It all seems so simple and clear. To us, the mystery is not (as many would have it) that religion in general and the Catholic Faith and history’s most ancient living institution, the papacy, in particular, have survived more than two centuries of the so-called Enlightenment; rather, the mystery is that such a large portion of the human race still does not believe as we do.

Part of the explanation for this lies in certain philosophical developments upon which much of the load of the Enlightenment has been carried. Aquinas has been consigned, by most thinkers whose first commitment is to thinking of themselves as moderns, to that quaint medieval period out of which the mighty edifices of rationalism, empiricism and scientism arose. Aquinas merely interpreted and embellished the thought of Aristotle, they hold, and the scientific paradigm in which he necessarily did his work was not significantly superior to that of Aristotle. His philosophical conclusions, therefore, cannot help but seem limited and irrelevant to the modern temperament and philosophical corpus.

In particular, the “revolution” effected by Rene Descartes (who is considered by many the father of modern philosophy despite his devout Catholicism) and the ruminations of Immanuel Kant on the nature of knowledge and reason were major influences on the shape assumed by the Enlightenment project. Descartes was almost fanatically devoted to the removal of all doubt (his famous Cogito ergo sum was the rock upon which he based his system) and believed that the search for truth should concern itself only with certitudes comparable to those flowing from arithmetical demonstration. We are immersed in a culture today which generally shares that demand for certitude.

Kant taught that “our thought of an object by means of a pure conception of the understanding, can become cognition for us only in so far as this conception is applied to objects of the senses.”1 He argued that there were only three modes of proving the existence of a Deity (the physico-theological, cosmological and ontological) and that none of them could be successful if only because it is impossible “to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere might of speculative thought.”2

One can take issue with Kant on several grounds, but that is not the object of this essay. Whether or not we believers find it congenial, the fact remains that Kant remains enormously influential among contemporary thinkers. Culturally and philosophically speaking, we live much more in a Kantian than a Thomistic universe.

This truth is not, of course, wholly attributable to the force of Kant’s arguments, nor to the zeal of his supporters and disciples. Also at work are the darkening of the intellect attendant upon human sinfulness, a factor notably stressed by Aquinas and, historically, much in evidence in the late medieval period leading up to and through the Protestant revolt against Rome (a topic deserving a separate essay); and, much more significantly, God’s will.

God has chosen to remain, in very important ways, hidden in time and space, a deus absconditus. He has also chosen to reveal Himself through the Hebrew prophets and, definitively, in the Person of His Son, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. That revelation is adequate but not, by the measure of human curiosity, complete. St. Paul reminds us that we will see God as He is, face to face, only in heaven. On earth, we can see Him only as through a dark glass.

God’s hiddenness makes perfect sense in light of the emphasis the Lord placed on faith.3 If God walked among us, indisputably God, faith would be correspondingly depreciated. If God permitted His existence and the perfection of His attributes to be proven, to be shown to the minds of men with undeniable clarity, making faith the sine qua non of salvation would be inexplicable, superfluous or irreconcilable with divine justice. Our inability to prove to skeptics God’s existence would seem, then, part and parcel of His partial revelation of Himself.

None of this should be surprising to the faithful Catholic. No one can come to faith with unassisted reason and without the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Do we not believe, as part of our faith, that faith is a gift?4 Do we not stoutly maintain that faith, hope and charity are theological virtues, utterly beyond the reach of us mortals without direct infusion by God Himself? He may use us as instruments or mediators (indeed, Christ commanded us to make ourselves constantly available for that role), but God Himself is always and solely the causative agent of newborn faith.

What, then, is the object of this essay? I want to suggest that in our dealings with the non-believers we encounter, especially in our apologetic and evangelical endeavors, we might dispense with rigorous syllogisms designed to prove the truth of the Catholic faith and, instead, argue from the preponderance of the evidence. Which position, that is, belief or unbelief, is more plausible? 

I hope to construct here an outline of interconnected plausibility, moving from the general, that God exists, to the particular, that His Son founded the Catholic Church headed by the current successor of St. Peter. At each stage of the outline, the untenability of contrary beliefs will be suggested by appeals to common sense, probability and plausibility.

God Exists
Kant gave unbelievers strong arguments for spreading disbelief, but he himself believed in a Supreme Being, in however unorthodox and deistic a manner. His entire project was to show that reason did not permit “demonstrative certainty,”5 and the “same arguments which demonstrated the inability of human reason to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being must be alike sufficient to prove the invalidity of its denial.”6

Indeed, Kant can almost be regarded as an early advocate (as most deists are) of “intelligent design,” a contemporary endeavor gathering much force among scientists and other thinkers concerned to refute the increasingly shaky tenets of Darwinian evolution. This dour German professor even waxed eloquent on the subject:

The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that . . . language in the presence of wonders so inconceivable has lost its force, and . . . (e)verywhere around us we observe a chain of causes and effects, of means and ends, of death and birth . . . (that) we are constantly referred to some other thing, which itself suggests the same inquiry regarding its cause, and thus the universe must sink into the abyss of nothingness, unless we admit that . . . there exists something that is primal and self-subsistent—something which . . . secures its continuance and preservation.

This argument . . . is the oldest, the clearest, and that most in conformity with the common reason of humanity . . . This knowledge of nature again reacts upon this idea—its cause; and thus our belief in a divine author of the universe rises to the power of an irresistible conviction.7

Kant died almost two centuries ago in 1804, well before most of the scientific discoveries that fired human imagination as they occurred and that we so take for granted today. It is not difficult to imagine that, could Kant return to soak up the current state of scientific knowledge, he would be stimulated to even greater eloquence regarding the necessity of a divine being to explain it all. We now appreciate more fully how finely tuned the universe is and had to be to avoid both catastrophic dissipation and implosion. The precise distances of earth from sun and moon and the tilt of earth’s axis could not have been significantly different without profound implications for the congeniality of earth to the emergence and preservation of life forms. A cellular biologist named Michael Behe is showing, with all the rigor of the modern scientific enterprise, that strong doubts surround Darwin’s reliance on random selection to explain the existence of complex biological organisms.8 And Behe is not alone in his assault on the reigning paradigm, although it is still true that Darwinists are in the majority and are circling their wagons, behaving, for all that, very much like medieval monks defending their dogmas. Behe may well emerge as the Occam to Darwinism’s scholasticism and casuistry, slashing away at its doctrinaire corpus with his well-honed razor.

The 20th century, at any rate, found science itself undermining its own vaunted search for exactitude and certitude. Werner Heisenberg, who for a time was in charge of developing a nuclear weapon for Hitler’s use, formulated the uncertainty principle, holding that the behavior of subatomic particles was impossible to measure or quantify. Einstein, whose own general theory of relativity was the other stake in the heart of Newtonian mechanics, was very much disturbed by the implications of Heisenberg’s principle, but it has clearly carried the day in the scientific community, so much so that many modern physicists shade into a form of naturalistic mysticism, questioning, on scientific grounds, whether events actually take place if they are not humanly observed. Such developments inevitably seep into the surrounding culture, and there is a clear global trend toward radical skepticism regarding all the traditional structures of social and cultural stability. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism is the apple on the tree of knowledge in academia,9 and the past few decades have witnessed sustained attacks on reason itself, a frightening twist noted by the Holy Father himself in his recent Fides et Ratio.

There are no survey data I am aware of to prove it, but it seems a reasonable supposition that the party of deconstructionism and irrationalism is composed predominantly of agnostics and atheists. Their chief excitements appear to be the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and analysis of asteroids and Martian rocks for signs of bacterial activity, as if the discovery of a life form somewhere else than on earth might lend support to a theory of life’s origins not requiring Kant’s “divine author.” Carl Sagan was a wildly successful proponent of this mentality.

We believers, already quite convinced, both through revelation and science, of the fecundity God placed in nature, would regard it merely as further corroboration of the fact if a life form were indeed found in some distant solar system. Our atheist friends, by contrast, would still have to face the old question of whence that life sprang. Meanwhile, their scientific colleagues would inform them, from astronomy, that every particle in the universe is ultimately derived from an incredibly dense “point” that exploded countless eons ago, and that any question of life in those crucial, succeeding nanoseconds is utterly inconceivable; and, from biology, that spontaneous biogenesis has never been observed despite innumerable laboratory attempts to facilitate or induce it.

During the initial stages of the Enlightenment there was, and even today there is, much gleeful mockery of the credulity of those who still believed in those ancient fairy tales of religion, who actually believed that an all-powerful God created the universe and then came down from heaven to deliver His commandments to Moses.

We live in interesting times where we can actually see the shoe being shifted to the other foot, and shifting, even, with a speed corresponding to the rapidity of the discovery of new knowledge.

God remains largely hidden from our view, and we cannot prove beyond all doubt that He exists, or that He created the universe and everything in it. But that He does and that He did is more and more plausible even to the modern mind. And those who go out of their way to deny His reality increasingly seem credulous.

Modern physics has shown that matter is much less solid than once thought. The atom’s nucleus is something like a basketball sitting on the 50-yard line of a football field, with the electron swarm of its shell sitting out where the goalposts are, bound to the nucleus only by energy, non-material space. Comparable stretches of emptiness can be found inside the nucleus. It is not at all farfetched to imagine that ultimate, indivisible particles will never be found and that, therefore, matter is nothing but a configuration of energy.

Yet, modern agnostics and atheists cling to the notion that matter is eternal and that a “Grand Unified Theory” will someday emerge to explain the solidity and regularity of the universe without reference to a divine energy that creates and sustains. They have unshakeable faith that science will someday discover the “mechanism” by which inert matter spontaneously leapt into complex living organisms programmed to replicate themselves. They unquestioningly assume that buried in the eons of geologic time are secrets which, when discovered, will give us a full understanding of how it was that a chemical soup in the slime of the earth evolved into a rational human being able to reflect upon his own mortality. They are utterly unsurprised by the notion that we former clumps of muck have within us a resurgent spirituality that, even at its most elementary, enables us to be thrilled to the core of our being by an ode of Horace or the sublime stanzas of Dante.

Atheists and agnostics, in short, believe in miracles much more astounding than anything recorded in Scripture. Few seem to realize how much less skeptical they are than we.

God is Good and Loving
If God is both good and all-powerful (attributes clearly proper to the very concept of divinity), how is it that evil exists? This question has probably caused more mischief and misery than any other.

Catholics, filled with faith and guided by the teachings of the one, true Church, know the answer: Evil is a negative, the absence of the good, and negatives don’t really exist. The shortcomings, the failures to achieve the good, those evils that by any measure are unquestionably evil (e.g., a deliberate mortal sin such as adultery) are the regrettable side effects of a great good, the fact that God gave us free will.10 That very freedom is central to the revealed truth that we are created in the image of God, whose freedom is bounded only by His infinite love and mercy. When we use our freedom to choose the good, we become more like Him, just as every sin tarnishes our divine aspect by making us slaves to what is not good.

Those who have not been blessed with the faith have a more difficult time reconciling God’s goodness with the fact of evil. Souls troubled by evil respond in a variety of ways, from denying the existence of God to asserting that there must be two gods, one good, one evil, equal in power and forever contending between themselves for supremacy over nature. Man himself, in their tortured schemes, becomes nothing more than a cauldron of perpetual conflict and agony, with the impurity, darkness and crassness of the body clawing down the purity, light and alacrity of the soul.

In times of more vigorous faith, such forces produced heresies to be defeated by the Magisterium of the Church, such as Manichaeism and Albigensianism. In the thoroughly secular skepticism that characterizes our own time, the more usual ways to deal with the problem of evil are to deny outright God’s existence or to shrug and ask, “Who needs such a God?” Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Carpe diem.

A doleful state of affairs, to be sure, one rivaling in bleakness the pagan era preceding the good news announced by Christ.

The debate over the problem of evil will no doubt continue to the end of days. However assured we might be of the ultimate victory of God over all evil, the lingering effects of the Fall, the darkening of our intellects by personal sin, the societal corruption that seems to deepen with every dawn and that presses against our hearts as we ponder the future of our children, all these and many other factors will add to the bleak armies of despair and loss of faith. Again, no Catholic should be surprised by the persistence of this debate. Just as God’s hiddenness is a challenge to our faith, so is the pervasiveness of evil in the human condition a challenge to our hope. God clearly wishes for us to enjoy some small feeling of accomplishment for the celestial crowns He has fashioned for us.

Despite the surrounding darkness, it should be beyond doubt that God reigns in His heaven, that He is all good, that He loves us, and that not even a sparrow falls to the ground except by His leave. How can any person behold the stars in the night sky, a rose sweating dew in cool sunlight, or contemplate the joys of motherhood and fatherhood in a solid, Christian marriage, or ponder the perfection of a Shakespearean sonnet or a Bach fugue, or sit in awe of the mind of Wojtyla and the heart of Mother Theresa and not wish to leap to one’s feet and clap in joy at the sheer goodness of the God who gave us such wonders to behold? The evil that does press in about us is a shadow on all that, and a mystery to be solved in eternity; but it cannot deprive a calm and perceptive soul of its trust in the immutable goodness of the Creator.

The fact of creation also argues powerfully for the goodness of God. By human measures, goodness consists largely of a due regard for others, of self-forgetfulness. If we are made in God’s image, then His goodness (however transcendental and ineffable it must remain for us) must be something like this. God is completely happy and self-sufficient with no need of anything outside His own being. Therefore, His creation of an “other” in the form of the material universe and living creatures was to that extent an instance of self-forgetfulness, so to speak. It is not improbably fantastic to conceptualize creation as an act of self-abnegation, as it were, by God. Everything that exists, therefore, bears testimony to His goodness.

Those who permit the disappointments and tragedies of life to sadden them to the point of despair and disbelief are, quite implausibly, pushing aside a host of reasons to delight in this best of all possible worlds. They are failing to consider just how much more evil there would be in the universe if there were no God (and, therefore, no order, beauty or meaning) or if God were not good and loving. If God were cruel, does anybody believe we would have things like mountain air, songbirds, the fresh smell of babies, Corvettes and holes-in-one?

Those who deny God because things did not work out just as they wished are, to some extent, self-fulfilling prophecies, and bad yeast in the dough of God’s creation. The problem of evil is accentuated, not removed, by the wrong response to it. Using it as an excuse to abandon faith compounds the objective and subjective impact of evil, prepares the soil in which it flourishes and removes the most effective mechanism for coping with it. Maintaining faith in God’s goodness, by contrast, multiplies God’s tools for drawing good from evil.

In sum, it is difficult for one mind to hold as true both that God exists and that He is not holy and good. Well-intentioned and intelligent people can honestly debate whether or not God exists; but, once His existence is admitted, that truth points virtually inescapably to His goodness. The wonder, if He were cruel or evil, would not be that an all-powerful God permits evil but that He permits so much good to thrive in nature and in our midst.

God is Triune
Thus far we have set forth a number of good reasons to believe that God exists and that He is a loving God. How can we move from these assertions to the assertion that in His one being there are three Persons?

Again, God has no need of anything or anyone outside Himself. Indeed, for all eternity He has subsisted with no thing or person outside Himself, up to that relatively recent point, a mere 12 billion or so years ago, when He initiated time and created the universe.

But we have already persuaded ourselves in our enlarging web of reasonableness that God is loving or, as St. John puts it, is love.11 If He is loving or is love, then He was so from all eternity. But Whom did He love before the creation of the universe? Aren’t reciprocity and mutuality wrapped up in the very notion of love? If love is necessarily reciprocal and God’s nature is love, isn’t it necessarily the case that there is an “otherness” at the unified center of God’s being?

Wouldn’t it be a simple contradiction, or at least highly improbable, to say that God’s unity excludes any hint of otherness and at the same time say that God is love?

Again, unbelievers have heaped scorn on Christians for two millennia for believing that the one God subsists in three Persons, an obvious contradiction by human logic and a belief that we ourselves have always been obliged to confess is a mystery beyond human comprehension. But those who reject the trinitarian teaching, if they also believe in a loving God, have a logical problem of their own to contend with. Whom do Unitarians say God loved before all time?

On this particular point, the weights of plausibility might appear equipoised. And the reciprocal nature of love does not compel a trinitarian outcome. If there are three Persons in one God, it could just as well have been, by our lights, two or four Persons.

But we are building, step by step, a structure of plausibility which, when it is finished, will add to its overall credibility with its internal coherence. The necessity for a trinitarian resolution of the innermost dynamic of divine love will become clear as we proceed.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God
If, as we have seen, it is most probable that there are more than one Person in the Godhead because God is love, then it is inescapable that there is a necessary connection between the sole sources of that idea (by hints and prophecies in the Old Testament, and by explicit claims in the New) and the only human being who might be regarded as the personification of that truth.

Message and messenger, that is, merge in the person of Jesus Christ. No other religious leader in the history of mankind claims to partake of the Godhead,12 and without the revelation of this truth by Jesus Christ, it would be completely unknown.

The historical fact that the divinity of Christ and the subsistence of God in the Holy Trinity have been held as true by such a large segment of humanity for two millennia is, by itself, a strong argument from plausibility.

In naturalistic terms, how probable is it that the doctrine of the Trinity would not have been abandoned by sensible human opinion long ago were it not true? Put another way, how can we explain the fact that belief in the Trinity, so difficult to comprehend and explain in rational and logical terms, has not gone the way of the Egyptian Ra, the Babylonian Baal, the Zoroastrian priesthood, the Greco-Roman mythology of gods and demi-gods, and numerous other religious outcroppings of the human imagination if it were merely a product of human imagination?

In the naturalistic realm, in other words, the persistence of an implausibility ultimately gains plausible force. This is overwhelmingly so in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity, and all the more so because, in all conventional human measures, the doctrine is so patently absurd. 

On the supernatural level, it is more difficult to argue from plausibility for the doctrine of the Trinity. Initially, recalling that our structure of plausibility has already established to the satisfaction of any open mind that God exists and that He is good, we might ask how a good God could permit such a fundamental belief about His nature to be held by so many for so long, if it were not true. But false beliefs about God can be and often are widely held for long periods of history.

Islam, for example, teaches that Jesus Christ was a great prophet but not divine. To teach that He is divine, according to Islam, is the great sin of “association,” a blasphemous insult to the majesty and unity of the one God. Muslim and Christian doctrines about Christ directly contradict each other and, obviously, cannot both be true. Because the Christian teaching has been widely held for two millennia and the Muslim teaching widely held for almost 14 centuries, we clearly cannot argue that the existence of such contradictions has anything to do with the goodness of God. Islam must be assessed within a smaller sphere of plausibility. 

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Hilaire Belloc considered Islam a Christian heresy (and it must always be noted when discussing our Muslim brethren that they are more devoted to Mary than are our Protestant brethren). But Muslims share a problem with Protestants in their sense of ecclesiology. Islam shares with Christianity a kind of sensus fidelium referred to as ijma, the consensus of the community (in practice, the consensus of Muslim scholars), and even regards it as an infallible guide.13 At the same time, Islam teaches that Jesus was a great prophet on a par with Moses and Muhammad. The implausibility of the Muslim position arises from a tension between these beliefs. If God protects His people from error through ijma, isn’t Islam implicitly alleging that God did not protect Jews and Christians from such error in the pre-Islamic centuries? By common assent, Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God,14 and Muslims regard Jews and Christians as “people of the Book,” so the Muslim position calls into question both divine constancy and the coherence of ijma.

Unlike Islam, Christianity sees itself as the fulfillment, not a corrective, of Judaism. Christianity repudiates not even a “jot or tittle” of the Old Covenant, unlike Islam, which dissociates itself from Old Testament prophecies pointed at Christ and from the dozens of New Testament passages witnessing to the divinity of Christ. In view of the fact that the Biblical Canon was well established two centuries before the birth of Muhammad, and that modern textual analysis fully confirms the substantive integrity of the ancient texts, Islam offers no credible warrants for its claim that Christ did not assert his divinity and that the belief is a later accretion. 

Jesus Christ, unlike other claimants to Messiahship, has not faded into the mists of history. And this same Jesus Christ taught us that the Third Person of the Trinity was the Holy Spirit, Whom He would send after His ascension to the Father to instruct us in all truth.15

To believe otherwise is to begin to tear at the web of plausibility we have been weaving, and, at this point, we cannot do so without calling into question the very existence and goodness of the God Who presides over salvation history.

Jesus Established One Visible Church
The believability of this proposition is grounded principally in Scripture, so let us recall how firmly embedded the authority of Scripture is in the probability system we have built up to this point.

To recapitulate, we discover a good and loving God in contemplation of the wonders of nature and, negatively, in our serial rejection of the alternative schemata that would seem to flow by necessity if God did not exist or were cruel or indifferent. This good and loving God appears in the Hebraic Scriptures with a remarkably clear correspondence to the disclosures of our naturalistic speculation. In these writings by members of a “primitive” nomadic tribe dating back many thousands of years, we find a description of God that consistently and cohesively conveys an aura of self-revelation and that comports quite well with the expectations aroused by our probability assessments (of the sort we are making in this essay), to which we are pleased to ascribe a higher level of intellectual rigor, if not Cartesian certainty.

This sort of corroborative coincidence, of course, is not completely unparalleled in the broad panoply of the human story. The Vedic scriptures offer an intriguing example of “primitive” writings bearing an inherent vitality still able to resonate in a corpus of modern theosophical speculation, and are testament to the great energy residing in the mystical impulse that, seemingly, is a base component of human nature.

The Hebrew Scriptures, however, are the only monument to this intuitive convergence that is also monotheistic.16 Because we have already established to the satisfaction of any mind that values common sense that there is only one God and that He is good and holy, the Hebrew Scriptures are unique and derive unassailable authority from that very uniqueness.

To put an amusing twist on this perspective (it is almost a reductio ad absurdum), if polytheism were true, why did the gods permit such authority to accrue to the scribblings of a small Near Eastern tribe of goatherds? Could they not agree among themselves on what needed to be done to stave off this pernicious belief that there was only one supreme being? Or did they not, even in their collectivity, have sufficient power to prevent that outcome? In that case, what kinds of gods are these?

That Jesus Christ founded one visible Church is established beyond cavil by these authoritative Scriptures: He told Peter that he was the rock upon which He would build His Church and gave him authority to bind and loose upon earth and consequently even in heaven.17 After His resurrection from the dead He thrice charged Peter to feed His lambs and sheep18 and gave His disciples, the first priests, power to forgive sins.19 The night before He died, he prayed for the unity of His followers, His Church, and made clear that this prayer for unity extended into the future so that all future believers in Him would also be one.20 He linked the authority of His heavenly Father with the authority of His earthly Church.21 He guaranteed the security of His Church in truth through the power of the Holy Spirit, Whom He would send.22

The Church Established by Christ is None Other than the Holy, Roman Catholic Church
To this point, this essay should have established to the satisfaction of any impartial judge that God exists, is good and holy, is one God in Three Persons and that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became man and established a church. As C.S. Lewis, implicitly appealing to the same norms of credibility we are now highlighting, observed, Christ is either who He said He is or He is history’s greatest charlatan. There can be no middle ground, such as proclaiming Christ a “sublime teacher” while rejecting His core teaching, that before Moses came to be “I am,” and that the Son of Man must suffer and die and rise from the dead. No human soul can avoid the ultimate existentialist choice, to accept or reject the claims of Christ.

Given the massive and ineradicable presence of Jesus Christ in human history, then, the truth of Christianity appears, in terms of sheer plausibility, inextricable from belief in an all-powerful Creator. If Christ is, indeed, as Scripture unequivocally describes Him, the epiphany of God in time and space, then every word that fell from His lips is incontrovertible truth, and every human mind must bow before that truth. If Christ is history’s greatest charlatan, however, the very conception of truth, omnipotence, goodness and holiness in any conceivable theological context stands on sandy foundations. How could a good, merciful and all-powerful God permit this thoroughly pernicious and pervasive deception of His children throughout what most historians would now regard as the formative and mature stages of human civilization?23

Christ was not a charlatan. He is the Son of the Eternal Father. He emptied Himself and became man to save us from our sins. These propositions satisfy our tests of believability and do not embroil us in the implausibilities associated with not believing in a First Cause.

But which Church did He found?24 Within the scheme of plausibility we have already constructed to this point, there can be only two claimants seriously rivaling Catholicism: Orthodoxy and Protestantism.

Orthodoxy clearly has the more credible claim from a Catholic perspective. We recognize the validity of the Orthodox sacraments, including its holy orders, a validity extending to the divine liturgies of the Orthodox and to Orthodox confection of the Holy Eucharist, the very center and wellspring of all Christian spirituality. Unlike Protestants, the Orthodox retain all seven of the sacraments established by Christ. Their baptism is the one baptism confessed in the Nicene Creed, they enjoy penitential absolution just as we do, their marriages are sacramental, they receive Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, under the species of bread and wine. Our communion with the Orthodox is so “profound” that it “lacks little” to prevent full communion.25

Further, the historical reasons for the 11th-century schism that divided us are increasingly recognized as spurious. As Pope John Paul II has been insistently reminding us both by word and example, healing the divisions in the body of Christ requires profound humility on all sides, starting with ourselves.

True humility never involves compromising the truth. Catholic doctrine on the Trinity is firmly grounded in the Magisterium as expounded most powerfully by Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas. The prospect that human language can ever improve upon the classic formulation is virtually nil. The mysteries of the Eternal Word’s begottenness and the Father’s paternity are truths to be firmly held in faith and defended against subtle attacks like those we see today in calls for the ordination of women and for “inclusive” liturgical and Scriptural renditions.

Still, as in all human conflict, the intrusion of pride and conceit in the Great Schism and its aftermath cannot plausibly be denied and not all of it was in the court of the Eastern Patriarch. While we Catholics can agree that the doctrine of the Trinity has been adequately and optimally defined, the fact that we must still describe the doctrine as a mystery bespeaks the inherent deficiency of human language in addressing transcendent reality. One supposes that one of the joys of heaven will be delving deeper and deeper into the Trinitarian mystery without ever reaching bottom. That the debate retained its divisive potential through the entire second millennium of Christianity is a scandal that all followers of Christ should be striving to lift from their consciences.

Beneath the pride-tainted scandal, however, lies a substantive issue: Petrine supremacy. If the Patriarchs of the East had humbly bowed to that authority, the scandal of schism would not have consumed even one generation. Balancing on the scales of plausibility the respective claims of Catholicism and Orthodoxy to being Christ’s true Church will turn, then, on one’s response to two questions. First, did Christ really designate Peter as primus inter pares of the original twelve Apostles? Second, was it His intention for this designation to remain effective until He came again to judge mankind at the end of time?

An affirmative answer to both questions has a solid Scriptural base, especially in the Orthodox-Catholic context.26 Christ not only stated clearly that He would build His Church upon this petrus (the new name He bestowed on Simon Bar-Jona). He also predicted that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church and He gave Peter broad authority to bind on heaven and earth, an authority that would have had difficulty maintaining itself against the gates of hell had it expired with the death of Peter.

In addition, the base metal of humanity all too frequently alloyed with the golden office given to Peter by Christ provides ironic corroboration of the Catholic position. God stocked the papacy throughout history with dozens of saints, intellectual giants and political geniuses; but He also allowed the See of Rome to be headed by great sinners, weak-minded figureheads and power-hungry politicians with the most tenuous attachment to the demands of the Faith. The very persistence of the papacy and of the Faith against the gates of hell, despite frequent periods of corruption and stagnancy at the very top of the institution, offers dramatic confirmation of Christ’s detailed foresight of the future as He spoke those words, and of the meaning He intended to convey by those words to all future generations.

Because all sincere Christians, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, acknowledge Christ’s divinity, we must recognize that He also foresaw in great detail the ongoing debate over the meaning of those words to Peter. It strains credulity to think that, had He intended to support either the Orthodox or Protestant position, He would not have taken pains to clarify that He actually meant something else than what common sense plainly dictates.

In this case and in many others besides, the non-Catholic view of things implicitly has the eternal Son of the Father wishing that He had phrased His thoughts more clearly. The Protestant outlook seemingly places the Holy Spirit, Who is the custodian of Christian truth and Who inspired the Gospel writers to write what they wrote, in the position of second-guessing the Second Person of the Trinity.

God has no need of afterthoughts. To imply that He does is to tear violently at the meshes of plausibility that we unconsciously accept for guidance in our daily living and that we must also learn to accept in our theological reasoning.

The Holy Father clearly hopes to go far to heal the division of Orthodoxy from Catholicism. An East-West dialogue refreshed by humility before the promptings of the Holy Spirit can no doubt ultimately yield solutions for issues such as conceiving the Petrine office as privilege more than primacy, greater collegiality, and resolving outstanding points residual from ecumenical councils taking place after the schism. Starting with a tabula rasa and submerging past rigidities to the inherent openness of probabilistic reasoning more congenial to the modern temperament may, indeed, lead to common ground with startling swiftness.

The Protestant position may already have been an unintended victim of our analysis of the Catholic-Orthodox standoff. The greatest weaknesses of the Protestant position, however, have not yet been touched on.

Protestantism must stand or fall with the strength or weakness of its two most constitutive propositions: That Christ’s redemptive passion was once for all and sufficient to all men for all time, that men can do nothing to further their own salvation, and that justification in God’s sight is wholly dependent upon faith in this proposition and acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior. Second, that Scripture alone is the authority for this faith and justification.

Let us first take up the second proposition, sola Scriptura. If sola Scriptura were true, then the first Christians had no basis for faith and their justification, because they had no written New Testament. The acts of the Apostles all took place before the Acts of the Apostles was written down. St. Paul’s Epistles were merely advisory letters to individual churches before they were officially recognized as the revealed word of God. Before the Catholic Church, in exercise of its Magisterium and living Tradition, established the Canon of the Old Testament and the New Testament,27 Christians had no official means of ordering their lives by Scriptural guidance. Because Gutenberg was twelve or thirteen centuries in the future and books were very expensive things, most Christians did not know what a Bible looked like and had no regular access to Scripture except through the oral tradition and from the readings in the divine liturgy of the Mass.

Most telling, nothing in Scripture commands the Church to adopt a Canon. Nor does Scripture say that Scripture is the only source of teaching authority. Before he himself was even aware that he was writing what the Church would later declare the revealed word of God, St. Paul described the Church as “the pillar and mainstay of the truth.”28 He regularly exhorted those who received his letters to stand firm in the preaching he had brought to them and to avoid false doctrines. Because it would be more than two centuries after Paul died before the Church firmly established the Canon, those who listened to the reading of his letters while he was still alive obviously had no standard but the Church’s guidance for distinguishing between sound preaching and false doctrines.

Luther, in short, would have us believe that Paul was exhorting the Corinthians and Colossians and Thessalonians to run to their Bibles and look it up whenever any dispute about the truth arose.29

Sola fide is found only once in Scripture, in the epistle of St. James. The Apostle there instructs us that “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” Faith without works, he writes, is dead.30

Luther, who anchored his theology in the Pauline teaching of justification by faith,31 considered the epistle of James “rubbish” and wished to exclude it from the Canon, and, as a practical matter, Protestant preachers who follow Luther’s lead do so exclude James by desuetude. But the fact is that James remains in the Protestant Canon. This fact points up the irreconcilable tension between the twin pillars of Protestantism. How can sola fide be maintained when sola Scriptura thunders, by the pen of James, that sola fide is dead?

Luther was acutely aware of this tension. Not content to dismiss as “rubbish” a letter officially accepted by Christ’s Church as the revealed word of God for at least twelve centuries, when he translated the Pauline discourses on justification by faith into German he inserted the word “alone.” After all, had not Paul claimed to make up in his own flesh what was lacking in the sufferings of Christ?32 Luther here made up for a lack of foresight on God’s part. If James could not safely be excluded from the Canon, at least Luther could have him refuted by the superior reputation of Paul.33

But Luther’s position and, by extension, the position of most Protestants leads inevitably to a morass of Scriptural incoherence, such that any number of proof texts can be adduced to contradict others. It is not just that James proclaims dead faith without works. If one accepts Luther’s sola fide and the common belief of Evangelicals that a sincere acceptance of Jesus as my personal Savior guarantees my salvation no matter what sins I have committed or will commit in the future, what is one to make of the numerous assertions in the New Testament regarding behavior and the safety of one’s soul? Will we be known by our fruit or not? Will we be condemned for neglecting to clothe the least of Christ’s brethren or not? Will we be fools for accumulating riches when this very night they shall have our soul? Do we already have our reward or not if we parade around in public shows of piety? Will our declaration of faith save us from having a millstone tied to our neck and being thrown into the sea if we cause one of Christ’s little ones to sin? Do we risk the fires of Gehenna or not if we are angry with our brother? Do we or do we not bring judgment on ourselves by judging others? Do Christians baptized into the Body of Christ not frequently fall into such sins?

Uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone ultimately compels insouciance towards large chunks of the New Testament. It is not a plausible rendition of the teaching of Jesus Christ. The most obvious examples of this are the Protestant rejection of the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharist.

After His resurrection Christ appeared to His apostles and told them “whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”34 Christ told His disciples this immediately after wishing them peace, saying that He was sending them just as His Father sent Him and instructing them to receive the Holy Spirit. To contend, as Protestants do, that the Lord did not intend to establish a permanent and recurring authority by which His ministers could reconcile Christians with their merciful Father after they sinned, and that this sacramental authority was not integrally enveloped by the Holy Spirit’s custodial mission for Christ’s Church after the Lord’s Ascension is simply not credible within this Scriptural context. What meaning can a Protestant give to the Lord’s use of the pronoun “you” in this passage that can pass our tests of plausibility and common sense? For Catholics, Christ’s “you” referred to the apostles to whom He was speaking, to their successors, the bishops, and to all the priests that have been ordained by those bishops throughout the history of the Church.

So, too, for the Holy Eucharist, the means chosen by our Lord to give literal fulfillment of His promise to remain always with us. The words of the Eucharistic discourse in the gospel of St. John35 are a stumbling block for Protestants, most of whom have regarded the Sacrifice of the Mass and Catholic belief in transubstantiation as idolatrous and utterly beyond credence. Catholics cannot help but look sorrowfully upon these Christian brethren as direct descendants of those disciples who could not brook that “hard saying.” For Protestants, it seems, their principle of sola Scriptura and their scriptural literalism can be jettisoned if they conflict with the boundaries of their empirical realism. Again, one wonders how it is, as a simple matter of propositional plausibility, that our omniscient Savior failed to clarify for Christian posterity that His words, preceded by the usual markers of His seriousness, “Amen, amen, I say to you . . . ,” were not to be taken literally. How do Protestants soften that hard saying by converting the “bread of life come down from Heaven” to a robust faith in Jesus then identify with Peter, who separates himself from those departing disciples by asking Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast words of everlasting life”?

Once more, only Catholic literalism retains substantial plausibility in the whole context of John 6. Protestants may make sola fide one of the pillars of their break with Rome, but only those Christians who have preserved their fidelity to the See of Peter are able to demonstrate vigorous faith by embracing that hard saying of the Savior. His flesh is meat indeed and His blood is drink indeed. Non-Christians recoil from what they perceive as implicit cannibalism. Certain Protestants, by reverting to symbolic interpretations, are not far removed from non-Christians. In all the earth, only Catholic and Orthodox Christians stand with Peter on this. Above all with regard to the Holy Eucharist, Protestants can devise no convincing response to the ancient aphorism, “Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia.”

Summary
Because God chooses to remain largely hidden in space and time, we cannot prove to everybody’s satisfaction even that He exists. There are extremely persuasive reasons for believing that He does, however, and that what the Catholic Church teaches about Him are true: That He is good and loving, that He is three Persons in one God, that His eternal Son became man and established a Church to bring His redemption of men from their sins to fulfillment, and that that Church is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic faith headed by the pope, the successor of St. Peter.

Disbelieving any of these propositions raises serious problems of logic, internal coherence and sheer common sense. Such disbelief, accordingly, leads to a suspicion that factors other than a disinterested search for the truth are at work.

Finally, there is the argument from beauty. Love, truth, and beauty are universally recognized, even by pagan thinkers, as the trinity of goodness. Each possesses an integrating force with respect to the other two and all are inseparable from the others, such that truth is always beautiful, beauty leads inevitably to love and love is real only in the presence of the truth.

A Catholic can say without fear of contradiction that the Faith he professes is far and away the most beautiful possession of all, the pearl of great price. Literally nothing else in all of the human story can compare with it. Because of that Faith, we can say Father to the Creator of all that is and Brother and Friend to His Eternal Son. This Father, Who loves us with an intensity beyond human rhapsody, is so patient and merciful that He is willing to sweep our trillions of sins into oblivion. He satisfied His own justice toward our rebellion by giving His only beloved Son for us. His Son took our own flesh for the purpose of expiating our sins, and the woman the Father took as daughter, the Holy Spirit as spouse and the Son as mother, He has given back to us as our own tender mother. He gave us a Church that will last until the end of time, fully equipped and empowered to deal with our fractiousness and tame our waywardness in a practical, down-to-earth, sensible way by administering the sacraments and keeping open for us the channels of our loving Father’s grace and kindness.

No Homerian epic, no romance of Tristan and Isolde, no Mozartian ecstasy, no Wagnerian grandeur, no Shakesperean pathos can begin to compare with the sublime beauty of Jesus Christ hanging on the Cross, emptying Himself of every drop of blood for love of us and pouring out from His lanced Heart the saving waters upon which His Church; the Ark of the New Covenant, still sails, the hand of Peter still on its till.

Jesus rebuked the disciples for hindering the children from coming to Him, for “of such is the kingdom of God.” He went on to say that “whoever does not accept the kingdom of God as a little child will not enter into it.”36 Our Lord was surely saying that the kingdom is a gift for those whose desires are other than power and status. He was also saying that the kingdom is reserved for those who can place their trust in His Father and believe, simply and without a great deal of worldly sophistication, what His Father places plainly before their eyes. The world in which we live is filled with men and women searching for reasons not to believe, for they have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear, just as when the Son of Man walked the earth.

Frank Creel’s family was converted to the Catholic Faith when he was a child by then-Monsignor Sheen’s “Catholic Hour” on radio. He was a seminarian during Eisenhower’s second term, a Peace Corps volunteer in Kennedy’s administration, an infantry officer in Vietnam in Johnson’s, a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Nixon’s, and a federal civil servant from Ford’s to Clinton’s. Now retired and the father of three grown children, he lives with his wife in Virginia.  

1 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952), p. 53. 
2 Ibid., p. 179.
3 Mk 16:16: “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be condemned.”
4 Catechism of the Catholic Church (“CCC”), United States Catholic Conference, 1994, 153.
5 Kant, op. cit., p. 188.
6 Ibid, p. 192.
7 Ibid, pp. 187-8.
8 Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press (1996). In his website blurb, Behe says the book “uses examples such as vision, blood-clotting, and cellular transport to demonstrate the life comprises an astonishing array of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts that defy current naturalistic explanations.” His review of the professional science literature shows that it is completely silent on the subject, apparently “stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life.”
9 See John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press (January, 1989). Go to http://my.linkbaton.com/bibliography/ derrida/jacques/ for a complete listing of Derrida’s works.
10 CCC, 309-314. All the misery and evil of human existence is, even if sometimes mysteriously, the consequence of Adam’s fall from grace and the inherited death of the soul and the rupture with God’s perfect creation that flowed from the Fall. Still, God is guiding His creation back towards ultimate perfection, and he will draw a greater good from every evil that takes place (or good that fails to materialize immediately) during this process.
11 1 Jn 4:8, 16. As the CCC puts it, “God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” (221)
12 Jn 8:58; 10:30.
13 Muslim ulama base this on the Prophet’s saying, “My community will never agree on an error.”
14 Christians should not be misled on this point because because Muslims say “Allah” instead of “God” or “Deus”; these are mere linguistic accidents. The Arabic for “god” is “ilah,” so that “Allah” simply means “the (one, true) God.” If you attend an Arab Catholic Mass, the priest will be praying to Allah.
15 Jn 14:26.
16 I include in this rubric the Christian Scriptures in the New Testament. Muslims would also include the Quran, which they consider a “corrective” to the “errors” that crept into the Jewish and Christian accounts. Islam is a special case that must be dealt with in its own terms (see below), and Catholics, obviously, cannot accept the Quran as divine revelation or Muhammad as the seal of the Prophets.
17 Mt 16:18-19.
18 Jn 21:15-17.
19 Jn 20:23.
20 Jn 17:11, 20-21.
21 Lk 10:16.
22 Jn 14:16-17, 26; 15:26; 16:7-15. CCC’s paraphrase of these passages is at 729: “The Spirit of truth, the other Paraclete, will be given by the Father in answer to Jesus’ prayer; he will be sent by the Father in Jesus’ name; and Jesus will send him from the Father’s side, since he comes from the Father. The Holy Spirit will come and we shall know him; he will be with us forever; he will remain with us. The Spirit will teach us everything, remind us of all that Christ said to us and bear witness to him. The Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth and will glorify Christ. He will prove the world wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment.” To hold that “us” here refers to individual readers of the Scriptures rather than to the one body of the Church, as many Protestants do, is completely improbable, especially in light of the endless variety of private interpretations of Scripture. To assert that these varying interpretations actually have their source in direct inspiration by the Holy Spirit is tantamount, at best, to an endorsement of relativism or, at worst, to an implicit blasphemy that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity exaggerated the coming role of the Third Person or that the Holy Spirit wasn’t quite up to His charge.
23 This is not the same problem we encountered in our discussion, above, of the Trinity. Clearly, as we saw there, good and intelligent people can disagree about the nature and attributes of God. But if Christ is not Who He says He is, then history is a tale of utter depravity in which a blaspheming charlatan has rallied to His banner a group of believers who constitute the majority religion in what is arguably the main stream of civilization over the better part of two millennia. Such a scenario is immensely more difficult to reconcile with the notion of a good God than the disparity, for example, between Christianity and Islam.
24 I confine the analysis to Christianity because we have already established that Christ is God and that He founded a Church. In passing, I can note plausibility tests that non-Christian monotheisms would have difficulty satisfying. Judaism, for instance, can scarcely claim that God’s promise to Abraham to multiply his descendants like the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore (Gn 22:17) has been fulfilled without reference to the followers of Christ. If a clear majority of Jews still held firmly to the ancient faith, that could be seen as testament to their patience and fidelity in continuing to expect the prophecy’s fulfillment, just as many still await the promised Messiah. Sadly, most modern Jews, even Israelis, seem thoroughly secularized in their thinking and not all that anxious to hide their disdain of Jews who still take the Law and the Prophets seriously. Muslims generally take their faith more seriously, but with no pope or priestly hierarchy they suffer from some of the centripetal doctrinal forces that Protestants brought on themselves by teaching direct inspiration in the interpretation of Scripture. Islam has contended with many of the same theological issues observed in the history of Christianity, predestination vs. free will, the consensus of the community (ijma) vs. personal interpretation (ijtihad), rationalism vs. transcendentalism and the like; but because Islam has no institutional teaching authority comparable to that of the Catholic papacy, its ijma is just as fractured as Christianity as a whole and more so than the relatively monolithic Catholic deposit of the faith. There are four main schools of law in Islam (in a faith where the law enjoys primacy over doctrine); Sunnis and Shi’is, in a cleavage dating all the way back to the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, regard one another as seriously un-Islamic, and the Wahhabis emerged in 18th-century Saudi Arabia as a kind of Islamic fundamentalists disgusted with almost all they observed in contemporary Islam; and popular Islam has long been infected (from an orthodox Muslim perspective) with strong strains of mysticism (Sufism) and syncretism. The early martyr, Husayn (son of the fourth Caliph, Ali, and Fatima, daughter of the Prophet) is very much a Christ figure who spilled his “precious blood” as a “ransom for his people, for Mankind.” Fatima, his mother, “is the primal mother figure, immaculate and sinless, the pattern for virtuous women, the object of prayer and petition . . . (and) a woman of sorrow” (John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, Oxford University Press, NY [1991], p. 112). Interestingly for us Catholics, Bishop Sheen found special significance in Mary’s appearance to the shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, seeing it as a portent of God’s plans for his Muslim children. I have mentioned, above, the problem with Islam’s plausibility in the historical context, regarding Jews and Christians as “people of the Book” even as it contradicts central truths in those books and introducing a new teaching about the person of Jesus almost three centuries after Jesus’ Church firmly settled the question. At any rate, the doctrinal flexibility of Islam which allows it, despite its imprecation of “associationism” and rejection of all intermediaries, to believe in Muhammad as a divinely designated intercessor (Esposito, op. cit., p. 32) scarcely warrants it to pass on the truth claims of the Catholic Church’s more cohesive and consistent deposit of the faith. Mormonism, for all the moral energy and obvious virtue of its adherents, continues to promote theological positions bordering on the bizarre, such as its teaching that God Himself was once a mere man and that such promotion to divinity is available to us all, so much so that the faith’s pretense of being truly Christian so strains our sense of the plausible that I find no need to deal extensively with it in this essay.
25 CCC, 838.
26 Mt 16:18-19. Protestants usually sidestep the issue by asserting that the “rock” Christ founded his Church on was Peter’s strong faith, thus buttressing the sola fide pillar of their own split from Rome.
27 Four Church Councils between 360 and 419 AD (Laodicea, Hippo, Carthage III and Carthage IV) listed canonical books as divinely inspired. At the close of the 4th century St. Augustine listed the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments in De Doctrina Christiana and, with his great stature, effectively closed discussion in the West of the extent of the Canon. In 405 AD Pope Innocent I issued a letter giving papal approval for the 46 OT and 27 NT books still regarded as canonical by the Catholic Church.
28 1 Tim 3:15. All alone, this single verse demolishes the theory of sola Scriptura. The author frequently listens to Hank Hanegraaff, the “Bible Answer Man,” on local radio. On April 10, 2001, Hank’s guest was Eric Svendsen, author of Evangelical Answers, which was billed as a response to the “new” Catholic apologists, exposing their “logical fallacies, doctrinal errors, and very unbiblical defenses.” A Catholic caller, obviously well versed in Scripture, had some very penetrating questions for Dr. Svendsen, who used this very verse from 1 Timothy to claim that the pillar and mainstay of the truth is, not the Church, but Scripture! So much for biblical literalism.
29 The implausibility of sola Scriptura in the light of the canonical problem has been a major factor in the conversion of Protestant men of the cloth, exemplified most edifyingly by the redoubtable Scott Hahn and now thought to number in the hundreds, to the true Faith. The commitment of such converts to the truth is especially powerful witness considering the fact that conversion almost always compels the convert to abandon a calling once thought to have come from God, and for which the convert had spent a good portion of his life preparing. In this sense, because Protestant Evangelicals tend to be much better versed in Scripture than Catholics, it might be conceded that the salvation of these new Catholics was due to Scriptura, if not solamente.
30 The entire discourse is at 2:14-26.
31 See especially Rom 3:21-26 and 5:9-11. Luther seems to have glossed over the previous chapter, where St. Paul reminds us that “the goodness of God is meant to lead (us) to repentance” and that on the day of wrath God “will render to every man according to his works” (2:4-6).
32 Col 1:24.
33 For Catholics, of course, there can be no contradiction of Scripture by Scripture, and if there are apparent contradictions they must always be attributed to the dimness of our understanding. For us, Paul preached that faith, indeed, does justify man but always “through love.” James, for his part, was merely saying that faith that does not lead naturally to good works is a feigned faith. Lutherans and Catholics now seem ready to consign the whole “faith vs works” argument to the dustbin, as a useless distraction not significantly less spurious than the filioque dispute. Catholics have always recognized that faith was the precondition to everything good, and Lutherans seem ready to accept that the act of faith is itself a work. The most recent formulation of the dialogue is that both faith and works flow from grace, and that all that man does or believes is always and everywhere the free gift of our gracious God.
34 Jn 20:23.
35 Jn 6. The entire chapter is significant for Eucharistic theology, but Christ’s most unequivocal words are at 6:54-59, which follow the Jews’ questioning, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” and precede the account of the many disciples who found this a “hard saying” because of which they “turned back and no longer went around with him.”
36 Mk 10:14-15.