Reformed Dogmatics<\/em><\/a>, 608). He is \u201crich unto all that call upon him,\u201d whether Jew or gentile. Christ is the \u201cLord, rich with salvation for all the nations of the earth.\u201d He is not merely the universal Lord of humanity, but Lord of all: \u201cso catholic, so all-comprehensively universal is our Lord Jesus Christ, that \u2018it pleased the Father that in him should all the fullness dwell.\u2019\u201d Because Christ is catholic, so is the church: \u201cThat catholic Christ is the head of the church, and in Him the church is truly universal\u201d (608).<\/p>\nHoeksema draws out the Pauline parallel of Adam and Christ by using a horticultural analogy: \u201cWe may compare the race in Adam to a tree, with Adam as its root, and its descendants developing into families, tribes, and nations as the trunk and branches. When Adam falls through his wilfull disobedience and becomes subject to the wrath of God and death, the whole tree of the human race became corrupt in its root; and from the root corruption and death entered into all its branches, so that it can no longer bring forth any good fruit. But this tree of the human race receives a new root; and the root is Christ. Grafted on that new, the tree is saved, transformed into a far more glorious tree than the original or than the original could have ever become in Adam.\u201d Hoeksema is not a universalist; far from it: the universality of salvation is strictly limited by election. While \u201cthe tree is saved,\u201d yet \u201cmany of the branches are cut off.\u201d Still, the church isn\u2019t \u201ca gathering of a few or of many individual human beings, while the race is lost; but it is the saved human race, redeemed, delivered, sanctified, and glorified, holy unto God, as God conceived of that race before the world was.\u201d The catholic Christ as the head of a redeemed human race: \u201cThat is the fundamental idea of the true catholicity of the church\u201d (607-8).<\/p>\n
This catholicity is a new covenant reality, though throughout the old covenant \u201cthe truth that she will be gathered from the whole human race is never completely hid\u201d (609). But the promise of a catholic church is fulfilled in the new covenant, when the earthly temple is rebuilt in the resurrection of Jesus, when the Jerusalem above becomes the mother of all, when \u201cMount Zion is no longer a local hill in the land of Canaan, or is the throne of David a mere symbol of national glory and sovereignty,\u201d since \u201cboth have been realized and universalized in our exalted Lord\u201d (610). Pentecost is not the birth of the church, which has existed from the beginning, but with the coming of the Spirit \u201cthe church breaks through the limits of her national boundaries to become strictly catholic,\u201d with a catholic Lord and a catholic gospel and a catholic faith (611).<\/p>\n
Hoeksema knows that the church often fails to be catholic: \u201cOften the church is tempted to deny her catholicity when the world would press her into the service of national interests. But essentially the church is catholic, and she looks forward to a universal hope, the kingdom of heaven in the new creation\u201d (611).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christ is strictly catholic,\u201d writes Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Dogmatics, 608). He is \u201crich unto all that call upon him,\u201d whether Jew or gentile. Christ is the \u201cLord, rich with salvation for all the nations of the earth.\u201d He is not merely the universal Lord of humanity, but Lord of all: \u201cso catholic, so all-comprehensively universal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,659],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholicity","category-ecclesiology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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