By Dr. Motunrayo J Adetola
Some have asked what the difference is between Roman Catholics and the other Christians who claim to be Catholic but aren’t members of the Roman Catholic Church but recite the same Ancient Nicene Creed composed by the Church in 325AD (1700 years ago).
The phrase ” I believe in One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church..” confuses many adherents of the traditional denominations such as Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist.
It’s actually sad that most independent Pentecostal denominations do not use this creed or any of the other creedal formulas of the ancient church. Let’s explore this.
The Common Term, Catholic Faith derives from the belief in one God who exists as a Trinity, (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Catholic (synonym Universal) emphasizes the virgin incarnation, virgin birth and Second return of Christ,
His second return, the unity of the One Universal (Catholic) Church with Christ as head and all these are captured and well summarized in the Nicene creed formulated in 325AD at Nicaea and completed at the Council at Chalcedon in 451 AD
Please have a look at the Nicene Creed today (see attached image). It remains an excellent summation of the Christian faith before the Roman Catholic Church began adding such teachings like Marian veneration, Baptismal regeneration, creation of a special order of “saints”, Purgatory etc…are mostly later developments.
To the question, what constituted the Catholic Church? When we look in the Bible, the Church was in someone’s house Acts 2:46 or named after cities (Antioch, Ephesus, Colosse etc).
In time, leadership structures emerged and the senior teaching pastors were elected to become Bishops. Apostle Peter was first Bishop in Antioch before he got to Rome.
The evolution of the churches was such that the churches in the cities or big towns were considered more important than those in smaller town and so, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople had the 5 big Bishops also called the Metropolitans and smaller areas had Suffragan Bishops aka junior Bishops.
You will observe I listed 5 cities in antiquity. Rome was in the Western axis of the Roman empire and was the chief city of the empire until Constantine unified the Western and Eastern axis and then moved to the East where he built a brand new capital named after himself, Constantinople.
The remaining 4 cities are located in the East. The Bishops of the remaining 4 cities were NOT under the Bishop of Rome (Pope).
The Nicene conference apart from clarifying the divinity of Christ, composed the Nicene creed, set the date of Easter but also delineated the geographical boundaries of each Metropolitan (Bishop) so that Bishops do not arbitrarily cross into the jurisdictional areas of others.
Patriarch Tawadros II, The currrent Metropolitan (Bishop) of Alexandria to this day also uses the title Pope and he is the 118th, tracing his succession to St Mark (the same one who authored the gospel and companion of Apostles Paul and Peter) who was the first Bishop of Alexandria as early as 45AD, about a dozen years after the resurrection of our Lord.
The title Pope simply means Papa or Father and the Eastern equivalent is Patriarch which the Bishops in the East…Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, Greeks, Russia, Ukrainians etc deploy till today.
To wrap up, the Roman Catholic Church (aka Western Church) is merely a Branch of the original Catholic church which includes the Churches led by the Metropolitan AND Suffragan Bishops in the East. To be certain, every denomination which subscribe to the teachings of Scripture as summarized in the Nicene creed is Catholic.
The whole idea of the 16th century Reformation stemmed from the fact that the Western Church (RCC) has deviated significantly from its earlier moorings by bringing in strange doctrines, added layers of authority such as Tradition and Magisterial rulings that are strange and that they consider on same level to scripture.
These they have used to bring strange and additional doctrines to the ones for instance that the early Church (Catholic) clearly defined.
The denomination that had William Tyndale executed by strangulation and then burned at the stake after being “convicted of the heresy” of translating the Bible to a language that common folks can read and understand. The same Roman church had John Wycliffe body exhumed and then burnt 3 decades after his burial after they had declared him a heretic for translating the Bible into English! They preferred the Bible to remain in Latin, a language that most people could not read, write or speak.
We cannot gloss over history. There are deep theological issues which the Reformation brought to the fore but the Roman Church through their countereformation continue to double down on.
The reformers of the 16th century in Luther, Zwingli, Calvin fought sometimes with their lives to bring back what clearminded earlier Christians such as Augustine of Hippo had written and taught much about.
