I Believe In The “holy Catholic Church” Or “holy Christian Church”?

The great Lutheran blogger Anthony Sacramone–remember Luther at the Movies?–goes from posting whole handfuls of entries a day at Strange Herring to going months without posting a thing (and now to keeping the public from reading it, for some reason). But he sometimes puts something up at the First Things site. He has a characteristically humorous, provocative, and instructive post there now: What’s in a Name? Plenty. » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

After riffing on how Campus Crusade has changed its name to “Cru,” he complains about how his fellow Lutherans in the Missouri Synod and other confessional churches translate the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds as “I believe in the Holy Christian Church,” instead of the more direct rendition of the Latin, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church” like everybody else does (only sometimes with an asterix).

He does cite the fact that this comes from the German translation that predates even the Reformation, but he makes the case that today in English we should show that we are “catholic” in the sense that we claim to be by using “catholic” like the rest of the universal church. He points out that all kinds of sects and heretics claim to be “Christian.” We need to affirm that we part of the historical universal Body of Christ, which is what “catholic” does.

In the course of the discussion, he gives some interesting biographical tidbits about his own spiritual pilgrimage that I have always wondered about. But doesn’t he have a good point? In the Athanasian Creed, which I’d be glad to confess every week, we do use “catholic.” It’s a good word, like “evangelical,” and we shouldn’t cede it just to the Church of Rome. Or are there reasons to change it?