of the church at the time; but as such, it was not an eternal truth about the church; nor even necessarily an authentic truth. If you take the creed as pointing to essentially spiritual truths, then the church's catholicity is a spiritual matter (ie, a universal body of believers united in Christ), which may or may not be reflected in its physical structure (ie, a given hierarchy instituted by Christ). You could hold to some mistaken notions of the church's physical structure, yet still get the spiritual structure right. You might even hold to those mistaken notions precisely because your accurate understanding of the spiritual truths combined with your intuitions to suggest a certain structure. So it doesn't seem problematic to me for 21st century Protestants to recite the Nicene Creed and take "Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" to refer to a spiritual unity and authenticity, rather than to some culturally-bound, historical fact about how the church's structure once was, but cannot be now. In fact, that seems to be the right and appropriate way to understand the creed. The other way around is ass-backwards and nonsensical in modern Christendom. 4. "Communion" doesn't mean what Catholics like to say it means All this said, I'm not remotely convinced that communion with Rome was regarded as a given in the definition of catholicity. Or, put another way, if "communion" was regarded as a given, then I'm not remotely convinced it meant "submission" or "oversight by" or "complete unity with" or any