One, holy, catholic, apostolic

One

The Scriptures never speak of the Church in the plural except for her local assemblies. The Lord says upon this rock I will build my church (Matt. 16:18), one church, not many; the Apostle confesses one body, and one Spirit... one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Eph. 4:4 to 6); and because the one bread is one, we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread (1 Cor. 10:17). One flock, one shepherd (John 10:16); one bride; one house of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Where the New Testament says churches, in the plural, it means the local churches of the one Church (Acts 15:41; Rev. 1:4), as many hearths of a single fire.

Holy

The Church is holy because her Head is holy and because He made her so: Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it... that it should be holy and without blemish (Eph. 5:25 to 27). Her people are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation (1 Pet. 2:9); her Mysteries sanctify; her martyrs and saints are her fruit in every age. The presence of sinners and hypocrites within her does not unmake this mark, any more than tares unmake the field: the Lord Himself taught that wheat and tares grow together until the harvest (Matt. 13:24 to 30). Sin in her members is a wound she heals by repentance; the mark of holiness belongs to her nature, her Head, and her end.

Catholic

Catholic, καθ᾽ ὅλου, means according to the whole: the whole faith, kept whole, for the whole world. She is sent to teach all nations (Matt. 28:19) and is led by the Spirit of truth into all truth (John 16:13); she holds the faith entire, not a selection of it, and holds it everywhere the same. The word appears within living memory of the Apostles:

Apostolic

The Church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone (Eph. 2:20), and her first portrait is a congregation that continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship (Acts 2:42). Apostolic means two things held together: the apostles’ teaching, kept without addition or subtraction (Jude 3; 2 Thess. 2:15), and the apostles’ ministry, handed on in an unbroken succession of bishops. Neither suffices alone. A succession that alters the teaching has kept the chain and lost the treasure; a teaching without the Church’s ministry and Mysteries is a book without a body.

Which, then, is the one Church?

This library confesses, with the saints it documents, that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of the Creed is the Orthodox Church: the same visible body, in unbroken continuity of faith and Mysteries, that received the Creed and kept it unaltered. That confession is not a boast of merit, and it passes no sentence on any person; the histories on this site show Orthodox hierarchs failing and Orthodox zealots sinning. It is a statement about where the marks are found together: the one faith once delivered, kept whole, taught everywhere the same, on the apostles’ foundation.

For the same reason, this library resists the modern theory that the one Church is presently divided into many bodies to be reunited by mutual recognition and doctrinal minimum. A Church that could be divided in her faith would have lost the first mark; the Creed does not confess a federation. The taxonomy of that dispute, with the councils and the confessions on each side, is set out on the Heresies and Confessions page, with every contested point labelled.

The marks and the wall

The four marks are why communion carries the weight it does. Because the Church is one, communion is never a private act: the one bread makes the many one body, and the cup joins the communicant to everything the altar confesses. Because her mark is the one faith, communion is confession, and can never be allowed to seal a false one. That is the whole logic of heavenly communion and of the wall that guards it: the faithful who cease commemorating a hierarch openly preaching condemned heresy are not leaving the one Church; they are refusing to let her first mark be traded away in their own mouths.