I<\/span>n an 1851 essay on \u201cCatholicism\u201d published in the Mercersburg Review<\/em>, John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is \u201ccatholic\u201d or \u201cuniversal.\u201d He distinguished two ways of understanding the church\u2019s universality\u2014as \u201call\u201d or as \u201cwhole.\u201d If the church is catholic as \u201call,\u201d then it is an agglomeration of congregations that are prior to the church itself. This is an \u201cabstract\u201d understanding of catholicity, since the universality in view refers to a totality that \u201cexists only in the mind\u201d (3).<\/p>\n If the church is catholic as \u201cwhole,\u201d the universality is not abstract, but real, and prior to the existence of individual instances. If the \u201call\u201d is a mechanistic picture of catholicity, \u201cwhole\u201d is an \u201corganic\u201d one (3).<\/p>\n Idealist that he is, Nevin prefers the \u201cwhole\u201d version of catholicity to the \u201call.\u201d Then things get really interesting, since Nevin argues that catholicity is wrongly understood, truncated, if it is understood only \u201cextensively\u201d or geographically, and not also intensively<\/em>. Catholicity is inherent in the gospel of the incarnate Christ, because the incarnate Christ claims everywhere and every thing, every realm of life. No area of the map is off-limits to Jesus and the church. But by the same token and for the same reason, no area of human life is off-limits to Jesus and to the energizing spiritual presence of the church.<\/p>\n Nevin writes, \u201cIt is full as needful for the complete and final triumph of the gospel among men, that it should subdue the arts, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, etc., to its sceptre, and fill them with its spirit as that it should conquer in similar style the tribes of Africa or the islands of the South Sea. Every region of science, as it belongs to man\u2019s nature, belongs also to the empire of Christ ; and this can never be complete, as long as any such region may remain unoccupied by its power. . . . We might as soon dream of a like exclusion towards the empire of China; for it is hard to see surely how the idea of humanity would suffer a more serious truncation by this, than by being doomed to fall short of its own proper actualization the other way\u201d (12-13). Appealing to the parable of leaven, he argues that all culture is to be permeated by the gospel\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n The rhetoric is nineteenth-century American triumphal, but the logic of the argument is impeccable. The church\u2019s mission cannot stop at any geographic boundary. How can we stop at the equally artificial boundaries of culture?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an 1851 essay on \u201cCatholicism\u201d published in the Mercersburg Review, John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is \u201ccatholic\u201d or \u201cuniversal.\u201d He distinguished two ways of understanding the church\u2019s universality\u2014as \u201call\u201d or as \u201cwhole.\u201d If the church is catholic as \u201call,\u201d then it is an agglomeration of congregations that are prior to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,1149],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholicity","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n