The Second Attribute in the Nicene Creed: Holiness

While the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) and perhaps the Eastern Orthodox Church (EOC) have some claim to an outward unity that the Reformed do not have, they certainly have nothing of the sort when it comes to holiness. The Roman Catholic Church may be externally the Roman Catholic church, but it’s not externally the holy catholic church. This fact raises the question: “If the Roman and Orthodox churches need to look to an objective gift of holiness rather than focus on a visible holiness, does not this bolster the Reformed case that this is true for unity too?

Michael Horton makes an interesting big-picture comparative observation:

In both Roman Catholic and free-church ecclesiologies . . . . the church’s visible holiness is inherent, although for the former it flows from the one to the many and for the latter from the many to the one . . . . In both paradigms . . . , the means of grace employed . . . are oriented first of all toward an infused, inherent, and inward holiness . . . . Covenant theology has taken a different route than either of these paradigms. Regardless of the personal holiness of its members, the church . . . is holy because it is the field of divine activity, in which the wheat is growing up into the likeness of its firstfruits, even though weeds are sown among the wheat.[1]

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