Varieties of non-Catholic Christianity
Because non-Catholics disagree with each other as much or more than they disagree with the Catholic Church, there is only one true statement that can be made about all of them as a group: whatever they have kept from the Catholic Tradition unites them with Catholics; whatever they have rejected from or added to the Catholic Tradition separates them from Catholics.
There isn't even a convenient label for all of the kinds of non-Catholic Christianities; neither the ancient Eastern schismatics nor many of the recent non-denominational Christians want to be identified as "Protestants"; I still tend to lump all of the Western schismatics together as Protestants because it is a handier term than "non-Catholic Christian," but I have seen that this makes some of the more recent schismatics unhappy.
The schisms in Christianity date to different times and places:
| 1054 | Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern, Orthodox Catholicism |
| October 31, 1517 | Martin Luther inaugurates the classical, mainline Protestant schisms |
| 20th century | Rise of non-denominationalism; thousands or tens of thousands of independent Christian groups that do not want to be called "Protestant" or be identified with any kind of Christianity other than their local church. |
All it takes to launch a new version of Christianity is a Bible and a collection basket. The essence of Protestantism is private judgment. There is no Pope of Protestantism. No Protestant can tell another Protestant what to believe. This is a formula for more splintering. In the end, there are logically as many different kinds of Protestantism as their are Protestants, each one saying: "Leave me alone. I've got my God, my Bible, and my way of life. That's all I need or want."
Some identifiable groups
- Adventists
- Anabaptist
- Anglican / Episcopalian
- Baptist
- Calvinist
- Congregational
- Gospel Hall Brethren
- Lutheran
- Methodist / Wesleyan
- Non-denominational
- Pentecostal (Charismatic)
- Presbyterian
- Quakers
- Reformed
- Restoration movement
- Unitarian
- Waldensians
Sacramental
- Orthodox
- "High Church" Anglicans and Lutherans
Agrarian
- Shakers (?)
- Mennonites
- Hutterites
- Amish
Evangelical
- Revivalist
- Wesleyan Methodists
- Baptists?
Fundamentalist
- Biblical literalists
Modernist
- Feminist
- Secularized
- Bultmann
- Tillich
- Harvey Cox
- Gregory Baum
- Syncretistic--New Age
- The dancing bear
- Hindu/Buddhist Christianity
- Emerging Churches--postmodern Christianity.
Apocalyptic
- Dispensationalists
Pacifists (cuts across other categories?)
- Quakers
Different methods of grouping:
- Date of schism from Catholicism or from another schism
- Ecclesiology
- Church organization
- Relation to other Christian bodies (connected or disconnected)
- Dogmatic theology (creeds of the churches)
- Sacramental theology (liturgy)
- Relationship to society (established or free)
- Biblical hermeneutics
- patristic, neo-patristic
- monastic
- scholastic, Thomist
- idealist, Kantian, Hegelian, transcendental
- positivist, rationalist
- existentialist
- evangelical, Pentecostal
- socialist, liberationist, Marxist
- secularist, atheistic
- Catholic vs. Protestant?
- mystical (gnostic?)
- Scriptural, Biblical
- fundamentalist
Fideist
- Barthian
Existentialist
- Kierkegaardian
Possible methods of representation
- Genealogy
- Timeline
- Decision tree
- Cartesian grid
References