Faith In Christ's Church

The idea of having faith in Christ’s church sounds catholic because it is. Most people and theologians think of it as being Roman Catholic rather than Protestant. When the Protestant Reformation began in Germany with Luther and in Switzerland with Calvin a lot of Protestants saw the Reformation as a complete break from the Roman Catholic Church, as a kind of starting over. But that is not the way that either Luther or Calvin saw it. Neither Luther nor Calvin understood themselves to be creating a separate church or denomination. Rather, they thought that they were reforming or correcting The Church, not starting a different organization.

They understood themselves as catholic in the generic sense, but they also thought and hoped that their efforts would contribute toward the reform or correction of what people today call the Roman Catholic Church, the Church Universal. I’m going to make the case for the Catholic side of that division, but also the case that the catholic position does not belong exclusively to the Roman Catholic Church, but is actually the common possession of them all, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches.

This idea builds on last week’s sermon about the church as an organism versus the church as an organization. Both Luther and Calvin argued that the church is a living organism, not simply a social organization. However, the generic Protestant position has become the idea that the church is a social organization; the idea of the church as a living organism has fallen into Protestant neglect. …