the holy catholic Church

The Text

The clause that has stuck in more Protestant throats than any other in the creed. Generations of Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Pentecostal Christians have lowered their voices, skipped the word, or hastily explained the asterisk to a confused visitor. The clause is in fact one of the great confessions of the creed. To confess the holy catholic Church is to confess that the work of the Holy Spirit, who was named in the previous clause, has a public, communal, world-wide, named outcome: a people set apart through whom God is acting in history. The clause does not name a denomination. It names what every denomination, at its best, is gesturing toward. The church confessed here is older than any of its visible forms, larger than any single one of them, and the gathered body of the same risen Christ whose ascension and return the previous clauses have named.

Translation Notes

Sancta — holy. The first adjective. The church is set apart — not because of any merit in its members, but because of the work of the Holy Spirit who has just been confessed. To call the church holy is not to make a sociological claim about the members’ moral performance; it is to make a theological claim about the Spirit’s vocation of the body. The church is holy by virtue of its head and its Spirit, not by virtue of itself. This distinction has done a great deal of pastoral work in every century in which the visible church has obviously failed.

Catholica — catholic. The most contested word in the clause for English-speaking Protestants. The Greek katholikos is constructed from kata (according to, throughout, on) + holos (whole). The basic adverbial sense is on the whole, throughout the whole, in its entirety. As an adjective applied to the church it names what is whole, complete, world-wide, not partial. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110), in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, supplies the earliest Christian use: “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church.” For Ignatius, the catholic church is the whole church under its lawful pastors, not a particular communion within it.

Across the Reformation and after, the word catholic in English usage drifted into one of two senses. The narrow sense — capital-C Catholic, the Roman Catholic Church under the bishop of Rome — became the dominant English meaning in popular use. The original conciliar sense — lower-case catholic, the whole church of all places and times — was preserved in liturgical recitation of the creed but required constant footnoting. The 1939 Methodist Hymnal and later editions placed an asterisk by catholic in the printed creed with the footnote “universal” — a pastoral aid that has helped generations of Methodists pray the clause without confusion, even if it has also tended to suggest the word is just a synonym for universal and not worth preserving.

The hidden adjective: apostolic. The Apostles’ Creed names two marks of the church (holy, catholic); the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed names four (one, holy, catholic, apostolic). The shorter Apostles’ Creed leaves one and apostolic implicit — they belong to the substance even when the wording does not name them. The four marks together — una, sancta, catholica, apostolica — became the standard ecumenical catalogue of the church’s identity from the late patristic period forward.

Ecclesia — church. The Greek ekklēsia is the assembly of the called-out, applied in the Septuagint to the qāhāl Yisrael, the gathered congregation of Israel before the Lord. The Christian church inherits this vocabulary directly. The church is not first a building (kirk, Kirche, church — those English and Germanic words come from the Greek kyriakē, the Lord’s [house]); the church is first an assembly, a gathering, a people called. The Old Testament background is part of what is being confessed when this clause is prayed; the church does not begin at Pentecost without warning but is the continuation of God’s covenant people from Abraham forward.

Historical Context

The clause is older than the developed Latin form of the creed and is among the most stable elements of all early baptismal confessions. The Old Roman Creed (c. 200) already has sanctam Ecclesiam. The descriptor catholicam appears slightly later but is universal in the Western creedal tradition by the 4th century. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) expanded the clause to its fourfold form: one holy catholic apostolic church. The Apostles’ Creed retained the more compressed form.

The pressing historical question is what the early church meant by the clause and how that meaning shifted over time. In the patristic context, catholic had three distinct but overlapping senses. Geographic: the church is the worldwide body of Christ, not a regional sect. Doctrinal: the church holds the whole faith, not a partial version. Temporal: the church is the church of all ages, not a generation that has cut itself off from its forebears. Vincent of Lérins’s famous test of catholicity (early 5th c.) summarized this triad: “What has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” No actual doctrine satisfies the test perfectly, but the test names the orientation.

The clause acquired new freight in the great divisions of the church. The Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople created two communions each claiming to be the catholic church. The Reformation of the 16th century created more. Catholic polemicists treated catholic as a proper noun naming the Roman communion in distinction from the splinter Protestant communions. Protestant Reformers — Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican alike — insisted that they were not founding new churches but reforming the catholic church; their confession of the holy catholic church in the creed was the doctrinal protest against any reduction of catholicity to Roman communion.

The Anabaptist tradition of the 16th century rejected the established forms of the visible church in a more thoroughgoing way and concentrated catholicity in the local gathered believers’ community. The 20th century brought the ecumenical movement, which has labored to recover a robust account of the church’s catholicity across the denominational lines that the previous four centuries had hardened.

The clause has been politically and pastorally consequential beyond doctrinal disputes. The conviction that the church is catholic is what has fueled the church’s resistance, in every generation, to identification with a single nation or empire. Roman Christians refused emperor-worship; Hispanic and Anglo Methodists in Texas have shared one body at the same Eucharist; the ecumenical movement of the 20th century rejected the apartheid theology of separated churches. The clause is implicated, every time it is prayed, in whether the body of Christ is allowed to extend across the lines the surrounding culture wants to draw.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8 (c. 110); Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church (c. 251); Augustine, On Baptism (against the Donatists), City of God XX; Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (434)

The patristic understanding of the church’s catholicity was settled by the 4th century along several converging axes. Ignatius gave the basic ecclesial form: where the bishop is, there is the catholic church, gathered around its lawful pastor and gathered in continuity with the apostolic teaching. Cyprian gave the unitary form: “He cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother.” For Cyprian, schism is the great sin against the body, and the unity of the visible church is not negotiable. Augustine, in the Donatist controversy of the early 5th century, gave the form that has shaped Western theology since: the church is a mixed body in which holy and unholy members are visibly present together, and the holiness of the church is grounded in the work of Christ and the Spirit, not in the moral performance of any member. The Donatist insistence on a pure church of unstained ministers and members was, for Augustine, a doctrinal error masquerading as a moral virtue.

Vincent of Lérins’s Commonitorium (434) supplies the canonical patristic test of catholicity: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est — what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. The test is regulative rather than mechanical; what it names is the orientation of the church’s mind toward what is genuinely whole rather than what is local, recent, or sectarian.

Strengths

• Holds visible unity, doctrinal continuity, and the mixed character of the empirical church together with great integrity
• Augustine’s anti-Donatist account is the permanent answer to every renewed temptation to purify the church into a sect

Weaknesses

• The patristic settlement assumed an unbroken visible communion of the church that the later divisions have obviously breached
• Cyprian’s strong unitary form has been used in subsequent centuries to underwrite triumphalist claims that the patristic substance does not warrant

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 8 (“On the Grace of Christ as the Head of the Church”); Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam (1302)

Aquinas treats the church most fully under the doctrine of Christ as the head of the body (Summa Theologiae III, q. 8). The church is the mystical body of Christ; Christ is the head, the members are the redeemed, and the grace that flows from the head to the members is the principle of the church’s life. Aquinas distinguishes the church triumphant (the saints in glory), militant (the church on earth still in the struggle), and suffering (the souls in purgatory) — three states of one body united by participation in Christ.

The high-medieval papal expansion of the doctrine — culminating in Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) — pressed the unitary form of catholicity to the point of declaring submission to the Roman pontiff to be a condition of salvation. The Protestant Reformation read this as a corruption; the modern Catholic tradition, including Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, has substantially reframed it.

Strengths

• The mystical-body theology, drawn from Paul (Rom. 12; 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 4–5; Col. 1) and developed by Aquinas, is the most powerful single biblical-theological model of the church in the Latin tradition
• The threefold distinction (triumphant, militant, suffering — though the third state is sectarian-specific) preserves the church’s continuity across death

Weaknesses

• The high-medieval papal expansion overreached and provoked the very fractures the Reformation later named
• The scholastic synthesis assumed a degree of visible unity that the subsequent history of the Western church has not maintained

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, On the Councils and the Church (1539); Augsburg Confession, Articles VII–VIII; Apology of the Augsburg Confession

The Lutheran definition of the church is one of the great Reformation contributions to ecclesiology. Augsburg Confession, Article VII: “The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered.” The two marks (right preaching of the gospel, right administration of the sacraments) constitute the visible church wherever they are found, across any institutional divisions. The Lutherans are emphatic: the unity of the church does not consist in uniform human ceremonies or organizational submission to Rome but in the gospel and the sacraments. The Augsburg confession of catholicity is therefore a confession that the church exists wherever its essential marks exist, in any visible form.

Article VIII addresses the visible mixed character: even where hypocrites and false Christians are present alongside genuine believers, the sacraments are nonetheless efficacious because they are Christ’s, not the minister’s. This is the explicitly anti-Donatist Lutheran position.

Strengths

• The two-marks definition is theologically lean and ecumenically useful — it identifies the church without proliferating disputed identifying features
• Preserves anti-Donatist patristic insistence on the church’s mixed character

Weaknesses

• Some Lutheran applications have so emphasized the invisible church (the assembly of true believers known only to God) that the visible form of the church has felt accidental
• The two-marks definition does not by itself supply an account of how the visible church is to be ordered; later Lutheran tradition has had to fill in

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes IV.1–2; Heidelberg Catechism Q. 54; Belgic Confession, Articles 27–29; Westminster Confession Ch. 25

Calvin’s treatment of the church in Institutes IV.1–2 develops the Lutheran two-marks definition and adds, in some Reformed traditions, a third: the right exercise of church discipline. The Belgic Confession (1561) names the three marks explicitly: pure preaching of the gospel, pure administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline in correcting sin. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 54) puts the doctrine pastorally: “What do you believe concerning the holy catholic Christian church?” A. “That the Son of God, out of the whole human race, from the beginning to the end of the world, gathers, defends, and preserves for himself, by his Spirit and Word, in the unity of the true faith, a church chosen to everlasting life. And that I am, and forever shall remain, a living member of the same.”

The Reformed tradition has been especially attentive to the distinction between the visible and the invisible church — the visible being the empirical body of professing believers, the invisible being the body of the elect known only to God. The distinction is not a dualism; the visible church is the empirical form within which the invisible church exists.

Strengths

• The Heidelberg’s account is among the most pastorally satisfying summaries of the doctrine in the Reformation tradition
• The visible/invisible distinction provides theological resources for engaging the empirical failures of the visible church without despair

Weaknesses

• The strong invisible-church accent has occasionally devalued the visible church and produced an individualism the Reformers themselves resisted
• The disciplinary mark (in the Belgic-Westminster strand) has sometimes been wielded sectarianly

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Symbol of Constantinople (381); Khomiakov, The Church Is One (1850s); John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (1985)

The Eastern tradition holds the one holy catholic apostolic church with particular emphasis on the local Eucharistic assembly as the full manifestation of the catholic church. Where the bishop is, where the Eucharist is, where the apostolic faith is — there the catholic church is fully present in any given local gathering. The Eastern church has resisted any reduction of catholicity to geographic extension; the catholicity of the church is qualitative (the wholeness of the faith and the wholeness of the gifts present in any genuine Eucharistic gathering) and not merely quantitative (the worldwide spread).

Aleksei Khomiakov’s The Church Is One (mid-19th c.) is the major modern Slavophile defense of the Orthodox account. John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion (1985) is the most influential 20th-century articulation, ecumenically engaged with both Catholic and Protestant theology.

Strengths

• Recovers the local-Eucharistic character of catholicity that the Latin tradition has sometimes underplayed
• Resists the reduction of catholicity to institutional submission

Weaknesses

• The strong Eucharistic-ecclesiology can leave the wider visible unity of the worldwide church underdeveloped
• The Eastern refusal to recognize the validity of Western (especially Protestant) sacraments has complicated the ecumenical conversation

Roman Catholic (post-Reformation)

Tradition: Council of Trent; Robert Bellarmine, On the Marks of the True Church; Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus (1870); Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (1964)

The post-Reformation Roman Catholic account, codified at Trent and elaborated in the work of Bellarmine, treated the marks of the true church as institutional and visible: communion with the see of Rome, apostolic succession of bishops, valid sacraments, doctrinal continuity. Vatican I (1870) defined papal primacy and infallibility within their narrow exercise. Vatican II (1962–65), and especially Lumen Gentium, substantially reframed the doctrine: the church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church but is not exhausted by it; ecclesial elements are present in other Christian communions; the Holy Spirit is at work in them. The reframing is one of the most important theological developments of the 20th century and the basis of the modern ecumenical dialogue.

Strengths

• Lumen Gentium has provided a framework within which the Catholic tradition can speak about catholicity without flatly denying the ecclesial reality of non-Roman communions
• Has preserved a robust account of the visible-institutional dimension of the church that some Protestant accounts have lost

Weaknesses

• The Tridentine and Vatican I expansions of papal authority have left enduring obstacles to ecumenical convergence
• Some pre-conciliar formulations are still operative in popular Catholic practice and continue to confuse the ecumenical conversation

Anabaptist / Believers’ Church

Tradition: Schleitheim Confession (1527); Menno Simons; Anabaptist Vision of Harold S. Bender (1944)

The Anabaptist tradition concentrated catholicity in the local gathered community of believers, voluntarily covenanted to Christ and to one another, sharing in believer’s baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the discipline of the body. The visible established churches — Roman, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican — were judged in the 16th century to have compromised the gathered character of the church by accepting infant baptism and the political-territorial settlement. The Anabaptist confession of the holy catholic church therefore names a transterritorial communion of gathered communities rather than a continuous institutional body.

Strengths

• Preserves the New Testament accent on the gathered, covenanted character of the local church
• Restores the radical-discipleship dimension that the established churches have often lost

Weaknesses

• The reduction of catholicity to gathered communities can underdeveloped the doctrine’s universal-temporal scope
• The historical Anabaptist hesitation about infant baptism has been unable to demonstrate from the New Testament itself the negative claim it requires

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: World Council of Churches, Constitution and Faith and Order documents; Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (Lima, 1982); Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio; Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran-Catholic, 1999)

The 20th-century ecumenical movement has been a sustained labor to recover the one holy catholic apostolic church across the visible divisions of the modern denominations. The Faith and Order conferences (Lausanne 1927, Edinburgh 1937, Lund 1952, Montreal 1963, et al.) produced theological convergences that would have been unimaginable a century earlier. The Lima document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982) is the most successful single piece of multilateral ecumenical theology in the modern period. The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) settled the central Reformation dispute that had endured for over four centuries.

Strengths

• Has restored the catholicity of the church as a live ecumenical project rather than a historical regret
• Has produced unprecedented doctrinal convergence on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and justification

Weaknesses

• The ecumenical movement’s pace has slowed since the 1990s, and significant institutional union has not generally followed the doctrinal convergence
• The ecumenical theology has sometimes been more enthusiastically received by official commissions than by the laity of the churches involved

Liberation

Tradition: Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis (1986); Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells; Latin American comunidades de base

The liberation tradition has read the church’s catholicity through the lens of the church of the poor. The Latin American base communities (comunidades eclesiales de base) of the 1960s–80s embodied a renewal of the local-Eucharistic understanding of the church in which the poor became not merely the object of the church’s mission but its subject and site. Boff’s Ecclesiogenesis argued that the church is being born again from the base in a manner that recovers the New Testament’s catholic-popular form against the Christendom form the medieval church had imposed on it. The judgment passages of Matthew 25 and the Magnificat have functioned as the canonical center of the doctrine in this tradition.

Strengths

• Restores the Lukan and Matthean accent on the poor as the bearers of the church’s life
• Recovers the New Testament’s local-popular form of catholicity

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms can press the political-popular dimension at the cost of the apostolic and trinitarian
• The ecclesial future of the base-community model has been less stable than the early generation hoped

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley held a particularly catholic ecclesiology for a tradition that began as a movement within a national church. His Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749) is among the most generous Protestant treatments of Roman Catholic Christianity in the 18th-century English-speaking world: “If we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike.” His sermon “Catholic Spirit” (Sermon 39, 1750) is the locus classicus: “Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart?… If it be, give me thine hand.” The sermon names a generous-but-discerning catholicity that has remained a Wesleyan ideal even when actual Methodist practice has fallen short.

The Articles of Religion (1784), Article XIII: “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.” The article is a verbatim adoption of the Anglican Article XIX, itself an adaptation of Augsburg VII. The Methodist confession of the visible church therefore stands within the broad Reformation two-marks tradition (Word and sacraments), not within the Anabaptist or the Roman.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the application of the doctrine to the Methodist movement’s own existence. Wesley insisted, throughout his life, that the Methodist societies were not a new church but a renewal movement within the catholic church, gathered for the pursuit of holiness and the spread of scriptural Christianity. The historical separation that produced the American Methodist Church in 1784 was, on Wesley’s account, a pastoral necessity in the post-Revolutionary American context, not a repudiation of the Church of England. The Methodist self-understanding has, at its best, preserved this conviction: Methodism is one stream within the catholic church, not a competitor to it.

The Methodist tradition has also been distinctively attentive to the connectional form of catholicity. The conference system (district, annual, jurisdictional, general), the itinerant ministry, the apportionment of resources across local churches, the worldwide Methodist family — these structural features are an embodied attempt to confess catholicity in working organizational form. Connection is the Methodist word for the holy catholic Church understood as an actually functioning, visibly-united communion across local boundaries. Methodist polity is, at its theological core, an attempt to make the creed’s confession of catholicity visible in the daily institutional life of the church.

The name Methodist itself, as Wesley’s brother John explained, was originally an Oxford insult that referred not to organized regularity but to an ancient medical school. The followers of Galen taught that medicine was for a hereditary elite; the Methodists (in the medical-school controversies of antiquity) taught that anyone, with the right training, could practice the healing art. The Oxford Holy Club took the same conviction into Christian discipleship: holiness was not reserved for the religious orders or the social elite; anyone could pursue God’s transforming work with the right disciplines. The Methodist application of the church’s catholicity has therefore had a strongly anti-elitist form from its 18th-century origins. The catholic church is not a church for the cool kids; it is a church in which the Lord himself disrupts the cool-kids-table arrangement of every social order.

Hymnody

Charles Wesley wrote little explicitly on the doctrine of the church under a particular hymn-title; his ecclesial hymnody is woven through the entire 1780 Collection rather than concentrated. The hymns of the church gathered, of the Lord’s Supper, of the love-feast, and of the watch-night together carry the Methodist hymnic doctrine of the church.

“Christ, from whom all blessings flow” (Charles, 1740) names the church’s life from its source: “Christ, from whom all blessings flow, / Perfecting the saints below, / Hear us, who thy nature share, / Who thy mystic body are.”

“Jesus, united by thy grace” (Charles, 1742) names the gathered company explicitly as the catholic body: “Jesus, united by thy grace, / And each to each endeared, / With confidence we seek thy face, / And know our prayer is heard.”

“The Church’s one foundation” (Samuel J. Stone, 1866; not Wesleyan in origin but central to Methodist worship) is the great 19th-century hymn of the catholic church: “The Church’s one foundation / Is Jesus Christ her Lord; / She is his new creation / By water and the Word… Elect from every nation, / Yet one o’er all the earth.”

“In Christ there is no East or West” (John Oxenham, 1908) carries the 20th-century ecumenical sensibility into the Methodist hymnal: “In Christ there is no East or West, / In him no South or North, / But one great fellowship of love / Throughout the whole wide earth.”

“One bread, one body” (John B. Foley, 1978) entered the Methodist supplemental hymnals through the broad Catholic-evangelical liturgical convergence of the late 20th century and has become a standard at communion: “One bread, one body, one Lord of all, / One cup of blessing which we bless.”

“They’ll know we are Christians by our love” (Peter Scholtes, 1966) named, in the late-1960s ecumenical moment, the criterion of the gathered church’s catholic identity in language drawn directly from John 13:35.

For Pentecost and Epiphany — the two liturgical feasts most concerned with the catholic scope of the gospel — the Methodist tradition has drawn heavily on shared ecumenical hymnody: “Of the Father’s love begotten,” “O day of God, draw nigh,” and the great translation hymns from the Greek and Latin patristic stock.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The clause is best taught by way of an apology and an asterisk. The apology: the word catholic in popular English has been so narrowed to the Roman communion that the older sense survives mostly in liturgical recitation and academic theology. The asterisk: the word means universal, whole, world-wide, the church of all places and times. The Methodist Hymnal printed the asterisk for several editions, and the asterisk has done a great deal of pastoral work; what is sometimes lost in the asterisk is the further claim the word makes. Catholic does not just mean universal in the sense of widespread. It means whole, complete, not partial, not sectarian, not reduced. The church is the body that holds the whole of the gospel for the whole of humanity for the whole of history.

This is also why translating catholic with the easier word universal would lose something. Words matter in a faith that confesses the Word made flesh. To pray holy catholic Church is to inhabit a word that has been doing theological work for two thousand years, and to inhabit it in spite of the surrounding linguistic noise.

The clause confesses one church. The visible church in the present moment exists in many institutional forms — Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, independent. The clause does not pretend this fragmentation away. It confesses, against it, that there is a holy catholic Church of which all the genuinely Christian communions are partial expressions, and toward whose fuller visible unity all genuinely Christian communions are obligated. The hardest pastoral work the clause does is to refuse the tribal instinct of every Christian who would treat their own communion as the whole. There are no cool kids in the catholic church.

The clause confesses holy. The empirical church is obviously, often, painfully not holy. Augustine’s account remains the indispensable resource: the church is a mixed body — saints and hypocrites visibly together — and the holiness of the church is grounded in its head and its Spirit, not in the moral performance of its members. To confess the holy church is therefore not to whitewash the empirical church; it is to confess the work of the Spirit within a church that is also obviously full of sinners (the speaker first among them). The Donatist option — to flee the impure church and reconstruct a pure one — has been ruled out by the Augustinian settlement and by every responsible reading of the New Testament since. The body of Christ is always larger than the morally satisfactory.

The clause confesses church — ekklēsia, the assembly of the called-out. The church is therefore not the place one drifts into; it is the people one is called into. The vocabulary itself has a kind of antidote to consumer religion built into it. The church is not the place that meets your needs; the church is the people who have been called by the same Lord into the same body for the same work.

What the clause finally protects, against every modern reduction, is the body in which the Holy Spirit (named in the previous clause) actually does the Spirit’s work. The Spirit is not a freelancer. The Spirit gathers. The Spirit forms a body. The Spirit makes the church. To confess the Holy Spirit and not the holy catholic Church would be to confess a Spirit that did half of what the Spirit actually does. The clause is therefore not a sociological footnote to the doctrine of the Spirit; it is the public form the Spirit’s work takes.

For the preacher: the temptation in this clause is to teach the word catholic and stop. Do not stop. Teach the word, and then preach the church it names. Preach a church that is wider than the local congregation, older than the local denomination, more diverse than the cultural neighborhood, more contentious than the public-relations narrative. Preach a church that has at its center a Lord who broke down the dividing wall of hostility and made one new humanity out of those who had every reason to remain two. Preach a church that, against every empirical setback, is what God is building. Not has built. Is building.

Further Reading

• Exodus 19:5–6 — the calling of Israel as a holy nation, the Old Testament foundation of ecclesiology
• Matthew 16:13–20 — Christ on this rock I will build my church
• Acts 2:37–47; 4:32–37 — the apostolic church as gathered community
• Romans 12:3–8; 1 Corinthians 12 — the body of Christ
• Ephesians 2:11–22; 4:1–16 — one new humanity, four marks of the church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic implicit)
• Colossians 1:15–20 — Christ as head of the body, the church
• 1 Peter 2:9–10 — chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation, people for his own possession
• Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans (c. 110)
• Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church (251)
• Augustine, On Baptism (against the Donatists); City of God esp. Books XIX–XXII
• Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (434)
• The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) — the fourfold marks
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 8 (Christ as head of the church)
• Martin Luther, On the Councils and the Church (1539)
• Augsburg Confession, Articles VII–VIII (1530)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.1–2
• Heidelberg Catechism, Question 54
• Belgic Confession, Articles 27–29
• Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 39, “Catholic Spirit” (1750); Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749)
• John Wesley, Sermon 74, “Of the Church” (1785)
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article XIII
• Charles Wesley, “Christ, from whom all blessings flow” (1740); “Jesus, united by thy grace” (1742)
• Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (1964) and Unitatis Redintegratio (1964)
• Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper 111, WCC, Lima 1982)
• Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran World Federation and Roman Catholic Church, 1999)
• John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (St. Vladimir’s, 1985)
• Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis (Orbis, 1986)
• Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Abingdon, 1989) — a Methodist ecclesiology for the late-Christendom situation