Theopedia

Catholic

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

— Matthew 28:19 (ESV)

Definition

Catholic, from a Latin word meaning “universal,”1 names the church’s reach across every nation, age, and place, one of the four marks confessed of the church in the Nicene Creed’s “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”2 The whole company of the elect, gathered under Christ across every age, is likewise called “the catholic or universal church.”3 Capitalized, “Catholic” also names the Roman Catholic Church specifically, whose own claim to that title rests on visible, institutional succession rather than the invisible bond of election the term names here.4

Confessional Witness

The Nicene Creed, in the form associated with the Council of Constantinople (381),5 confesses:

“[And we believe] in one holy catholic and apostolic church.”2

The wider Reformed confessional family says the same thing in its own words. The Heidelberg Catechism asks what a believer holds concerning “the ‘holy catholic church’ of Christ” and answers that the Son of God “gathers, defends, and preserves to himself by his Spirit and word, out of the whole human race, a church chosen to everlasting life.”6 The Second Helvetic Confession devotes its own article to the term:

“We … call this Church catholic because it is universal, scattered through all parts of the world, and extended unto all times, and is not limited to any times or places.”7

The Second London Baptist Confession puts the same doctrine this way:

“The catholic or universal church, which (with respect to the internal work of the Spirit and truth of grace) may be called invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ, the head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”3

Each formulation locates catholicity in the elect gathered under Christ across every age and nation, not in a single visible government spanning the earth. The confession draws that distinction explicitly a few paragraphs later, denying that the papacy holds any claim on the church’s headship at all: “neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof.”8 The Second Helvetic Confession names the same point, rejecting both a schism that shrank the church down to one region and a claim that stretched one region’s church over the whole: “we condemn the Donatists who confined the Church to I know not what corners of Africa. Nor do we approve of the Roman clergy who have recently passed off only the Roman Church as catholic.”7

Biblical Basis

From the beginning, the New Testament church understood itself as a single body spanning many congregations rather than a set of separate ones: Paul addressed “the church of God that is in Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:2), not “the churches,” even though believers in the city met in several different households.9 That oneness came with an explicit mandate to cross the boundary lines of Jesus’s own first disciples, who were entirely Jewish: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Older texts point the same direction and further: God’s promise that in Abraham “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3), the psalmist’s vision of the nations as the Son’s own inheritance (Ps. 2:8), John’s vision of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” gathered before the throne (Rev. 7:9), and Paul’s report that the gospel “is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world” (Col. 1:6).4

Historical Development

The earliest church

Before Christianity held any legal standing in the Roman Empire, believers in a city met scattered across several private homes, yet did not think of themselves as separate churches: Paul’s letters address “the church” in a city, singular, never “the churches.”9 His first disciples were Jewish, and the religion they had known was bound to one people, but Jesus sent them instead to “all the nations” (Matt. 28:19).1

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed (325, 381)

The creed adopted at Nicaea in 325 already spoke of “the holy catholic and apostolic Church,” but only inside its closing formula condemning those who denied the Son’s full deity. The form associated with the Council of Constantinople in 381 drops that condemnation, expands the creed’s clauses on the Holy Spirit,5 and restates the same words about the church as their own article of belief: “[And we believe] in one holy catholic and apostolic church.”2

Vincent of Lerins and the fifth-century rule of catholicity

In the fifth century, the monk Vincent of Lerins, writing against a rigorous Augustinianism he judged excessive,10 proposed a test for true doctrine that later Roman theology adopted as its own account of catholicity: a teaching is catholic when it has been held “quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,” what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all.11 Rome later formulated its rule of judgment around this dictum, treating antiquity and universal consent as marks of true doctrine and, by extension, of the true church that teaches it.11

Rome and the name “Catholic”

The bishops who governed the earliest congregations were widely understood as the apostles’ legitimate successors, a pattern the Greek Orthodox and other Eastern churches kept without ever collapsing it into a single papal monarchy.4 In Rome, though, the local bishop’s office grew into just such a monarchy: it was Leo I, bishop of Rome from 440 to 461, who “clearly and with all deliberateness in several letters developed this primacy of the Roman See and elevated it to the rank and value of a religious dogma.”4 From that point, Bavinck observes, “the terms ‘Roman’ and ‘Catholic’ were linked from the start and evolved together.”4

The Reformation’s rejection of Rome’s exclusive claim

The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) answered Rome’s claim to the name by rejecting it outright, condemning “the Roman clergy who have recently passed off only the Roman Church as catholic” in the same breath as the ancient Donatist error of shrinking the church down to one corner of the world.7

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism confesses the same four marks, but where Protestants ground them in the church’s spiritual bond with Christ, Bavinck writes that Rome seeks them “first of all… in a specific, hierarchically ordered institution.”4 On this view catholicity is bound up with apostolicity: Rome’s office-bearers are held to be “successors, in an unbroken line, of the apostles,” receiving their authority “in lawful succession from the apostles,” and it is this visible, traceable continuity, not merely geographic spread, that grounds the church’s claim to the name.4 Bavinck grants that Rome’s appeal to the church fathers for this reading “has merit,” but argues Rome both overstates its own numerical growth and understates that of Protestant churches, and that “there is a fundamental contradiction between the terms ‘Roman’ and ‘catholic.’”4

Eastern Orthodoxy and other Eastern churches likewise hold their bishops to be the apostles’ legitimate successors, but never developed that office into a single papal monarchy the way Rome did.4

Objections and Responses

Objection: a church fragmented into thousands of denominations cannot be called catholic. Ronald Heine names the tension: the church today is “a fragmented body of people,” divided into Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant groups, the last splintered further into “numerous subgroups,” with little realistic prospect that “all Christians in their various groupings” will “give up their distinctive characteristics and unite as one church.”9 Bavinck answers that the church’s purity has always come in degrees rather than as an all-or-nothing possession: “there is for us an inevitable elasticity thanks to the church’s de facto pluriformity which forces us to look for its unity in the spiritual bond of faith rather than in the external form of its government.”4 Catholicity, on this account, was never a claim that every true congregation shares one visible government; it is a claim that the elect scattered across those congregations, in every nation and age, are one body under one head.

Objection: only a church that has kept an unbroken line of ordination back to the apostles, under one visible head, has any real claim to the name catholic. Scripture, Bavinck answers, “says nothing about such an apostolic succession, and succession in itself is no guarantee of purity of doctrine.”4 The Reformers looked instead to “the succession of doctrine” (successio doctrinae) rather than “succession of places and persons” (successio locorum et personarum) as what marks a true church.4 The confession states the same conclusion about the papacy specifically, denying it any claim to the church’s headship: “neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof.”8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 140: “The word ‘catholic’ comes from a Latin word that means ‘universal.’” ↩ ↩2

  2. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 137. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “Catholicity is not just a geographical, spatial, and temporal matter—spread over the whole earth and existing in an unbroken line from the apostles—but also a pointer to the fullness of the grace and truth intended by God for all people.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 116: “with the clauses defining the Person and work of the Holy Ghost added, and the Anathema omitted. This new form of the Creed has been generally attributed to the Council of Constantinople, convened by the Emperor Theodosius, A.D. 381.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Lord’s Day 21, Q&A 54. ↩

  7. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 17, “Of the Catholic Church.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 26, para. 4. ↩ ↩2

  9. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 138. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology”: Vincent of Lerins, “who in his Commonitorium not only lists the marks of tradition but also, at the end, registers his opposition to a rigorous Augustinianism.” ↩

  11. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 123: “They have formulated their rule of judgment in the famous dictum of Vincent of Lerins: ‘Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.’” ↩ ↩2