Nick Compise

95 Antitheses for Protestants to Answer: 1. If the Church is Christ's body, guided by Him as her Head, how can her supposed errors justify leaving her? 2. Who sent Luther, Calvin and Zwingli to preach, and what proof of that commission did they show? 3. Where does Scripture give lay people or princes the power to make pastors? 4. If the people who called Luther were already in the true Church, why did he lead them out of it? 5. If the Reformers received their mission from the Catholic bishops who ordained them, how could a true Church send them to preach against herself? 6. If the Reformers were commissioned as priests of the Roman Church, where did that commission authorize them to lead her children out of obedience to her? 7. If only bishops can ordain, and Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were not bishops, who gave valid orders to the ministers who followed them? 8. If the Reformers were sent directly by God, where are the miracles that confirmed every such mission in Scripture? 9. Which prophet in Scripture overthrew the lawful priesthood instead of being received by it? 10. Where did Scripture foretell the Reformation, as it foretold the time and works of Christ? 11. How can anyone obey Christ's command to "tell the Church" if the Church is invisible? 12. If the marks of the Church are the Word preached and the sacraments administered, which are visible acts, how can the Church be invisible? 13. If the Church consists only of the elect, how can anyone know which pastors belong to it, since no one knows who is predestined? 14. How could St. Paul expel the incestuous Corinthian from the Church if only the elect are its members? 15. If the Church failed before Luther, how did Christ keep His promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against her? 16. If the Church is a city set on a mountain that cannot be hidden, how could she have been hidden for a thousand years before Luther? 17. In what town or country did a Protestant church exist eighty years before Luther? 18. If true believers before Luther hid their faith, did they not sin by refusing to confess it? 19. If the whole Church was corrupt for a thousand years before Luther, were all Christians of that time lost? 20. If the Church can err, why should anyone follow Calvin rather than Luther or his own judgment? 21. If, as Calvin says, the Church cannot err in what is necessary for salvation, how could she cease to be the Church, as Beza says she did? 22. Why do so many Reformed doctrines repeat heresies condemned by the early Church in the centuries Protestants admit were pure? 23. Where does Scripture list which books belong in Scripture? 24. If Esther, Hebrews, James and Revelation were once doubted and are still accepted, why are Maccabees and Wisdom rejected? 25. Where does Scripture say a book must exist in Hebrew to be canonical? 26. Why should Christians take their Old Testament canon from the Jews rather than from the Church? 27. By what authority did Luther reject the Epistle of James while Calvin kept it? 28. How can anyone verify that a private "inner witness of the Spirit" about the canon comes from God? 29. If the Spirit reveals the canon inwardly to every believer, why have millions of Christians never received that witness? 30. Which council, church or writer before the Reformation held exactly the Protestant canon? 31. On what authority except the Church's do Protestants accept Hebrews and Revelation? 32. If Scripture is easy to understand, why do Lutherans and Calvinists disagree about the words "This is my body"? 33. If Scripture is easy to understand, why did St. Peter say Paul's letters contain things hard to understand? 34. If every believer can understand Scripture alone, why do Protestant churches need pastors and commentaries? 35. If salvation depends on reading Scripture, how are those who cannot read to be saved? 36. When Protestant translators of the Bible disagree with one another, whose translation should a believer trust? 37. Why do Reformed congregations sing as the Psalms of David the rhymes of Clément Marot, which add words that are not in Scripture? 38. When two sincere readers draw opposite meanings from the same passage of Scripture, who decides which is right? 39. Where does Scripture say that Scripture alone is the rule of faith? 40. If apostolic tradition and Scripture both come from the mouth of Christ, how does rejecting apostolic tradition honor His word? 41. If St. Paul commands Christians to hold the traditions they received "by word or by epistle," where are the traditions received by word? 42. When St. Paul told the Corinthians, "The rest I will set in order when I come," where was that teaching written down? 43. If Scripture is the touchstone of doctrine, who judges the result when two people test the same doctrine against it and disagree? 44. If God's Word is infallible but a person's reading of it is not, how can anyone be certain what God's Word teaches? 45. Would Christ have left His Church a map and compass but no pilot? 46. Who is the visible head of the Protestant churches throughout the world? 47. What authority on earth can settle a dispute of doctrine between two Protestant churches? 48. If Lutherans and Calvinists both follow Scripture alone, why do they disagree on the Eucharist, the number of sacraments and church government? 49. Why could the Protestant leaders at the Colloquy of Worms not agree on a single profession of faith? 50. If God is not the author of confusion, who is the author of the Protestant division into ever more churches? 51. If Christ promised that signs would follow those who believe, where are the miracles of the Protestant churches? 52. What prophet have the Protestant churches produced? 53. If Christ counseled poverty, chastity and obedience, who in the Protestant churches lives by these counsels? 54. Why has no one ever called the Protestant churches "Catholic," though the Creed confesses one Catholic Church? 55. If Christ formed His Church perfectly in His own blood, who has the authority to "re-form" her? 56. If truth always comes before error, which is older: the Catholic Church or the Protestant churches? 57. If the Church of Rome was once holy, as Protestants admit, when did she fall from the faith, and why did no historian record it? 58. Where was the Protestant church one hundred, two hundred or three hundred years before Luther? 59. What heathen nation have Protestant preachers converted to Christ? 60. If the Protestant churches claim to be the Church of the Apostles, where is the unbroken line that joins them to it? 61. If Christ commands us to hear the Church, and the Church speaks most clearly through her bishops gathered in a General Council, why do Protestants refuse to hear the Councils? 62. If every private Christian may retest the decrees of a General Council against Scripture, what question of faith can ever be settled? 63. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin each retested the Church's teaching on the Eucharist; why did they reach three different answers? 64. If the Council of Nicaea was a true council, why do Protestants reject the priestly sacrifice it took for granted? 65. Why did Calvin's followers expel ministers at Lausanne for contradicting their confession, while claiming the right to contradict the Council of Nicaea? 66. If the Church was pure for her first six centuries, as Calvin and Beza admit, will Protestants let their doctrine be tested by the Fathers of those centuries? 67. Who understood Scripture better: Augustine, Jerome and Chrysostom, or Calvin and Beza? 68. Why did Christ give the name "Rock" to Simon alone, and promise the keys of the kingdom to him alone? 69. When Satan sought to sift all the Apostles, why did Christ pray for Peter alone and charge him to confirm the others? 70. When Christ said to Peter, "Feed my sheep," which of His sheep did He leave out? 71. Why is Peter named first in every list of the Apostles, and why does he speak and act first throughout the Acts of the Apostles? 72. If the Church needed a visible head while the Apostles were alive, why would she need one less after their deaths? 73. In the first five centuries, which bishop besides the Bishop of Rome was ever called the successor of Peter? 74. If the emperor Phocas invented papal primacy around 607, why do Irenaeus, Cyprian, Jerome and Augustine bear witness to it centuries earlier? 75. In 1519 Luther gave six reasons for Roman primacy and called them unanswerable; which of them has been answered? 76. If God gave the Jews a High Priest whose sentence settled disputes of the Law, did Christ leave His Church with less? 77. If Christ upheld the chair of Moses although the Pharisees sat in it, why should the sins of some popes overthrow the chair of Peter? 78. If God cannot confirm a falsehood by a miracle, what do the miracles attested by Augustine, Ambrose and Gregory at the Mass and at the relics of the saints confirm? 79. On what ground do Protestants reject miracles reported by the Fathers of the early centuries that Protestants admit were pure? 80. If God decreed a man's sin and he could not have willed otherwise, how is the man guilty? 81. If God's law is impossible to keep, why did Christ command us to keep it? 82. If the whole Church could err for a thousand years, how can any Protestant minister be certain that he does not err? 83. Where did Christ say, "This signifies my body"? 84. Where does Scripture teach that Christ's body cannot be in more than one place? 85. Which gives God more glory: Christ's true Body in the Eucharist or a mere sign, and a justice that truly makes us just or sins merely not counted? 86. If preaching is the form of Baptism, how are infants validly baptized, since they cannot understand a sermon? 87. If St. Paul calls it "the chalice of benediction which we bless," why do Protestants deny that the Eucharist is consecrated by words of blessing? 88. If Christ said one sin will not be forgiven "in this world nor in the world to come," in what world are other sins forgiven after death? 89. If Christ warned that a debtor stays in prison "until he pays the last farthing," what is that prison from which a man is released? 90. If St. Paul says some will be "saved, yet so as by fire," what fire saves the soul if not the fire of Purgatory? 91. If prayer for the dead is useless, why does Scripture praise Judas Maccabeus for praying for the dead "that they may be loosed from sins"? 92. If the damned cannot praise God, who are those "under the earth" who bend the knee at the name of Jesus? 93. Where does a just man go who dies with a small sin, since nothing defiled enters heaven and hell is too great a punishment? 94. If God forgave David's sin yet still punished him by the death of his child, does no punishment remain after sin is forgiven? 95. If Calvin admits the whole Church prayed for the dead for 1,300 years, why should anyone believe that Calvin alone was not deceived?