Can We Credit the Church with Salvation?

The answer is, "No!" We cannot credit the Catholic church with salvation, when the Bible says that God now dwells in a temple not made with hands.
-------------------------------

By Daniel Mann:

Many highly educated Protestants have emigrated to the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). Why? The late Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things and Catholic priest, explained:

“An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the [RCC] Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third-century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, ‘He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.’ In an important sense, every Christian, even the most individualistic, is an ecclesial Christian, since no one knows the gospel except from the Church” (FT, March 2010; “How I became the Catholic I was”).

According to Catholic doctrine, the Church is even more fundamental than Scripture, because it was by the hand of the Church that we received Scripture. It was the Church which wrote our Scriptures and it was the Church which recognized them as Canon and preserved them.However, there are numerous problems with this formulation:

1. Although we all acknowledge that the Church was certainly involved in this process, Scripture is still fundamentally acknowledged to be the Word of God and not the Word of the Church. Although Paul had referred to the Gospel as “My Gospel,” this was merely a way of distinguishing the Word that he preached from the erroneous message of others. Instead, he writes: “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe” (1 Thes. 2:13).

2. Nowhere does Scripture instruct us that it is also the Church which saves. If the Church is more important than the Gospel message of Scripture, then we should acknowledge that the Church saves. Instead, Paul writes, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile” (Romans 1:16). In contrast, the Church is never referred to as the “power of God for the salvation.”

3. God designed His gracious salvation in such a way so that no one could have any basis on which to boast (Eph. 2:8-9; 1 Cor. 1:26-30). Any institution that claims that it possesses the keys of salvation has created for itself a basis for boasting, even if this isn’t its intention.

4. Trusting in an institution or a person is something that is prohibited: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD…But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him” (Jeremiah 17:5-7). Our trust must be in Him alone: “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken” (Psalm 62:5-6).

5. Our Lord explicitly states that He will not share His glory with another (Isaiah 42:8). This would seem to include the Church. If a church claims that it has exclusive authority to save or to forgive sins, then it has exalted itself in an unbiblical way.

6. Paul castigated the Corinthian church for making an issue of who baptized whom. He responded, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?” (1 Cor. 1:13). In other words, “Quit arguing about this! It doesn’t matter who baptized you (even if it was by false ‘brethren’!).” However, if RCC thinking is correct, then Paul had dismissed a very important distinction – which church, people or lineage could effectively perform baptism.

7. Although the early Church was intimately involved in the formation of the Canon, it shouldn’t get the credit, nor arrogate for itself a stature surpassing that of Scripture. God gets all the credit. Paul stated that he couldn’t even take credit for any of his works: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them--yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Cor. 15:10). Even though God had placed him in a privileged role, he declared himself to be “nothing” (2 Cor. 12:11), let alone as necessary for salvation.

8. If the Church should be credited for salvation, to some degree, because it was the source of Scripture, then too should Israel be credited for the salvation of the OT believers. However, this message is entirely foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures.

9. The RCC cannot make the claim to be THE Church. For one thing, this would mean that Catholics are the only ones saved, since the rest of us aren’t within the saving embrace of the RCC. Rather than creating unity, this claim further divides the already fractious Christian world. For another thing, the Orthodox Church can also make this claim. Who’s right? Such a claim only breeds contention. It’s better to acknowledge that there is no one right church, but only those who trust in Jesus.

Under the weight of our present religiously pluralistic Western society, the RCC seems to be backing off from its exclusivistic claims, at least among every-day Catholics. Ironically, in many regards, it seems to have shifted to inclusivism – Christ’s saving grace can be received without faith. However, many Protestants are also gravitating to inclusivism. Just ask Billy Graham! (See his interview with Robert Schuller on YouTube.)