We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church

The Text

The clause opens the ecclesiological-eschatological cluster that closes the creed. It is governed, in the creed’s grammar, by the Holy Spirit: the Church is the third article’s confession, placed immediately after the Spirit (clauses 16–19) because the Church is the Spirit’s creature. The Church is not a human voluntary association that later acquired a theology; it is what the Spirit makes when he is poured out — the called-out people in whom he dwells, through whom he speaks, in whom he sanctifies. To confess the Church in the third article is to confess that the Church exists by the Spirit, not by human organization.

The clause names the four classical marks of the Church (the notae ecclesiae): one, holy, catholic, apostolic. Each is a confession and, since the divisions of the church, a problem. The creed confesses one Church — and the church is visibly, scandalously divided. It confesses a holy Church — and the church is manifestly composed of sinners and has done unholy things. It confesses a catholic Church — and catholic has become, in common usage, the name of one communion among others. It confesses an apostolic Church — and the traditions dispute what apostolicity requires (apostolic succession of bishops? apostolic doctrine? apostolic mission?). The four marks are simultaneously the church’s deepest self-understanding and the site of its sharpest controversies.

The catholic tradition has held the four marks as gifts and tasks: they are real, given by the Spirit, and at the same time not yet fully visible, summoning the church toward what it is. The Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic by the Spirit’s gift; the Church is called to become visibly one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in its life. The clause is therefore not a complacent self-description but a confession that judges the church even as it constitutes it.

Translation Notes

Ekklēsian / Ecclesiam — Church. From ἐκ (out) + καλέω (to call): the called-out assembly. The word is the Septuagint’s term for the קָהָל (qahal), the assembly of the Lord — Israel gathered before God. The New Testament’s choice of ekklēsia for the church is therefore a claim of continuity: the church is the eschatological assembly of God’s people, the Israel of God gathered around the Messiah by the Spirit. The English church (and Scots kirk, German Kirche) derives from a different Greek root, κυριακόν (kyriakon, belonging to the Lord — the Lord’s house, the Lord’s people), which entered the northern languages; ecclesia survives in the Romance languages (église, iglesia, chiesa) and in English derivatives (ecclesial, ecclesiastical). Both roots are theologically rich: the church is the called-out assembly (ekklesia) that belongs to the Lord (kyriakon).

Mian / unam — one. The mark of unity. The unity is grounded in the unity of God (Eph. 4:4–6: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father) and in the one Christ whose one body the church is (1 Cor. 12; Eph. 1:22–23). The unity is given (the church is one in Christ by the Spirit) and is also a task (John 17:21, Christ’s prayer that they may all be one). The visible disunity of the church is, on the catholic reading, a real wound in something that is, in its deepest reality, one.

Hagian / sanctam — holy. The mark of holiness. The church’s holiness is not the moral achievement of its members but the holiness of its Head communicated to the body by the Spirit — the church is sanctified, set apart, made holy by the One who indwells it (Eph. 5:25–27; 1 Cor. 6:11). The patristic and Reformation traditions have wrestled with the relation of this confessed holiness to the manifest sinfulness of the church’s members; the catholic settlement (against the Donatist rigorism that would restrict the church to the visibly pure) is that the church is holy by the Spirit’s sanctifying presence even while its members remain simul iustus et peccator, and that the church’s holiness is finally eschatological — the Spirit is making the church holy and will present it holy at the last.

Katholikēn / catholicam — catholic. The mark of universality and wholeness. From καθ’ ὅλου (according to the whole). The word’s classic patristic definition is Vincent of Lérins’s what has been believed everywhere, always, by all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est) and Cyril of Jerusalem’s: the church is catholic because it extends through the whole world, teaches the whole faith without defect, brings the whole human race under godliness, and heals every kind of sin. Catholic in the creed is a mark, not a denominational name; every tradition that recites the creed confesses its faith in the catholic Church. The later use of Catholic as a proper name for the Roman communion (and the Reformation rejoinder that the Reformers intended to be more catholic, not less) is a development the creed itself does not make.

Apostolikēn / apostolicam — apostolic. The mark of apostolicity. The church is apostolic in being founded on the apostles (Eph. 2:20; Rev. 21:14), in holding the apostolic faith (the regula fidei, the apostolic deposit), in continuity with the apostolic teaching and mission (Acts 2:42), and — in the episcopal traditions — in the apostolic succession of ministerial order. What apostolicity requires is the most contested of the four marks ecumenically: whether it is constituted by succession of bishops in historic order (the Roman, Orthodox, and much of the Anglican reading), by fidelity to apostolic doctrine (the classic Reformation reading), or by participation in the apostolic mission (a modern ecumenical emphasis). The catholic substance held across the dispute: the church today is the church of the apostles, holding their faith, sent on their mission.

Historical Context

The four marks were not all present in the earliest creeds. The Apostles’ Creed (Western, baptismal) confesses the holy catholic Church (sanctam ecclesiam catholicam); the 325 Nicene Creed did not have an ecclesiological clause at all; the 381 Constantinopolitan revision added the present clause with all four marks — one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The expansion is part of the same pneumatological development that added clauses 16–19: having confessed the Spirit, the council confessed the Spirit’s primary creature, the Church.

The clause did dogmatic work against the schisms and the questions of the patristic period. Against Donatism (the 4th–5th-century North African rigorist movement that held the church to consist only of the visibly pure and the sacraments of sinful ministers to be invalid), the holiness of the church was articulated by Augustine as the holiness of Christ communicated to a mixed body (the church is a corpus permixtum, a field of wheat and tares until the harvest), not the moral purity of its members; the validity of the sacraments depends on Christ, not on the worthiness of the minister. Against the perennial temptation of sectarianism, the catholicity of the church was articulated by Cyril of Jerusalem and Vincent of Lérins as the wholeness of the faith and the universality of the communion. Against gnostic and heretical claims to secret apostolic traditions, the apostolicity of the church was articulated by Irenaeus and Tertullian as the public, traceable continuity of the apostolic faith in the churches the apostles founded.

The Reformation made the clause the central dogmatic battleground. The question was: where is the one holy catholic apostolic Church? The Roman position located the marks in visible communion with the see of Rome and the historic episcopate. The Reformers — who had no intention of founding a new church but claimed to be reforming the one church — relocated the marks: the church is found where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered (the Augsburg Confession VII; the Reformed notae of word, sacrament, and discipline). The Reformers distinguished the invisible church (the whole company of the elect, known to God) from the visible church (the institutional body, always mixed), and located the four marks primarily in the former while seeking their visible expression in the latter. The Roman response (the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation ecclesiology, classically Bellarmine) insisted on the visible, hierarchical, Rome-communion church as the locus of the marks. The dispute defined Western ecclesiology for four centuries.

The modern ecumenical movement (20th–21st centuries) is, in large measure, the church’s attempt to take this clause seriously again — to confront the scandal that the church which confesses itself one is visibly divided. The major instruments: the World Council of Churches (founded 1948); the Faith and Order movement; the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium (1964) and Unitatis Redintegratio (1964), which reframed Roman Catholic ecclesiology toward the recognition of real (if imperfect) ecclesial reality in other communions; the bilateral dialogues; and the convergence documents (notably Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 1982). The clause has been the engine of the ecumenical century.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Ignatius of Antioch, Letters; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III–IV; Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics; Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XVIII; Augustine, anti-Donatist works; Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium

The patristic settlement articulated all four marks. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110) gave the earliest use of catholic Church (To the Smyrnaeans 8: where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church) and the strong doctrine of unity around the bishop and the eucharist. Irenaeus and Tertullian articulated apostolicity against the gnostics: the apostolic faith is public and traceable, held in the churches the apostles founded, in the succession of teaching (Irenaeus’s succession of presbyters/bishops is, in its original form, primarily a succession of the apostolic teaching, the guarantee that the public faith has not been secretly altered).

Cyprian’s On the Unity of the Catholic Church (251) is the great patristic treatise on unity, with its famous (and famously double-edged) maxims: there is no salvation outside the church (salus extra ecclesiam non est) and one cannot have God as Father who does not have the Church as mother. Cyprian’s high doctrine of unity around the episcopate became foundational; his rigorism on the (in)validity of schismatic sacraments was, however, not received by the catholic mainstream, which followed Augustine.

Augustine’s anti-Donatist works are the decisive articulation of holiness and the visible/mixed church. Against the Donatists’ pure-church rigorism: the church is a corpus permixtum (Matt. 13’s wheat and tares), holy by Christ’s holiness and the Spirit’s sanctifying work, not by the moral purity of its members; the sacraments are valid by Christ’s action (ex opere operato in the later precision), not by the minister’s worthiness; the church’s full holiness is eschatological. Vincent of Lérins’s Commonitorium (434) gave catholicity its classic test: what has been believed everywhere, always, by all — the canon of catholic consent.

Strengths

• The patristic articulation of all four marks is the permanent dogmatic foundation
• Augustine’s corpus permixtum settled the holiness question against rigorism — permanently valuable pastorally
• Irenaeus’s public, traceable apostolicity remains the catholic answer to esotericism
• Vincent’s canon (ubique, semper, ab omnibus) is a durable, if not mechanical, test of catholicity

Weaknesses

• Cyprian’s no salvation outside the church, pressed without Augustine’s qualifications, has produced a harsh exclusivism the catholic tradition has had to temper
• The patristic articulation of apostolicity-as-episcopal-succession, hardened over time, became a principal point of later division
• The polemical contexts (Donatist, gnostic) produced sharper formulations than the catholic substance always required

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (the church as the congregatio fidelium and the mystical body), Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed; the canonists; the high-medieval doctrine of the church as societas and corpus Christi mysticum

The scholastic tradition received the marks and articulated the church under two integrated images: the congregatio fidelium (the congregation of the faithful) and the corpus Christi mysticum (the mystical body of Christ). Aquinas’s ecclesiology (dispersed through the Summa rather than gathered in a single treatise, and in his Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed) holds the marks together: the church is one by the unity of faith, hope, and charity and of the one Spirit; holy by the indwelling Spirit, the sacraments, and the blood of Christ; catholic in extending through all places, all conditions of persons, and all times; apostolic in being founded on and continuous with the apostles. Aquinas’s integration of the church as body (organic, Spirit-animated) and the church as congregation (visible, ordered) holds the visible and the mystical together without collapsing either.

The high-medieval period also saw the over-juridicization of ecclesiology in the canonical and papalist literature — the church increasingly defined as a societas perfecta (a complete, self-sufficient juridical society) with the marks read in strongly institutional terms. This juridical reduction is part of what the Reformation reacted against and what Lumen Gentium in the 20th century deliberately corrected by recovering the church as mystery and people of God before institution.

Strengths

• The integration of body and congregation holds the mystical and visible together
• Aquinas’s articulation of the marks is balanced and pastorally usable
• The corpus mysticum image preserves the Spirit-animated, organic reality of the church

Weaknesses

• The high-medieval juridical reduction (church as societas perfecta) flattened the mystery into institution — a distortion later self-corrected
• The Aristotelian-juridical vocabulary requires translation
• The marks, read in strongly institutional-papal terms, hardened the lines that the Reformation would contest

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, On the Councils and the Church, On the Papacy in Rome; Augsburg Confession VII–VIII; Apology VII–VIII; the Lutheran notae ecclesiae (word and sacrament)

The Lutheran tradition relocated the marks without abandoning them. The Augsburg Confession VII gives the classic Reformation definition: the church is the congregation of saints in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered — and it is enough (satis est) for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments; it is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by human beings be alike everywhere. The Lutheran notae are therefore word and sacrament: where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, there is the one holy catholic apostolic church, whatever its institutional form.

Luther distinguished the church as creatura verbi (the creature of the word) — the church does not create the gospel; the gospel creates the church — and held the four creedal marks while reading them evangelically: one by the one gospel; holy by Christ’s imputed holiness received in faith; catholic by the universality of the gospel, not by communion with Rome; apostolic by holding the apostles’ doctrine, not necessarily by episcopal succession. The Lutheran Apology VII–VIII articulates the distinction of the church properly (the assembly of believers, known fully to God) and the church as also including hypocrites (the mixed visible assembly).

Strengths

• The Augsburg VII satis est is a powerful and ecumenically generative principle (the church’s unity rests on gospel and sacrament, not uniformity of polity)
• Creatura verbi rightly grounds the church in the gospel, not the gospel in the church
• The evangelical reading of the marks recovers their substance from juridical reduction

Weaknesses

• The satis est, applied without care, can underdetermine the visible-structural unity the clause also confesses (an ecumenical critique from the episcopal traditions)
• The Lutheran reading has sometimes treated apostolicity so exclusively as doctrine that the question of order and succession was under-engaged
• The invisible/visible distinction, pressed too far, can relativize the scandal of visible disunity the clause means to confront

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes IV.1–2; the Belgic Confession Articles 27–29; the Scots Confession Ch. 18; the Westminster Confession Ch. 25; the Reformed notae (word, sacrament, discipline); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1–3

The Reformed tradition holds the marks with the addition of a third nota: discipline (the ordered exercise of pastoral oversight and correction) alongside word and sacrament. Calvin’s Institutes IV.1–2 is the great Reformation ecclesiology. Calvin distinguishes the invisible church (the elect, known to God alone) and the visible church (the institutional body, the mother of believers — Calvin retains Cyprian’s maternal image: there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb); he holds the four creedal marks while locating their visible test in the pure preaching of the word and the right administration of the sacraments (Institutes IV.1.9). The Reformed confessions sharpened the true church / false church distinction (the Belgic Confession Art. 29 gives marks for discerning the true church amid the corruptions of the visible body).

Barth’s Church Dogmatics IV reconstructs the doctrine in the 20th century around the church as the provisional representation of the whole humanity justified, sanctified, and called in Christ; the church’s being is an event of the Spirit gathering, upbuilding, and sending the community. Barth’s strong Christological-pneumatological grounding of the church (the church has no being apart from the act of the Spirit) is a major modern Reformed contribution and is close, at key points, to the patristic and Eastern instinct that the church is the Spirit’s creature.

Strengths

• The addition of discipline takes seriously the church’s call to be visibly holy
• Calvin’s retention of the maternal-Cyprianic image holds the visible church’s necessity against individualism
• Barth’s event-ecclesiology recovers the church as the Spirit’s act, close to the patristic instinct

Weaknesses

• The true church / false church sharpening, pressed polemically, has produced sectarian fissiparousness in parts of the Reformed tradition
• The invisible/visible distinction, over-pressed, can relativize the visible unity the clause confesses
• The Reformed tradition’s history of division is itself a standing question put to it by the mark one

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the patristic-conciliar tradition; the doctrine of the church as the eucharistic-sacramental body and as communion (koinōnia); Khomiakov’s sobornost; modern: Florovsky, Afanasiev (eucharistic ecclesiology), Zizioulas (Being as Communion), Lossky, Staniloae

The Eastern tradition holds the marks within a eucharistic and communion ecclesiology. The church is, primarily, the eucharistic assembly: where the bishop (or his presbyter) presides over the gathered people at the one eucharist, there the whole catholic church is fully present — catholicity is not first geographical extension but the wholeness of the church present in each local eucharistic community in communion with all the others. The Russian theologian Khomiakov’s term sobornost (conciliarity, togetherness-in-freedom) names the Eastern reading of unity: a unity that is organic and Spirit-given, neither the juridical unity of submission to a single see (the Eastern critique of the Roman reading) nor the merely confessional unity of agreement in doctrine (a perceived Protestant minimalism), but the unity of the one Spirit in the communion of the churches.

Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology and Zizioulas’s Being as Communion (1985) are the major modern Eastern contributions: the church is communion — the being of the church is constituted by the Spirit in the eucharistic event, and the four marks are dimensions of that communion. Holiness is the Spirit’s sanctifying presence and the communion of saints (the living and the departed in one body); apostolicity is both the succession of the episcopate and, equally, the church’s pentecostal-eschatological constitution by the Spirit (Zizioulas’s careful holding-together of the historical/apostolic and the eschatological/pneumatological dimensions).

The Eastern position on the perennial question — where is the one church? — has historically been to identify the one church with the Orthodox communion, while the modern Eastern ecumenical engagement (the Orthodox have been members of the WCC since its founding) has wrestled, not without internal tension, with how to speak of the ecclesial reality of the non-Orthodox.

Strengths

• Eucharistic ecclesiology recovers catholicity as wholeness-in-each-local-church, a profound and ecumenically fertile insight
• Sobornost offers a unity that is neither juridical centralism nor confessional minimalism
• Zizioulas’s holding-together of the apostolic and the pneumatological is a major contribution
• The communion-of-saints dimension of holiness is richly developed

Weaknesses

• The historic identification of the one church simply with the Orthodox communion is in tension with the ecumenical recognition of ecclesial reality elsewhere — an unresolved internal Orthodox question
• The eucharistic-episcopal grounding makes intercommunion with non-episcopal bodies dogmatically difficult
• Sobornost can be invoked rhetorically without resolving concrete questions of authority

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: the Faith and Order movement; Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio (Vatican II, 1964); Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Lima, 1982); the bilateral dialogues; the Church as Communion convergence; receptive ecumenism

The modern ecumenical movement is the church’s sustained attempt to confront the scandal that the church it confesses one is divided. Lumen Gentium (1964) is a watershed: it recovered the church as mystery and people of God before institution; and its careful formula that the one church of Christ subsists in (subsistit in) the Catholic Church — rather than simply is the Catholic Church — created theological space to affirm that real elements of sanctification and truth, and real (if, in the Roman judgment, imperfect) ecclesial reality, exist in other communions. Unitatis Redintegratio committed the Roman communion to the ecumenical task.

Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (the Lima text, 1982) is the most widely received convergence document, articulating substantial agreement on baptism (see [[one-baptism-for-the-forgiveness-of-sins]]) and significant convergence on eucharist and ministry. The bilateral dialogues (Anglican–Roman Catholic, Lutheran–Roman Catholic — yielding the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification — Reformed–Roman Catholic, Methodist–Roman Catholic, the various dialogues with the Orthodox) have produced a body of convergence unimaginable a century ago. The contemporary frame of receptive ecumenism asks not what must others learn from us but what can we learn, and receive, from one another — a posture close to the Wesleyan catholic spirit.

The convergence on the marks: increasingly, the traditions confess that the one church is a gift not yet visibly realized and a task laid on all; that holiness is the Spirit’s, received by sinners; that catholicity is wholeness and universality, not the property of one communion; that apostolicity is fidelity to the apostolic faith and mission, with the question of order still under negotiation. The remaining hard questions — ministry and its recognition, the eucharist and intercommunion, authority and how decisions are made for the whole church — are the unfinished agenda.

Strengths

• Subsistit in created real theological space for mutual ecclesial recognition
• BEM is a substantive, widely received convergence
• The bilateral dialogues have achieved agreement (notably on justification) once thought impossible
• Receptive ecumenism reframes the task in a humble, learnable key

Weaknesses

• Convergence on doctrine has outpaced convergence on ministry, eucharist, and authority — the church remains unable to share the one table
• Reception (the actual receiving of agreements into the life of the churches) lags far behind dialogue
• The clause’s confession of one church remains, after a century, visibly unfulfilled — the standing rebuke and summons

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s ecclesiology is the most ecumenically generous in the magisterial tradition, and the present clause is, in a sense, the home of the most characteristic Wesleyan instinct. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784), Article XIII — Of the Church — gives the Reformation definition in the form Wesley abridged from the Anglican Articles: The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered. Wesley held the four creedal marks in their catholic substance; what is distinctively Wesleyan is the spirit in which he held the mark one.

Sermon 39, “Catholic Spirit” (on 2 Kings 10:15, Is your heart right, as my heart is with your heart? … If it be, give me your hand) is the classic Wesleyan text on this clause. Wesley’s argument: differences of opinion and of mode of worship are inevitable while we are in the body and see in part; they do not dissolve the unity of those whose hearts are right with God through faith working by love. The catholic spirit is not speculative latitudinarianism (an indifference to truth — Wesley explicitly rejects this: a man of truly catholic spirit is fixed as the sun in his judgment concerning the main branches of Christian doctrine) nor practical latitudinarianism (indifference to the church’s worship and order); it is love that embraces, with a true catholic love, all whose hearts are right with God, across the lines that divide the visible church. Wesley’s catholic spirit is the lived form of the creed’s one… Church: the confession that those who are one in the essentials of faith are one in the one Church, however divided their communions.

Wesley’s own situation gave the clause practical edge. He lived and died a priest of the Church of England and insisted Methodism was a renewal movement within the one church, not a new church (the societies were never meant to be a separate denomination; the separation came, against his intention, through the pressure of events and his own American ordinations of 1784). The Wesleyan tradition therefore carries, in its origins, both a strong sense of the one catholic church and a costly awareness of how division actually happens — not by intention, usually, but by the slow hardening of necessary expedients into walls. This makes the Wesleyan-Methodist tradition characteristically ecumenical: the Methodist churches have been among the most active in the modern ecumenical movement (the WCC, the COCU/Churches Uniting in Christ, the Methodist–Roman Catholic and Methodist–Lutheran dialogues, and the various united churches — the Church of South India, the United Church of Canada, the uniting churches — in which Methodists have merged across the old lines).

Charles Wesley’s hymnody confesses the clause directly. Christ, from whom all blessings flow, / perfecting the saints below, / hear us, who thy nature share, / who thy mystic body are. And the great hymn of the church’s unity: All praise to our redeeming Lord, / who joins us by his grace, / and bids us, each to each restored, / together seek his face. // He bids us build each other up; / and, gathered into one, / to our high calling’s glorious hope / we hand in hand go on. The line gathered into one is the present clause sung.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the four marks in their full catholic substance, without modification; hold the mark one not as a complacent self-description but as a summons and a wound; practice the catholic spirit — fixed in the essentials, generous in opinions and modes, embracing in love all whose hearts are right with God; remember that division usually comes not by heresy but by the hardening of expedients, and resist that hardening; treat the ecumenical task as a Wesleyan obligation, not an optional extra; and let the parish know that when it confesses one holy catholic and apostolic Church it is confessing something larger than itself, larger than Methodism, larger than Protestantism — the whole Spirit-gathered people of God, of which it is one called-out part.

Hymnody

The hymnody on this clause is the repertoire of the church — its unity, its foundation, its communion of saints.

“The Church’s one foundation” (Samuel J. Stone, 1866) is the classic English hymn of the four marks, written explicitly to confess the creedal clause against a 19th-century schism: The church’s one foundation / is Jesus Christ her Lord; / she is his new creation / by water and the word. The third stanza confesses the mark one amid the church’s distress: Though with a scornful wonder / men see her sore oppressed, / by schisms rent asunder, / by heresies distressed, / yet saints their watch are keeping; / their cry goes up, “How long?”

“Christ is made the sure foundation” (Latin, 7th c., Urbs beata Jerusalem; trans. John Mason Neale, 1851) confesses the apostolic-catholic church built on Christ the cornerstone.

“Glorious things of thee are spoken” (John Newton, 1779) is the great hymn of the church as the city of God: Glorious things of thee are spoken, / Zion, city of our God.

“The Church of Christ in every age” (Fred Pratt Green, 1969) confesses the church’s apostolic mission in modern key: The church of Christ in every age, / beset by change but Spirit-led, / must claim and test its heritage / and keep on rising from the dead.

“In Christ there is no East or West” (John Oxenham, 1908) confesses the mark catholic as the universal fellowship: 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.

“For all the saints” (William Walsham How, 1864) confesses the communion of saints — the church’s holiness in its eschatological breadth: O blest communion, fellowship divine! / We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; / yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. / Alleluia!

“The Church’s one foundation” and “Onward, Christian soldiers” (Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865 — We are not divided, all one body we, / one in hope and doctrine, one in charity) carry the mark one, the latter with the irony, often noted, that its confident we are not divided is sung by a church that manifestly is.

“All praise to our redeeming Lord” (Charles Wesley, 1747) is the Wesleyan hymn of the church gathered into one.

“Blest be the tie that binds” (John Fawcett, 1782) confesses the communion of the church: Blest be the tie that binds / our hearts in Christian love; / the fellowship of kindred minds / is like to that above.

“One bread, one body” (John Foley, 1978) and the modern eucharistic-unity hymnody confess the mark one at the table.

For the liturgical year: this clause is performed every Sunday in the creed and is the dogmatic substance of Pentecost (the church’s birth by the Spirit), of feasts of the apostles, of All Saints (the communion of saints, the church’s holiness in its full extent), and of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (January, observed across the traditions), which exists precisely to pray the mark one into visible reality.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Three pastoral tasks attach to this clause.

The first is teaching the parish that “catholic” is not the name of another church but a mark of their own. Many Protestant parishioners, reciting one holy catholic and apostolic Church, silently understand catholic as Roman Catholic and wonder why they are confessing belief in a church they do not belong to — or quietly substitute Christian for catholic. The pastor’s task is to teach the word: catholic means according to the whole — the whole faith, for the whole human race, in every place and time. To confess the catholic church is to confess that one’s own congregation is not the whole church, not a self-sufficient religious club, but one called-out part of a people that spans the globe and the centuries and the divided communions. The word, rightly taught, is an antidote to congregational and denominational narrowness.

The second is teaching the four marks as gift and task, not as boast. The clause is not the church congratulating itself. The church confesses itself one while bleeding from its divisions; holy while repenting of its sins; catholic while tempted to sectarian narrowness; apostolic while needing constantly to test itself against the apostolic faith. The pastor’s task is to let the marks function as the Spirit’s both-and: they are real (the Spirit has made the church one, holy, catholic, apostolic — it is not nothing, not a mere aspiration) and they are unfinished (the Spirit is making the church visibly what it already is in him). The confession should produce neither complacency nor despair but repentance and hope.

The third is the concrete practice of the catholic spirit. This clause has immediate, local, pastoral cash value. It governs how a congregation regards the other congregations in its town — the ones of other denominations, other languages, other styles, other politics. It governs whether the parish prays for the other churches by name, cooperates with them in mission and mercy, observes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, receives the gifts of traditions not its own. The pastor’s task is to make the clause operational: to ensure the parish’s life actually expresses the one holy catholic apostolic Church it confesses — in shared prayer, shared service, mutual honor, and the refusal to speak of other Christians as rivals or strangers. The creed recited on Sunday should be visible in the parish’s relationships by Wednesday.

For the preacher: this clause is the proper subject of the sermon on the Sunday within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, of Pentecost (the church’s birth), and of All Saints (the communion of saints). The homiletical danger is two-fold and opposite: triumphalism (the church as glorious institution, the marks as possessions) and cynicism (the church as hopeless human failure, the marks as embarrassing fiction). The faithful preaching holds the creed’s own posture: the church is the Spirit’s real creature, marked by his gifts, summoned by those same gifts toward what it is not yet, and worthy — for the sake of its Head — of both honest repentance and unembarrassed hope.

For the liturgist: the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the regular intercession for other churches by name in the prayers of the people, the occasional shared worship across denominational lines, and the careful teaching of the word catholic in catechesis are the concrete liturgical means by which the parish is formed in this clause. The creed itself, recited weekly, is the primary catechesis — but only if the parish has been taught what it is saying.

Further Reading

• Genesis 12:1–3 — the calling of a people for the blessing of all nations
• Exodus 19:5–6 — a priestly kingdom and a holy nation
• Deuteronomy 7:6–8 — Israel chosen, the qahal of the Lord
• Psalm 87 — the city of God, mother of the nations
• Isaiah 2:2–4; 56:6–8 — the nations gathered to the Lord’s house
• Matthew 16:18 — on this rock I will build my church
• Matthew 18:15–20 — the church’s discipline and presence of Christ
• Matthew 28:18–20 — the apostolic commission
• John 17:20–23 — that they may all be one
• Acts 2:42–47 — the marks of the apostolic community
• Acts 15 — the council; catholicity in decision-making
• Romans 12:4–8 — one body, many members
• 1 Corinthians 1:10–17; 3:1–9 — against division
• 1 Corinthians 12 — the one body and the gifts
• Galatians 3:26–29 — one in Christ Jesus
• Ephesians 1:22–23; 2:11–22; 3:1–13; 4:1–16; 5:25–32 — the great ecclesiological texts
• Colossians 1:18, 24 — Christ the head of the body
• 1 Timothy 3:15 — the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth
• Hebrews 12:22–24 — the assembly of the firstborn, the church festal and triumphant
• 1 Peter 2:9–10 — a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation
• Revelation 7:9–17; 21:1–22:5 — the church consummated, the holy city
• Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans, To the Ephesians
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies III–IV
• Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics
• Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XVIII
• Augustine, anti-Donatist writings; Tractates on John; City of God (esp. XIX–XX)
• Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, art. 9; Summa Theologiae III on the church and sacraments
• Luther, On the Councils and the Church
• Augsburg Confession VII–VIII; Apology VII–VIII
• Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.1–2
• Belgic Confession Articles 27–29
• Scots Confession (1560), Chapter 18
• Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 25
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article XIII
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 39 (“Catholic Spirit”); Sermon 74 (“Of the Church”)
• Charles Wesley, “All praise to our redeeming Lord,” “Christ, from whom all blessings flow”
• Lumen Gentium (Second Vatican Council, 1964)
• Unitatis Redintegratio (Second Vatican Council, 1964)
• Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (WCC Faith and Order, Lima, 1982)
• Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (1938); The Splendour of the Church (1953)
• John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (St Vladimir’s, 1985)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §62; IV/2 §67; IV/3 §72
• Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Doubleday, 1974)
• Geoffrey Wainwright, The Ecumenical Moment (Eerdmans, 1983)