Four Witnesses Quotes

“The early Church is no mystery, but I must say that, for me personally, it was a terrible challenge. I studied the writings of the four witnesses. I studied everything else I could find from the early Church. I looked and looked for something resembling my own faith, for something at least similar to the distinctives and practices of my own local church . . . and found only Catholicism. It was like something out of a dream, a nightmare. I had always believed, on the best authority I knew, that Roman Catholicism as it exists today is a rigid, clotted relic of the Middle Ages, the faded and fading memory of a Christianity distorted beyond all recognition by centuries of syncretism and superstition. Its organization and its officers were nothing but the christianized fossils of Emperor Constantine and his lieutenants; its transubstantiating Mass and its regenerating baptism, the ghosts of pagan mystery religion lingering over Vatican Hill. Catholicism represented to me the very opposite of primitive Christianity. The idea that anything remotely like it should be found in the first and second centuries was laughable, preposterous. I knew, like everyone else, that the early Church was a loose fraternity of simple, autonomous, spontaneous believers, with no rituals, no organization, who got their beliefs from the Bible only and who always, therefore, got it right . . . like me. I also knew that the object of the Christian game, here in the modern world, is to “put things back to the way they were in the early Church”. That, after all, was what our glorious Reformation had been all about. That, for crying out loud, was the whole meaning of Protestantism. So, as you might guess, finding apostolic succession in A.D. 96, or the Sacrifice of the Altar in 150, did my settled Evangelical way of life no good at all. Since that time I have learned that many other Evangelical Christians have experienced this same painful discovery.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“The gooey, amorphous “spirituality” of paganism allowed people to do their own thing in matters of religion. Sing, shout, prophesy, pray, go into a trance . . . nobody gave a fig, so long as you did not attempt to impose any of your high-falutin’ opinions on anyone else.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“And thus the name Katholikē Ekklesia begins to be used, as it is here, to mean “the original Church known everywhere”. And that original Church, Theophorus insists, is always recognizable as the one that “clings inseparably” to a bishop appointed by the Apostles.52”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“by the grace of God, I was able to follow in their footsteps on April 6, 1996, when, at the great vigil of Easter, I was confirmed as a Catholic. I chose St. Augustine of Hippo as my patron saint. And I mean literally that I made my decision by God’s grace alone. No intellectual process, no course of reading, can ever, in and of itself, bring a man to faith—either in Christ or in His kingdom, the Church. Faith is a miracle. And what the four witnesses had offered to me was the story of another miracle—another incarnation. I knew, and already believed with all my heart, that the Son of God had become Man at Bethlehem for my salvation; “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). But now I could see that the early Fathers believed more: They believed that His Bride had become flesh too. The”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points [of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul, and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them, and teaches them, and hands them down, with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth. For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the Churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world. But as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shineth everywhere, and enlightens all men that are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth.29 How”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“After all, I had spent quite a lot of time in denominations, para-church movements, and “home-cell” groups whose publicly announced intention was “to restore the pure Christianity of the early Church”. Not one of them had ever sent me back to any first- or second-century documentation for evidence. So who knew? Who could have imagined—with so many competing versions of “pure New Testament Christianity” on the market out there—that finding out what the early Church was like might be as simple as opening up the records and having a look? Like”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“the once-vital nation of the Romans was slipping farther and farther down the slopes of madness. Material prosperity and external peace were not enough; then, as now, they made poor substitutes for hope and idealism. Ever more fragmented, daily more frightened, helplessly angry and pathologically skeptical—the Roman people soon began to retreat into morbid individualism. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. The government, presented with an exploding population of ungovernable libertines and hopelessly hamstrung by political gridlock, did what governments always do under such circumstances: incapable of believing in a Shepherd, they started looking for a Strongman.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words