"The Church is the body of Christ, His bride, the world to come, and the temple of God. The members of His body are all the saints. However, not all of the saints who will please God have yet appeared, nor yet is the whole body of Christ thus complete, nor the world to come yet filled. I say this about God's Church. There are, though, many unbelievers in the world today who will believe in Christ; many sinners and debauched who will repent and change their lives; many undecided who will be persuaded. There are many, a great many, up to the sound of the last trumpet, who will prove well-pleasing to God and who have not yet been born. All those who are foreknown by God must be born, come into being, before the world beyond our world, the world of the Church, of the first-born, of the heavenly Jerusalem, is filled up. Then shall the end come and the fullness of the body of Christ be complete." +Symeon the New Theologian, On the Mystical Life
Awesome! I like this saint :-)
Unless I am mistaken, it literally means "down + whole", and yet it is translated to mean "universal". Has this word changed over time in such a way as to have obscured its original meaning?
Could the Greek word "catholic" have originally meant "the whole faith handed down" or "the whole faith written down", reflecting what Jude says: "a faith once delivered to the saints", not handed out a little at a time, but the whole thing down on papyrus right there in front of them.
Thus it is not until the final book of the NT scriptures [John's Book of Revelation] has been passed down to the church that Ignatius coins the word "catholic" as regards the church. Before this the church did not have the whole apostolic testament, but Ignatius now recognizes that the church now has the "whole" testament of the faith handed "down" to it.