Read an Excerpt
A Layman's Guide to -
Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations? Who started them? When? Why?
By C. Jack Trickler AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 C. Jack Trickler
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4490-4576-0
Chapter One
Getting Started
Most Americans have a truncated view of early Christianity and the development of its denominations. That view usually runs something like this: Jesus chose his disciple Peter to be the rock on which Christianity would be built. After Jesus was crucified, Peter went to Rome and started what became the Roman Catholic Church. When the Roman Empire broke into its eastern and western parts the Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant movement began when Martin Luther disagreed with the Roman Catholic Church's practice of raising money by selling indulgences and he nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church. The discussions that resulted led some Christians to leave the Roman Catholic Church and start their own churches. Those Christians protested the Roman Catholic Church's practices and that protesting led to their being known as protest-ants, Protestants.
While containing some accurate elements, this limited vision creates a significant distortion of historic reality. The compression of 2,000 years of church history into one paragraph is comparable to condensing the history of the United States into four lines of type. Much too much would be left out of the story.
This book focuses on the historical situations and the differences of opinion that led to the creation of our many denominations. As was my prior book, this book is history. There will be no preaching and no attempt to sway you from one denomination to another.
We will look at the people who created Christian denominations and at the beliefs and characteristics of those denominations that distinguish them from other denominations. We will begin with a quick look at what can be thought of as pre-Jesus denominations and then at what can be thought of as the Christian denominations that began shortly after Jesus' crucifixion. We will look at the people and events that led to the development of denominations. That road was far from peaceful. As Christians gained political power, all too often that led to the torture and murder of those who held contrary beliefs. We humans are a feisty bunch and do horrible things to each other in the name of God! Recognizing that will help us understand why there are so many denominations and why Christians sometimes defend denominational differences so emphatically. Looking at such matters cannot help but cause us to draw parallels to other religions and to the divisions within those religions. Think of Muslims as Sunnis, Shiites, Wahhabis, etc., and think of what caused Muhammad's followers to break into denominations. Examining and understanding what has caused Christians to create so many denominations should help us understand why humans have created so many religions. Hmm! Does that make us wonder if God views Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., as members of various denominations?
If you who have read my previous book, A Layman's Guide to Who Wrote the Books of the Bible? When? Why?, you know that I am a Christian layman with an abiding interest in the history of Christianity. The good reception of that first book and my continuing interest in the history of Christianity led to this book. As with the first book, this book deals with a subject about which there are many reference books. What sets this book apart from at least many of the others is that this one, as with my prior book, is in layperson's language and presents a more complete yet concise summary of the subject.
As you read this introduction, you may wonder what is the author's denomination. Well, I am a United Methodist. Does that in any way affect my objectivity regarding the subject of this book? I do not think so. I believe that learning the origins of, the bases of, and the beliefs of other denominations helps each of us understand more clearly our own denomination's history and doctrines. I hope this book is devoid of Methodist bias. And I must share a bit of humorous family history that should help dispel any concern of author bias. My mother was raised as a German Lutheran. My father was raised as a Methodist back in the days when it was the Methodist Episcopal Church. When my parents married they faced the not-uncommon question of whether they would attend church together and, if so, which church. My mother offered to become a Methodist if my father would learn to dance. (Methodists did not do such things back then.) This story plus my mother once telling me, when I was unhappy over something, that I was "as sour as a Methodist preacher" gave me the impression that Lutherans had a lot more fun than Methodists.
The title of this book could be misconstrued as implying that there are too many denominations. Not so! Rather it should be taken as the beginning of a study to find out what brought so many Christian denominations into being and what differentiates one from another. What is there about human nature and history that has led us to so many ways of worshiping the one God all Christians worship? Denominations will not be graded, just described.
As you read this history of Christian denominations you may keep having these two thoughts: 1) How peacefully our 21st Century American Christian denominations live alongside each other compared to some of the murderous conflicts among denominations a few hundred years ago!, and 2) How the present-day conflict between the Muslim Shiites, Sunnis, Taliban and al Qaeda resemble the Christian denominational battles of a few centuries ago.
The scope of this book will begin with a quick look at a period in history often referred to as the Apostolic and Ante Nicene Eras. Apostolic refers to the time just following Jesus' crucifixion when the apostles were beginning to spread what became Christianity. Ante Nicene refers to the years before the council of bishops that met in 325 in Nicea. (That meeting will be one of the subjects of Conversation 3.) Particular attention will be given to the aspects of the Christian movement that helped create the present-day denominations in the United States. The United States has become a sort of depository for the ethnic and Christian movements whose followers emigrated to the United States and brought with them their unique religious traditions. Believers who were no longer welcome elsewhere migrated to America from parts of Europe, such as the Pilgrims, Quakers, and Roman Catholics.
With that as a teaser we will start at the beginning before Jesus and then move to the time of Jesus, 1500 or so years before Luther, and conclude somewhere after exploring such differences as those between the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopalian Church and The Church of England; why there are about 20 separate denominations calling themselves Methodists; why there are so many Baptist denominations; where the Universalist Unitarians came from; the Lutherans; the Quakers; the Church of Christ (aren't we all?); Presbyterians (about a dozen varieties); and the two dozen or so Pentecostal Churches. We will also look at what are termed non-denominational churches. Please recognize that in focusing on the way Christian denominations developed in Europe and in the United States we will slide by the stories of Christianity in other areas of the world, such as in China, India, South America, Africa and the Middle East. This is not to suggest that they are not important. It is done to keep this book from becoming too long.
Now let's face the question of how far to go into the details of individual denominations. The first parts of this book will examine the development of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches along with a number of denominations that came into existence and then disappeared in the first few centuries AD. When we explore the history of Martin Luther and the beginning of Protestantism we will come face to face with the need to curtail exploration of denominations. As an example: Today there are 66 million Lutherans in the Lutheran World Federation in 78 countries with 108 distinct Lutheran denominations within that federation. There are another 49 Lutheran church groups around the world that are not associated with the Lutheran World Federation. There is no way this book can examine the individual characteristics, beliefs, practices, etc., of each of those, especially recognizing that there are many other denominations to explore, including yours and mine and many of those have split into numerous additional denominations. When we get to Protestant denominations we will delve into the origins of the major denominations in the historical sequence of their origins, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, etc., and conclude each segment with a brief history of that denomination and its major subdivisions in the United States. (The length of this book will make you glad the study of each denomination is not longer! And, sorry if your particular denomination is one of those not covered.)
The informal style of my writing led one of those who proofread my prior book to suggest that I call the chapters of that book conversations. I did so, and that brought favorable comments. This book is also divided into conversations.
If you have ever wondered why we Christians don't all just get together without denominational differences, come on along. You should find this journey interesting.
Five quotations come to mind as we begin this study of why there are so many Christian denominations. One is from the Bible: Ecclesiastes 12:12 says, "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." (Just think, that was written about two thousand years before the invention of the printing press!) The second quotation is from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) who said, "It is differences of opinion that makes horse-races." The third is from the preface of Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of Christianity, "- the history of Christianity is the history of what God has done for man through Christ and of man's response." The fourth is the final sentence in The Gospel According to John, "But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." The fifth is from an article by Alan Jacobs in the January, 2009 issue of First Things: "Since Luther's time to our own, every generation of Protestants produces people who rise up to proclaim that the Church lost its way within decades of Jesus' death, leaving the true gospel forgotten and unproclaimed until - well, us."
This book will deal with two intertwined aspects of human nature and history: 1) The fundamental differences of thought, vision, beliefs and circumstances that led to the starting of what we now call Christian denominations and 2) The historical settings and circumstances that led the followers of Jesus, the Christians, to develop differing beliefs, worship practices and organizational structures.
The reference to human nature at the beginning of the previous paragraph requires explanation as to how human nature relates to the process of dividing and creating new Christian denominations, a process now in its third millennium. Start with the old saw about whether the glass is half full or half empty and then go on to such matters as whether religious leaders should be married only to their jobs or if they may have wives and husbands; whether baptism should be administered to babies or should be administered when the person being baptized is mature enough to make a meaningful confession of Christian faith; whether the wine or grape juice and bread used in communion represent the blood and flesh of Jesus or if they become the actual blood and flesh of Jesus; which version of the Bible should be taken as the most authoritative; etc. Our human tendency to develop differing understandings of what we think God wants us to believe and do continues to lead to the creation of more new denominations.
There is another thought to consider before we look at the early Christians. We can think of the people in history as having been different from us, as just people in old paintings and strange clothes; or we can see them as the same sort of people we find in today's churches, the sort of people we might have been had we lived in those earlier times and circumstances. Seeing them as the sort of people we might have been adds meaning, depth, and warmth to this study.
And yet another thought to ponder before we move on: As humankind evolved into various cultures in various parts of the world, our ancestors began to ask from where humans had come and what caused there to be life. Over time that thinking evolved, so people reasoned that some sort of super power had created all, including humans and all aspects of life and earth. Further evolution of thought led to beliefs that the unknown power had done so for some purpose. People who understood that purpose and who lived accordingly were deemed to be good. Those who did not do so were deemed to deserve some form of eternal punishment. (In the part of the world where Christianity developed that concept is traceable to the Persians of about 5,000 BC.) Christians believe that super power is God and that God sent His son Jesus to earth to show humans the way to follow God toward good lives and to life after death with God and Jesus in heaven.
As humankind continued to observe, learn and think about the universal mysteries of life, new thoughts evolved. An appropriate example for our purposes is the origin of what we now term philosophy with Greeks such as Socrates and Plato (whom many Christian scholars feel had significant roles in the development of Christianity). For example, Plato (429-347 BC) taught that human souls are immortal. Consider this quotation attributed to him: "The soul is utterly superior to body, and that which gives each one of us his being is nothing else but his soul, whereas the body is no more than a shadow which keeps us company. So it is well said of the deceased that the corpse is but a ghost; the real man - the undying thing called the soul - departs to give account to the gods of another world, even as we are taught by ancestral tradition - an account to which the good may look forward without misgivings, but the evil with grievous dismay." (Laws 12.959a-b) (It should be noted that Plato's concept of the soul was that when the soul left a human body it became available for use in another human. That is quite different from the Christian concept of the soul maintaining its unique personhood beyond death.)
Incidentally, Plato and Luther had similar negative views of the priests of their respective religious cultures accepting money for the forgiveness of sins. That is very interesting when you think of Plato and Luther as being separated by about eighteen and a half centuries and that Plato lived almost four centuries before Jesus.
If we examine a number of the ancient religions, such as Zoroastrianism, the panoplies of gods of the Greeks and of Romans, Orphisim and Orpheus, the Babylonian Enuma Elish story of creation, the Egyptian beliefs about the creation of mankind, and the Hebrew stories in what Christians call the Old Testament, we see an amazing array of beliefs about how humans were created, how humans relate to the gods or to one god or to God, and what happens to humans when they die. Some ancient religions developed beliefs about there being life after death, some of those beliefs with bodies after death, some just as spirits (souls). Genesis 3:19 has God telling Adam and Eve, "- you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Most of the ancient religions that believed in life after death related the quality of humans' behavior during life (sinful or sinless) to the quality of whatever happened after death. It should be noted that pre-Christianity Judaism was divided on the question of life after death.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Layman's Guide to - by C. Jack Trickler Copyright © 2010 by C. Jack Trickler. Excerpted by permission.
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