On The Terms Catholic & Protestant

"Where is the word Catholic found in the Bible?" This apparent critique is a favorite of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians who seek to discredit the Catholic Church as a later development in Christian history. Many non-Catholic Christians believe they are part of a pure Bible church stripped of all the so-called man-made traditions added by the Catholic Church. What they do not realize, however, is that many Protestant views of the world find their source in the nominalism that preceded the Reformation. Nominalists denied the existence of universals, and were the opposing school of the realists (Thomas Aquinas being foremost among the realists, although Nominalism developed after his death). The rhetorical question found above is nominalism stripped of its intellectualism.

What is not fully apparent to these individuals is that Christ established a Church in objective reality. While names are important and should signify the ultimate reality they are attached to, they can never capture that reality completely. This is why Jesus was given many names in the New Testament. But sometimes names do not signify their underlying realities. For instance, naming a particular church the Church of Christ does not make it so. And calling someone a bishop in a fly-by-night church does not make that person a bishop. The office of bishop has a universal reality outside of its name. (In the city in which I live there are dozens of individuals who think they are bishops simply because of the title).

The Church established by Christ was built on the foundation of the Apostles, is marked with holiness, has a mandate to be universal in scope, is fundamentally one, and has both visible and invisible aspects. It is this Church that is now called the Catholic Church (catholic means universal). The name matters much less than the objective reality.

I have a different set of observations about the term Protestant. I see a couple of problems using this term to describe non-Catholic Christians. Firstly, how effective is it for a body to define itself by what it is not (i.e. not Catholic)? That is something for its opponents to do. Being against something is only a means to the end of being for something. Secondly, it is disingenuous to group together under the the umbrella of Protestantism the thousands of non-Catholic Christian sects that have populated history in both space and time. What does the 16th century Lutheran church have to do with 19th century fundamentalism? Very little I would answer. In fact, the 16th century Lutheran church was much closer to Catholicism than it is to 95% of the sects that have come into existence since the Reformation. Another important point is that the early reformers (i.e. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) never intended to set in motion a continuously dividing and subdividing Protestant world. They thought (wrongly) that they were each restoring the true Church founded by Christ. This is why the early reformers had contentious relationships and often called the teachings of their opponents heresies.