Part 8 of a Study in the Nicene Creed

“And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”

“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Ephesians 4:4-6

Cyprian famously said that, “Outside the church, there is no salvation,” and Augustine added that, “I would not have known God as my Father unless I knew the church as my mother.” It may surprise the nascent Reformed student that Calvin and Turretin both reaffirmed these sentiments.1 However, some qualification is in order. The church is a “mother” to us in its nursing capacity. This speaks of instrumental causality. The ministries of the church are, collectively, doing this “mothering” or “nurturing” activity. But we must ask whether or not there is a hierarchy among the means of grace so ministered. First Peter gives us a clue in speaking of “the pure spiritual milk” of the word (2:2). Our chapter breakdown conceals that this comes on the heels of referring to the imperishable “seed” (1:23) of that same word that gives birth to us to begin with. Thus the church that is mother is but a channel for the real source of life: the invisible word. Why would we confess the church? We don’t believe “in” the church, do we? We believe that the church exists. We believe that God is saving the church as a bride for his Son. But what sense does it make to suggest that the church is an object of belief, that we would confess belief in it? The church, Turretin said, is “the primary work of the holy Trinity.”2 The church must be viewed first as a divine work, whatever else it may be. 

1. The Church is ONE

2. The Church is HOLY

3. The Church is CATHOLIC

4. The Church is APOSTOLIC

The Church is One

1. To speak of the church’s oneness is different than to speak of its catholicity. Oneness here means undivided. Whatever differences there are between this tradition and that—and those differences actually should not be minimized—Paul says that “there is one body” (Eph. 4:4). Now the most important thing to say up front is that in the biblical worldview, we move from God to all things outside of God. God makes all things by his word: his will and therefore his word that carries out his decree: “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps. 33:9). 

2. As a corollary of this, all things move ultimately from the invisible to the visible. This is true of the mathematical order and symmetry of the universe with its physical constants, and it is true of the DNA of biological life. It is true of the movements of empires and it is true of the great motions of redemption and the restoration of all things. Time prohibits us from giving too much nuance here. I am well aware that within any of these scenes in the drama, there are many subplots where things move from the visible to the invisible. A child learns to read and then think by starting with the sight of symbols, and faith is increased not only through word but also sacrament. All true, but these are all subplots in relation to plot, scenery on stage in relation to script in the mind of the Playwright. In the grand scheme, all things move from the invisible to the visible. Now the implications for the oneness of the church is simply this: It is the word of God that creates the church—from the invisible truth begetting faith to all of the external traits of the body of Christ. The word creates the church. Not the other way around. Not side-by-side. And if that is true, then the oneness of that Word (or what is called “orthodoxy”) is the DNA of the oneness of the body.  

3. Ecumenicalism distorts this virtue of unity. It heralds a unity at all costs: a unity severed from the head of truth. Richard Phillips put this very well in speaking about the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus in John 17. 

according to Paul the church is already united. He says, ‘There is one body and one Spirit’ (Eph. 4:4). Not that there ought to be one body, but that there is one body, one unified church. We are not exhorted to ‘create’ unity among Christians, but to maintain it, that is, to serve and promote the unity that is already a fact (Eph. 4:3). Likewise, Jesus prayed to the Father, not to us, for church unity, and we can be sure that his prayer was answered.3

I said that the oneness of that Word creates the oneness of the body. So, the principle is: Divide the truth and you divide the body. The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs put it in this way,

When they divided from God, they divided from His people … If you are divided from the truth, what can hold you together? Truth is a single, simple, plain thing; but error is various and ensnarls itself with infinite contradictions.”4

The Church is Holy

1. The holiness of the church consists first in God’s own evaluation of the church. To understand this, we must distinguish between two main ways that the New Testament speaks of sanctification. And right away we will see again the invisible-to-visible principle. There is a sanctification that is immediate. In Christ, God takes us to himself all at once, so that “you were sanctified” (1 Cor. 6:9). Yet there is a root and a fruit, so that “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Heb. 10:14). The fact that there is both an immediate and a gradual is one core reason why the ancient Donatists were wrong about the purity of the church.

2. Webster points out that no matter what aspect of the Trinitarian economy of salvation we view things from, “God separates the Church. The Church does not separate itself, for it has neither mandate nor competence to do so.”5 Accordingly, this attribute of the church is “an alien sanctity.”6 If the ground of the church’s holiness was in the natural pedigree or the activities of its priesthood, then they would have grounds for boasting.

3. We also see another sense in which the church can be confessed. We believe God when he says the church is holy. We have to—it doesn’t look very holy most of the time! For Bavinck, this was the sense in which the church is “an object of faith, for what one believes is not visible.”7 So to believe in the holiness of the church is really still to be rooted in gospel belief, because it belongs to the good news that God is making the church “to be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4).

The Church is Catholic

1. As has often been said, this is catholic with a “lowercase c.” The word simply means “universal.” Remember the principle already set down: the word of God that creates the church—from the invisible truth begetting faith to all of the external traits of the body of Christ. If this is the key to the oneness of the church, then it is also the key to the catholicity of the church. The Roman Catholic Church is a contradiction in terms. It builds universality on locality. It moves (naturalistically) from the visible to the invisible. Let us hear Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI], who said,

If Orthodoxy starts from the bishop and from the Eucharistic community over which he presides, the point on which the Reformed position is built is the Word: the Word of God gathers men and creates ‘community.’ The proclamation of the Gospel produces—so they say—congregation, and this congregation is the ‘Church’ … Communio is catholic, or it simply does not exist at all.8

I think Benedict XVI did a very good job there summarizing the Reformed view. That is why it is all the more striking that he can trade in the Word making the church’s catholicity, in exchange for a single, fallible mortal, in a single pagan locale, which calls itself “the Eternal City,” but which the Bible assigns the euphemism “Babylon,” calling Jerusalem instead the Eternal City. But to recognize Jerusalem above as our mother (Gal. 4:26) is really to recognize the Word as our true spiritual milk (1 Pet. 2:2). 

2. Every reformer since Martin Luther has had to confront the question: “Where was the true church before your reformation?” The answer given by the magisterial reformers was not only to point to Scripture, but also to point to history. In other words, the Reformation’s argument to Rome was precisely that we, the Reformation, are the catholic church; and that the Roman was a schismatic, a pagan insurrection, a newfangled, late-medieval innovation. We never left the catholic church. The Roman pseudo-church left us. That’s the argument. That was always the argument. 

3. The Reformed confessions are not shy to speak of catholicity; but when they do, they trace the roots back to the invisible work of the triune God. The Belgic, Helvetic, and Westminster all speak in this way: “one single catholic or universal church—a holy congregation and gathering of true Christian believers,”9 “namely, of those who truly know and rightly worship and serve the true God in Christ the Savior, by the Word and holy Spirit, and who by faith are partakers of all benefits which are freely offered through Christ,”10 The real problem with “Roman Catholicity” is not the presence of exclusivity but the absence of objectivity; to cite Bavinck, “in a real sense Rome has no marks or criteria by which the true church can be known. These, after all, presuppose a standard that is above the church and by which it may be judged by everyone.”11 

The Church is Apostolic

1. The apostolicity of the church refers to its inheritance from the first church: that of the Apostles. What did it inherit from them? Where Rome claims “apostolic succession” in the sense of a lineage that extends from Peter to the present pope, the Reformed tradition would speak of a different line of succession. Is the teaching of the church the same as that of the apostles? That is the mark. Calvin famously wrote that,

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the church of God has some existence.12 

2. Another way to say all of this is that we read these four credal attributes of the church in light of the three Reformed marks of the true church: Word, sacrament, and discipline. Without the DNA of the Word informing the internal systems of sacrament and discipline, the external traits of the body would be an outer shell. They would be a dime a dozen. The world, the flesh, and the devil have their own versions of these: worldly oneness (unity at all costs), worldly holiness (asceticism and severity to the body), worldly catholicity (the grandeur of elite people and places to tie things together), and the worldly apostolic (a physical lineage only one notch higher than the pedigree of bred animals). None of that is what the pastors at Nicaea meant by these attributes, which flowed from the invisible triune God, through the Word made visible, and thus, as Calvin saw better than most, the whole ministry of the church has no right or meaning apart from being a ministry of the Word.

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1. Turretin, Institutes, III.1

2. Turretin, Institutes, III:1

3. Richard Phillips, Mark Dever, and Philip Ryken, The Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 26.

4. Jeremiah Burroughs, Irenicum (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, ), 15.

5. John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 60.

6. Webster, Holiness, 62.

7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, IV:287

8. Joseph Ratzinger, quoted by Michael Horton, “The Church,” in Allen and Swain, ed., Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 312.

9. Belgic Confession, Art. 17.

10. Second Helvetic Confession, Ch. 17.

11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, IV:308

12. Calvin, Institutes, IV.1.9