One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

All who are part of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ are stirred by the solemn description of the Bride of Christ penned long ago at the early Councils of the Church.

 



 

ONE - the mocker may, with some apparent justification, scorn this idea yet it remains in all our hearts a conviction that there will not be two, three or 3003 churches that meet their Lord on the Day - just ONE.  We struggle to express this very often and we do not agree who is in and out but the Oneness is not a question.

 

HOLY - here the mocking observer points to any number of ecclesiastical political evils throughout history, to glaring inequalities, to cultures of abuse and who knows what else.  The mocking observer ought to pause however for without God there is no holiness and none of those 'sins of the Church' are sins at all.  The holiness of the Church is a gift from above, variously grasped and expressed in too lesser a degree but never absent and firmly destined for the Bridal Day.

 

CATHOLIC - at which the Protestant mumbles worriedly yet should not.  The church is not a race or a tribe, a nation or a structure - it is catholic, global, entire, planetary, multi-communal, multi-era, uniquely inclusive.

 

APOSTOLIC - the Church is not simply Jehovah's Witness (to quote Isaiah), or Red Letter Christians (to quote the equally-well-meaning Tony Campolo) but is derived from the teaching of the Apostles and the full appreciation of the meaning of incarnation, substitution, resurrection, ascension and finality of the Messiah.

 

Wow.  In just four words - so much!!! 

 

But not enough.

 

When Professor Whitley lectured at Oxford a century ago he was brave enough to point out that in this crucial formulary the early Fathers forgot something.  It was not a minor omission.  As we all know, omissions are harder to spot that mistakes.  But this omission was a very big mistake because it is the omission of what is, arguably, the Founder of the Church's only commission.

 

We believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic, MISSIONARY Church . . .

 

As my previous blog sadly implies (and as has been my experience and perpetration as a leader), conciliar meetings of varying branches of this Church continue to damn the missing word with faint praise, never denying it while never promoting it to a place where it is held tenaciously as the essence to which other tenets must often bow.