Schisms and Divisions

Christianity is not a monolith but the outcome of several major ruptures which defined distinct traditions. These schisms have theological, ecclesiological and political roots together.

The Great Schism of 1054

Underlying causes

16 July 1054

The papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida laid a bull of excommunication against the patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia. Cerularius replied by excommunicating the Roman legates. The rupture crystallised tensions accumulated over centuries. The excommunications were lifted symbolically by Paul VI and Athenagoras I in 1964, but the ecclesiological schism remains.

1204 and the sack of Constantinople

The deeper trauma for Orthodoxy is not 1054 but 1204, when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. Hagia Sophia was profaned, relics were plundered and a Latin patriarch imposed. That Catholic crusaders committed this against Orthodox Christians remains the gravest wound in Orthodox collective memory.

The Protestant Reformation

The Reformation did not arise ex nihilo. It rested on centuries of accumulated tension: the pre-Reformers Wyclif in England and Hus in Bohemia; biblical humanism in Erasmus; the corruption of the Roman curia, from Tetzel’s indulgence campaign to a worldly papacy; the rise of princely nationalism against Rome’s universal authority; and the invention of printing around 1450, which made the rapid diffusion of ideas possible.

Divisions within Protestantism

Marburg (1529)

The colloquy at Marburg was convened by Landgrave Philip of Hesse to unite the reforming parties. Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen of the fifteen articles and separated irrevocably on the fifteenth, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Luther held a real corporeal presence, “in, with and under”; Zwingli a commemorative symbolic presence. The rupture divided Protestantism into two families that have never been fully reconciled.

Dort (1618-1619)

The first major division internal to Calvinism. The Arminian Remonstrances of 1610, five articles contesting absolute predestination, provoked a crisis in the Dutch Reformed Church. The international Synod of Dort decided for strict Calvinism in the five points later summarised as TULIP and condemned Arminianism; the Remonstrant ministers were exiled. The division has run through the whole subsequent history of Protestantism.

The revivals

The evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Wesley in England, Edwards in America and Zinzendorf in Germany, produced a further wave of divisions: Methodism separating from Anglicanism, Pietism in tension with Lutheran orthodoxy, then in the nineteenth century a proliferation of Baptist and Adventist bodies, and finally Pentecostalism at Azusa Street in 1906.