The following comes from Vernon Johnson (an Anglican convert to Catholicism) in his 1929 book, One Lord One Faith. I am reproducing it so Latter-day Saints will appreciate the ecclesiology of Catholicism and why they view our belief in a “Great Apostasy” to be, as many call it, a form of “Ecclesiastical Deism”:
THE CHURCH’S SUPERNATURAL LIFE
On
the other hand, if the Manhood of Our Lord is questioned or denied, then the
whole of the supernatural life of the Church is destroyed. For it is by Our Lord
having taken our manhood upon Himself that our humanity is taken up into the
Godhead.
“God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor 5:19).
Our
Lord’s Sacred Humanity is the link by which we are united to the Godhead. There
is no other link. It is the channel through which the divine life flows into
the Church—and to the Church is the mystical body of Christ on earth—the company
of men and women who are lifted up into the indivisible life of the Godhead, so
that they become actually “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 pet 1:4).
If
Christ is divided, this fails. For the Church’s union with God depends upon the
union of the human and the divine in the Person of Jesus Christ—perfect God and
Perfect Man. The church, then, is the mystical body of Christ, drawing all her
life from Him Who is the head, through the Holy Spirit; and, because she is His
mystical body, she cannot be divided any more than Our Lord can be divided. The
fact that Our Divine Master’s body was not broken on the ross was prophetic of
this.
Now
the preservation of this visible unity of the Church as a body is not at the
expense of the union of the individual soul with its Lord, as so many people
fear. The heart of Saint Paul’s religion was an intimate union with Christ:
“To
me to live is Christ.”
“I
live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
It
is Saint Paul who prays for his brethren:
“That
he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with
might by the Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by
faith” (Eph 3:16-17).
And
yet it is Saint Paul who insists on the visible unity of the Church as a body.
The
reason is that each individual is only fully one with Our Lord through His
Church, which is His body. It is to in the human body—each limb is only able to
fulfill its duty insofar as it is in full union with the rest of the body and
its head.
Saint
Paul teaches this most plainly:
“for
as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body,
being many, are one body so also in Christ: for by one Spirit we are all baptized
into one body” (1 Cor 12:12-13).
Then
Saint Paul goes on to show how God has arranged in the human body that there
should be the most delicate and intimate relationship between all the limbs
through the medium of the one body; that each limb only fulfils its function
perfectly if it is in full union with the whole body; that if one limb suffers,
all the others limbs suffer too: and then Saint Paul says God has ordained all
this “that there should be no schism in the body” (1 Cor 12:25)—no breaking of
the unity. Finally he ends up with the tremendous sentence:
“Now
ye are the body of Christ and members in particular” (1 Cor 12:27)
But
so difficult is it to preserve unity on earth that it is only the supernatural
union of the Church with the indivisible union of the Church with the indivisible
life of the Godhead through her Lord that preserves her external unity.
And
so we come back again to Our Divine Lord’s prayer:
“I
pray that they may be one, even as We are One; I in them and Thou in Me, that
they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou hast
sent Me and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me” (Jn 17:22-23).
Now
we can see why any denial of the unity of the Faith or of the external unity of
the Church is regarded with such horror and spoken of so severely by men who
were great lovers of souls. It is because such a denial strikes at the Person
of Our Blessed Lord, destroys all divine authority of the Church, and saps her
supernatural life. To warn men against such a catastrophe in the very strongest
words is not the mark of narrow ecclesiasticism, but of the saviour and mother
of souls; and the motive of it all is love.
No
wonder Saint Paul cries to insistently:
“One
Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;”
and
that even the tender Saint John says:
“Every
spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” (or, in the
Vulgate, “dissolving Jesus”) “is not of God, and this is that spirit of
Anti-Christ” (1 Jn 4:3). (Vernon Johnson, One Lord One Faith [London:
Longmans, Green and Company 1929; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008], 78-80)
