestants before that.
You’ve got a few groups that are kind of split off that are sort of like Protestants, but we can trace where they come from as well. So my point is, like, if you want to find the one church so you can be part of the flock, so there can be one flock and one shepherd, well, go look and see, well, where did the church that Jesus founded end up in history? And it’s very easy.
If you want to find the church that can claim to be 2000 years old, it’s right there. And it’s not going to be the pop-up shop evangelical church. It’s not going to be the Lutherans, it’s not going to be, you know, the Anglicans or anybody like this.
We can trace these histories. We know where they came from and we know where the Catholic Church came from.
https://www.catholic.com/video/why-jesus...e-catholic
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
