Today in class we went over the major splits of the Church. The first if these splits took place in 1054, when the Orthodox Church split from the Roman Catholic Church to teach what they claimed to be the continuous and "unchanging" teachings of Christianity. The Orthodox Church separated from the Roman Catholic based on their differing beliefs in the Holy Trinity: Roman Catholicism believes that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, whereas Orthodox believes that all three are perfectly equal parts of a perfect trinity. Because Roman Catholicism wanted to "change" the creed by including the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is often said that the two split up because of a phrase, this phrase being commonly referred to as filioque, which means "and the Son".
The second major splits of the Church occurred on October 31st, 1517, when Martin Luther broke away from Roman Catholicism and founded Protestantism. This split was due to the increasingly hierarchic and corrupt nature of the Catholic Church. Protestantism gives clergy the right to be female, and to marry. It also believes in consubstantiation of the Eucharist, that it is both bread and whine and body and blood, as opposed to the Catholic belief in the actual transformation into the body and blood.
We learned about several other types of Protestantism, including Anglo/Episcopalian, Presbytarian, and Ana Baptist. A conclusion was reached, however, that there is something ludicrous in any claim of being the one version of the truth, and that these splits in the Church do do little more than weaken Christianity as a whole.
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