What's the difference between baptist, methodist and orthodox?
The Orthodox Churches refer to the historic Churches of the East--Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, etc--and can be distinguished into two kinds: The Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox.
The Oriental Orthodox refers to those Churches who did not accept the authority of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, the reasons for this are complicated and in a lot of ways boils down to semantics more than actual theology; but ultimately it resulted in a schism. The Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Tawahedo Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox church, and the Armenian Apostolic Church are all Oriental Orthodox, as such these particular Churches are in communion with one another.
The Eastern Orthodox refers to those Churches in the East who did accept the Council of Chalcedon. What we know as the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches today were one Church, so the Eastern and Western Churches were in communion with one another for the first thousand years of Christian history; from the time of Christ and the Apostles until the 11th century. While the breech between East and West began earlier, and was not really final until later, most historians locate the formal schism in the year 1054 AD when the Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Constantinople ended up excommunicating one another. Things had been shaky since the time of Photius of Constantinople in the 9th century, and the schism was not true and final until the 15th century Council of Florence which destroyed any chance at reunification between East and West.
The Methodists can be traced back to the 18th century evangelistic ministry of John Wesley, an Anglican priest. Originally Methodism was a movement from within Anglicanism, but eventually became its own thing. In the United States Methodism was chiefly identified with Wesley and Wesleyanism, Wesley's own brand of Arminian theology; back in Britain Methodists were more identified with George Whitefield, who was a Calvinist. As such Methodist history is part of the larger history of Anglicanism, and the Reformed debate between Arminianism and orthodox Calvinism (See
English Reformation,
The Remonstrants, and
The Synod of Dordt).
Baptists can trace their origins to the 17th century in England as one of the Non-Conformist, Separatist groups of the period. Their chief defining characteristic was their rejection of infant baptism in favor of baptizing only believers (a belief known as Credobaptism or "Believer's Baptism"). These English Baptists eventually made it to the New World in order to practice their religion freely, the first of these originally lived alongside the Puritans in Massachusetts, but the Puritans wanted to have a Geneva-style theocracy and so dissenters were mistreated; one such dissenter, a Baptist by the name of Roger Williams moved away and founded the new colony of Rhode Island, Williams was big on religious freedom and so Rhode Island was one of the first places that had religious tolerance and freedom as part of its social fabric. So several characteristics of Baptists, at least of the American variety, largely followed these distinctives (the list is not exhaustive, just to give examples):
1. Baptism only of believers by immersion.
2. Freedom of conscience.
3. Each congregation is autonomous.
4. Separation of Church and State.
In the years since Baptists grew increasingly more diverse as they disagreed on many different issues, some of these issues include Calvinism/Arminianism, Missionaries/No Missionaries, Slavery/Abolition.
These are the brief histories of these groups; accounting the beliefs of all three, and the differences, would be a fairly massive undertaking.
-CryptoLutheran