- The history of Christianity
Schism: division over substantial matters
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Believing that divine truth and human salvation are at stake, Christians take the formulation of doctrine with the utmost seriousness. Ecclesiology, in which the church itself is the topic of study, is integral to the process, for it addresses the nature, identity, and location of “the church” as the body that receives the revelation, transmits the message, and incorporates believers into its community. When differences arise among Christians on substantial matters, they may fall into division for the sake, as each side sees it, of truth and salvation. As long as parties to the conflict remain within hailing distance of each other, they continue the controversy and hope nevertheless to achieve reconciliation in the truth, for it belongs to salvation that Christ’s disciples should live together in unity.
Schisms have occurred for a variety of reasons. First, certain decisions made by general councils have not been accepted by all sides in dispute at the time. Institutionally, the longest-lasting divisions of this kind have been between those churches which rejected the Christological decisions of Ephesus in 431 (denounced as Nestorians by their opponents but self-designated the Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East) or of Chalcedon in 451 (denounced as monophysites by their opponents but referring to themselves as a communion of “non-Chalcedonian” or “Oriental Orthodox” churches) and those churches that abide by Ephesus and Chalcedon, namely the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.
Second, Christians have divided as a result of the breakdown of apparent consensus. This happened between the Byzantine East and the Roman West in the early Middle Ages. While linguistic, political, and cultural factors certainly played a part, irreducibly doctrinal matters were also involved. The West was uneasy with the Eastern understanding of the decisions of Chalcedon concerning the natures of Christ. The Carolingian Council of Frankfurt (794) feared that the “Eastern” Council of Nicaea II had sanctioned the veneration of images beyond due limits. The gravest matter, however, concerned the insertion of the word Filioque into the Nicene-Constantinoplitan creed, whereby the Western churches had come to confess that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and from the Son.” The word was introduced—probably as an anti-Arian move—by the regional Council of Toledo in 589 and later spread throughout the Frankish empire; Rome adopted it only in 1014. The Orthodox East objected formally to the unilateral alteration of the creed and materially to a teaching that seemed to them to fuse the Father and the Son into a single principle. In 1054 the bishops of Rome and Constantinople engaged in a mutual excommunication because of theological differences and the refusal of Constantinople to accept Roman claims of primacy. The excommunications, which effectively divided the East and the West, were “erased from memory and the midst of the Church” by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople in 1965, but their two churches are not yet in ecclesiastical communion.
Third, what Jeffrey Burton Russell, the noted historian of the medieval church, calls “dissent” from “order” in the medieval West generally occurred less on the intellectual plane than as an attempt at moral and institutional reform. Nevertheless, what were labeled with the rather elastic term “heresies” sometimes had doctrinal import. Reforming movements often arose in monastic or lay circles, perhaps against a background of apocalyptic impatience with the present world, and they could be domesticated by “the authorities,” so that even popes could espouse reform. Few long-lasting schisms took place along these lines (though the Waldenses and the Hussites have survived as separate bodies). On the doctrinal level, the greatest potential for disruption resided in the reformers’ claims of new inspiration by the Holy Spirit, which was sometimes mediated through new interpretations of Scripture. The role of the Holy Spirit was elevated by Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130/35–1201/02) to a re-periodization of the history of salvation, in which the impending “age of the Spirit” would follow on those of the Father and the Son.
Whether positively or negatively, some have interpreted the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century as the last of the medieval reform movements. The Protestant reformers were concerned with matters of doctrine and viewed the condition and practices of contemporary Christendom as the disfiguring outcrop of distorted understandings of God, humankind, and salvation. Liturgical features of the mass (connected above all with its sacrificial character), the intercession and relics of the saints, purgatory and indulgences—all appeared to require the reaffirmation of Christ alone (against the mediation of church or saints), grace alone (against merit), faith alone (against works, though not as the fruit of faith), and Scripture alone (as norma normans; “the norm that norms,” or “ultimate standard”) over any subordinate standards in tradition. The response of the “papal church” was neither quick enough nor far-reaching enough for the reformers, who therefore each carried out their confessional, liturgical, catechetical, and institutional programs in their respective territorial areas. Although various families of Protestant churches formed themselves (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican), they usually were not in full ecclesiastical communion with each other; the separating factors were chiefly differences over the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper and over the pastoral and governmental structures of the church.
The emergence of new issues is yet another circumstance that may cause division among Christians. Heavy debate has attended the relation between the Christian doctrine of creation and the cosmological and evolutionary theories of the natural sciences. Although no major ecclesiastical schisms have taken place directly over these questions, shifts in worldview fostered by the rise of the sciences may underlie some of the doctrinal tensions in modern Christianity.
At the beginning of the 21st century, it seemed that three issues in particular might cause division. First, the ordination of women to the presbyterate and then to the episcopate in the last quarter of the 20th century resulted in an “impairment of communion” within and among the provinces of Anglicanism, and it further complicated the relationships between Protestant churches on the one hand and Catholic and Orthodox on the other. Second, the question of the acceptability or not of homosexual practices is agitating many Western churches and disturbing relationships within their global ecclesiastical families. Third, a study text of the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission, The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement (1998), signals that “some churches” are asking whether it is necessarily “church-dividing” to “confess Christ only as one mediator among others.” Certainly, the relation between Christ—scripturally and traditionally preached by Christians as the unique and universal Saviour—and the religions into which most of humankind is grouped is an important issue.
Controversy: fighting over the faith
Controversies have always preceded schisms but have not necessarily resulted in them. After a division, the contesting parties seek to consolidate their respective positions, both among their supporters and against their opponents, so that doctrine takes on an apologetic character even between Christians and acquires—on the assumption that attack is the best form of defense—a polemical edge. As a result, the teaching of each community sometimes suffers through the exaggeration of certain features and the neglect of others.
One controversy that led to schism is the debate between East and West concerning the Spirit’s procession. The Eastern churches have long suspected that the West’s error resides in giving an “Augustinian” priority to an undifferentiated divine essence that in fact renders the distinct persons nonessential to the Godhead. The West, meanwhile, has suspected that the East, by holding to the Father (alone) as “the fount of deity,” may never have overcome the “Arian” subordination of the other two persons of the Godhead.
The other main issue between East and West has concerned the status of the see of Rome. Although the East has recognized that Rome enjoyed a certain “primacy of honour” among the other patriarchal sees of the first millennium (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem), it considers hypertrophic the development by which Rome dogmatized its own claim to universal jurisdiction and an infallible teaching authority.
In the 16th century, Luther’s pugnacity on behalf of his rediscovered gospel expressed itself in combative writings aimed at various targets. The most decisive of those aimed at Rome was the treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), which attacked the current sacramental system and left Christ himself as the sole sacrament in the scriptural sense (cf. 1 Timothy 3:16) and baptism and the Lord’s Supper as his “sacramental signs.” Luther also attacked the “enthusiasts” among the would-be reformers; at the colloquy of Marburg (1529), rejecting the teachings of Huldrych Zwingli, he proclaimed the existence of the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper with a literal est (“This is my body”). Luther approved the relatively conciliatory Confession of Augsburg (1530), but the Schmalkaldic Articles of 1537 turned fiercely against Rome, which responded at the Council of Trent (1545–63), where it asserted the validity of traditional Catholic teachings in areas of conflict—salvation, sacraments, ecclesiology—and anathematized any who should hold positions that it perceived to exist in Protestantism.
The confessional documents of the Reformation churches typically combined a reaffirmation of the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the ancient councils and creeds with a new statement of scriptural soteriology against the current understanding and practice of the Roman Church. They also treated questions of authority, government, and discipline. In sacramental doctrine, the Reformation confessions not only state disagreement with Rome but also reveal certain differences among the various Reformation churches.
Interconfessional apologetics and polemics became built into standard works of theological instruction. A perduring example was Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (final edition 1559). From the Catholic side, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet displayed what he saw as the inconsistencies of Protestantism in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688).
Nevertheless, the European “Wars of Religion” of the 16th and 17th centuries resulted, if only by reaction and at a geographically variable pace, in the growth of civil tolerance. An admixture of other cultural factors led to a certain moderation of confessional claims at the intellectual level also; exemplary in this regard would be the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81). Eventually, the divided churches realized that the task of evangelization, in relation both to domestic secularization and to the global mission, called them to a mutual reconciliation that lay in the nature of the gospel.
An instance of emergent ecumenism, which developed into a broad movement in the 20th century, is found in John Wesley’s “Letter to a Roman Catholic” (1749) and his sermon “Catholic Spirit” (1750). Not only on the basis of the universal Creator and Redeemer common to all humanity but also on the grounds of a shared Christian faith (which he set forth as an expansion upon the Nicene Creed), Wesley invited Catholics and Protestants to join in a “union in affection” in which they might “help each other on in whatever we are agreed leads to the Kingdom,” even if differences in “opinions,” “modes of worship,” and church government prevent “an entire external union.”
Geoffrey Wainwright The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica