Catholic
It is true that the term "catholic" is not used in the New Testament, in contrast to our other three terms. The Church is explicitly called "one," and "holy," and is said to be founded on the apostles and devoted to their teachings. But we do not see a verse with the term "catholic" in it. That is not to say, however, that the concept of the Church's catholicity is not in Scripture. It is most definitely a New Testament quality of the Church as we will see.
Furthermore, catholicity is demanded from the fact of the Church's unity. As I traced in part III the characteristic of holiness from the Church's unity with the Godhead, so, too, will we trace the catholicity of the Church from that Trinitarian unity, and the wholeness obtaining in the particular. Catholicity has come to mean, for many, universality or the worldwide scope of the Church. As we trace the concept from the New Testament and one of its earliest expressions in St. Ignatios of Antioch, however, we will see that the original impetus of the word was not so much worldwide universality as completeness and wholeness.
First, let us start with the verses from the first chapter of Ephesians that will ground us in our understanding of this essential aspect of the Church.
And He put in subjection all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him Who filleth all things in all. (Ephesians 1:22-23, The Orthodox New Testament, © 2004 Holy Apostles Convent)
The Church is the fullness of Christ, who Himself fills all things. Thus, wherever the Church is, the wholeness that is Chirst is there. If a particular Church is said to contain the fullness of Christ, it can by extension be said that a particular Church contains the wholeness of the Church, since Christ, Himself, fills the Church.
Now some may object that St. Paul is merely here referring to the universality of the the Church; i. e., that the fullness of Christ applies to the whole of the Church. We could point out that the Ephesian epistle is addressed to the Ephesian Church, but there is some textual question as to whether the ascription is original to the document, and some speculation as to whether Ephesians itself functioned as a circular letter. So let us turn our attention to the Colossian letter:
For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the divinity bodily, and ye are made full in Him, Who is the head of all principality and authority . . . (Colossians 2:9-10)
Once again we have the stress that in Jesus is the fullness of the Godhead. And here, the Apostle asserts that the Church in Colossae is "made full in Him." In other words, all of Christ dwells in the Church in Colossae, and if the Church contains the fullness of Christ, then the wholeness of the Church dwells in Colossae.
Compare also the following salutations to the Corinthians: "[T]o the Church of God which is in Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called saints, with all those calling upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, both theirs and ours" (1 Corinthians 1:2). "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the Church of God which is in Corinth, with all the saints who are in all Achaia" (2 Corinthians 1:1). In other greetings, he refers to the saints in a particular locale (Romans, Philippians, Colossians), or the Churches in a particular region (Galatia). He refers to the Church of the Thessalonians; as opposed to the Church of Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1).
But there is also the greetings of our Lord to the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the Revelation given to John:
The point being that just as in Christ is the fullness of the Godhead, just as the Father is the font of the Godhead, just as the Spirit is one in substance with the Godhead--that is to say, just as each Person of the Trinity is fully and completely God, so, too, each local Church, participating in this Trinitarian unity, is fully and completely the Church. Jesus is no less God than the Father or the Spirit; the Holy Spirit no less God than Jesus or the Father. Nor is it the case that adding the Three Persons together creates a sum greater than the particular Person. The fullness of the Godhead is manifest in the Trinity and in each Person of the Trinity.
So, too, is this the case of the Church and its characteristic of catholicity. This is not to deny the universal aspects of catholicity, for the whole Church does, of course, include all Churches of the world and the Church in the heavenlies. But understanding catholicity from the standpoint of universality can lead to an erroneous conclusion: that the universal Church is made up of parts, local congregations or dioceses, each in itself incomplete apart from the whole. This is not the New Testament teaching. Each local Church is the whole of the Church and at the same time is a part of the entire Body of Christ on earth and in heaven.
But lest one think this is an aberrant interpretation, it was also the earliest interpretation of the first century Christians. Take St. Ignatios of Antioch, for example, who died right at the beginning of the second century, so lived most of his life during the lifetimes of the Apostles. (Church tradition describes him as the child Jesus took up in his arms in Mark 9:35, and with St. Polycarp, was a disciple of the Apostle John. If Peter is counted as the first bishop of Antioch, St. Ignatios is the third, serving after Evodius.) Like St. Paul and our Lord, Ignatios greets the Church in a particular locale:
And as we've seen in Ephesians and Colossians, St. Ignatios also understands the fullness of the Church to dwell in a particular Church:
Take ye heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to [show forth] the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever ye do, ye may do it according to [the will of] God. (St. Ignatios of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 4)
and
Take ye heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to [show forth] the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever ye do, ye may do it according to [the will of] God. (St. Ignatios of Antioch, Epistle to the Philadelphians, chapter 4)
Again, we know that the saint understands there to be one bishop in one locale, and therefore one Eucharist. This Eucharistic unity and the episcopal ministry founded on it is understood to be in the "one flesh of our Lord." Each Eucharist contains the fullness of Christ's divinity. It is not as though one could add up all the Eucharists around the world and get a full Christ. Each Eucharist is fully Christ, and nothing less. And again, where the fullness of Christ is, there is the whole Church.
The first epistle of Clement is a communication between two Churches: "The Church of God which sojourns at Rome, to the Church of God sojourning at Corinth," (1 Clement 1:1). The occasion of the writing is the sedition against the leaders of the Church in Corinth. St. Clement writes of the orderly transition from the Apostles to the bishops after them, and notes that,
We are of opinion, therefore, that those appointed by them, or afterwards by other eminent men, with the consent of the whole Church, and who have blamelessly served the flock of Christ in a humble, peaceable, and disinterested spirit, and have for a long time possessed the good opinion of all, cannot be justly dismissed from the ministry. (1 Clement 44)
Note here that the consent of the whole Church is predicated. But St. Clement does not mean the entire Church around the world, but rather the local Church which comprises the whole Church. And lest one think this is a tendentious reading taking "whole Church" in a way St. Clement did not intend, note his talk on the offering of the altar (using the offerings of the Old Covenant as a type and the Eucharist as the anti-type):
Not in every place, brethren, are the daily sacrifices offered, or the peace-offerings, or the sin-offerings and the trespass-offerings, but in Jerusalem only. And even there they are not offered in any place, but only at the altar before the temple, that which is offered being first carefully examined by the high priest and the ministers already mentioned. Those, therefore, who do anything beyond that which is agreeable to His will, are punished with death. Ye see, brethren, that the greater the knowledge that has been vouchsafed to us, the greater also is the danger to which we are exposed. (1 Clement 41)
Like St. Ignatios, there is one sacrifice and one altar for the whole Church. And yet, St. Clement well recognizes that there are many Christian altars on which the Eucharist is offered throughout the world. How can he compare the many altars of the New Covenant with the one altar in Jerusalem? Because the one altar of a local Church is the one altar of the whole Church.
Throughout all this discussion on catholicity, I have been stressing the wholeness of the Church in the local Church over against the worldwide extent of the Church. The Church has not denied this universal aspect, though it did develop later (some of the beginnings of which development can be seen in St. Cyprian of Carthage's The Unity of the Catholic Church, where, for St. Cyprian, "catholic" is used in the sense described above, and yet there are intimations of universality as well). My point is not to deny the notion of universality, but to combat the notion of the Church as the sum of its parts. It is manifestly not that.
After all, if the Church is one with the Godhead, then wherever the Church is, it is all there by way of the hypostatic union in Christ.
Posted by Clifton at March 8, 2005 12:00 PM | TrackBack