Remnant vs. broad catholicity views of God's own in church history

This is a central, interesting point that comes up constantly in my confrontations with what I call 'church Christians.' And in this case I don't necessarily mean that really negatively, this is just about the true history of Christians through time. I just on my own discovered the theme of *God's remnant* existing in all eras. I mean, I just started seeing in those terms in the heat of some debate. "God always has His remnant," I would say.

Here is a comment by a person from a blog:

"Luther and Calvin both have moments where their telling of the story of the Church retrojects their own emergency situation [he means the necessity of a Reformation] into a sort of norm; Calvin especially has a sort of remnant ecclesiology which takes the topos of the major Prophets as basic in his reading of Church history. And thus he can approximate the “bloody succession” story we more usually associate with the Radicals [represented by modern day Baptists, i.e. the story of a constant, usually very minority, remnant of Christians with the pure doctrine; the Waldensians are the classic example]. [...] The big popularizer of the “bloody succession” story in English was Foxe [of Book of Martyrs fame]– but he was no Anabaptist or separatist, he was a full-bore Anglican state-churchman..."

The commentater then goes on to talk of the other common view of church history, that being a sort of broad catholicity (small 'c') that is defined by a majority of Christians through time and held together by a common holding to basic creeds such as the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed, etc.

I agree that Calvin effuses the remnant ethic history. The catholic-majority history view are always trying to say Calvin is one of them, but he isn't, and the Bible itself isn't (notice the commenter referred to the prophets of the O.T. and the remnant theme throughout them).

Anyway, it's new for me to encounter these two views side-by-side. I caught on to it just from reading the Bible and being in the mix of debate, so I had a 'light-going-on' moment when I read this person's comment. (The person writing the comment is something of an academic church historian type...)