When in the creed Christians confess the church as Holy and Catholic, like so much theological language, it all depends what you mean by "holy". Nicholas Lash offers a rich exegesis:
"Holiness is otherness, the unimaginable, the unattainable fulfilment of all our hopes and dreams, perhaps of all our fears. God, alone, is holy, awe-inspiring, glory-templed. And the purifying touch of holiness can burn. But in uttered Word and outbreathed Spirit, the Holy One comes close, touches and transforms. Holiness is, then, after all, communicable. Indeed all things are sanctifiable, may be made holy, by the breath of God. Life in God's Holy Spirit is, accordingly, all things' existence purified into peace and friendliness, reconciled relationship, sharing – in delight and harmony – in the very life of God. Hence the enablement, and the requirement, that human beings, who are moral agents,…conform their words, and deeds, and institutions, their treatment of each other and of what we call the natural world, to the pattern of God's outpoured peacefulness. Thus it is that, quite properly, but, nonetheless, secondarily and derivatively, we conceive the church's holiness in moral terms. If it could be shown that, on the whole, Christianity had made and makes no significant contribution, by announcement and example, to the peacefulness and healing and completion of the world, then there would be no reason to give it any further serious consideration."
Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 88-89
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