From within seventy years of Jesus’ death early documents show that his followers were keen to call themselves catholic. According to the Vatican in 2021 1.3 billion people called themselves Roman Catholic. There is a significant difference between what the work originally meant and what it means today. There is good news in rediscovering its original meaning.
The word katholikos in Greek means “according to all”. It is often translated universal. In fact, one of the first uses of catholic in a Christian context was to ridicule Christians.
Catholic as an Insult
The word was used by a group of people in the early second century that came to be called the Gnostics. The Gnostics thought that it was ridiculous to believe that God was universally accessible. They believed that only special religious people could have a close relationship with God. Only those in the know—that’s where the term Gnostic came from: gnosis means knowledge in Greek—could have a close relationship with God.
Jesus, whom they believed wasn’t fully God, was one of those special people in the know and there were other gurus after him that were also in the know. But the idea that everyone could have a close relationship with God was preposterous to the Gnostics. They called non-Gnostic Christians “Catholics” for teaching that God was universally accessible.[1]
Christology Means Catholicity
The early catholic Christians taught that anyone could know God in Christ. The early church leader Ignatius of Antioch said: “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” The church is universally accessible because Jesus is truly God and truly human. Because Jesus is truly God, when we know Jesus we know God. Because Jesus is truly human any other human can know Jesus and therefore know God.
No matter how sinful we are, no matter what race we are, whether we are Jew or pagan, anyone can have a relationship with God. Jesus’ last words to the thief on the cross are a good example of this. This criminal has done nothing to deserve God’s forgiveness. But he says to Jesus, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:39–43). A relationship with God and eternal life is open to anyone who puts their trust in Jesus.
Is the Roman Catholic Church Catholic?
When we understand what the word catholic actually means, it also helps us to identify wrong teaching. For example, the Roman Catholic Church teaches today that special people, like Mary, the saints priests, nuns bishops and the Pope are especially holy and have special access to God. They also teach that people can approach God through these special holy people. That’s the opposite of what the earliest Christians thought being catholic was all about! God is universally accessible only through Jesus.
Over time the word catholic has come to take on different meanings. One of the main ways the word catholic is used today is to mean orthodox or official. The Catholic Church is the true church and all others are false churches. That’s what the Roman Catholic church teaches today: that their church is the authentic church and that because Protestant churches “have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery are not churches in the proper sense”, but merely “ecclesial communities”. They are not Orthodox or Catholic by their definition of the word.
By contrast, we confess that the Roman Catholic Church is neither catholic in the sense of universally accessible, not in the sense of being the true, official church.
[1] Ignatius Smyrn 8.2, see Ireneus adv. Haer 3.15.2 vol 2 p. 79ff cited in T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 253.