IT has often been asked, if the Church founded by Jesus Christ was One, why is there today such a vast collection of Christians claiming to be a part of the Body of Christ, and yet not being in full unity with one another?

Over the centuries, various events have taken place in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church which have caused multiple schisms (i.e. divorces) to take place.  Of course, the issues surrounding these schisms often revolved around those of dogmatic beliefs. 

But as will be elaborated herein, disputes over doctrinal concerns were often also tainted by human realities of pride, power, and prejudice.  Had those disputes been handled purely based on dogmatic concerns, the schisms that had resulted from those conflicts would perhaps have not been thus tragic.

The state of the Body of Christ today is very reflective of three major disputes and the consequent schisms that took place in the history of Christianity.  One the one hand, we have the Roman Catholic Church. 

On the other hand, we have the cluster of Eastern Churches, which are themselves also generally divided into the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, both not being in full communion with each other.  Beyond that, there is also a very significant cluster of Christian communities called the "Protestants" comprising over 40,000 denominations globally.

Together, all these Christians form about 2.2 billion people, a third of the world population.  Unfortunately, they do not all exist in a state of full unity.  There is much to be learnt from the human dimension - the inner politics - which had been largely responsible for further tarnishing the already complicated relationships arising from the pertinent dogmatic disagreements.

The Patristic Period

The predominant concern of the Church Fathers throughout this era lay with the natures of Jesus Christ.  Was he human or divine?  Did he have one or two natures?  If he had two natures, how did the two natures relate with each other?

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, the Council drafted the now well-known Chalcedonian formulation which became the watershed for all subsequent dogmas about Jesus Christ.  The declaration contained several phrases crafted with the goal of explicitly rejecting the various rampant heresies about Jesus: "acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation".

At the same time, the Council also acknowledged that even though the orthodox position on Christ's natures was that he possessed two natures, there was no single interpretation for how the two natures related to each other.  Since these variances in interpretations had to be accounted for, the Council went so far to only give its weight to whatever consensus it could find.

This position of the Council was cause for grave concern on the part of the Eastern Church that is today known as the Oriental Orthodox Churches, as they had a particular emphasis on the unity of Christ's two natures.  Of course, the Council would not include this interpretation into its formulation so as to avoid foreseeable controversy on the matter.  Pope Dioscorus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, therefore refused to accept the formulation promulgated by the Council of Chalcedon.

Now, although what followed this dispute was a consequent schism between those who had rejected the Council's formulation and the rest of the Church, the schism was not born purely out of theological dispute.  There were other human agendas involved too.

The Bishops of Alexandria had been leaders in the first three Ecumenical Councils prior to this fourth one at Chalcedon.  The dominance of these Alexandrian bishops in those Councils had become the cause of envy among many from the other Churches.  Furthermore, the dominance of the Alexandrian view in those earlier councils had led to the excommunication of the Bishops of Constantinople, which was the capital of the Empire.

In fact, just two years prior to this most recent Council, there was another Council that had been convened, and the Bishop of Rome (Pope Leo) was excommunicated as a result of the meeting having been overly steered by the Bishop of Alexandria.  In the first place, this was one main reason that the Emperor Marcianus subsequently assembled 600 Bishops in the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), so as to render the Council two years prior to that null and void.

So beyond the theological concern, there was quite obviously a nationalistic ego involved in the decisions of the Council.  The other patriarchs had a vendetta against the Bishops of Alexandria for the way the latter had steered the previous Councils in exclusion of those other Bishops.  For them, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD was payback time!

The Medieval Period

The next major schism which took place in 1054 AD is well known to have been caused by the filioque controversy. 

One of the most significant events in the early history of the Church was agreement throughout the Roman Empire, both East and West, on the Nicene Creed (i.e. the "I believe").  It was intended to bring doctrinal stability to the Church.

However, over time, a disagreement arose over the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed (an addition to the part of the text which referred to the Holy Spirit "proceeding from the Father").  The Western Church had subsequently added the filoque phrase (Latin, "and from the Son") to the Creed.  The filioque is first recorded as having been added to the creed at the Third Council of Toledo (589 AD), and by the 9th century, it was used in the Western church routinely until this day.

For the Eastern Church, the filioque indicated a double procession of the Holy Spirit and was unacceptable.  In other words, the Holy Spirit could not proceed from two sources (i.e. the Father and the Son).  The Eastern Church insisted that there was only one source of being within the Trinity.  The Father alone was the sole and supreme cause of all things, including the Son and the Spirit within the Trinity.

Theological though this argument may have been, the consequent schism between the Eastern Church and the Western Church was tainted by many political factors.  The truth was, the relationship between East and West had long been embittered by rivalry for dominance, and the filioque controversy was merely the last straw that had broken the camel's back.

For one thing, there was rivalry over the dominance of language, as the West was Latin-speaking and the East Greek-speaking.  Pope Leo IX of the Western Church and Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople had both suppressed the use of the Greek and Latin languages in their respective domains in order to assert the significance of their own languages. 

For another thing, there had all along already been disputes over whether the Patriarch of Rome (the Pope) should be considered a higher authority than the other Patriarchs.  All five Patriarchs of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church were in agreement that the Patriarch of Rome should receive higher honours than the other four, but they disagreed on whether he had juridical authority over the other four. 

In 1054, Roman legates had traveled to Cerularius to deny him the title "Ecumenical Patriarch" and to insist that he recognise the Catholic claim to be the head and mother of the churches.  At Cerularius' refusal to concede to the demands of the Wetern legates, the leader of the Latin contingent excommunicated Cerularius, and he in turn excommunicated the legates.

But in fact, the Western legates' acts were of doubtful validity because Pope Leo IX had died, while Patriarch Cerularius's excommunication was applicable only to the legates personally and not to the Western Church as a whole.  Still, such political rivalry had caused a schism that was never to be bridged again.

In 1965, the Western Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople had both nullified the anathemas (i.e. condemnations) of 1054 AD.  But healing and communion after over 900 years of mutual discord requires much more than mere retraction of past condemnations.

The Reformation Period

A new period of Western Christianity began in the 16th century.  The most significant development was the Protestant Reformation in 1521.  The Reformation was a complex affair.  Its agenda went beyond "reforming" the doctrine of the Church.  It addressed social, political and economic issues.

It began with Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and a biblical theologian.  He challenged what seemed to be the predominant teachings of the Catholic Church at that time.  For example, he asserted that salvation was attainable through Christ alone without the mediation of the Church, that the Bible alone was the source of authority, and that all baptised Christians had the right of priesthood.

Luther was convinced that the Catholic Church was corrupt in its ways and had lost sight of the central truths of Christianity, the most important of which, for him, was the doctrine of justification (i.e. God's act of declaring a sinner righteous) by faith alone through God's grace alone in Christ alone.

Luther's teachings against the Catholic Church and the Pope changed the course of Western civilisation. He was excommunicated by the Catholic Church in 03 January 1521 upon refusal to recant his teachings which were deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.  He subsequently married a nun, Katherina von Bora, who also defected from the Catholic Church.  She was 26 and he was 42.

As the Reformation spread, the three cities that became the centres of the Reformation were Germany (Martin Luther and the University of Wittenberg), Geneva (John Calvin), and Zurich (Huldrych Zwingli).

The key to Luther's success lay not so much in convincing the masses of his doctrinal correctness; it lay in responding to the political climate of the day.  Luther's Germany was nothing like modern-day Germany.  Germany at that time was divided in multiple territories with different royal governing authorities. 

In order to push his agenda for reform, he had done much to garner the support of the princes of the various German territories.  The strategy he had adopted was that of presenting to them the semblance of a Catholic reformer rather than a heretical revolutionary.

So as to gain the favour of the princes, Luther assisted them in quelling revolts by the lower classes of society in the name of religion.  Apart from the suppression of the lower classes, the middle classes of northern Germany, namely the well-educated urbanites, would appeal to religion in order to express their discontent according to the cultural medium of the day. 

The great emergence of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses without the regulatory impositions of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices gave rise to the revolt for self-motivated purposes.  To many of the middle class masses, papal institutions were rigid.  It therefore made sense for them to jump onto Luther's anti-papal bandwagon.

In Northern Germany, the burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration at having to collect taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to Rome with little or nothing left for themselves.  In Northern Europe, Luther appealed to the growing national consciousness of the German states because he denounced the Pope for involvement in politics as well as religion. 

Moreover, he backed the nobility, who were now justified in crushing the Great Peasant Revolt of 1525 and confiscating church property because of Luther's Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms.  This explains the attraction that Lutheranism held for some of the territorial princes.

With the church now subordinate to and the agent of civil authority and peasant rebellions condemned on strict religious terms, Lutheranism and German nationalist sentiment were ideally suited to coincide.  With this, the Reformation was a success and the rest was history.

Politics, Pride, Power and Prejudice

Thus obvious is the smearing of the Church's doctrinal disputes with disgraceful political endeavours by her children.  Of course, one must not be mistaken and falsely conclude that the Body of Christ would have remained in full unity had those political motives been absent. 

Unity must always serve the priority of truth and cannot be achieved at the expense of truth.  Hence, it was not wrong that separations might have had to take place in the face of doctrinal controversies accompanied by efforts to preserve the orthodox teachings of the Church.

However, the bitterness of the disputes tainted with human motives is another issue all together.  Because of such political motives involved in the processes, often accompanied by lack of mutual respect for the dignity of others, we cannot conclude with an utterly clear conscience that the historical schisms of the Church were orchestrated by the Holy Spirit in His effort to preserve truth among the people of God.  In large measure, the disputes had more to do with power and dominance than truth.