IB World Religions 3.4.6. Schools of Thought: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Beyond Notes

3.4.6. Schools of Thought: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Beyond

Branches and denominations

1. Christianity is usually mapped as three great families: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant. Around 2.4 billion people identify with one of them, and each family contains many further divisions.
2. Two ruptures produced that map. The Great Schism of 1054 divided the Latin West from the Greek East, and the Reformation from 1517 divided Western Christianity again.
3. A denomination is an organised body of Christians with its own doctrine, worship and government. The word quietly grants that Christians in other bodies are Christians too, which is why some groups refuse it.
4. Doctrine is only part of the story. Language, empire, politics, migration and the personalities of leaders all helped decide which Christians ended up in which church.
5. The disagreements that separate the families cluster around a few questions. Where does authority lie, how many sacraments are there, how is salvation described, and what should worship look like?
6. The centre of gravity has moved sharply. Most Christians now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the fastest-growing churches are Pentecostal and independent rather than the historic Western bodies.

The Roman Catholic Church

1. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest single body in Christianity, with roughly 1.3 billion members. It is a communion of the Latin church and around twenty Eastern Catholic churches, all in communion with the bishop of Rome.
2. Sacramental life stands at its centre. Seven sacraments are celebrated, the Mass is the principal act of worship, and transubstantiation describes the bread and wine as becoming the body and blood of Christ.
3. Doctrine is developed through councils. The Council of Trent framed the Catholic answer to the Reformation, and the Second Vatican Council reshaped worship, the role of lay people and relations with other churches and religions.
4. The word catholic carries a claim. It comes from the Greek katholikos, meaning according to the whole, and expresses the church's claim to hold the faith of all times and places.
5. Religious orders keep distinct schools of thought alive inside one church. Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits each have their own spirituality, and currents such as Thomism and liberation theology run alongside them.
6. Internal variety is now geographical as well. Catholicism in Latin America, Africa and the Philippines has developed its own emphases, and traditionalist and progressive currents disagree sharply about the reforms of the 1960s.

Orthodox and Oriental churches

1. Eastern Orthodoxy is a communion of self-governing churches with around 220 million members. Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian and other national churches share one faith, defined by the first seven councils, without a single earthly head.
2. Worship carries the identity. The Divine Liturgy is sung rather than spoken, services are long and largely unchanged since the fourth century, and icons are treated as windows onto the persons they show.
3. Salvation is described as theosis, becoming by grace what God is by nature. Its practice is hesychasm, an inner stillness cultivated through the repeated Jesus Prayer.
4. The break with Rome had several causes. The Western addition of the filioque clause to the creed, papal claims to universal jurisdiction and centuries of political distance all contributed, and the excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965 without restoring communion.
5. The Oriental Orthodox churches separated earlier still. The Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac churches rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 over how to describe the natures of Christ, and modern dialogues have concluded that much of the dispute was verbal.
6. Eastern Catholic churches complicate the picture. They keep Byzantine or other Eastern rites while remaining in communion with Rome, and their existence is still resented by many Orthodox as an attempt to draw the East westwards.

The Protestant families

1. Protestant churches descend from the Reformation and share two commitments: the final authority of scripture and justification by faith. They divide over worship, sacraments and government.
2. Lutheran churches follow Luther and the Augsburg Confession. They kept a formal liturgy and a high view of the Eucharist, and they remain the majority tradition in Germany and Scandinavia.
3. Reformed churches follow Calvin and Zwingli. They stress the sovereignty of God and the doctrine of election, govern themselves through elders, and include the Church of Scotland, the Dutch Reformed churches and Presbyterians worldwide.
4. Anglican churches trace their shape to the English Reformation and describe themselves as a middle way between Rome and Geneva. The Anglican Communion now has around 85 million members, and its largest provinces are in Africa.
5. Anabaptist and Baptist churches insist on baptising believers rather than infants and on the gathered congregation. Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites descend from the radical wing of the Reformation, and many hold to pacifism.
6. Methodism grew out of the revival led by John Wesley and his brother Charles inside the Church of England. It stresses personal holiness and Christian perfection, spread through hymn singing and small groups, and gave rise to the Holiness churches.

Fundamentalist, Pentecostal and Charismatic

1. Fundamentalism takes its name from The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 defending doctrines their authors held to be essential. The word is now often used as an insult, which hides that origin.
2. Its marks are consistent. Fundamentalists hold to the inerrancy of scripture, read the Bible literally where they can, reject liberal theology, and often separate from Christians who do not.
3. Evangelicalism is the wider movement they sit inside. The historian David Bebbington identified four marks of it: conversion, the Bible, the cross and active mission, and most evangelicals reject fundamentalist separatism.
4. Pentecostalism began in revivals at the start of the twentieth century, above all at Azusa Street in Los Angeles from 1906. It teaches baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience beyond conversion, usually evidenced by glossolalia, speaking in tongues.
5. Its growth has been the largest shift in modern Christianity. Several hundred million people now belong to Pentecostal churches, and the prosperity teaching found in some streams is criticised sharply by other Pentecostal leaders.
6. The Charismatic movement carried the same practices into existing churches from the 1960s. Catholic Charismatic Renewal has been formally recognised by Rome, and Anglican, Lutheran and Baptist congregations run charismatic worship without leaving their denominations.

Independent and ecumenical currents

1. Non-denominational churches present themselves as simply Christian. They are usually evangelical in doctrine and independent in government, and many of the largest congregations in the world are of this kind.
2. African Independent Churches were founded by African leaders rather than by missionaries. The Aladura churches of Nigeria and the Zion Christian Church of southern Africa combine Christian teaching with African forms of worship and healing.
3. Chinese Christianity has grown largely through house churches. Registered and unregistered congregations exist side by side, and estimates of the total number of Christians in China vary widely.
4. Some groups claim to restore an original Christianity that was lost. Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints make that claim, and most other churches decline to recognise them as Christian because they reject the Trinity.
5. Ecumenism pulls in the opposite direction. The World Council of Churches was founded in 1948, the Catholic Church takes part as an observer, and the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999 settled much of the old Lutheran and Catholic quarrel.
6. The result is division and convergence at once. Churches that remain formally separate now share Bible translations, worship songs, relief agencies and, in places such as South India, actual union.