Similarity between the Catholic Church and the Churches of Christ

In the 1500s Ulrich Zwingli devised the three basic methods of establishing authority for church work and worship: Command, Apostolic Example, and Necessary Inference.

Ulrich Zwingli, possibly more influential than Luther in the long run, and much more influential on the acapella hardline Churches of Christ in the USA, was rebelling agains the stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1500s everyone was a member of the Roman Church, or they suffered dire consequences. The Roman Church at the time claimed they were the only way to God, forgiveness and heaven. If you weren’t baptized by a Roman Catholic priest, you couldn’t receive communion, couldn’t receive the forgiveness of sins, and couldn’t go to heaven when you died, or so they claimed.

Ulrich Zwingli set out to prove them wrong. There were many reasons why people wanted to rebel against the Roman Church, one was that the Roman Church took 10% of wages every year, another was that the monopoly of the Roman Church encouraged corruption, another was that the formulaic way the Roman Church approached spirituality encouraged hypocrisy.

But Ulrich Zwingli, as a Catholic priest in Zurich, Switzerland, was more interested in the formula of how the local congregation was supposed to work, and whether there was actually supposed to be a hierarchy beyond the local congregation. So he delved into the original early worship formats of the churches as recorded in the New Testament writings: the communion Supper, baptism, singing, giving, preaching, the elders, deacons and evangelists. And Voila! out popped the Churches of Christ.

Okay, there were three hundred years in between, but the essentials were there: no choirs, no solos, a cappella singing, no instruments, elders and deacons in each congregation, no fealty to a hierarchy beyond the local congregation. It was all there. Maybe they missed adult baptism, but that was sure to follow later. John Calvin in nearby Geneva followed his playbook exactly.

In addition, Zwingli attacked the magic hold of the Roman Church: the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of communion, he said was only symbolic (Luther flipped his lid over this one), and also baptism: only symbolic. After all, it was the Enlightenment when Science ruled.

But what had Zwingli done? Had he really swept away the corruption of the Roman Church? A little bit. He had constructed a formula eliminating the concentration of money and power in Rome, which certainly helped. But he had continued the false hope that the format produces spirituality.

In the hardline Churches of Christ it is openly mourned that one first has to find a church that has remained faithfully obedient to the work, organization and worship found in the early churches of the New Testament, and only secondarily to seek a congregation that also is loving, vulnerable, honest and encouraging. This is the opposite of what Jesus taught.

First of all, Jesus never said to join a congregation, or attend a congregation, or how to organize a congregation. Perhaps it was understood, because our records of Jesus record that he attended synagogue regularly until he was kicked out. What he did say was that his disciples would be known by their love.

The hardline Churches of Christ took the easy way out. It’s so much easier to judge people by whether they baptize correctly, worship correctly, or organize correctly, than to look at our own hearts, and examine the way we treat one another. In fact we have set up another corrupt system parallel to the system that Zwingli was trying to tear down.