The Apostles' Creed: Its Relation to Primitive Christianity.

By

Swete, Henry Barclay:

3d ed. Cambridge : University press, 1899,

VII

There is another group of controverted points in the Apostles’ Creed which remains to be examined. It belongs to the third paragraph of the Creed, and the three points it includes relate to the character and the privileges of the Church.
Credo…sanctam ecclesiam. So the Old Roman Creed was content to confess. “Holy Church,” if not a New Testament phrase, is certainly in harmony with New Testament teaching (1 Pet. 2:9, 1 Cor. 3:17), and it appears in the earliest literature of the second century1. At Rome it must have been familiar before the middle of the second century; in Hermas the Church, an imposing figure in the imagery of the Shepherd, is thrice entitled ἡ ἁγία (uis. i. 1. 6, 3. 4; iv. 1. 3). Tertullian (adv. Marc, v. 4) quotes Marcion’s text of Gal. 4:27 in the form “quae est mater nostra in quam repromisimus sanctam ecclesiam2.” The words seem to bear witness that in Marcion’s time the catechumens already confessed their belief in the Holy Church. We may therefore be fairly certain that sanctam ecclesiam stood in the Roman Creed during Marcion’s residence at Rome1.
On the other hand, ‘catholic’ as a symbolical term is neither Roman nor Western. Outside the Creed it is of frequent use in Christian Latinity from the end of the second century. Tertullian not only employs catholicus freely, but combines it with ecclesia (adv. Marc. iv. 4), and the translator of the Muratorian fragment has it in the same connexion. Nevertheless sanctam ecclesiam catholicam does not appear in a Western Creed before the latter part of the fifth century, and probably never made its way into the true Creed of the Roman Church; when adopted in Gaul, it was doubtless an importation from the East, where its use was at this time all but universal2. The indifference which Rome manifested to so ancient and widespread a term may possibly have been due to the comparative independence of the great mother Church of the West. She did not feel herself in need of the support which the scattered Churches of the East derived from the thought of the solidarity of the Christian brotherhood. It may be suspected that Rome was never in hearty sympathy with the idea of the Church’s catholicity; when she borrowed the word, it was narrowed in her use of it into a sense alien to that which it had borne on the lips of the first teachers of the Faith.
‘Catholic’ is not a word of Biblical origin; καθολικός appears neither in the LXX. nor in the text of the New Testament1; its Latin representative finds no place in the Vulgate, or, apparently, in the older Latin versions. Yet the word lay ready for use in the pages of the later Greek writers, and had been adopted by Philo2. As applied to the Church, it meets us for the first time in the letters of Ignatius, who writes to the Smyrnaeans (c. 8), “Wheresoever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” It is singular that its next appearance is in the circular letter of the Church of Smyrna, addressed on occasion of the martyrdom of Polycarp “to all the congregations (παροικίαις of the holy and catholic Church in every place3.” The phrase is thus a true product of the sub-apostolic age; and if it gained admission into the Western Creed at a relatively late date, it can claim to have been known to the Churches of Asia Minor before the Roman Creed had taken its earliest form.
Professor Harnack, however, contends that the words “Catholic Church,” as used in the fifth century, had drifted away from their original meaning. “Originally it meant nothing more than the ‘universal’ Church, the whole Christian community called of God on earth. The idea of applying it to the concrete, visible Church was not yet thought of…But after the end of the second and the beginning of the third century, the word ‘Catholic’ took a second meaning, which gradually came to be regarded in the West as of equal authority with the first. It described the visible, orthodox Churches which, under definite organisation, had grouped themselves round the Apostolic foundations, and especially round Rome, as distinguished from the heretical communities.”
There are three points in this statement which need separate examination. In the first place we are told that the Catholic Church, as conceived by writers of the second century, was not a ‘concrete, visible’ body. It was, we must suppose, an invisible abstraction, realised by a mental process, but possessing as yet no tangible form. This is true of the Church in the same sense as it is true of every world-wide society which cannot be presented to the eye in its completeness; but it is no less true of the later Catholic Church than of its earliest beginnings. On the other hand the units which compose the Catholic Church were as concrete and visible in the days of Ignatius as in those of Cyprian. When Ignatius argues that the Bishop is the centre of the particular Church, as Jesus Christ is of the whole Society, he certainly means by the Catholic Church the aggregate of all the Christian congregations, which were visible and concrete bodies. It is difficult to discover any essential difference between this conception and that which prevailed after the second century. “The Church is called ‘Catholic’,” writes Cyril of Jerusalem, “because she extends through the whole world, from one end of the earth to the other1.” The earliest expositions of catholicam after its introduction into the Western Creed are entirely in harmony with this view. “What,” asks a Gallican writer, “is the Catholic Church, but the people who have been dedicated to God throughout the world? As different members make up the completeness of the human body, so a variety of races and nations, agreeing in one faith, form the one body of Christ1.” The Catholic Church as conceived by the teachers of the fourth and fifth centuries was neither more nor less concrete than the Church of the Ignatian age.
Harnack is on still more doubtful ground if he means to suggest that in the West the word ‘Catholic’ gradually became the symbol of the organisation which grouped the Churches round the See of Rome, and ended in their subjection to the Papal supremacy. That the Churches of the West even in the second century had begun to look up to Rome with the reverence which was thought to be due to the foundation of St Peter and St Paul is familiar to every one who has read Irenaeus and Tertullian; “ad hanc enim ecclesiam propter potentiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem convenire ecclesiam2,” expresses the feeling of the Church of South Gaul about a.d. 180, whilst from Carthage at the end of the century there comes an equally clear note: “percurre ecclesias apostolicas…si…Italiae adiaces, habes Romam, unde nobis quoque auctoritas praesto est3.” That this tendency existed is matter of fact; that it affected the sense of the word ‘catholic,’ or influenced its introduction into the Creed, has not been proved. Evidence is wanting to shew that Irenaeus and Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, understood the Catholic Church to mean the aggregate of the Churches which recognised the supremacy of Rome. The phrase came from the East, where the influence of the Roman Bishops was less directly felt than in Africa and Gaul; it was used by Western writers to comprehend the whole Christian brotherhood throughout the world; the earliest expositors of the Apostles’ Creed manifest no desire to employ it as a vehicle for enforcing Roman claims. Under these circumstances it is unreasonable to prejudice the phrase by reading into it a tendency which it does not appear to have reflected until a much later age1.
One point remains in Harnack’s indictment. He reminds us that the word ‘catholic’ became after the second century a synonym for ‘orthodox,’ and that the Catholic Church was limited to those Christian societies which were regarded as retaining the Apostles’ faith. Here the Berlin Professor is on solid ground. The growth of heresy and the gradual separation of heretical minorities from the great body of the faithful, led to a secondary application of the word ‘catholic.’ Catholics were contrasted with heretics, the Catholic Church with the sects which had parted from it. Perhaps the earliest genuine example of this change is to be found in the Muratorian fragment, which excludes from the canon certain heretical apocrypha “quae in catholicam ecclesiam recipi non potest.” As we proceed, the secondary sense becomes frequent. The letter of Pope Cornelius († 252), which has been preserved by Eusebius (H. E. vi. 43), complains that his rival Novatian was ignorant that ‘a Catholic Church could have but one ‘Bishop.’ ‘Who are you?’ the martyr Pionius was asked by the examining magistrate. ‘A Christian.’ ‘Of what Church?’ ‘Of the Church Catholic1.’ “When you are abroad in foreign cities,” Cyril charges his catechumens, “do not enquire simply for the Church, for the heretical sects venture to call their dens by that name; but ask for the Catholic Church2.” St Pacian, when the Novatianists asked why he called himself a Catholic and was not content to be known as a Christian, replied “ ‘Christian’ is my name, ‘Catholic’ my surname; the latter distinguishes me from others who bear the same name, but are not of the same family3.” This limitation of the magnificent phrase of Ignatius was doubtless deplorable, but it was necessary. Everywhere in the third century there were Christians and Christians; the Churches which held to the Apostolic tradition were parted by an impassable gulf from the disciples of Valentinus and Basilides; yet the latter recognised the Gospels, and passed as members of Christ. But ‘Catholics’ they could not be called, for heresy was essentially partial and local, and limited to the few1. Nothing was more natural than that the name which did not fit heretics should become the distinctive property of the majority, and thus the mark of orthodoxy which attached itself to tenets, societies, individuals, and even buildings which were used in the worship of the Apostolic Church.
It may readily be admitted that this secondary meaning was present to the thoughts of the generation which defined the Holy Church of the Western Creed to be ‘catholic.’ Catholicam, as understood in the fifth century, was exclusive as well as comprehensive; it embraced all Christian communities which held fast by the Apostolic doctrine and discipline, but shut the door against those who rejected either. Neither the Arian nor the Donatist could claim to belong to a Church which was defined as Catholic. Possibly it was the exclusiveness of the term quite as much as its comprehensiveness which commended it to the post-Augustinian Church. “Know,” writes Nicetas, “that this one Catholic Church is planted in all the world, and be sure that you adhere stedfastly to her communion. There are, it is true, other Churches falsely so called, but you have nothing in common with them; heretical or schismatical bodies have ceased to be ‘holy’ Churches, for their faith and practice differ from that which Christ commanded and His Apostles delivered1.”
Harnack congratulates himself that the Protestant Churches of Germany replaced ‘Catholic’ by ‘Christian,’ in their version of the Apostles’s Creed. “The Church of the Reformation could not,” he says, “consent to retain an epithet” which had received an interpretation foreign to her conceptions. As a matter of fact, one great ‘Church of the Reformation’ retains it to this day. Our English Reformers ridiculed the absurdity of identifying the Catholic Church with a single branch of the Church2. But their resistance to the Roman claims did not suggest to them the expediency of abandoning the term which had been thus abused. It remains in the English Prayer-Book as a witness to the continuity of the Reformed Church in England with the Church of the early centuries. In the midst of the thousand divisions of Christendom it points to the organic unity of the true Body of Christ. Among the cries which proclaim the advent of an ‘undenominational’ and ‘unsectarian’ Christianity it witnesses to the preciousness of a definite faith.

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