Long Division

In western Europe, there was really only one type of church, and they all ultimately answered to the Pope in Rome.

This was the scene when Martin Luther began his scathing criticism of the Church power structure, especially the way money was being used to reduce punishment for sin.

To Luther and his students at the university, this corruption was utterly unacceptable. This was their church, after all, and there was only one of them…. for now, anyway.

This famous schism wasn’t the first in Christian history, although it was arguably the widest fracture. Ultimately, Protestants today—Luther’s theological descendants—make up more than a third of all Christians worldwide.

Nevertheless, the Great Schism from nearly five centuries earlier rivals the Protestant-Catholic split in terms of importance. The year was 1054, and things were getting heated between the west and the east. Rome claimed authority over all of Christendom through the Pope, who was clearly God’s main representative on Earth… or was he?

This was a central argument behind the split, and it certainly didn’t help that people in the east spoke Greek while those in the west spoke Latin. Constantinople’s view was that the Pope was a really cool dude who deserved an elevated status—the first among equals, as later described—but obeying his commands without question? That wasn’t something those in the East could accept.

This also wasn’t the first division like this. In fact, division within religion has a long history.

Some 3000 or 3500 years ago, this idea that there was one supreme being above all others began to form. This coalesced and sharpened into the idea that there was only one god, not a multitude with one powerful god at the top.

Naturally, this idea did not remain unified forever. Monotheism was durably codified into Judaism, and eventually Christianity splintered off from Judaism. Islam drew from those same earlier Abrahamic traditions while arguing that the other two religions had strayed from the original message from God.

Eventually, these movements splintered into sects and denominations, and most of those denominations have gone on to split into sub-denominations and sub-sub-denominations.

This long division of religion is ongoing today.