The Church: Catholic and Apostolic

The question is not, what is the true church? The question is, what is a true church? And so, what are the non-negotiable essentials that are found in a true or valid church, without which you can't be a valid church? If you've read the Nicene Creed before, you'll remember that there's one line that can cause some confusion. It states that the church is one, wholly Catholic and apostolic. So how are Protestants to understand that, that the church is Catholic? Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

Each Saturday, we're working our way through R.C. Sproul's Foundation series, and we're in the middle of a section on the church. So what are the essential elements of a true church? And what does it really mean when we describe the church as Catholic and apostolic?

Well, here's Dr. Sproul to explain. A few years ago, I had to embark on a lecture tour of Eastern Europe, which took us to Prague in what is now the Czech Republic, to Budapest in Hungary, and then on by antiquated train from Budapest to Cluj-Napoca in Romania. And when we crossed the border from Hungary into Romania, the train stopped and there had to be a time for us to go through the customs check, and we had been warned that customs in Romania might be a very, very difficult procedure. Well, two soldiers got on the train and came to us and spoke to us in somewhat stentorian language and pointed for us to take down our suitcases and to open up everything. And just as we were about to do it, their boss came in, who was a great big burly guard, and he came up and asked for our passports, and we gave them our passports, showed them that they were American passports. There were four of us there, Vest and I, and our friends of ours, the Ingrams, and Mrs. Ingram was sitting there, and she had a brown paper bag with something sticking out the end of it, and the guard said, what's that? And she opened the bag and displayed a Bible, and he said in broken English, give me book, and he took it, starts leafing through it, and he looked at us and said, you, he looked at me and he said, you know American. He looked at Mr. Ingram and said, you know American, and we didn't know what in the world was going on, and he's saying, we weren't Americans, and I said, yes, look, we have our passports. He said, no, you know American, and he opened up and he said, points to this passage, he says, read this, and I read it, it said, we are citizens of the commonwealth of heaven. And he said, see, I know Romanian, you know American, we are citizens of heaven, and he hugged us and he said to the guys, these people are okay, they're Christians, let them go.

And here in the providence of God, we encountered a Christian customs guard on the border of Romania and Hungary. Never forget that incident because it communicated to us the flesh and blood reality of what is meant by the third characteristic of the church that we've looked at. The church is one holy Catholic, which means universal. Again, in the Apostles' Creed, we say we believe in the communion of saints, forgiveness, the sins of the resurrection, and so on, and we believe in the Catholic Church. We're not talking about the Roman Catholic Church at that point because in American religious jargon, the phrase or the term Roman Catholic has been shortened to simply Catholic, so that in many times when people refer to the Catholic Church, they mean the Roman Catholic Church, where technically the term Catholic does not refer to a specific institution, but refers to the spread and the extent of the Church of Jesus Christ to all nations, tribes, and peoples, to all the remote corners of the world.

And that's a significant thing. Of course, that's one of the points that the Roman Catholic Church criticizes Protestantism for because the church that I'm a member of happens to be the PCA, which is the Presbyterian Church in America. Now, we have missionaries at other places in the world, but there's not a Presbyterian Church in America in China. Our church is organized within the geographical limits and boundaries of the United States of America. And most Protestant churches do have national or regional boundaries, where the Roman Catholic Church does not, the Greek Orthodox Church does not, but rather their membership extends around the world, and they still are tied visibly into a multi-national headquarters situation. And so the Roman Catholic Church says to us, you're not a true church because you're not Catholic.

We are true because we have members in all the nations of the world, and all of those members are united under one head, the head of the church here in Rome. And at the same time, we would respond by saying that the universal church is the invisible church, that the Church of Jesus Christ that we are a part of extends around the world, just as I encountered when I was on the border of Romania. And as I experienced in the situations there in Eastern Europe, again, I was there to teach principally, to lecture in the seminary in Budapest and to pastors in Prague, and yet I also had the opportunity to preach in those countries while I was there. And though I didn't know the language and didn't know the meaning of the words that people were singing, and when I preached there was a translator, I experienced the Lord's Supper with Hungarian people in Budapest.

And I preached in a church in Prague and had the people, the peasants from the country, listening to them pray and so on, even though I didn't know what they were saying, listening to them sing, I didn't know what they were singing. I experienced the koinonia, the fellowship of Christians, which fellowship goes well beyond the regional boundaries of a given location. Now, next we see that the church is one wholly Catholic, universal, and apostolic. I mentioned earlier that the chief image of the foundation of the church in the New Testament is that the foundation of the church are the prophets and the apostles.

What is the significance of that? The significance of this is found herein, that when Christ established the New Testament covenant community and He gave certain gifts and offices to the church, He gave first the office of apostleship. And He established in the first century the primary authority of the nascent infantile Christian community was vested in the apostles. And that authority goes with this office or the title apostle, which comes from the Greek apostolos. Now, an apostolos literally means in Greek, one who is sent from. Now, in the Greek culture, an apostle would be an envoy or an emissary or a delegate sent, for example, by a king or a general or somebody in a high level of authority who carried with him the delegated authority of the king. So that if the envoy made a commitment, the king would stand behind it.

He was a spokesman for the supreme authority he represented. Now, sometimes in our popular understanding of the Christian faith, we hear about the disciples of Christ and the apostles of Christ, and we tend to use those terms interchangeably, as if there's no difference between being a disciple of Christ or being an apostle. Well, there is a significant difference between those two words. Now, for the exception of the apostle Paul, all of the apostles in the New Testament were first disciples, but not all disciples became apostles. And Jesus had far many disciples than the 12.

We remember at one point in His ministry, He sent 70 of His disciples out on a mission. And a disciple, the word mothates in Greek, means student or learner. And the disciples were those who gathered around Jesus really to study in His rabbinic school.

They called Him rabbi. They followed Him around, and He would lecture to them, and they would memorize His teachings and so on. And so they were His students.

They were His pupils. Jesus was a teacher, and He had a little school, and His students were His disciples. That's where we get the word discipleship or discipline from in our own language. However, towards the end of His ministry, when He was going to depart from this world, He chose from His body of disciples a select number of apostles, to which apostles He transferred His authority to them, saying, you know, I'm sending you out in My name. Those who receive you, receive Me.

Those who reject you, reject Me. Now that's a very serious matter, because again, in early church history, heretical groups arose which tried to supplant the authority of the apostles, and in the case of the Gnostics, tried to claim that authority for themselves, yet at the same time, claiming allegiance to Jesus, saying we believe in Jesus, it's just Peter and Paul that we don't buy into. Irenaeus, in answering the heretics of that time, gave the argument that Jesus Himself had given, saying to them that just as Jesus had a dispute with the Pharisees, because the Pharisees said that they were children of God, they followed Moses, they followed Abraham, but they rejected Jesus. Now again, the first apostle and the primary apostle of the New Testament is Jesus Himself, as He is the one who was sent by the Father and authorized by the Father to speak for the Father. All authority on heaven and earth has been given unto Me, Jesus said. I speak nothing of My own authority, and everything that the Father reveals to Me, that I declare. And so Jesus is the supreme apostle of the church. And what happened in Jesus' day, as He was engaged in His arguments with the Pharisees, the people wanted to reject Jesus and affirm God. Jesus said, you can't do that. If you embrace Moses, remember it was Moses who wrote of Me. If you embrace Abraham, Abraham rejoiced to see My day. You can't love the Father and hate the Son.

That's the point. And that's the point, by extension, that Irenaeus was making against the heretics of his day when he said, if you reject the apostles, you are rejecting the one who commissioned them, namely Christ, and if you reject Him, you are rejecting the one who commissioned Him, namely God, so that there is a line of authority from God to Christ to the apostles. Now that's very relevant to our day because there's never been a time in church history where apostolic authority has been more under attack than in our own day. And I have to say it out loud, chiefly by the feminists who have problems with the apostle Paul. They think that he was a chauvinist and so on. So he's fair game. It's open season on the apostle.

And by the higher critics who want to remain Christians and profess allegiance to Christ while they reject the authority of sacred Scripture. The Psalms have a statement in which it is said, if the foundation be shaken, how can the building stand? I remember many, many years ago, I was living in Ohio, in Cincinnati, and we brought a minister from California in for a series of meetings. It was a very, very cold and wintry week, lots of snow. I remember trying to get him to the airport at the end of this, and he flew out of Cincinnati, returning to Los Angeles. And while he was in the air, a major earthquake hit Southern California, doing millions and millions of dollars of damage.

This was, again, back like in 1970 or 71. And I talked to him a little bit later, and I said, well, how did it go for your church? He said, well, at first, he said the news was all good. He said there were buildings down all around our church, he said, and I went to the sanctuary, and the church looked perfect, no window broken or anything. He said, but when they came in to assess the damage, they discovered that the foundation had shifted from under the building, and our building was condemned.

We weren't allowed to meet in it because of the danger. Apparently, that is for outward appearances, it looked like the church building, the sanctuary was fine, but the foundation had moved. And once the foundation moves, the building is no longer stable. And that's what the issue is in our day over the apostolic nature of the church. When people say the church has authority but we reject the Bible, they are rejecting the church itself because they're rejecting one of the four marks of the church, namely the apostolic character of the church. That's the foundation that Christ established, and if we attack the word of the apostles, the authority of the word of the apostles, those attacks are not at the outward areas of the building, but they attack the very heart and soul of the church as the attack goes to the foundation and will destroy the visible church. And in fact, what we've seen in the last 150 years with the impact of liberal theology, with its categorical rejection of the inspiration and the authority of the Bible, is that we've seen, frankly, the wholesale destruction of the visible church. We see countries where the churches are absolutely empty, and other countries where they're fortunate of two percent of the people come to those buildings. And this is largely the impact of an institution that abandoned apostolic authority.

Who wants to hear one more lecture on social concerns? I can go any number of institutions other than the church to hear that. So, the apostolic authority, which means biblical authority, is the foundation of the church.

Now, that gets me to the last dimension of the characteristics. During the Reformation, people were arguing about who is the true church, and Protestantism split and fragmented into several different groups. You had the Reformed in Switzerland and Scotland. You had the Church of England in England, the Anglican Church there. You had the Lutheran Church in Germany and Huguenots in France and so on. And people were asking the question, how can I find the true church? Rome said it was the true church.

The Orthodox Church said it was the true church. And the Protestants said, wait, the question is not what is the true church. The question is, what is a true church? Because just as a particular congregation can be a mixed body containing tares and wheat, so no church, said the Reformers, is infallible.

So, every church has some mixture of error or corruption in it, denominationally, not just in terms of the local parish. And so, the question is, what are the non-negotiable essentials that are found in a true or valid church without which you can't be a valid church? Basically, the Reformers came up with three marks of a true church. The first mark is that a true church is a church that has and professes the gospel. And that means the whole gospel, so that if a church denies any essential point of the gospel, such as the deity of Christ, the atonement of Christ, justification by faith alone, those elements that make up the gospel, if the gospel is rejected, that institution is no longer a church. That's why the Reformers said that Rome has embraced the deity of Christ, the atonement of Christ, all those other things, but as long as she condemns sola fide, as long as she condemns justification by faith alone, according to the Reformers, Rome was denying the gospel, and by denying the gospel, she was no longer a church. Of course, Rome came back and said, well, the Reformers are the ones who are distorting the gospel, justification by faith is not the gospel, and so on, so they're not churches.

But that's what that dispute was about. It was about the gospel. And the Reformers say, you can't be a true church if the gospel is not held and proclaimed. The second thing that was a mark of the true church is where the sacraments are duly conferred. For the Reformers, there were two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. Now, they recognized that there were differences, intermural differences among Christians over the mode of the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, and we'll look at that later on, over whether baptism should extend to infants or not, and what is its mode, dipping, immersing, and pouring, or whatever, but that the basic baptismal formula in the name of Christ and the basic celebration of the Lord's Supper, as Christ established it in the New Testament on a regular basis, that these sacraments are necessary elements to a true church. I mean, because there were those who so rejected the sacramental emphasis of the Roman Catholic Church, and where the sacraments seemed to swallow up the preaching of the Word, that some people reacted against that and said, well, the sacrament stuff we don't need. All we need is the Word, and they wanted to create churches with the Bible without the sacraments. The Reformers said, no, no.

Excuse the pun, you don't throw the baby out of the bathwater here. That our Lord Jesus Christ did establish sacraments, and they are for the edification of the people of God, and it is the duty of the church to be engaged in the proper observation of the sacraments. Third mark of a true church, it's kind of sometimes divided into two, is discipline, which requires some form of government. The discipline of the church is where the church has the responsibility for the spiritual nurture of its members, its pastoral care to the end that people are growing in their faith towards sanctification. And discipline is required when the church is infected with impurities and corruption. And what is said here is that, for example, if the clergy of a given church continually deny the deity of Christ, and the church does not remove them or does not censure them, does not exercise discipline for them, then they would have ceased being a valid and legitimate church. So that's a critical piece of the puzzle of what makes a true church. If you find yourself looking for a new church, that's a really helpful checklist. Do they preach the gospel? Do they administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper? And do they practice church discipline?

That was R.C. Sproul on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Listeners to Renewing Your Mind are members of churches around the world. And a series like this one, Foundations, where R.C. Sproul helps us know what we believe and why we believe it, can actually help us be better members of the local church as we each seek to faithfully follow God's Word. You can request your copy of this 60-part series on DVD along with the digital study guide with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

And as always, you'll be able to stream the messages anytime in the free Ligonier app. So I encourage you to visit renewingyourmind.org today. When people look for a church today, they're often not considering elements like the right practice of church discipline. So what do we consider? Often it's the church programs, or in particular, the style of worship. Well, next time, R.C. Sproul will explore the topic of worship, so I encourage you to join us next Saturday here on Renewing Your Mind. .