Hello everyone! I made this thread because I want to get more knowledge about Christianity. I am/have converting to Christianity, and I just want to know the "types" of Christianity. I believe that I am an evangelical Christian. There are so many other types of Christianity, like Orthodox, Catholic and etc, and I want to know some of the other types of Christianity and how it's differs from others.
God bless,
Bella ❤
The broadest division in Christianity can be said to be between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity.
Western Christianity describes the way Christianity developed in the Latin-speaking West (corresponding to the Western Roman Empire).
Eastern Christianity covers what we would call the Greek-speaking East (corresponding to the Eastern Roman Empire) it also describes Christianity beyond the historic borders of the Eastern Roman Empire--Ethiopia, the Middle East, and beyond.
Western Christianity covers Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, and what are known as the Old Catholic Churches.
Eastern Christianity covers Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the other Eastern Churches.
It can get complicated pretty quickly, but here's some of the necessary history:
In the early 5th century (400s) a theological controversy erupted surrounding then Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople. Without getting into all the details, there seems to have been some misunderstanding of what Nestorius actually believed, but he was accused of believing that Christ's Deity was separate from His humanity. A council was held in Ephesus and Nestorius was accused of teaching heresy. Nestorius' teacher Theodore of Mopuesta was also condemned, the problem is that Theodore was a highly venerated theologian among Christians in what is modern-day Iraq, this led to a schism. The modern "Nestorian" Churches is chiefly represented by the Assyrian Church of the East. These Christians are among those who traveled the farthest east in their missionary travels, we've found churches built by them as far as Western China, and there were many Central Asian tribes that were entirely converted to Christianity--"Nestorian" Christians were important members in the courts Ghengis Khan and his sons, especially Mongke Khan who married a Nestorian princess. The traditional Christians of Iraq, though having become much smaller in number since the Iraq War and now the situation over there with ISIS, are traditionally of this tradition.
Also in the 5th century another controversy brewed over a figure named Eutychus, Eutychus taught that in the union of the divine and human natures Christ's humanity was subsumed by His divinity and so Christ only had one nature. This resulted in the Council of Chalcedon. While Eutychus was condemned, the language used by Chalcedon was a problem for some leaders in the Church, resulting in another schism, this schism resulted in what we know as the Oriental Orthodox (a group of Eastern Churches such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Armenian Apostolic Church) who also rejected Eutychus as a heretic, but the issue was highly politicized and people spoke past one another.
In the 11th century a number of factors arose which resulted in the Western Latin-speaking Church and the Eastern Greek-speaking Church to separate. This is known as the Great Schism or the East-West Schism, and as a result Roman Catholicism in the West and Eastern Orthodoxy in the East have existed as separate church bodies since.
In the 16th century a number of reformers, most notably Martin Luther an Augustinian monk, spoke against what he perceived to be theological errors that had crept into Catholicism and wanted to see the Catholic Church reformed from the inside out. Of course what happened was Luther was labeled a heretic, and the Protestant Reformation as it came to be called resulted in numerous schisms.
The Reformation can be split into three categories:
1) The Magisterial Reformation: the "Lutherans" (they called themselves Evangelicals or
Evangelische in German, not to be confused with modern Evangelicalism) with important reformers being Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon among others. The Reformed, which includes reformers such as John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Knox (the founder of Presbyterianism)
2) The English Reformation: King Henry VIII of England wanted to divorce his wife, the Pope said no, so Henry decided to break off from the Roman Catholic Church and named himself head of the English Church. The history of Anglicanism thus begins and is a bit complex.
3) The Radical Reformation: There were a lot of people who also believed Rome was wrong, but they believed people like Luther and Calvin weren't going far enough. They became known as the Radical Reformation and they are a highly diverse group, many of the sects that came about didn't last long, such as the Zwickau Prophets a militaristic sect believing the world was ending. It also includes explicitly heretical movements such as the Socinians who denied the Trinity. But it also includes Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites; Simons and those like him were called Anabaptists because they rejected the practice of baptizing infants and thus had themselves and others re-baptized (that's what "anabaptist" means, "re-baptizer").
Remember I mentioned the complicated history of Anglicanism earlier? Well in the 17th century there arose two groups that opposed the current way the Church of England did things, one group was known as the Puritans, the Puritans were Calvinist Protestants who believed the Church of England wasn't Protestant enough and retained too much similar to Roman Catholicism and they wanted to purify it. The other major group of opponents were known as Separatists, who believed there was no hope to purify the Church of England and so believed in separating completely from it. One of the major Separatist groups were the Baptists, who like the Anabaptists in Europe rejected infant baptism and believed only in baptizing confessing adults. Puritans came to North America famously on the Mayflower and founded the colony of Massachusetts. In addition to the Puritans who came at the same time were Separatists, the Separatists, such as Roger Williams--a Baptist--were not very welcomed by the Puritans and so Roger Williams founded a separate settlement, Rhode Island.
In England there were other groups, broadly known as Non-Conformists. These included the Quakers, the Shakers, the Diggers, the Adamites, and many others. The Quakers are one of the few Non-Conformist or Dissenter groups that has really continued to survive and thrive into the modern era, largely because a colony of Quakers was set up in North America by the Quaker William Penn, that colony being Pennsylvania.
In the 18th century a revival movement known as the Great Awakening happened in both Great Britain and in the English American Colonies. One of the most important figures of this time was John Wesley, an Anglican priest who had a profound spiritual experience while on board a ship to America that had a group of Pietist Moravians. A major result of this was Methodism and what has been termed the Wesleyan Tradition.
In the 19th century there was a massive increase in denominations and sects, especially in the United States. Here are some notable examples:
In the 1840's a Baptist minister named William Miller became convinced from his reading of the Bible that Jesus was going to return October of 1843, he gathered a large following; however the Lord didn't show up and so Miller revised his prediction to the next year in 1844. That didn't happen either, it became known as the Great Disappointment. Miller gave up trying to predict Christ's return, but many of his followers--Millerites--continued to be active. One important Millerite was a woman by the name of Ellen G. White who claimed to have the gift of prophecy, as a result of her particular teachings (including that Christians should worship on Saturday on the Jewish Sabbath rather than on Sunday) came the Seventh-Day Adventists.
In the 1820's a young farmer from upstate New York named Joseph Smith, Jr. claimed to have been spoken to by an angel of God and the angel pointed him to uncover golden plates, and the means to translate them. Smith claimed his Book of Mormon was the translation from these plates, and that God had commissioned him to restore the true church of Jesus Christ which had been lost due to apostasy early on. Thus the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (or Mormonism) was founded.
An ex-Irish Anglican priest named John Darby helped found the Plymouth Brethren in Britain, Darby's most particular doctrine was that God had divided history into several dispensations. It was also Darby, in connection with this doctrine of Dispensationalism, who came up with the idea of "the Rapture", that true believers in Jesus will be taken directly into heaven before a period of great tribulation. This idea was unique to Darby and his group until it became popularized later by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody and in the marginal notes of Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible which brought it across the pond to the United States where it gained some popularity in the early 20th century but really took off in the 70's, 80's, and 90's with publications such as The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series of novels.
An ex-Presbyterian minister named Charles Finney developed became a prominent figure in a growing Revivalistic Movement (called Revivalism) in the 19th century. Finney's revivalistic techniques were called the New Measures, and they depended on getting people hyped and into a particular emotional mindset to make them receptive to the preaching. The New Measures also included what was then called the "Anxious Bench" but is more commonly known as the "Altar Call" today. It was an innovation by Finney.
Revivalism also produced, out of the Wesleyan Tradition, a form of Wesleyanism known as the Holiness Movement. The Holiness Churches stressed personal piety (Pietism) and individual holiness, and emotional fervor was an important component of Holiness revivals in the United States. It was, in fact, from one of the Holiness revivals, in 1906 at Azusa Street, San Francisco that Pentecostalism was born. Holiness Churches include a number of denominations such as Church of God (Anderson), Church of God (Holiness), Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene.
Pentecostal denominations from the early 20th century include the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Apostolic Faith Church, Church of God (Cleveland).
In the early 20th century the Modernist Controversy became a major point of conflict in American Protestant seminaries, this conflict resulted in the publication of a multi-volume work titled The Fundamentals. The resulting name for those who stressed the Fundamentals over and against what they saw as the evils of Modernity were Fundamentalists. Fundamentalism, however, became deeply culturally isolated and many felt there was a major loss in not engaging popular culture. A number of important early 20th century evangelists came onto the scene. Billy Sunday and later Billy Graham. In fact what is today popularly called the "Sinner's Prayer" was invented by Billy Sunday and popularized by Billy Graham. Another important figure here is Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ and author of a major evangelistic tool known as "The Four Spiritual Laws. it's from these ideas that really began to take root in particular due to Billy Graham's evangelistic crusades that there came to be what was called Neo-Evangelicalism. Neo-Evangelicalism eventually just became known as Evangelicalism, from which the term "Evangelical" is derived.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's the American counter-culture was in full swing, and a movement of counter-culture Christians arose known as the Jesus People (pejoratively called "Jesus Freaks"). Many weren't widely welcomed in many churches because counter-culture people ("hippies") were dirty and barefoot. However some churches came about that embraced elements of the Jesus People phenomenon, most notably Calvary Chapel and a breakaway from Calvary Chapel known as the Vineyard Churches.
Also in the 1960's there was a renewed interest in certain dimensions of Pentecostalism, churches that weren't quite Pentecostal but embraced the idea of speaking in tongues and an individualized experience of the Holy Spirit became known as Charismatics. And thus the Charismatic Movement was born.
In the 1980's and 90's there has been a significant increase in self-described "non-denominational" churches. These are usually independent congregations of Evangelicals and/or Charismatics which do not belong to an established denomination. Some of these have become very massive and influential with the advent of the Church Growth Movement and the boom of the Megachurches.
This lengthy post by no means covers even close to everything, but it is a somewhat rudimentary overview of much of the history that has led to there being such different sorts of churches and denominations.
-CryptoLutheran
