“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (St. Matt.
28:20).
Second objection: “So Christ did found a Church. But that Church is
definitely not the apostate Church of Rome!”
Not only did Our Lord establish a Church, but he also made that Church
identifiable according to certain marks. To qualify as a mark the means of
identification must possess two aspects: (i) it must be an outwardly visible
sign objectively evident to everyone, including non-Christians; (ii) it must
be an essential characteristic without which the Church would not be the
Church of Christ.
According to the Presbyterian minister Loraine Boettner,
“The marks of a true church are:
1. The true preaching of the Word of God.
2. The right administration of the sacraments. And,
3. The faithful exercise of discipline.”²
One obvious difficulty with Boettner’s marks is that they do not include a
test to determine whether the church in question was actually founded by
Christ. Furthermore, his criteria (based on Calvin’s) do not aim to discover
“the true Church” but “a true church.” Any man-made institution could
therefore claim to be a true church so long as it fulfils the three above
outlined points. We would soon end up with the absurd situation of having
many true churches each considering themselves to be teaching the truth
concerning the word of God, the sacraments and discipline, while having
no unity of belief, government or discipline between themselves. This
absurd situation is what some hope to replace the Catholic Church with.
2
Roman Catholicism, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. (Phillipsburg,
NJ), 1962, p. 20.
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