15 The Holy Catholic Church
The Holy Catholic Church
It is by strict theological logic that the Creed confesses faith in the Holy Spirit before proceeding to the church, and that it speaks of the church before mentioning personal salvation (forgiveness, resurrection, everlasting life). For though Father and Son have loved the church and the Son has redeemed it, it is the Holy Spirit who actually creates it, by inducing faith; and it is in the church, through its ministry and fellowship, that personal salvation ordinarily comes to be enjoyed.
Unhappily, there is at this point a parting of the ways. Roman Catholics and Protestants both say the Creed, yet they are divided. Why? Basically, because of divergent understandings of “I believe in the holy catholic church”—“one holy catholic and apostolic church,” as the true text of the Nicene Creed has it.
Roman Versus Protestant
Official Roman Catholic teaching presents the church of Christ as the one organized body of baptized persons who are in communion with the Pope and acknowledge the teaching and ruling authority of the episcopal hierarchy. It is holy because it produces saintly folk and is kept from radical sin; catholic because in its worldwide spread it holds the full faith in trust for everyone; and apostolic because its ministerial orders stem from the apostles, and its faith (including such nonbiblical items as the assumption of Mary and her immaculate conception, the Mass-sacrifice, and papal infallibility) is a sound growth from apostolic roots. Non-Roman bodies, however church-like, are not strictly part of the church at all.
Protestants challenge this from the Bible. In Scripture (they say) the church is the one worldwide fellowship of believing people whose Head is Christ. It is holy because it is consecrated to God (though it is capable nonetheless of grievous sin); it is catholic because it embraces all Christians everywhere; and it is apostolic because it seeks to maintain the apostles’ doctrine unmixed. Pope, hierarchy, and extra-biblical doctrines are not merely nonessential but actually deforming; if Rome is a church (which some Reformers doubted) she is so despite the extras, not because of them. In particular, infallibility belongs to God speaking in the Bible, not to the church nor to any of its officers, and any teaching given in or by the church must be open to correction by “God’s word written.”1
Some Protestants have taken the clause “the communion of saints” which follows “the holy catholic church” as the Creed’s own elucidation of what the church is; namely, Christians in fellowship with each other—just that, without regard for any particular hierarchical structure. But it is usual to treat this phrase as affirming the real union in Christ of the church “militant here in earth” with the church triumphant, as is indicated in Hebrews 12:22-24; and it may be that the clause was originally meant to signify communion in holythings (word, sacrament, worship, prayers), and to make the true but distinct point that in the church there is a real sharing in the life of God. The “spiritual” view of the church as being a fellowship before it is an institution can, however, be confirmed from Scripture without appeal to this phrase, whatever its sense, being needed.
The New Testament
That the New Testament presents the Protestant view is hardly open to dispute (the dispute is over whether the New Testament is final!). The church appears in trinitarian relationships, as the family of God the Father, the body of Christ the Son, and the temple (dwelling-place) of the Holy Spirit, and so long as the dominical sacraments are administered and ministerial oversight is exercised, no organizational norms are insisted on at all. The church is the supernatural society of God’s redeemed and baptized people, looking back to Christ’s first coming with gratitude and on to his second coming with hope. “Your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3ff.)—such is the church’s present state and future prospect. To this hope both sacraments point, baptism prefiguring final resurrection, the Lord’s Supper anticipating “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).
For the present, however, all churches (like those in Corinth, Colossae, Galatia, and Thessalonica, to look no further) are prone to err in both faith and morals, and need constant correction and re-formation at all levels (intellectual, devotional, structural, liturgical) by the Spirit through God’s Word.
The evangelical theology of revival, first spelled out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the present-day emergence of “charismatic renewal” on a worldwide scale, reminds us of something which Roman Catholic and Protestant disputers, in their concentration on doctrinal truth, tended to miss—namely, that church must always be open to the immediacy of the Spirit’s Lordship, and that disorderly vigor in a congregation is infinitely preferable to a correct and tidy deadness.
The Local Church
The acid test of the church’s state is what happens in the local congregation. Each congregation is a visible outcrop of the one church universal, called to serve God and men in humility and, perhaps, humiliation while living in prospect of glory. Spirit-filled for worship and witness, active in love and care for insiders and outsiders alike, self-supporting and self-propagating, each congregation is to be a spearhead of divine counterattack for the recapture of a rebel world.
Tailpiece: how is your congregation getting on?
Note:
1Anglican Article XX.
Further Bible Study
The church’s nature and destiny:
1 Peter 2
Ephesians 2:11-4:16
Questions for Thought and Discussion
How does the Roman Catholic use of the New Testament differ from the Protestant one? How does this affect the concept each holds of the church?
How does Packer define “the communion of saints”? Do you agree with what he says? Why or Why not?
What is the function of a local Christian church in relation to the universal church?