The universal church

One church through all the world

‘Catholic’ comes from the Greek ‘katholikos’, meaning ‘throughout the whole’. The word does not describe the church in the New Testament, but the idea is everywhere in it. The risen Lord sent his church to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19), and "All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing" (Colossians 1:6). John saw where it ends:

After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 7:9

That multitude is one. "There is one body and one Spirit" (Ephesians 4:4), and Jew and Greek, slave and free, "are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The universal church includes not only believers on earth today but all the saints who have gone before.

What the church has said

The earliest surviving text to call the church catholic is a letter of Ignatius of Antioch, c. 110, who wrote that wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8. In the mid-fourth century Cyril of Jerusalem explained that the church is called catholic because it is spread through the whole world, teaches completely every doctrine people need to know, brings every kind of person to godliness, and heals every kind of sin Cyril, Catechetical Lectures 18. Vincent of Lérins taught that we must hold the faith "which has been believed everywhere, always, by all" Vincent, Commonitory.

The Nicene Creed confesses "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" Nicene Creed. The Belgic Confession expands the thought:

Furthermore, this holy Church is not confined, bound, or limited to a certain place or to certain persons, but is spread and dispersed over the whole world; and yet is joined and united with heart and will, by the power of faith, in one and the same spirit.

Belgic Confession, art. 27

Where the traditions differ

All the traditions confess the catholic church in the same creeds, but they locate its fullness differently. The Catholic Church bears ‘catholic’ as its name and teaches that it is catholic because Christ is fully present in it and because it is sent to the whole human race, a catholicity it sees fully realised in communion with the bishop of Rome Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Orthodox churches understand the catholic church to be wholly present in each local church gathered around its bishop in the right faith and the Eucharist.

Protestant churches do not identify the universal church with any one communion; they confess it as the one church of all true believers. The Reformers did not see themselves as founding a new church but as reforming the catholic church by Scripture. Luther rendered the word in his German Creed as the ‘Christian’ church Luther, Small Catechism, and many Lutheran churches still confess it so. For the meaning of the church itself, see the lesson What the church is; for the history of its divisions, Why are there so many churches and denominations?