Would it be better if there were no Christian denominations?

[GKMotley]

Still a few bumps in the road.

 

[MarkRome]

And I have already challenged that presuppositional position above by demonstrating that your own Church admits to the development of uniquely Roman Catholic dogmas.

You mean Catholic dogmas. They are Catholic. Roman Catholic refers to the Western Rite of the Church. There are many Rites that aren’t Roman which are still Catholic. Again, the concept of denominations was invented in the 18th century to deal with the growing disparate body of Protestant groups teaching different things. It wasn’t true pre-Protestant Reformation. There weren’t “denominations” in the first centuries of the Church. They were all Catholic.

 

[Hodos]

You mean Catholic dogmas.

No, they are not universal, and the debate still rages on whether they are apostolic in origin. Ask your Eastern Orthodox brothers whether they accept the doctrine of papal infallibility as apostolic in origin. So they aren’t catholic in the original sense of the word. They are Roman Catholic dogmas, in other words, denominational doctrines. When you have to add a qualifier to the word catholic, it isn’t catholic any longer.

 

[AlNg]

There weren’t “denominations” in the first centuries of the Church. They were all Catholic.

i thought that there were Oriental Orthodox in the 5th century who adhered to Miaphysite Christology.

 

[MarkRome]

Ask your Eastern Orthodox brothers

They don’t accept “denominations” either.

 

[MarkRome]

i thought that there were Oriental Orthodox in the 5th century who adhered to Miaphysite Christology.

They aren’t a “denomination” either.

 

[AlNg]

Roman Catholic refers to the Western Rite of the Church. There are many Rites that aren’t Roman which are still Catholic.

There are western Roman rite Churches which are in union with the Orthodox Catholic Church. They are still Orthodox.

 

[MarkRome]

Mostly in English speaking countries as a result of Anglican’s promoting the three-branch theory of the church. The proper name for the universal Church is not the Roman Catholic Church. I also point you to Orientalium ecclesiarium which discusses the Eastern Rites as they related to the universal Church. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_...cree_19641121_orientalium-ecclesiarum_en.html

 

[ReaderT]

Reader- but is the Orthodox Church still considered a denomination, even it it considers itself the first/only “real” denomination?

Well, from our perspective we are the True Church, and everyone else has split off from us - so we don’t consider ourselves a denomination. The Catholic Church actually believes that we are a bona-fide apostolic Church with valid sacraments, but that we are not correct in everything.

For the record, my post “Become Orthodox” was more tongue-in-cheek than serious

I also find it hard to understand if Catholic and Orthodox were both one original Church at the birth of Christianity, then how come they differ in some beliefs now?

The same way that Catholics and Protestants were one church but came to be separate - someone, along the line, had a different opinion of how things were/are supposed to work, and this disagreement became a split.

 

[Kei]

Of course it would be better and for about a thousand years it was.

Well, not really. There were always heretical groups, even from the beginning with gnostics. St Augustine was a Manichaean, which was kinda pseudo-Christian, before he converted. Of course there was the Arian heresy (St Nicholas, pray for us!) which led to a crisis, along with a bunch of other heresies. But almost all Christians came to realize the various heretical groups were heresy eventually (how many people today are knowingly Donatists?), even if it took a while after ie official declarations or councils or what have you. Rome always held steady, even as various patriarchs/sees in the East would succumb to heresy.
Protestantism grew powerful with “secular” and cultural power, and it is difficult to defeat because it is like a hydra since you could argue against and defeat protestant position X , but then this other protestant sect may not even believe X, because of how many there are.

But I believe there are various mystics/visionaries who foresaw a time of Christian unity prior to the end of the world. Let us pray for unity! God bless.

 

[Dan_Defender]

It would be better. Jesus prayed that we be one like the Father and Him are one.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

I’ll save everyone the trouble, One’s desire to have Christianity operate under a single umbrella depends solely on if they are in alignment with whoever holds that umbrella.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

Sometimes it seems to me that the existence of denominations has done much more harm that good.

I don’t think that anybody is going to disagree with you that it would be preferable if there were no denominations. The problem is that everyone thinks that their own denomination is the one which has got everything right. If they didn’t, they presumably would join a different one (or start their own). The exception is possibly very liberal Christians who possibly believe that all denominations just offer different, but equally valid, perspectives on the same central truths. Likewise, there are liberal Christians who believe that all religions are simultaneously true. But, for the most part, people tend to believe that their religion or denomination is right.

Of course it would be better and for about a thousand years it was.

You are overlooking the schisms that occurred when the Church of the East parted company with other Christians at the Council of Ephesus and the Oriental Orthodox Churches were separated at the Council of Chalcedon. As @Kei points out, there were also many other forms of Christianity in the early centuries, although it’s only the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox Churches that formed distinct denominations that have survived to the present day.

What I find hard to understand, is that the original Church was one, and then it split into Orthodox and Catholic, and then after somehow Catholic itself split into a “further group” of Roman Catholic (or the history goes something along those lines)?

It’s a bit more complicated than that. The Church of the East separated in 431 and the Oriental Orthodox Churches separated in 451, so there had already been two major schisms before 1054. Although the Catholic Church today comprises 24 autonomous particular churches sui iuris, this occurred more through a process of churches coming into communion with the see of Rome rather than the Catholic Church splitting into different churches. Generally, these churches were formed when members of the Church of the East or Oriental or Eastern Orthodox Churches united with the Catholic Church, hence the term “Uniate”, which is no longer used. An exception is the Maronite Church, the oldest Eastern Catholic church, which evolved independently of these churches.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

I agree, but the question is whether the faith professed by Roman Catholics in the 1500’s to now is the same the faith professed by the apostles.

This is a good point, and I was having this argument with somebody the other day. Quite obviously, if you asked an Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker, Mennonite, Hutterite, etc to what point in history they are able to trace the origins of their denomination, they would say, “c. 30 CE”. It is not as if a Baptist will tell you that in the 17th century their denomination jettisoned the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, and so on and just started a brand new denomination. They will tell you that in the 17th century they were stripping away 1,000 years or so of error in order to get back to the original Christianity. Equally, a Catholic will say that in the 17th century the Baptists were guilty of committing new errors and establishing a new heretical and schismatic denomination of Christianity that was even further removed from the one true church than the English Protestants of the 16th century already were.

 

[dochawk]

What I find hard to understand, is that the original Church was one, and then it split into Orthodox and Catholic,

You misunderstand.

There was never a time that the Catholic and Orthodox were a single church.

The various churches, each of them, were both Catholic and Orthodox. They were in communion, as opposed to being single entity.