What do our churches mean by “catholic” when we recite the Nicene creed (381) and declare our belief in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church?
No, we don’t mean the Roman Catholic Church. That’s an instance of one particular organization inserting the adjective into its name. And the claim that they alone are the catholic church is, ironically, uncatholic.
Etymologically, the English word derives from the Greek katholikos, which combines the preposition kata (meaning, with respect to) with the noun holos (meaning, whole), as in, with respect to the whole.
The Indicative of Catholicity—What It Is
Theologically, however, we start with the gospel. The gospel is the good news that Jesus is gathering to himself a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation through the new covenant in his blood. As such, Christ’s church—this gathering—is and will be comprised of people from all the earth. It’s a global people. When we declare our churches “catholic” in a Sunday morning gathering, we are declaring something about the nature of those individual gatherings thanks to the gospel. We are saying that our local gatherings,
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