Transcript

Let me say a word in defense of reason in dialogue with faith because faith is that truth that unites us to that substance.

But reason, in order to realize its full potential, needs the horizons revealed by and truth contained in the faith, and not just any faith, but the Catholic faith.

Thank you very much for coming!

We have a nice turnout here.

I hope everyone is enjoying the conference; I know I certainly am getting a lot out of it and having the opportunity to meet you good folks.

I spend seventy-five hours a week squirreled away in my cave working on annotations for the Bible and the hours beyond that playing with my nine children.

So it’s good to see you all, and I’m glad that you’re here.

I’m in a cave like St. Jerome; that makes me look good, not him.

But this afternoon's workshop is entitled One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: The Four Marks of the Church in Ephesians.

Every Sunday, you and I profess our faith by reciting the Nicene Creed, in which we say, as an article of faith, that we believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

The Nicene Creed, as you know, goes back to the first ecumenical council in the year—who knows when?—the

Nicene: 325, and its final form dates to the second ecumenical council, the Council of Constantinople I, which is the date 381. So the Nicene Creed in the fourth century—ever since the fourth century, the Church has acknowledged these four amazing properties about herself, and they become objects of reflection and appreciation and contemplation.

So that when the Church, in a sense, views herself, she sees a four-fold mystery within herself that derives directly from Christ.

Now, I mentioned last evening in my commercial that the Nicene Creed goes back to the fourth century, so the Church has been describing itself and meditating upon itself in these ways for more than a millennium now.

Actually, scholars of theology will tell us that the four marks of the Church, as something that is concretely perceived about the Church, actually go back to the second century A.D. in the seven letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch.

St. Ignatius of Antioch was a bishop in Syria in the late first century, early second century.

Tradition has it that he was actually appointed in his post as the successor of St. Peter, who the Church of Antioch claims to be its first bishop, this would be before Peter made his way to the imperial capital of Rome.

We’re not really sure under what circumstances he was arrested or the reason why he was arrested, but while he was under military escort being taken to Rome—most likely to be thrown to the lions in the Colosseum—we're actually not quite sure about all the circumstances that surrounded the final moment when he wore the martyr's crown.

But on his way, he wrote seven very famous epistles, one of them to St. Polycarp, one of them to the Church of Rome, and the other ones to various churches in Asia Minor.

It’s widely recognized in theology that the four marks of the Church are not articulated in that precise order, but they’re clearly present in Ignatius’ own teaching on the Church, especially the oneness of the Church and the catholicity of the Church.

Ignatius of Antioch's letters date to about 107—that's an approximate date, 107. So we’re in a sub-apostolic age, right after the death of the apostles, and he’s speaking of the Church in this four-fold way.

Now I would like to offer a humble suggestion, and that is that the four marks of the Church actually go back even further.

They go back to the inspired writings of the New Testament itself; in particular, they go back to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.

It certainly would not be fair to say that Paul articulates this doctrine in a fully developed way, but in seed form at least, the idea that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic is something that is rooted in Paul’s teaching on the Church.

That should not surprise us because Ephesians is the Epistle of the Church.

It is Paul’s personal guided tour through the mystery of Christ, the mystery being not only Jesus himself but the extension of himself in the sacramental mystical body that you and I call the Church.

Before we dive into this, let’s ask God for some insight and some encouragement from on high, and he would elevate our study and help us to make these truths our own.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Lord God in heaven, we give you our thanks, we give you our praise, we give you our worship.

We bend the knee of our hearts before you; we bow our souls in your presence and confess you as our Lord, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier.

Send us light from on high to open the eyes of our hearts.

Help us to see, appreciate, and love this great body, this bride of yours, that is the Church, of which we are a part and of which we are not worthy to be a part of.

By your grace, you have elevated us to the family of God.

And so we thank you for the many blessings that you have poured out upon us, bringing us to this point in our life, leading us, shepherding us on to eternal life in your embrace forever.

We ask the intercession of St. Joachim and Anna and the intercession of Mary, our Mother.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et Benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.

Santa Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.

Amen.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Okay, my plan for the next fifty minutes or so is to give a brief overview of the four marks of the Church in general—their general characteristics and properties—and then we want to transition and look at each one of the four marks individually and do, as I say, a little catechetical review on each of the four.

What does the Church mean when she says that she’s one, or holy, or catholic, or apostolic?

Then we’re going to drop our anchor in the Book of Ephesians at various points, and I think we will see that Paul shares this vision, at least in a provisional and sort of outlined way, the four marks of the Church.

What are marks?

What does the word itself mean?

The four marks of the Church are those essential features of the Church which, in a sense, serve as distinguishing characteristics.

They are signs of her authenticity.

I sometimes like to think of the four marks of the Church as being the fingerprints of the Bride of Christ—the fingerprints of the Bride of Christ.

They constitute the evidence of her divine origin and the evidence of her divine mission.

In fact, that’s something that we need to wrap our minds around right from the start: the Church is not reducible to a human society.

It’s not something that could be exhaustively explained in sociological categories.

The Church is essentially a supernatural mystery.

If it were not a supernatural mystery, it wouldn’t be part of a creed; we wouldn’t say that we— you know, credo, I believe—with supernatural faith in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

The Church is a supernatural mystery.

In fact, we can go one step farther: it is an incarnational mystery.

The incarnation, as we know, is the great event in which God united Himself with humanity— with you and me— by taking upon our nature.

The Church is the Body of Christ, so the Church is a sacramental extension of Christ.

Therefore, what is true of Christ must also be true of the Church.

You would expect it to be true of the Church that the same imprint and image that you see in the Son of God become man will be in the body of the Son of God become man.

So the Church, like Jesus Himself, is fully human, but it's not merely human.

There’s something divine about the Body and Bride of Christ.

In fact, when you say, as St. Paul says so many times in his epistles, that the Church is the Body of Christ, he's at least implying two things.

He’s implying that, like anybody, it has an exterior dimension, an empirical side—something that encounters our senses, something that we can see, observe, study, and contemplate.

It has this outer dimension; that’s the bodily dimension of the Church that is visible in you and me and in her organized unity and various things that we’re going to look at here.

But it also has that hidden interior dimension, right?

The Church is born of heaven; the glory of God resides within her in a hidden and veiled way, just as it did in the Son of God.

Of course, there are two different mysteries; it’s not one and the same thing, but it’s an echo or a reflection of the greater mystery of who Jesus Himself is.

He’s fully human, but not merely human; He is divine.

That divinity begins to show forth or peek through the cracks of the Church when she’s worshiping her Lord and living according to His demands.

To say that the Church is a body that is empirical or is visible is to say two things, and these would be, in a sense, two general characteristics that are true of all four of the marks of the Church.

One is that they are perceptible.

The mystery of God comes to a concrete expression in the Church in these four ways; it’s perceptual, meaning there are historical manifestations of the Church's oneness, historical manifestations of the Church's apostolicity, catholicity, and sanctity.

As a matter of fact, the First Vatican Council, at the end of the 19th century, said that certain properties of the Church, such as her unity and catholicity, could actually serve as motives of credibility.

Motives of credibility!

In other words, to perceive the full mystery of the Church, you need to have supernatural faith, but even reason apart from faith, looking on and observing the Church, is able to see something about the Church that is not fully explained by human means.

It can't be scientifically explained, at least not to the inner core.

When reason observes the four marks of the Church, which can be verified historically and otherwise, it is not compelled to enact a faith; it’s not forced to believe.

But it shows us that faith—reason tells us that faith is itself a reasonable act because God has left evidence of the divine origin of the Church and the divine mission of the Church and broadcast it for the world to see.

So faith is a reasonable act because the four marks of the Church constitute this motive of credibility.

It doesn’t force belief, but it shows that our belief is not irrational.

That’s basically what I mean when I say that the first characteristic is that they’re perceptible.

They are open to investigation by reason, but reason doesn’t penetrate the whole mystery.

The four marks together are perceptible; they are also permanent.

In other words, the unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity of the Church are constitutive of the Church’s very identity.

If you look at a house, it’s not the shutters or the window dressings; it’s not something exterior that’s not constitutive of the structure itself.

The four marks of the Church would be more like the floor joists, the wall studs, and the wiring.

It’s something that’s built into the very structure of what the Church is.

You can’t take any part away; take any side away from a square and it ceases to be a square.

Take any one of the four marks away from the Church, and it ceases to be the one true Church of Christ.

So they’re integral, they’re structural, they’re permanent.

In general, the four marks are perceptible; we can observe them, and others can look on and investigate the Church and its claims based on what they see.

On the other side, they’re permanent; they’re constitutive of the Church.

This is absolutely critical in our day and age because there are more than—I'm pretty sure it’s in excess of 30,000 Christian bodies laying claim to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, claiming to be the one true Church of God.

Now, why would any one of these churches want to lay claim to that?

Because Jesus Himself said in the Gospel of John, chapter 10, that when He’s describing the Church, He said there will be one flock and there will be one shepherd.

Jesus did not found multiple churches; Jesus founded one Church.

Now there are elements of the one true Church—of her truth and her sanctity and so forth—beyond the visible confines of the Roman Catholic Church.

We know that we can maybe talk about that in the question-and-answer period, but the one true Church of Christ, according to the teaching of our Church, subsists in the Roman Catholic Church.

You can counterfeit, then, say, a $50 bill, but you cannot counterfeit the work of God by founding a Church that has these four essential constitutive properties that we are calling the four marks.

Let’s transition now; that’s the purpose of the four marks—they authenticate the Church’s divine identity—that’s their purpose.

What are the properties themselves?

Number one: the Church believes and the Church confesses that the Church is one.

This is otherwise known as the mark of unity.

What does it mean to say that the Church is one?

Well, it means at least three things.

We could go on for hours talking about the four marks and unpacking the full implications of each one of these signs of her identity, each fingerprint in all of its details.

But I’m going to define myself to three with each one of the marks.

So the teaching that the Church is one means at least three things: it means she has one founder, it means she is one family, and it means she professes one faith.

I had a professor one time who told me that you should always avoid annoying alliteration, but I find it helpful, so I hope that it doesn’t throw you off too much.

So the first point: the Church is one because she has one founder.

This is something that we obviously know, but it’s easy to breeze over, especially when we cite it so explicitly in the Creed.

The very first line of the Nicene Creed is I believe in one God.

You and I can easily take that for granted, but it wasn’t so easy to take for granted in the 4th century when you had pantheons of gods being worshipped.

Now, we have our own gods today to be sure—whether it’s the climate or whatever.

It’s certainly true to say that we live in a polytheistic culture.

But it’s important to appreciate the fact that the Church comes from one founder because she only believes in one God.

In the ancient world, there were multiple gods, and therefore there were multiple cults and multiple communities that gathered for worship for each of these gods of the sun, the moon, the sky, the stars, various cosmic forces, and so forth.

The Church has always believed that there can only be one God.

In fact, we know that this is something that Christianity inherited from ancient Israel.

Ancient Israel did not have a creed quite like the Nicene Creed, which is a synthesis of what the Church believes in short compass and becomes a platform and foundation for catechetical teaching, but she did have one essential creed, if we can call it that.

Back in Deuteronomy 6, it’s called the Shema.

Does anybody know what that is?

The Shema, Deuteronomy 6, verses 4-5: “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”

Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one.

That is the most essential teaching of biblical theology, and it goes all the way back to ancient Israel.

This is what distinguishes the one people of God from all other peoples: it’s her belief in one God and that she derives her life and her way of living from one God.

Okay, so believing in one God has the implication that there is one people of God.

There is one Father overall, and so there must be one family who confesses that Father.

And that brings us to the second point: if the Church is one because she has one founder, she is one because she constitutes one family.

Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there’s a gentleman around here—Scott, I think his name is—who talks a lot about covenants and the idea that covenants create kinship.

They create legal and familial bonds of kinship where it doesn’t exist by nature; they create them by grace.

You and I, because we are part of the New Covenant, are incorporated into a single kinship unit: the family of God.

We are incorporated by the grace of divine adoption.

We saw that on the first night, right at the beginning of Ephesians.

What is one of the things that Paul blesses God for?

It’s for adopting us as His sons and daughters.

So the Church is one family; that means we’re all brothers and sisters under God, the fatherhood of God.

But God was not content to leave it that way.

It wasn’t just the visible family of God and the invisible head of the Church; God also provided for us a sign of her unity in the spiritual father that we call the Pope.

The Pope is a sign and source of the Church's unity.

It is part of this first fingerprint or mark of the Church because it shows us that professing our allegiance to this one man, this one spiritual father figure, is what unites us around one table and enables us to confess the same faith.

It’s a litmus test for our membership and unity within the one family of God.

So the Church is one because she has one founder, she constitutes one family, and she professes one faith.

The Church, in other words, professes to believe in the same set of doctrines, now as in the first century, without addition, subtraction, alteration, or substitution.

We all know— I assume most of you know— that the Church believes in the development of doctrine.

I like to think of the deposit of faith that the Church believes and holds as the one Gospel.

The gift of faith, the deposit of faith, was a gift to the Church in the beginning, and throughout the centuries, she’s still unwrapping it.

There’s only one gift, but she’s going deeper and discovering more, okay?

Increasing her understanding and appreciation for all that God has done for us in the work of redemption.

The one faith can be verified if you look at the various creeds throughout history, beginning with the Apostles' Creed, which goes to the second century, perhaps in its formulation, though in its doctrine it goes back to the apostles themselves—hence the name.

There are a whole series of creeds, beginning with the Apostles' Creed all the way up to, I think it’s 1968, Pope Paul VI’s Creed of the People of God, another creed in the 20th century.

They all teach the same essential content of faith.

So the Church only believes in one Gospel.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in chapter 1, he actually pronounces an anathema upon anyone, whether man or an angel from heaven, who should preach to you a Gospel other than the one that they received from the apostles.

There can only be one Gospel, one faith that the Church professes.

Every peel-off, every splinter group is altering the body of faith in some way or another, deviating from the standard of one essential set of beliefs.

I was reading a little while back about the superscriptions to the Gospels—that is, the most ancient copies that we have of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in papyrus form or parchment form or whatever from the earliest centuries of the Church.

They all have a standard or uniform title on the front page of each of them.

The Gospel of Matthew is kata Mathion (according to Matthew), Mark is kata Markon (according to Mark), Luke is kata Loukan (according to Luke), and John is kata Iohanen (according to John). It’s an awfully strange title to give a book—“according to”—it’s a prepositional phrase.

It’s an odd title.

What scholars have come to understand rightly is that this was the Church’s way of preserving her belief that there can only ever be one Gospel.

It can have four different expressions; this can be a Gospel according to Matthew, and according to Mark, etc. But we can’t really call them Gospels, at least in the sense that they would compete with this Gospel sacred idea in early Christianity that there can only be one Gospel.

Now, it’s not wrong to refer to them as the four Gospels; that’s not the point.

But the early Church was extremely conscientious about preserving our belief in one body and deposit of faith.

Now, let’s drop down in Ephesians just for a moment to see if the oneness or unicity of the Church is something that Paul wants his readers to grasp and understand about the Church of Christ.

I think indeed he does.

We’re going to look briefly here at Ephesians chapter 4, verses 1 to 6. Now, if you remember back to the first night and the outline, you’ll see that the beginning of chapter 4 is sort of the fulcrum where we transition from the doctrinal section to the moral section, right?

From an exposition of the Gospel’s truths to an exposition of the Gospel’s implications in our lives, okay?

So, chapter 4—this is the midpoint of the letter—Paul says, I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Verse 4: There is one body and one Spirit; just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Is it just me, or is Paul trying to impress upon you the oneness of the Church?

That the Church's unity derives from God because she’s indwelt with one Spirit?

That’s why Pope Pius XII would refer to the Holy Spirit as the soul of the mystical body of the Church.

On this idea that a body has a soul that animates it and livens it and so forth, the Church has one Spirit; therefore, she is one body—the one body of Christ.

She professes one faith, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

Okay, the oneness of the Church, I think, is evident for Paul, right?

To say the least, when you read these few passages.

If there’s one Lord, then indeed there’s one founder; it’s God Himself.

If there’s one faith, any deviation from that faith ceases to be the true faith.

And there’s one baptism; there was one Church whose sacraments are administered in such a way that recipients become members of the Body of Christ.

Now, we would have to qualify that in different ways now, but Paul is making the point that when you come to the Church, everyone is incorporated into one and the same thing by professing that faith and receiving baptism, which is the context in which that faith is professed.

Okay, that’s the first mark of the Church.

I’m going to save questions until the end, so I’m going to keep going here.

The second mark of the Church: the Church is holy.

This is otherwise known as the mark of sanctity.

Well, let’s ask the first question: what is holiness?

In biblical terminology, holiness refers to something that is set apart from sin and set apart for God.

Set apart from sin and set apart for God.

Usually, the term actually appears, especially in the Hebrew Bible, with reference to ancient Israel’s liturgy.

Something that is holy is something that is designated for liturgical use; it’s set aside for a sacred purpose.

It becomes an instrument through which or by which the people of God worship the Lord.

So, it has a cultic sort of connotation to it.

That’s holiness.

And holiness, if we’re going to break this down into our three points—holiness is something that the Church possesses, holiness is something that the Church pursues, and holiness is something that the Church pours forth to the world.

All right?

So, number one: the Church possesses holiness.

This follows, I think, as a matter of inference because the Church, if she is a supernatural mystery, then the Church possesses it.

It’s simply the work of God.

The Church is the work of God; it is not our work.

We’re part of it, and we participate in it, but essentially it comes from God, and God is all holy.

In the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Isaiah, the Father—Yahweh—is referred to over and over again as the Holy One of Israel.

In the Gospels, you read about Jesus casting out demons, and the demons confess, We know who you are, Jesus; you are the Holy One of God.

The third person in the Trinity gets the adjective holy more than any other; He is the Holy Spirit, or as Paul says in Romans 1, the Spirit of holiness.

So the Church possesses holiness because she originates with God.

There’s something to distinguish here, though, that I think might be helpful when you’re explaining this to people, and that is there’s a distinction between positional holiness and progressive holiness.

All of us possess, to the extent that we’re in the state of grace, a positional holiness.

If we’ve been baptized, we are part of the holy people of God.

This appears over and over in the New Testament when Paul and other apostles refer to members of the Church as the saints, or the NAB translation actually has the holy ones.

Small s, saints.

All of us are small s saints if we’re baptized because we’ve been set apart for God.

We’ve been filled with God's grace, and we’ve been set apart for the purpose of glorifying God in our life, so that each of our choices, each of our decisions, and actions in life becomes a way of serving the Lord or worshiping Him through our commitment to His teaching.

That’s positional holiness.

But then there’s progressive holiness.

The holiness that we receive in baptism is something that we’re supposed to cultivate; we’re supposed to increase in holiness.

So that brings us to our second point.

Holiness is something the Church possesses, but it’s also something that the Church pursues.

One of those most, dare I call it, frightful passages of Scripture, but one of my favorites, is Hebrews 12, verse 14, where the apostle says, Strive for peace with all men and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

No one will see the Lord!

That passage of Scripture indicates more clearly than any other that holiness is an absolute condition for our salvation, and it will not be granted to us apart from our effort.

Strive for holiness, apart from which no one will see the Lord.

Now, this idea that the Church is called to pursue holiness—she is, in some way, holy, and yet she’s called to be more holy—this is, I think, it would be fair to say, the most vulnerable to objection from the outside world.

It’s easy to see where the Church is unholy; it’s easy to see where there is a lack of sanctity and Christ-like service and sacrifice.

But you and I should not be surprised about that.

One reason is because Jesus Christ said that’s the way it would be.

If you go back to the parables of the Kingdom, the Father was just talking about them this morning in Matthew chapter 13. There are two of them: one of them is the parable of the weeds and the wheat, and another one is the parable of the great dragnet, where Jesus explained to us that the Church, which is the Kingdom of Heaven in its earthly expression, would be a mixed bag.

There would be saints and sinners shoulder to shoulder and side by side.

The Church would be a field in which the true wheat of God was growing, but alongside it is something that looked the same, was almost indistinguishable, but was not the genuine article—that is, the weeds.

It’s actually a reference to something called bearded darnel, a plant that looks almost exactly like wheat, and a farmer couldn’t properly distinguish it.

Distinguishing enough that it was hazardous to start pulling up what you thought was wheat and what wasn’t, so Jesus says in the parable they will continue to grow together, and they will be separated out, sorted—the good from the bad—at the end.

The final judgment is God’s business to sort it out in the end, to separate the weeds from the wheat.

The same thing with the dragnet; the idea was that it gathers in all fish, good and bad alike, and we would have to wait until the judgment until the Lord would differentiate one from another.

So Jesus said we would be saints and sinners living side by side, and it’s probably important for us not to assume that we are the saints.

Don’t assume you’re not one of the sinners because our mission is to grow in holiness and strive for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

But it’s easy to judge the Church when you see unholiness.

My response to that is sort of like saying, well, you don’t judge a football team on the basis of its worst players, right?

You don’t judge its ability to make the playoffs or the Super Bowl on the basis of the guys that are sitting on the bench because they didn’t work hard enough in the preseason.

You judge the Church on the basis of her saints—those who are living her life to the full, taking full responsibility, and availing themselves of the full benefits that the Church has to offer.

The assistance that the Church offers each and every one of us to grow in holiness.

You know, I was thinking about this when I was talking with my wife last night.

We were talking about the four marks of the Church and how each of them are sort of signs.

You have the glimmer of God's own grace sort of refracting through it.

It’s easy to explain, when you’re looking on, how to explain the failures of a sinner.

Without God, you don’t need God to explain that phenomenon.

We all sin; it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.

All you have to do is shift your will into neutral and follow the course of the world—whichever way the wind is blowing, that’s the way you’re going, right?

You’re subject to all of your lower passions, that part of our human nature which is intrinsically selfish.

It’s easy to be a sinner, and you don’t need God to explain it.

However, if you sort of flip the proposition around, you cannot explain the saints apart from God.

The saints live a superhuman life.

Explain to me how St. Catherine of Siena can live for months upon months upon months on nothing but receiving the Eucharist once a day.

There’s not a really good natural explanation for that.

You need God to explain the extraordinary heroism of the saints and martyrs of the Church.

And so that is where the mark of holiness shines brightest—that's where it’s most conspicuous.

All right?

So holiness for the Church, then, is a mandate.

On the one hand, holiness is something we have to pursue, but holiness is also something that the Church provides.

There are means for it.

You may not be aware of this—I suspect some of you are—but we’re all familiar with the seven sacraments, and we’ve all participated in them, most likely.

However, most people don’t seem to be aware that the Church teaches that the Church is the universal sacrament of salvation.

It’s an analogy, but the Church describes herself in her totality as a sacrament of salvation for the world.

The Church exists for one primary purpose, and that is to make us holy.

She does this, of course, through the administration of the sacraments; that’s what pours God’s grace into our life in a very direct way.

But even in her teaching, we are sanctified as the people of God.

Again, we would expect this because Jesus said as much in the Gospel of John, chapter 17, where you have the great high priestly prayer of Jesus.

He prays for His disciples and says, Sanctify them in the truth, Father, for thy word is truth.

We are sanctified by our reception, by internalizing and embracing the truth that God imparts to us through His Church.

That’s part of what it means to say the Church is the universal sacrament of salvation.

So the Church is holy.

Does St. Paul see this?

I think he does.

If you look at Ephesians chapter 5, the chapter where Paul is extolling the wonders of married love, he does so saying that married love is a parable of a greater relationship between Christ and the Church.

He says, beginning in Ephesians 5, verse 25, Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her, that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Why did Christ sacrifice Himself?

Why was the death that He freely accepted, freely accepted?

It was for this primary purpose: to make the Church holy and without blemish.

Paul might actually be referring—some people say—to this idea that in early Judaism part of the process of conversion involved a ritual bath.

There’s also the idea that there’s something called a nuptial bath, that before a couple got married, the bride went through this sort of ritual washing before she was presented to her husband.

This is what Paul is saying about baptism; I think that’s a distinct possibility.

Another possibility, actually, is that he’s alluding to a prophetic text.

We won't turn there; we don't have time in this context, but in Ezekiel 16, where God called Jerusalem to be His bride, He found her lying injured and bloody on the side of the road, and He washed her clean and decked her out as a bride.

Paul is saying that is what God has done through Christ for the Church in preparing a bride for Himself who would be washed clean and without blemish.

So does Paul see the Church as something that is holy?

That is the very reason why Jesus died, Paul said, was to make the Church sanctified.

Okay, the third mark of the Church—let's move on—the Church is Catholic.

This is known as the mark of universality.

The Church is Catholic; she is universal.

The word catholic actually comes from a Greek expression, katholikós, which is a compound of a preposition kata and holos, meaning whole.

Catholic means according to the whole, according to the totality of something.

Okay?

What is that totality?

Well, the Church is Catholic because the Church embraces all ages.

The Church is Catholic because she embraces all nations, and the Church is Catholic because she possesses all that we need to reach our heavenly destiny.

Okay?

So first, what does it mean?

The Church is Catholic because she embraces all ages.

This goes back to what is called the promise of indefectibility.

Has anybody ever heard that word?

The indefectibility of the Church, right?

We know that, and it’s rooted in what passage in Scripture?

Does anybody know?

Matthew 16. Jesus promises to build the Church upon Peter.

He says, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, singular.

I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

All the forces of hell raging down below will never overwhelm the Church.

She may dwindle in number, and she may suffer greatly at the hands of oppressors, but she will never be destroyed, snuffed out, or stamped out of existence because Christ Himself preserves her life.

The Church embraces all history, from the day of Pentecost to the final day—the consummation, the coming of the Son of Man and the judgment of the world.

So that’s one thing the Church means when she calls herself Catholic.

It also means that she embraces all nations.

This, in effect, is the most conspicuous part of this.

To say that the Church is Catholic or universal is to say that every people, tribe, tongue, and nation finds a home in her.

The Church exists to create— I said to make us holy—and to regenerate humanity, to bring about a whole new human race.

Sin is what scatters the family of man; grace, channeled to the world through the Church, is what regathers them.

This is really where we turn the corner in salvation history, where we move from Israel to the Church.

In the Old Testament, God invests Himself in one nation and one nation only to show forth His holiness, to enable them, allow them, and actually encourage— summon them to participate in this process of enlightening the world about the way of God, His holiness, about the futility of idols, and so forth.

But God invests Himself into one nation.

When you cross the threshold from the Old to the New, there’s an explosion of divine grace so that all nations are now summoned to pour into the one Body of Christ.

The Church fans out from Jerusalem to all nations.

You read all the accounts at the end of the Synoptic Gospels; in the last chapter of each Synoptic Gospel, we have a great commission passage where Jesus sends forth the disciples.

Go, therefore—this is the version of Matthew, chapter 28—go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Church is reaching as wide as she can reach to encompass the globe, embrace all peoples and nations.

She is, by her very nature, multi-ethnic, multinational, universal, global.

Okay?

Third item.

The Church is Catholic because she embraces all ages, she embraces all nations, and she, number three, possesses all that we need to reach our heavenly glory.

I’d like to develop this a little bit more, but I see we don't have the time to do that today.

However, I want to read to you a great passage from the Catechism.

It’s in paragraph 868. Listen to how the Church explains her catholicity.

This is something we don’t normally think about or associate with this mark of the Church.

The Catechism says she— that is, the Church— bears in herself and administers the totality, that’s where you get the Catholic idea, the totality of the means of salvation.

The total resources that we need to go from being sinners cut off from God to saints who are united with God on their way to an eternal union with God is all found in one place: it’s in the Church, the one Church that subsists, as the Second Vatican Council says, in the Roman Catholic Church.

Does Paul think the Church is Catholic?

Paul does not use the word catholic, but clearly he has his finger on the pulse of what this mark is really all about.

If you look in Ephesians chapter 2, we’ll deal with this just briefly because Dr. Bergsma went through it in more detail this morning.

In Ephesians 2:11-22, Paul is talking about this transitional event, this shift in salvation history from one nation to all nations.

Beginning in verse 11, Paul is addressing Gentile readers, not Israel.

He says, That is, in the past, before redemption was accomplished through the Messiah, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision (which is made in the flesh by hands), remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth or polity of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise.

Drop down to verse 19. He says, So then you are no longer strangers.

A transition has taken place; a momentous shift has taken place.

So then you’re no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

All nations, not just Israel, all nations are now part of the family of God.

The circle of God’s holy people has been widened to the greatest possible extent, and that’s what the Catholic Church is by her very nature.

Okay, three down, one to go.

The fourth mark of the Church: the Church is apostolic.

This is the mark of apostolicity.

We mean three things at least—more than that, but at least three.

The Church is apostolic: one, in her origin; two, in her teaching; and three, in her authority.

The Church is apostolic in her origin, which simply means that she is traceable back to the original twelve—the eleven plus Matthias and St. Paul himself.

Those are the apostles, and their office is a unique one, an unrepeatable one—an office that in and of itself cannot be passed down, even though its authority will be transmitted.

The Church is apostolic in her teaching.

This is a key point when you're discussing the question of, say, the transmission of divine revelation.

How does the truth that Jesus spoke from His lips an ocean away on the other side of the world 2,000 years ago reach the ears of you and me?

There’s a vital link in this chain of transmission, and it’s called the apostles.

The apostles were the privileged conduit or channel through which Christ's doctrine would be poured forth into all subsequent history and through the Church thereafter.

So, Jesus transmits His truth to us through those apostles.

It’s a vital link because, you know, Scott mentioned this morning—I think, Gnosticism in the second century.

St. Irenaeus was doing a lot of hand-to-hand combat with Gnostic theology, and the one thing that the Gnostics did not appreciate—in fact, they absolutely denied—was that you don’t need to receive the Gospel through the apostles.

That doesn’t need to be a necessary link in a chain of transmission because, for the Gnostics, salvation was simply enlightenment.

So, for the Gnostics, Jesus was, in effect, more of a sage than a savior.

You needed to be liberated from ignorance more than you needed to be liberated from sin.

The Gnostics had a lot of sort of warped and strangely formed ideas, but one of them was this idea that the apostles were not a necessary part of the equation.

So, St. Irenaeus goes on and on to show that the Church can trace her origin all the way back to the apostles.

In fact, he gives us the first catalog of the first twelve popes from his day.

He was in Rome around 180 or 185 A.D.—twelve popes all the way back to Clement, Anacletus, Linus, and St. Peter himself.

The apostles are a vital link in establishing what the one true Church of Christ really is.

The Church is apostolic also because she wields apostolic authority, and this is what I was alluding to earlier.

What we call episcopal succession is the means by which that authority is passed on to the Church.

Each of the apostles laid their hands upon a man who would succeed them in office.

Their successor would be a bishop, not an apostle, because one of the constitutive features of being an apostle was having seen the risen Jesus Himself.

Even Paul had that Christophany on the road to Damascus, which qualified him to be a card-carrying bona fide apostle, even though he wasn’t part of the original twelve.

But the authority that an apostle wields was itself transmitable and transmitted.

All right?

This is something that you need to keep in mind, I think, when you’re reading the Gospels.

I’ve had so many conversations with people where just pointing this out seems to put things in a whole new light.

And that’s this: Christ did not give His authority to all.

There are some teachings of Christ; if you go to, say, the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5 to 7, it’s the Sermon on the Mount.

This is teaching that Jesus gives to the Christian disciples who are gathered around Him, but He’s ultimately teaching indiscriminately to all the crowds, and He’s making promises to them: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and so forth.

This applies to everyone.

But there are other things and other teachings that Jesus delivers that are not indiscriminately addressed to me and you.

In the Gospel of John, in particular, chapters 13 through 17—actually, up to the threshold of 17—Jesus is privately instructing the disciples about their authority, about what He will do for them.

His promise for them is not the same as His promise for us, at least not in all respects.

So, in John 16:13, when Jesus tells the apostles—because it’s only those who are left in the upper room, so it’s the apostles minus Judas—when He says, “He will lead you into all the truth,” He doesn’t mean me and you and you and you, all the lay faithful of the Church.

He’s talking to the shepherds of the Church, who will have the duty of communicating His truth throughout the centuries.

So they are the beneficiaries of the promise.

It’s important to read it with that in mind.

Likewise, in Luke 10:16, Jesus says, He who hears you hears me.

He did not say that to the masses; He said that to the select apostles.

That’s the authority that the Church bears within herself through her episcopal shepherds.

Similarly, you all know the story in Matthew 16 about the keys of the kingdom.

We didn't only have one person— as a matter of fact, even among the apostles themselves, only one received the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and that’s the person of Peter.

His office would be passed down to successors.

How do we know that?

Because the key itself is an image taken from the book of Isaiah, specifically in Isaiah 22. You guys are probably all familiar with that.

But the key—I'll make a pun, and not intending to do so—the key to this passage about the key in Isaiah 22 is that the keys are actually in transition; they’re in motion.

They’re passing from one man’s hand, Shebna, to another man’s hand, Eliakim.

So the keys symbolize not only authority but also the succession of that authority throughout history.

All right, does Paul have anything to say in Ephesians about the fact that the Church is apostolic or bears the mark of apostolicity?

Indeed, he does, in at least two passages.

One we just came close to last time, in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 20. We’ll back up to verse 19: So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.

If Paul is utilizing this theological metaphor, which is really a mystical reality of the Church as a temple, then the footer of this structure is none other than the apostles themselves.

In fact, I don't know if anyone pointed this out in an earlier talk, but you actually have the identical image in the book of Revelation.

When you see the vision, the unveiling of the New Jerusalem—this would be in Revelation chapter 21—you see the city, and it’s shaped like a cube.

It has twelve gates, which signify the twelve tribes of Israel, showing that the fullness of God’s purpose for Israel is fulfilled in the Church when they choose to unite themselves to the Messiah.

But then the foundation of this building is marked with the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

There’s only one Temple of God, one structure that has this one foundation, and that is the apostles.

Also, if you drop down a few verses later in Ephesians chapter 3, Paul says in verse 4, Ephesians 3:4, When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations.

As it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

This is what we were talking about when we say that the apostles were the privileged channels of divine revelation.

Jesus even promised to continue His teaching ministry after His ascension when He said, I have much more to say to you, but you cannot bear it now.

When the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will lead you into all the truth.

The Spirit would continue the teaching ministry of Jesus after the ascension of Jesus, but He would do so by communicating that truth to the apostolic shepherds that Jesus Himself had personally selected and invested Himself in over those years in Galilee and then Jerusalem.

So, I think we can say with some confidence that, though it’s in a not fully developed context form, Paul seems to understand, he seems to perceive the outer contours of the Church in terms of its oneness, its holiness, its catholicity, and its universality.

At least the outline of this vision of the Church is coming into view already in the early first century by Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

For me, at least, this is something that not only confirms my faith and sort of shores it up, but gives me a clearer sense of why we do what we do and the sacrifices we make, and why we follow this one Church that seems to be so countercultural and so fiercely assaulted in our day.

It really increases my love for the Church, and I think it should do the same for all of us.

Because when we admire the Church and when we love the Church, we are simply admiring and loving the work of Jesus Himself.

If the mystery of Christ is not only the person of Christ but the body that He has united to Himself, then the mystery of Christ is in our midst in the one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

Thank you very much for coming this afternoon.