The Marks of the Church
Towards the end of the Nicene Creed are the words, “We believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic church.” These are extremely potent, carefully chosen words that carry tremendous meaning. Because of this, we must be extremely careful as to how we interpret them. Many people have approached them from different angles and have had sharp disagreements over them. It is not my intention to explain every possible view, as seen throughout church history, but rather to present their most natural meanings when we define them in light of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.
One
The fact that the church is one has been the subject of a multitude of conflicts, especially because the Roman Catholic Church has tended, historically, to define the church in terms of its external expression and by its allegiance to the pope. This, of course, is an unacceptable interpretation in the eyes of Protestants, as that would immediately exclude them from the church. There are others who, wanting to exclude those who exclude them, define it in similarly external ways, but in a way that is congenial to that particular group.
In point of fact, there can be no real question as to whether or not there is only one church or even how this oneness is constituted. There can be only one church because there is only one Christ, in whom and through whom alone the church can exist. To say that there is (or even that there could be) more than one church is to say that Christ can be divided.
The issue of how this oneness is constituted should make perfect sense in light of all the preceding discussion throughout this work. All those who are in Christ make up the church. It does not matter they are affiliated the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches or any of a multitude of Protestant Churches, if they are truly in Christ, they are part of the one church. The only thing that can truly separate one from the church is if they are separated from Christ. Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage in North Africa in the third century is famous for saying, “Outside the church there is no salvation.” This has also been interpreted in many ways, but it seems to be most true when we consider that the church and the group of all people who are in Christ are coterminous (that is, they extend equally far). The only way to be saved is to be part of the church (though this is the one church of the creed, not a particular manifestation of that one church) because they are one and the same. The point that we need to remember is that it is not possible to be in Christ and somehow avoid being in the one church.
Holy
This is the mark of the church that was of particular interest to John Wesley. His basic insight will be explained presently. The question that has been asked is, “What makes the church holy?” Classically, and I agree, it has been stressed that it is Christ who makes the church holy because it is first and foremost his holiness that matters. If we take the idea of substitution seriously and the fact that, by taking on all of human nature and living a human life, God has taken our place in every aspect of our lives and not just our deaths, we can come to no other conclusion than that it is because Christ is holy that the church is holy.
However, is there not an implication for the actual believers who participate in the holiness of Christ? This was the conviction of John Wesley. Wesley was surrounded by people who argued that, because Christ was our total substitute, there was nothing that we needed to do in response. This is, of course, not how total substitution has been portrayed in this work. Wesley insisted that the holiness of Christ manifested itself in the lives of believers. Using terminology of the time, Christ imparts righteousness to every one to whom he imputes righteousness. That is, every single person for whom Christ is the total substitute also has a life that is fundamentally changed.
This cannot be doubted in light of the discussion of the person and work of Christ and the Spirit. If, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are grafted into Christ so that it is no longer we who live but Christ lives in us and that the Spirit takes the things of Christ and makes them ours, how can we not begin to manifest the righteousness of Christ in our own lives? Now, we are by no means any more loved by God because of this righteousness; indeed, while this righteousness is, in one sense, our own as it is working itself in our lives, it is still Christ’s righteousness. This is one of the crucial insights that Wesley had in the face of the antinomian (“without law”) teachers who surrounded him.
Catholic
The catholicity (or universality) of the church is closely connected with its unity. If there is only one church, this church must be universal. There can be none who are grafted into Christ who are somehow outside the scope of the church. In this very basic sense, the church is catholic.
There are, however, two other ways in which the church is catholic or universal. The church is catholic because, by its very nature, it is meant to span the globe. There is no part of the world that is somehow excluded from the promises of the gospel and so there is no place where the church is not meant to be set up. The fact that the church is not yet an earthly and historical manifestation of this global catholicity just goes to show that the church is not yet is it should be, for none are to be left out of the promises that have formed it and to which it bears witness. The other way that the church is catholic or universal is in regards to the human person. Absolutely all of the person is implicated in the gospel. As this was explored in greater depth in the last chapter, no more will be said of it here.
Apostolic
This is a crucial mark of the church and has a few layers of meaning. First, to say that the church is apostolic is to say that the church is founded on the witness of the apostles. This means that the church’s thinking and practice is explicitly built on that witness as the foundation on which sound thinking can be derived and a core set of data from which alone appropriate conclusions can be drawn.
This leads us to the second layer of meaning of the word apostolic. To say that the church is apostolic is to say that it cannot be any other way. It is important to note that there is a very big difference between saying that it “can” not be otherwise than it is and saying that it “could” not have been otherwise than it is. As we have discussed at a few other points before, God was, in theory, able to do things differently than he did; the creation might have been different, when God become a human being, he might have done so as a woman. However, those possibilities do not enable us to build our thinking on these other possibilities. God’s revelation is not utterly timeless and spaceless that can be reinterpreted and re-symbolized depending on our present culture and thinking, but God has revealed himself to us in time and space, as Jesus Christ, in Israel, two thousand years ago. We cannot bypass that revelation.
This is why the church cannot be anything but apostolic. The actual revelation of God, which took place in time and space, created a community in which Jesus dwelt, day and night, preaching, teaching, and shaping the thoughts and lives of a particular group of men and women. Even though the disciples did not understand at the time, after the resurrection of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, they remembered all of what Jesus said and did and understood what it meant. This is what God has actually done in revealing himself to human beings. To bypass the apostolic witness is to bypass the actual concrete revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
To give some more concrete reflections about this, think about the New Testament witness. If we were to avoid the apostolic foundation of the church, we would also avoid the entire New Testament. Not only the epistles were written by apostles, but the gospels themselves, the lives of Jesus were written down either by apostles themselves or by others based upon the witness of the apostles. To do away with the apostolic nature of the church is to do away with any reliance of the Bible. Human beings are free, of course, to disagree with the Bible and even hate what is written in it (indeed, it is to be expected since it stands so strongly against the ways of human beings), but to say that the Bible has no authority, or even that it is not the normative authority, is to stand at sharp deviation from the church throughout the ages.
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