[AJPS 23.1 (February 2020), pp. 5-14] Catholicity, Full Gospel, and Fullness of the Spirit: A Pentecostal Perspective on the Third Mark of the Church 1 Part 1 by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen “… wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” 2 “All churches want to be catholic, though each in its own way. This is the paradox of catholicity on this side of God’s new creation. Though it stands for totality (holos), it is always based on a certain particularity. No church is catholic purely and simply; each is catholic in a certain way. Thus also arises the dispute concerning catholicity.” 3 ~ St. Ignatius For starters: Should—or could—Pentecostals talk about catholicity? Any Pentecostal talk on catholicity, the third ‘mark’ of the Church, would be allegedly a short speech! Suffice it for the speaker to confess that Pentecostals do not usually have that word in their vocabulary—and if it happens to be mentioned, it will be (mistakenly!) linked with a 1 This essay is a slightly revised version of two earlier presentations of mine: “Full Gospel, Fullness of the Spirit and Catholicity: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Third Mark of the Church,” Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Joint Consultative Group between the World Council of Churches and Pentecostals, Bossey Ecumenical Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, Nov 14-19, 2010. “Full Gospel, Fullness of the Spirit, and Catholicity: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Third Mark of the Church,” Presentations at the “Theological Positions Colloquium at Continental Theological Seminary, Brussels, Belgium, Feb 16-17, 2011. Subsequently it was published as ”Full Gospel, Fullness of the Spirit, and Catholicity: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Third Mark of the Church,” in Pentecostal Issues, Ecclesiology & Ecumenism, ed. C. Donovan Barron and Riku Tuppurainen (Sint-Peters-Leeuw, Belgium: Continental Theological Seminary, 2011), 77-99. 2 Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8. 3 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 259.