A Progressive Christian Primer, Part 2: “The Catholic Faith”

Part 2 of my blog-before-it-becomes-a-book. Feedback welcome!

The “Catholic” Faith

One of the first words used to describe the new faith surrounding the first Jesus Movements was not “Christianity,” but “Catholic.” If you grew up in church, you may be familiar with a puzzling line in the early 2nd century “Apostles’ Creed,” which many churches read together as a regular part of their liturgies, and many evangelicals will know from the 1995 Christian artist Rich Mullins song “The Creed” and Hillsong’s well-known congregational hymn “This I Believe.” The line is this: “I believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and life everlasting.”

The word catholic is an adjective meaning “universal.” In the days of the formation of the creeds (the 4th and 5th centuries), catholic began to be synonymous with “orthodox,” meaning “right belief.” To be catholic meant that you were in fellowship with the inheritors and administrators of right doctrine, namely, the Bishop of Rome. Those communities whose beliefs fell outside of catholic orthodoxy, defined by the Nicene, Athanasian and Constantinoplian Creeds, were deemed not catholic, and therefore, heretical. Eventually the word became associated with one particular Christian communion, the Roman Catholic Church, which divided in 1024 into East and West, with the East taking the moniker of “Orthodox” (capital O), and the West taking “Catholic” (capital C). Protestantism, when it…