One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic

Today on Renewing Your Mind. The church is the only institution that I know of that absolutely requires that you be a sinner to be a member. So you might expect the church fathers in describing the church to call it the one unholy Catholic and apostolic church. But no, the fathers called it holy. The Nicene Creed gives us a description of the church, but the meaning of its words have become blurred over time. For example, do you belong to one true church, that is the Catholic Church? A true Christian would say, yes, you may find that surprising.

But Dr. R.C. Sproul will explain in this message from his series, Communion of Saints. As we continue our study now of the doctrine of the church, I want to take the opportunity to reach back into the pages of church history all the way back to the fourth century to get some insight into our understanding of the nature and the character of the church. I think most of you are familiar to some degree at least with the Apostles' Creed and then later with the Nicene Creed. Some of you use the Nicene Creed regularly in the liturgy of your church, that magnificent creed that affirms the deity of Christ, that He is God of God and light of light, that He is begotten and not made, and for us men and for our salvation has come down from heaven and so on. But in addition to the marvelous teaching of the person and work of Christ that we find in the Nicene Creed, we also have a famous list of adjectives that the church of the fourth century used to confess their concept of the church.

And those four adjectives that I want to look at in this session are these. The Creed describes the church as one holy, Catholic, and what? Apostolic church. We believe in one holy, Catholic, apostolic church.

Now each one of these adjectives calls attention to something I think of great importance about the nature of the church. Of course, at the time that the Creed was written in the fourth century, the unity that the church enjoyed was indeed an organizational unity. For the most part, there was but one visible Christian church. That was before the great schism, and it was before the Protestant Reformation which occurred in the sixteenth century whereby the visible unity of the body of Christ was broken and dashed into literally thousands of pieces. So we can no longer say with the confidence of the church fathers of the fourth century that the church is numerically one in the visible, unified sense. But there still is a sense in which some unity of the body of Christ has been preserved. In the first instance, the unity is still found throughout Christendom whereby in spite of the points of doctrine with which we disagree and by which our distinctives are determined, there is still a certain core or Catholic or universal faith that we all embrace.

And that is the truth. Virtually every church in the World Council of Churches, for example, in each one of its constituent creeds or confessions, testify or at least profess belief in the substance of teaching found in the so-called ecumenical councils, like the Council of Nicaea, like the Council of Christendons and so on, which means simply this, that there is a common core of truth that every church affirms. For example, the Trinity. We all believe in the Trinity. We all believe in the deity of Christ. We all believe in the work of Christ on the cross as an atonement.

We may differ on various dimensions of our understanding of the atonement, but we believe certainly that the death was an atonement, and so on. So that in its essential, the church still shares one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. If you're baptized in the Lutheran church and you decide to join the Methodist church, in all probability the Methodist church will recognize the validity of your baptism in the Lutheran church, and from the Methodists to the Anglicans and so on, because we have one Lord who is Christ, one faith essentially, and one baptism. So there is at least that much unity that has been preserved across denominational lines. There's another point of unity that is important that goes back even in earlier times from the Nicene Creed to the Apostles' Creed. When the Apostles' Creed talks about the church, it talks about the communion of saints, the communion of saints.

We're not to confuse that with the celebration of the Lord's Supper, which we call the Holy Communion. The communion of saints points to something beyond that. But we have a communion, and the word communion is almost a redundancy, because we see the word for oneness in the word itself, the Latin unio.

And com, of course, as a prefix, means simply with. So that in the fellowship of the church, we are with union with other people, with other people. And that is part of the oneness of the church.

Well, the second term that is used is the one, I think, about which people in our day and age have begun to be cynical. There have been so many scandals of prominent religious figures in the United States in recent years that some people have said, if there's any institution that is not holy, it's the church. And I've heard the complaint registered frequently that the church is full of hypocrites.

I remember one minister saying, there's always room for one more. And he said, at the same time, he said, if you ever find a perfect church, whatever you do, don't join it, because you'll ruin it. Because the church is the only institution that I know of that absolutely requires that you be a sinner to be a member. So you might expect the church fathers in describing the church to call it the one unholy Catholic and apostolic church. But no, the fathers called it holy. The simple reason is because the Word of God calls it holy. Believers in the New Testament are called the hagioi, the saints, which means the holy ones.

The word hagios is the word that is part of the name of the Holy Spirit. That's the title of the Holy Spirit. And yet we wonder, how can we be called saints when we are so manifestly unholy? Paul writes to the Corinthians, to the saints who were at Corinth, stop all this fighting and stop all of this immorality that he's describing and combating there in the church. And yet he still calls them saints.

Seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? For sinners to be called holy. Well, as Augustine pointed out centuries ago, there are several reasons why the church is called holy. The first is because as an institution and as a group, the church you recall is that body which is ecclesia, that it is called out from the world. And because God has separated this institution from every other human institution, He has consecrated it. And by consecrating it or setting it apart, God has made it holy. The second reason why we call the church holy, because the church members who are truly Christians are people who are really indwelt by the living presence of the Holy Ghost. In other words, the Holy Spirit descends upon the church, upon the people of God, and takes His dwelling place within them. And we know that every Christian is indwelt by the Holy Ghost. That doesn't mean that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit automatically conveys or confers perfection. We are not glorified. We are not yet perfectly sanctified. But in so far as the Holy Spirit dwells within us, we can be said to be the Haggioi, or the holy ones.

You see that. I've often wondered why when we look at the way the Bible distinguishes among the three persons of the Godhead, why only one of the three is given the title as part of His name, holy. We know that God is holy, but we don't speak of the Holy Father. And we know that the Son is holy, but we don't talk about the Holy Son. But rather we speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Why? Because the emphasis in the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the third member of the Trinity is to make the people of God holy. And so the Spirit as He works in this institution is working by the means of grace that are concentrated in it to bring the Holy Spirit grace that are concentrated in it to bring you through your sanctification. Alright, the third descriptive adjective here that we find is the adjective Catholic. And again, initially in the fourth century it was tacitly assumed there that the word Catholic meant Roman Catholic because the headquarters for the church at that time was in Rome. But notice that the creed didn't include that particular designation.

It didn't have to. But the word Catholic, as most of you already know I'm sure, simply means universal. And indeed the church of Christ in the fourth century was universal in the sense that wherever the Christian church was found, whether it was in Greece or in Italy or in England or wherever it was found, it was the same what we would call denomination. It was the same visible institution, the same visible organization with the same structure and the same hierarchy so that the church could say where the bishop is, there is the church. Now that Catholicity in the visible institutional sense has been lost. Although in the sixteenth century part of the controversy between Rome and the Reformers was precisely over this point. I mean, what was Rome to do with the churches that were springing up that had broken away from Roman Catholic communion, with the Lutheran church in Germany and the Reformed church in Switzerland and in Scotland?

How was that to be handled in those days? Well, Rome said these churches that were springing up in these nations were not true churches because they were not Catholic, because they were restricted to one nation or to one locality. And even still in our nation today, my denomination that I'm a member of is a Presbyterian denomination, and it's called the Presbyterian church in America. It has no visible connection with the Presbyterian church in Yugoslavia, if there is one, so that our church is national in its scope and in its boundaries. Rome, however, remains international, doesn't it? I was thinking today of what is the largest export from Italy.

It's not spaghetti. It's the Roman Catholic church, because that tiny little nation of Italy has an institution that is headquartered there that has its representatives all over this globe. And this was one of the arguments that the church said in the 16th century against the Protestants, you are local, we are Catholic. And so the Protestants said, yes, the faith that we embrace, the one Lord, the one faith, the one baptism, that is Catholic. That remains universal. And we still hold to the Catholic faith, the universal doctrine of Christ and of the Scriptures. And that Catholicity is still a vitally important element of every church. I'm a member of a Reformed church, and people speak to me and say, oh, you're Presbyterian.

I say, yes. Oh, I know what that means. They say, what's that mean? They say, well, that means you believe in Tulip, the five points of Calvinism. And I even know Presbyterians who think that Presbyterianism or Reformed theology is the five points of Calvinism.

They say, that's not true at all. Those are the distinctives. Those are the points that we hold in difference from other Christian bodies. But we have to be careful what we call ourselves, because there are three designations at least that go around the world today. There's the Catholic, there's the evangelical, and there's the Reformed or the Lutheran or the Methodist or whatever. Not everyone who is Catholic is evangelical. There's the Catholic, there's the Catholic, is evangelical. But everyone who is evangelical is Catholic, and not everyone who is evangelical is Lutheran or Reformed. But everyone who is truly Reformed is evangelical, and anyone who is truly Lutheran is likewise evangelical.

Do you see how this works? That there's the Catholicity, which is the foundational, essential doctrines of the Christian faith that every Christian has to hold to. And there's the evangelical, which means you believe in justification by faith alone.

And then there are your distinctives that define the various groups. But we don't throw away our Catholicity that is the universal truth of Christianity when we embrace the particular domination that we do. Alright, finally, and perhaps most importantly for our day, the church is apostolic.

When I say that this is of vital importance for our day, I say it for this reason. I doubt if there has been any time in the entire history of Christianity where the integrity of the apostles has come more sharply under attack from within the church as in our own generation, as in our own lifetime. When people attack the authority of the Bible, what they are attacking basically is the authority of the apostles. Irenaeus in the early church had to combat the heretics who were called Gnostics and other groups, and these people said, we are not going to follow the teachings of the apostles anymore. We have our own insight. We have our own knowledge.

We have our own source of authority. We believe in Jesus, but we are not going to accept the authority of the apostles. It was as if to say, Jesus we like, but it's Paul we can't stand. And what Irenaeus said to them, and rightly so, was that if you reject Paul, if you reject the apostle, then you reject the one who sent the apostle. For ladies and gentlemen, the word apostle in its basic meaning in the New Testament means simply one who is sent. But in the technical sense, if I send my son to the store for a loaf of bread, I have not made him an apostle in the technical sense of biblical apostleship.

There's another dimension to it. To be an apostle in the narrow sense of the New Testament is not only to be sensed by somebody, but to be authorized for that mission to speak with the authority of the one who sends you. When Irenaeus argued against the heretics the way he did, he was merely echoing Jesus' own argument with the Pharisees, because the Pharisees said, we're the children of God. We believe God. It's you, Jesus, that we're not going to accept.

Remember? How did Jesus handle that? He said, the Father sent me. This is the will of the Father that you believe, the one whom the Father sent. And so Jesus would not allow the Pharisees to have their cake and eat it too, because Jesus was the first apostle. He was the one the Father sent, and the Father sent him saying, and the Father sent him saying, all authority on heaven and earth is given to you. So what Jesus says, the Father says. And one of the things that Jesus said was, with respect to the apostles after He commissioned them, those who receive you receive Me. Those who will not receive you do not receive Me.

It frightens me, particularly in the militancy of some of the feminist movements. I have seen the Apostle Paul so slandered. I've seen him called a male chauvinist pig. I've seen it in print by women within the church saying, we can't stand this narrow-minded, bigoted first century Jew called Paul. We worship Jesus, but not Paul. Beloved, you can't have Jesus without Paul.

You don't know anything about Jesus except what you have learned through the testimony of the apostles. It was Jesus Himself who said that the very foundation of the church is the apostle. Now the last controversy that I want to touch on lightly as our time is getting away from us is with respect to this concept of the apostolic church. Some churches, the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and others, believe in an unbroken succession of the apostles from the original twelve down to the present day. In Rome, the Pope is considered the vicar of Christ.

He wears the shoes of the fishermen. He is there in the Basilica of St. Peter's. He is the successor of Peter, who Rome believes was the first bishop of Rome. And so they believe that a church is not authentically apostolic unless there is this continuum from the first century down to today that one can trace back to that starting point. Well, I don't have the time to analyze that in any detail, but the Protestant churches of the sixteenth century who rejected apostolic succession said the authority of the apostles remains intact in the life of the church right here.

Here is how the authority of the apostles is expressed in the life of the church today through the sacred Scriptures. And so we conclude with the Nicene Fathers that the church is one, the church is holy, the church is Catholic, and the church is apostolic. A clear and accurate description of the church, historically and biblically.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and all week we are bringing you portions of Dr. R.C. Sproul's series on the church. It's called Communion of Saints. The 20th century saw a dramatic decline in the biblical understanding of the church, and we're seeing the results of that confusion. Dr. W. Robert Godfrey is the chairman of the board here at Ligonier Ministries, and his latest teaching series addresses this very topic. It's called The Necessity of Reforming the Church. In it, he calls us to examine our own churches. What do we emphasize, and is it biblical? In six lessons, Dr. Godfrey reminds us of John Calvin's thoughts on why the church needs to be Reformed. The entire series addresses penetrating questions for all Christians today. We'll be glad to send you the DVD for your donation of any amount.

You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century grew out of a realization that the Roman Catholic Church's priorities were different from those found in Scripture. Men like Martin Luther and Calvin recognized that gap and worked to bring the church back under the authority of Scripture. Dr. Godfrey's emphasis in this series is to remind us that we should be willing to examine our own methods in the church and be ready to change. So we invite you to request The Necessity The Necessity of Reforming the Church. Our web address again is renewingyourmind.org, and our phone number, 800-435-4343. We look forward to hearing from you, and we thank you in advance for your generous donation. Who makes up the church? Everyone who's been baptized or those who make a profession of faith? How can we tell? I hope you'll join us for Dr. Sproul's message titled Wheat, Tares, and Waiting for the Harvest. That's Thursday, here on Renewing Your Mind.