A small part of the bigger thing. . .

When the bishops met in Nicea to confront Arius and other false expressions of God, there were some there who had the idea that God was this ousias or substance of which a part could be found in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.  God, however, we the stuff from which it all came and those who had a little bit of it were not the same as God.  It was a philosophical solution to a theological question and the Church said that this was not the catholic faith, not the faith of the apostles, and, most importantly, not the faith of the Scriptures.  The Nicene Creed was then an attempt to summarize what was catholic and apostolic and Scriptural in expressing who God is and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as this God.  I would highly recommend John Behr's The Way to Nicea as a solid introduction to what was being confessed by the orthodox and by the false teachers in the prelude to Nicea's answer.

I wonder if it is not the same when we speak about the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.  There are those who would see this as something above and different from the individual parts, much in the same way God was something from which little bit flowed out into the three persons of the Trinity but God remained wholly other.  Some people are all hot and bothered about whether or not they are part of that one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church -- as if it were not a reality in itself but showed up in bits and pieces.  Even those on the conservative end of the spectrum speak this way and certainly the liberal liturgicals.  Are we a part of the catholic Church?

Rome has its own answer which I will not elaborate upon here.  Suffice it to say that key to their answer is being under the authority of the Pope.  The East has its own problems with that, of course, just as we Lutherans do.  But the false part of it all is the idea that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is divided up into little parts here and there and little bits and pieces of the catholic faith are present here and there and everywhere.  That is not how the early Christians understood it and it is not how we should understand it either.  The Church was either catholic or it wasn't (and therefore heretical).  You did not have little bits and pieces of the catholic Church here or there -- not in the early understanding of geographic understandings nor in the modern idea of different communions or jurisdictions (Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, etc.).  The creed from Nicea functioned to point where that one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church was and where it was not.  It did not point to part of it but the wholeness of it.  You cannot have the catholic faith in bits and pieces.  It either is or is not catholic.  It is not present in parts or bits and pieces but the whole is present in its wholeness or not at all.

Being catholic is not being a part of something bigger but that which is the bigger is present in this particular place.  You cannot be catholic but ordain women or be catholic but promote same sex marriage or be catholic but not profess the Real Presence.  All of these are connected.  You cannot be catholic on some things but not on others.  The catholic faith does not live in parts or pieces but the whole lives in the wholeness.  I wish we would stop wondering if we were in or part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and were intentional about confessing the whole of this faith without reservation or hesitation.  How odd it is to wish to be a part of something whole but at the same time to disagree with some of what lives in that wholeness?  It is like being Trinitarian but not confessing the Son or the Spirit as fully God.  If you do that you are not Trinitarian.  Plain and simple.  So you cannot be catholic or as some wish to say part of the catholic Church but hold to different opinion about Scripture or the ordination of women or legitimize same sex desire or the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or baptismal regeneration.  As soon as you put a question mark where God has put a period, you are automatically not catholic.  Period.  Rome, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, etc., do not each have a part of the catholic faith nor are they parts of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.  You either are that or not.  That is what the Lutheran Reformation was really about.  The Lutherans insisted that by expressing an authority above the Scriptures and confessing doctrines about which Scripture knows nothing, Rome had ceased to be catholic and they intended to actually be catholic in doctrine and in practice.