“The Nicene Nature of the Church, Part III: The Catholic Church”
The Appomattox Court House Presbyterian Church Pulpit
Rev. Robert P. Mills
The Lord's Day, January 7, 2007
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Introduction
The one congregation I had the privilege of serving as pastor was a small country church. From a pastor's perspective, one of the nice things about a small church is that it's easy to see which members are missing on a Sunday morning. Another is that it's really easy to tell when there are visitors.
One Sunday morning I looked out and saw a husband, wife, and son in one of our back pews. Since we didn't get a lot of visitors, I was pretty excited and was looking forward to greeting our guests after the service. But as I was reaching out to shake the husband's hand, before I could even muster a "Good morning," I was accosted by his question, "Are you a part of the Catholic church? I heard you say 'Catholic church' this morning."
To say the least, the question, not to mention the tone of the word "Catholic," caught me a bit off guard. Our visitor had indeed heard the entire congregation say the words "catholic church." As was our custom, that morning we had affirmed our faith by reciting the Apostles' Creed, which includes the phrase "the holy, catholic church." My hurried attempt at an explanation fell on deaf ears, and our visitors never returned. I later learned that the Baptist church this family had been attending had just split, and that it was unlikely that they ever would have joined a Presbyterian congregation.
But that brief back door encounter left a lasting impression. I saw the power a single word can have on an individual's understanding of the nature and function of the Church. And I saw how important it is for all Christians to have at least a basic understanding of their history as those whom God has called to be his people.
Today, as we resume our sermon series on the Nicene nature of the Church, I want to start with a brief look at how the word "catholic" was understood in the early centuries of church history. Next we'll consider the opening verses of Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth, concentrating on v. 2. We'll end by exploring what it means for you and me here to day to confess, with the authors of the Nicene Creed and with Christians around the world and throughout the ages, "We believe one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."
I. Historical Considerations
Our English word "catholic," spelled with a lower case 'c,' is a transliteration of the Greek word katholicos. (We'll get to the upper case 'C' Catholic in a few moments.) The Greek katholicos is a compound word, combining the noun holos, meaning "whole, complete, undivided," with the preposition kata, meaning "by, of, according to." So at its most literal, katholicos means, "of the whole, according to that which is undivided." A frequently used English synonym is "universal," although, for reasons we'll discuss later, that's not the most helpful in this case.
While the understanding of the Church as whole, complete, and undivided is thoroughly biblical, the New Testament writers never use the adjective "catholic" to modify the noun "church." The first known use of the phrase "the catholic church" dates to the early second century, 70-80 years after Jesus' resurrection, when Ignatius of Antioch wrote, "Where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church."
Ignatius' simple, straightforward description recognizes that since all Christians are members of the one body of Christ, wherever you find followers of Jesus, there you find the church, which is his undivided body. We looked at the oneness of the Church in the first sermon of this series, which was drawn from I Corinthians 12:12-20.
Understanding "the catholic church" to mean the whole, complete, undivided church was normative for nearly a thousand years. Unfortunately, few contemporary Christians seem to know much about the first 1,000 years of the Church's history. I like church historian Bruce Shelley's observation:
"Many Christians today suffer from historical amnesia. The time between the apostles and their own day is one giant blank. That is hardly what God had in mind." [Bruce L. Shelly's Church History in Plain Language (Waco: Word, 1982), p. 9.]
This historical amnesia manifests itself when Christians today hear the phrase "the catholic church," hear "Catholic" with an upper case 'C,' and immediately think of the Roman Catholic Church. One reason we make that association is that we've forgotten, if indeed we ever were taught, that for the first thousand years of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church did not exist. For the thousand years that followed Jesus' death and resurrection, whenever and wherever Christians heard the phrase "the catholic church," they thought of the one church, the whole people of God, the complete and undivided body of Christ.
The ecclesiastical separation that resulted in the Roman Catholic Church was rooted in the political division of the Roman empire. As you may recall from high school history or college Western Civ, in A.D. 330, the Roman emperor Constantine divided his empire into a western section, headquartered in Rome, and an eastern section, with its capital in Constantinople, literally, Constantine's city. The small 'c' catholic church adopted a similar organizational arrangement, with the pope in Rome leading Christians in the western portion of the empire and the patriarch in Constantinople leading those in the east.
In the year 1054, following a lengthy series of theological and administrative disagreements, the pope and the patriarch excommunicated each other. The Christians in the eastern part of the Roman Empire became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church. Those in the west became known as the Roman Catholic Church. The event is known in church history as the Great Schism. The division endures to this day.
Looking back from the year of our Lord 2007, you and I can see that the upper case 'C' Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church, has existed for less half the history of the lower case 'c' catholic church, the whole, complete, and undivided church that Paul wrote about in his first letter to the church at Corinth. And it's to I Corinthians, the foundation of this series of sermons, that we now turn our attention.
II. Biblical Foundations
Paul opens the letter by giving his credentials: "Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus." Both parts of this affirmation aid our understanding of the catholicity of the Church.
First, Paul tells the Corinthian Christians, and us, that he has been "called by the will of God." So has every Christian everywhere at every time. The circumstances of our calls may vary. Not all of us will have a blinding encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. For many of us, our awareness of God's call develops in the context of the congregation in which we were raised. But the New Testament clearly teaches that all Christians are Christians because God has called us into a relationship with him through Jesus Christ.
Paul also says he has been called to be an apostle. We'll consider apostleship in more detail in the final sermon of this series, which will explore the nature of the Church as apostolic. But briefly, our English word apostle comes from the Greek apostello, which means "to send." So an apostle is one who has been called so that he may be sent.
At the heart of the message Paul has for us this morning is the second verse of his letter, which begins, "To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus." Those two phrases are synonymous. The church, by definition, consists of those who have been made holy. Those whom God has sanctified are, by definition, the Church. We explored those realities the last time I was here when we read I Corinthians 6:12-20 and talked about the holiness of the church as both a position and a process. Christians are holy because of our position in Christ and we are continually becoming holy as the Holy Spirit helps us conform our lives to God's will.
Before we move on, it's worth lingering over the fact that Paul describes the church in Corinth as "the church of God." As you may recall, a major reason Paul was writing to the Corinthians was because their church was deeply divided. Factions had arisen, each with their own leader. So Paul starts his letter by reminding his readers that the church does not belong to any of their leaders or factions. It doesn't belong to Paul, Peter, or Apollos. The church belongs to God. The church is God's creation. The church is God's possession.
And not only has God called Paul, not only has God called those in the church in Corinth, but Paul and the Corinthians are, as we read in v. 2, "called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Paul's point is clear. Some Corinthian Christians had become convinced that they were spiritually superior to other Christians in other places. They decided to take an autonomous approach to Christian faith and life, a course that was leading them away from every other church. So Paul starts his letter by reminding them that their own calling to be God's people is part of a much larger picture.
The Christians in Corinth, and those in Appomattox, are eternally united with all the saints, with believers in every place who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. In using the phrase "in every place," Paul is reminding the Corinthians that they are not alone; that there are those all over the world, indeed throughout all time, who call on the name of the Lord when they gather together. The one the Corinthians call "Lord" is the Lord of the undivided church.
And because Jesus Christ is Lord of all, because the church of God is whole, complete, and undivided, the Christians in Corinth are not more spiritual than the Christians in Appomattox. The Christians in Appomattox have no right to assume that their beliefs and behaviors can differ from the beliefs and behaviors of Christians in Guatemala. The church of God, Paul makes clear here and in his other letters, is whole, complete, and undivided. In other words, the church, as an essential part of its nature, is catholic.
III. Theological Implications
Having looked at how the phrase "the catholic church" was understood in the first 1,000 years of Christian history, and at the biblical understanding of the catholicity of the church, we now have a breadth and depth of perspective that can give us insight into why and how it matters for you and me today not merely to confess but also to live out our belief that the church of God is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
It's an unfortunate fact that for many American evangelicals, like the church visitor I mentioned at the outset of the sermon, the word "catholic" is problematic. To minds ravaged by historical amnesia, small 'c' "catholic" sounds like an upper case affirmation of papal authority; it sounds like an uncritical embrace of the Roman Catholic magisterium.
In response to such concerns, some evangelical churches reject the use of creeds altogether. For example, branches of the Baptist church I'm familiar with emphatically refuse to use the creeds and confessions of the small 'c' catholic church in their worship or their teaching. "No creed but Christ," I've heard some say. By God's grace, I've so far resisted the temptation to point out that "No creed but Christ" is itself a creed.
Other evangelical traditions, to their credit, acknowledge the importance of connecting themselves to other Christians across time and space by accepting the validity and usefulness of the creeds. This is important to us because one of the most visible ways a local congregation shows itself to be a part of the catholic church is through its relations to other churches. A congregation that isolates itself from other churches of God past or present, a church that has no desire to related to these churches in some fashion, is denying its own catholicity.
Nevertheless, fearful that some of its members might find the term "catholic" offensive, some evangelical churches edit the creeds by replacing "catholic" with "Christian" or "universal." The problems with such editorial alterations include that "Christian" is not a synonym for "catholic" and that, for the authors of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, "catholic" meant much, much more than "universal."
Two hundred years after Ignatius, Cyril of Jerusalem, penned what remains a classic description of the catholic church. I want to divide his description into three sections.
First, Cyril writes, "The Church is called Catholic because it is spread through the whole world, from one end of the earth to the other …" There's our understanding of catholic as universal: the church is rightly called catholic because it isn't limited to a specific place or time.
Second, Cyril continues, "The Church is called Catholic … because it never stops teaching in all its fullness every doctrine that men ought to be brought to know: and that regarding things visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth." The doctrinal dimension of the word "catholic" is one reason why the word "universal" isn't a good substitute; it's why I said earlier that it's not the best synonym in this situation. For Cyril, as for the other orthodox theologians of the early church, the word catholic as applied to the nature of the church had multiple levels of meaning, all of which taken together showed the church to be whole, complete, and undivided.
One of those early theologians was Augustine, a younger contemporary of Cyril, who said, "the true faith, the right faith, the catholic faith, which is not a bundle of opinions and prejudices … [is] founded on apostolic truth." As I noted earlier, this connection between the church's nature as catholic and its nature as apostolic is one we'll explore in more detail in the final sermon of this series. But Augustine, a theologian whose orthodoxy is recognized by Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, insisted that essential to the church's catholicity was its embrace of the teachings of the apostles, teachings that had been revealed to them by Jesus Christ. Those teachings unite Christians across time and space and mark the unalterable boundaries of Christian faith and practice.
A wonderful contemporary perspective on the doctrinal aspect of the catholic nature of the church is offered by D.H. Williams, a Baptist minister who teaches patristic theology at a Roman Catholic university. (How's that for small 'c' catholic?) Williams rightly observes that the faith shared by all who are members of the catholic church has a definite, definable content. This in turn means there's a certain quality of exclusivity within catholicity. He writes:
"The inclusive character of catholicity is based, not on a kind of all-incorporation of diversity that invites theological syncretism or dilution, but on the reception from God of a unique message and gift that transcends any one history or location. Practicing catholicism should not be confused with contemporary notions of inclusivity and tolerance....catholicity operates on the understanding that there exist true doctrines and practices, an understanding which is meant to distinguish the Christian church from theological or moral corruption." [D.H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 226.]
I wish I had the time to unpack that paragraph with you this morning. Since I don't, I'll simply highlight the key point: The church's historic description of itself as catholic must not be confused with the postmodern notions of pluralism and tolerance. To say that the nature of the church is catholic is not to say that Christians can believe whatever they want and behave however they'd like. The reason Paul wrote I Corinthians was to disabuse some misguided church members of such dreadful notions. Rather, an essential aspect of the undivided nature of the church, is "that there exist true doctrines and practices … meant to distinguish the Christian church from theological or moral corruption."
Going on to the third section of Cyril's definition. The church...
"is called Catholic also because it brings into religious obedience every sort of men, rulers and ruled, learned and simple, and because it is a universal treatment and cure for every kind of sin whether perpetrated by soul or body, and possesses within it every form of virtue that is named, whether it expresses itself in deeds or words or in spiritual graces of every description."
To put Cyril's words in contemporary terms, membership in the catholic church isn't limited to presidents and kings, but neither are they automatically excluded. The catholic church is not, as some liberation theologians have taught in recent years, the exclusive property of the poor, nor, as some prosperity gospel proponents would like you to believe, is church membership exemplified by material wealth. Membership in the catholic church isn't limited to those with Ph.D.s in historical theology. Then again, earning a graduate degree doesn't mean you've been prevented from receiving God's grace.
And no matter how you've sinned, no matter what you've said or what you've done, the catholic church, the body of believers created and sustained by God, is a place for you to find God's grace. The catholic church is a channel of God's steadfast love and mercy to wounded individuals and to a sin-sick world. The catholic church is a gift God has given us to shape our holiness, to guide us as we seek to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we will have within us the very mind of Christ.
To summarize, let me go back and read Cyril's definition one more time, this time without adding any commentary. I know I've just packed a lot of theology into a small space. But because this definition is so important to our understanding the word "catholic" in the context of the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds, it's worth hearing one more time. Cyril writes:
"The Church, then, is called Catholic because it is spread through the whole world, from one end of the earth to the other, and because it never stops teaching in all its fullness every doctrine that men ought to be brought to know: and that regarding things visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth. It is called Catholic also because it brings into religious obedience every sort of men, rulers and ruled, learned and simple, and because it is a universal treatment and cure for every kind of sin whether perpetrated by soul or body, and possesses within it every form of virtue that is named, whether it expresses itself in deeds or words or in spiritual graces of every description." [Cited in John Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 243.]
Conclusion
Looking back, I now think it likely that the visitor who came to my small country church had never been taught to associate the phrase "the catholic church" with the biblical concept of the church of God as whole, complete, and undivided. My guess is that he never had a pastor or Sunday school teacher tell him how Ignatius of Antioch, Cyril of Jerusalem, or Augustine of Hippo used the phrase to explain what Paul taught the Corinthians about the nature of the church. Even if he had learned about the Great Schism from reading a textbook or hearing a lecture, seemingly no one had explained that event to him as the origin of the Roman Catholic Church. So when the Creed came to the words "the catholic church," his knee-jerk negativity was not surprising.
What will you hear in the words "the catholic church" the next time you recite the Nicene or Apostles' Creed?
My prayer is that you'll hear that the church of God is whole, complete, and undivided not only across time and space but in its beliefs and behaviors. My prayer is that you'll sense your connections to Christians in palaces and rice paddies, in academic institutions and in parts of the world that don't have a written language. My prayer is that you, with Paul, will give thanks to the God who "called [you] to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Amen.
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