Protestant apologist Kelly Powers claims that the Bible is the cure for Catholicism and poses several questions to Catholics that he believes demonstrate problems with Catholic teaching. To be fair, Powers appears sincere and presents his questions in a spirit of kindness and honest inquiry. Nevertheless, his objections reflect significant misunderstandings about the Catholic Church, Sacred Tradition, and the role of Sacred Scripture. In this article, we will examine his questions one at a time and consider how the Catholic Church actually understands and responds to each of them.
Question 1: If You Did Not Have the Bible, How Would You Know the Catholic Church Is True?
The answer is simple: the Catholic Church existed before the New Testament was completed. The Church was already teaching, preaching, correcting errors, and settling doctrinal questions before all the books of the New Testament had been written and collected into a single canon.
Christ established a Church, and the apostles entrusted the faith to other men, who then passed it on to succeeding generations. The earliest Christians knew the teachings of Christ because they had received them from the apostles and their successors. Leaders were appointed within the Church to preserve sound doctrine, correct errors, and keep Christian communities faithful to the apostolic faith. This is why the apostles not only wrote letters to churches that had fallen into confusion but also appointed authorized leaders to teach and govern them.
We can also identify the true Church by examining history. Jesus founded His Church two thousand years ago, so we should ask which Church can actually trace its origins back to Christ and the apostles. When we examine Christian history, we find that it is the Catholic Church.
This conclusion is reinforced by the testimony of the earliest Christians. Christians of the first centuries described a visible and authoritative Church. They celebrated the Eucharist, recognized the sacraments, obeyed bishops, appealed to apostolic succession, and spoke of the Catholic Church. They did not practice or teach Protestantism. Their beliefs and practices were recognizably Catholic.
How, then, could we know that the Catholic Church is the true Church without first appealing to the Bible? We could know through the historical Church and the apostolic Tradition handed down within it. Some of that apostolic Tradition was eventually written down in Scripture, but Christians already knew and practiced the faith because it had first been transmitted orally.
Question 2: Without the Bible, How Would You Know Doctrines Such as the Eucharist or the Papacy?
The answer is much the same. Jesus Christ did not establish a book; He established a teaching, preaching, and authoritative Church. In Acts 15, for example, the apostles and elders gathered at the Council of Jerusalem to resolve a doctrinal controversy. Their decision was then delivered to the churches as something the faithful were expected to obey.
Christians did not need a completed New Testament canon to know that this council had taken place or that its ruling carried authority. The Church was present when it happened. Its leaders communicated the decision, and the teaching was passed from one Christian community to another.
The same process applied to Christian doctrine more broadly. The apostles transmitted the teachings of Christ to the churches, and the churches preserved and taught those truths. When we examine early Christianity, we find widespread agreement on the central doctrines of the faith: the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the sacraments, baptismal regeneration, infant baptism, the relationship between faith and works, apostolic Tradition, and the authority of the Church. These beliefs were being taught before the biblical canon was formally settled near the end of the fourth century.
Individual books of Scripture certainly existed and circulated before then, but there was not yet a universally settled New Testament canon collected as the Bible Christians possess today. The Church did not spend those first centuries in doctrinal darkness. It was already teaching and preaching the faith of Jesus Christ.
In fact, the more difficult question is how Protestantism could exist without the Bible. It could not. Yet Protestantism has not achieved doctrinal unity even with the Bible. Protestant groups all appeal to Scripture while disagreeing with one another about what it means. Throughout history, heretical movements have also appealed to biblical texts to support their teachings. The Gnostics, Arians, Sabellians, and Nestorians used Scripture, as have modern groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh-day Adventists.
The problem is not Scripture itself, but the idea that Scripture alone, interpreted apart from the Church and apostolic Tradition, is sufficient to settle every controversy. Different groups claim to follow the Bible, yet they arrive at conflicting doctrines and interpretations. The Bible alone has not resolved Protestantism’s internal disputes. On the contrary, the principle of private interpretation has contributed to continual fragmentation.
Question 3: Without the Bible, How Could You Test What Is True?
Powers next asks what a Catholic’s standard would be without the Bible. How could Catholics determine whether a pope, bishop, priest, apologist, or anyone else was teaching the truth?
The Catholic answer is Sacred Tradition and the teaching authority of the Church not instead of Scripture, but as realities that preceded the completed biblical canon and now work together with it. The Church and apostolic Tradition existed from the beginning. For centuries, many Christians had access to only a limited number of biblical books. A particular church might regularly hear the letter originally sent to its own community, while other apostolic writings were less readily available. Most Christians did not own personal collections of every New Testament book.
Imagine having access only to James, Romans, or one of the Corinthian letters. How could a person interpret every difficult passage properly without the rest of the New Testament? Christians interpret individual verses within the context of each book and each book within the context of Scripture as a whole. Early Christians frequently lacked that complete written context. Nevertheless, they still knew the Gospel because they received the apostolic faith through the Church’s preaching, worship, and oral Tradition.
Paul describes this process explicitly in 2 Timothy 2:2: “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” Paul taught Timothy, Timothy was to entrust that teaching to faithful men, and those men were to teach others. That is apostolic Tradition, the faithful transmission of Christ’s teachings from one generation to the next.
Some apostolic teaching was eventually written down in the New Testament, but much of the faith was first communicated orally. The Word of God was already being preached and passed down before the New Testament was completed.
Question 4: How Can Anyone Be Held Accountable Without Scripture?
This objection assumes that the Bible, by itself, provides a universally accepted interpretation against which every teacher can be measured. Protestant experience shows otherwise. Protestants routinely use Scripture to challenge one another, only to disagree about what the relevant passages mean. Each side accuses the other of misinterpreting the text or failing to “rightly divide” the Word of God, and both often leave the discussion holding the same position they held when it began.
The Bible alone is therefore not the cure for interpretive disagreement. The solution is Scripture read within apostolic Tradition and under the teaching authority Christ established in His Church. Tradition supplies the proper lens for understanding Scripture, while the Church provides a living authority capable of settling disputes.
Consider baptism. Some Protestants believe that baptism is the means through which a person is born again. Others insist that such a belief is heretical. One side cites John 3:5, in which Jesus speaks of being born of water and the Spirit, while the other denies that the passage refers to baptism. One side cites Romans 6, which describes being buried and raised with Christ in baptism. The other responds that baptism is merely symbolic. One side then points to 1 Peter 3:21, “Baptism…now saves you” while the other insists that only Jesus saves. The first responds that Jesus is the one who saves us through baptism.
Both sides possess the Bible. Both cite biblical passages. Both reject the other’s interpretation. Scripture has not failed; rather, Scripture alone cannot adjudicate between competing private interpretations.
The same problem appears in disputes between Trinitarian Protestants and Oneness Pentecostals. Trinitarians cite Matthew 28:19, where Christ commands baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Oneness Pentecostals appeal to passages in Acts that describe baptism in the name of Jesus. Each side claims that its verses determine the correct baptismal formula. Once again, both sides appeal to the Bible, yet neither accepts the other’s interpretation.
The early Church resolved such controversies by appealing not merely to isolated biblical texts but also to the Church’s authority and the apostolic faith it had received. That same method helps answer Jehovah’s Witnesses who claim that Jesus is a created being. Rather than endlessly exchanging proof texts, we can ask: Who taught this doctrine in the earliest centuries of Christianity? A similar teaching emerged historically with Arianism, a fourth-century heresy associated with Arius. It was not the apostolic faith consistently handed down in the Church.
The same historical test can be applied to distinctively Mormon beliefs, such as the claim that Jesus and Satan are spirit brothers or the practice of baptism for the dead. Where were these doctrines taught throughout the first eighteen centuries of Christianity? If no historical witness can be found, that absence is strong evidence that the interpretation did not come from Christ and the apostles.
Tradition safeguards the correct interpretation of Scripture by preventing every individual from reinventing Christianity according to personal judgment. We can examine what the earliest Christians believed about baptism, for example. They consistently understood John 3:5 as referring to baptism and taught that baptism brings regeneration. That interpretation continued throughout Christian history. When someone centuries later declares that baptism is only a symbol, we have good reason to recognize that claim as a later interpretation rather than the apostolic understanding.
