(LifeSiteNews) — Dutch Bishop Robert Mutsaerts recently criticized Christians who want “Jesus without the Church.”

In an essay on his blog titled “Jesus yes, Church no?,” the auxiliary bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch wrote: “There is a notion that I still hear quite regularly: Jesus wanted followers, but He did not want the institution of the Church.”

“It is like saying, ‘I am in favor of education, but against schools,’ or ‘I am in favor of soccer, but against soccer clubs.’ It is simply not possible; content without form is like water: it flows away.”

“He did not entrust His message to ‘humanity,’ but to twelve very specific men, at least four of whom seemed completely unsuitable,” the bishop said. “Those who claim that Jesus did not want a Church describe Him as a kind of floating moral philosopher, when in reality He was someone who ate with His disciples, traveled with them, corrected them, sent them out, and had to settle their quarrels.”

“That is not a spiritual cloud. That is a nascent organization,” he argued.

“The counterargument is usually this: ‘The Church cannot be from God, because it is so human.’”

“But that is exactly the same argument that could have been used against the Incarnation: ‘God cannot have become human, because humans are so limited.’ Christianity is, after all, the belief that God works precisely through the human.”

Mutsaerts recalled that Jesus said, “On this rock I will build my Church.”

“The funny thing is that people who claim to ‘follow Jesus alone’ often start by correcting Jesus,” he noted “Jesus did something else: He gave authority. He said to His apostles, ‘Whoever listens to you listens to Me.’”

“In Matthew 16 and 18, He speaks of ‘the keys of the Kingdom,’ ‘binding and loosing,’ and decisions that are ‘recognized in heaven.’ This is legal language. Not poetic imagery, but language of responsibility and leadership.”

“The idea that ‘Jesus did not want a Church’ would have been completely incomprehensible to the first Christians.”

“For them, the Church was not a later addition, but the natural consequence of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection,” the 67-year-old Dutch bishop noted.

“When Ignatius of Antioch says, ‘Where the bishop is, there is the Church,’ he is not saying this to defend power, but to preserve unity.”

Bishop Mutsaerts stressed the importance of the physical presence of the Church, as it corresponds with the physical Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

“God becomes man in a body: the Incarnation. Grace comes through visible signs: sacraments. Love takes shape in structures, such as marriage. A Church without human structures would be Gnostic: spirit without body. But Christianity is always spirit and body, grace and order, mystery and organization,” he said.

“No one denies that the Church has made (many) mistakes, has known abuse, has abused power.”

“But: Judas was already there, Peter denied Jesus, the apostles fled (the very first synodal action). Human weakness does not refute the divine character of the institution. On the contrary, it confirms how realistic Jesus was. He did not build his Church on perfect people, but on forgiven sinners,” the bishop added.

“Without the Church, there would be no Bible, because it is the Church that compiled the Bible.”

“I have always found it extremely curious that people distrust the Church, but blindly trust a book that they only know thanks to that same Church. In other words, the Church was there before the Bible,” he concluded.