Thomas O’Loughlin
All Articles by Thomas O’Loughlin
Professor of Historical Theology, University of Nottingham, UK
The origins of an ecumenical church: links, borrowings, and inter-dependencies
The creed’s confession that we believe in ‘one holy catholic church’ should not simply be understood as a doctrinal datum, but as an understanding of the Spirit’s work based in the experience of the early churches. The churches did not exist as discrete groups with merely a common religious profession, but as nodes within a network. This network was established and maintained by constant contact and by those who saw it as part of their service/vocation to travel between the churches—and these human and physical links account for how the Christian Church as a whole developed; its common heritage in the writings it produced which became, in time, the canonical collection; and its awareness that, despite difficulties, such links were essential to its identity. This culture of links, of sharing and borrowing, could form a model for a practical way forward today towards a renewed sense of our oneness in the Christ.
Around 150 CE we get the first explicit mention of the one Church—encompassing all the communities of Christians—as itself an intrinsic element of the Christian faith. The statement comes from the Epistula apostolorum and takes this creedal form:
Then when we had no food except five loaves and two fish, he commanded the men to recline. And their number was found to be five thousand besides women and children, and to these we brought pieces of bread. And they were satisfied and there was some left over, and we removed twelve baskets full of pieces. If we ask and say, ‘what do these five loaves mean?’, they are an image of our faith as true Christians; that is, in the Father, ruler of the world, and in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit, and in the holy church, and in the forgiveness of sins. (5,17–21).1
This text, the Epistula, presents historians with a wonderful array of problems such as how it relates to those texts, the gospels, which were at that time shifting in their status from being the standard and, possibly somehow authoritative, texts in use in the churches towards becoming the canonical texts of those groups by
I rely on Francis Watson, An Apostolic Gospel: The Epistula Apostolorum in Literary Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) for the dating and the translation of the Epistula. I am indebted to Prof. Watson for making available to me his work, ahead of publication, so that I could cite it here.