Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge opens with a neat piece of polemical framing: calling it the "Popish theory" is less a description than a preemptive verdict. The term doesn’t just mean "Roman Catholic"; it evokes a whole Protestant emotional register of suspicion toward hierarchy, tradition, and centralized authority. Before he argues, he marks the target as already compromised, a foreign import smuggled into Christianity.

The sentence then stages the real dispute: not whether there was a community around Jesus (everyone grants that), but whether that community counts as an organized Church with built-in permanence. By naming the elements -- Christ, the Apostles, "believers" -- Hodge sketches the Catholic claim in its strongest, most continuous form: a living institution beginning in the Gospels and meant to persist, structurally, across time. The key word is "organization". If the Church is an organization designed to be perpetual, then authority can be inherited, offices can be transmitted, and doctrinal continuity can be enforced. That’s the scaffolding for apostolic succession and, eventually, Rome’s claims about teaching authority.

Hodge’s intent is to sever that line. As a 19th-century Princeton theologian in an America of surging denominationalism and anti-Catholic politics, he’s defending a Protestant account where the Church is real but not identical with a single enduring apparatus. The subtext is about power: who gets to speak for Christianity now. If you win the origin story, you win the present.