The Pentecostal experience of the first disciples, because it was effected by God, has two characteristics: its comprehensive catholicity and its compact unity. Catholicity, universality, belongs properly to God’s redemptive activity. Where God is at work there can be no respect of persons. It cannot be that the reality manifested in Christ should be only for some men and not for others, only for the Jews and not also for the Greeks, only for the civilized world and not also for barbarians. Christ’s redemptive work belongs to all, and therefore also in a certain sense it requires all. So the Pentecostal experience bears this distinctive mark of catholicity in its miracle of tongues: “How have we heard every man our own tongue wherein we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappodocia” (Acts ii, 7). In the same moment that the new faith entered the world it was a faith that embraced all mankind, a Catholic faith. The church that was to be, was proclaimed in all tongues.[2] And this catholicity was a catholicity of unity. They were all assembled around the apostolic college, around the one Peter. And they all understood one another. One God, one Christ, one faith, one language. Fullness in unity, unity in fullnessso did the new faith enter the world.

And how did it go through the world, how did it come to us, to me? Not otherwise than as it came to the apostles: through the living word and through the quickening Spirit.

We know that Jesus prepared His disciples for the miracle of Pentecost through His living word. And His disciples too wished to be nought else but “eye-witnesses and first ministers of the word” (Luke i, 2). We see them at once, after the miracle of Pentecost, proclaiming the Gospel and giving testimony to Christ “in Jerusalem and Judea and in Samaria and even unto the ends of the earth” (Acts i, 8). Certainly some of them composed historical records of the life of Jesus and of the acts of the chief apostles. And they wrote also letters to single persons and communities, wherein they set forth the Christian teaching and the Christian life according to the inquiries and the special circumstances of those to whom they wrote. Yet these written communications were only supplementary to their oral preaching, sometimes in confirmation of it or preparatory to it. Even the Epistles to the Romans, Ephesians and Hebrews, in spite of their more general range, are concerned particularly with the special needs of the people to whom they are addressed, and make no sort of claim to be an exhaustive exposition of the Christian faith. So little thought was given to any final literary expression of the Gospel, that some apostles left no writing whatever after them and that apostolical writings could even disappear (1 Cor. v, 9; Coloss. iv, 16).