The seemingly large number of denominations, sects and traditions that fall under the banner of Christianity has been used as an argument both against Christianity as well as within Christian circles as an argument for traditions with more visible unity (e.g., Roman Catholicism) and as an argument for more ecumenism and greater unity among various traditions. Proponents of these arguments, despite coming from totally different perspectives, all seem to accept that there is *too much* division within Christianity and that this represents a fundamental problem either with Christianity itself, groups outside particular traditions or with the in which traditional Christianity understands Christian unity. So, how many denominations are there, and what implications does this have for Christianity at large? I will attempt to answer this to the best of my ability. Disclaimer: This article is from my own personal view and not meant as a definitive view of any group or body.
DEFINITIONS
To start with, we need to define terms. What is Christianity? While most would define Christianity as groups that use the Christian Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) as their teaching, the Bible and church history tells us that the definition is more precise. The least strict Biblical definition of Christianity is the belief that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came in the flesh, died and was resurrected on the third day. This underlies the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Incarnation, and the atonement. Therefore this excludes Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and various neo-gnostic groups such as Theosophists and various occultic groups that are often grouped as Christian.
Secondly, we understand what we mean by the term “denomination”. A denomination is defined as “a subgroup that operates under a common name, tradition, and identity”. Essentially, a subgroup of a larger umbrella term. Sunni Islam is a subgroup of Islam for example. Next, we have to understand how boundaries between Christian denominations are defined. What differentiates Lutherans from Dutch Reformed, or Catholics from Orthodox? Where are lines drawn? Historically and even still today, Christian denominations divide themselves according to doctrinal differences.
Lutherans divide themselves from Roman Catholics over doctrines of Grace among other disagreements. Roman Catholics separate from Oriental Orthodox on Christology. These theological differences, above political and cultural differences, are the driving force behind the divisions we see in Christianity. So, a Christian denomination then would be a subgroup that identifies as Christian and separates itself from other Christian denominations because of doctrinal differences.
Instead of going group by group, to make my job easier I have grouped Christianity into 3 major umbrella groups. The major umbrella groups include Protestantism, Conciliar Christianity and Restorationists. Let’s begin with Conciliar Christianity.
CONCILAR CHRISTIANITY
The term Conciliar Christianity, for the purposes of this article, is Christian groups that define their doctrine according to councils. For both the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox Church the ecumenical councils in the first millennium and later synods after the Great Schism infallibly define all their doctrines and are seen to be guided by the Holy Spirit. They believe these synods represent the voice of the entire church speaking in unison.
While many protestants accept the first 4 ecumenical councils they do not view conciliar decisions as infallible, separating them from this particular subcategory of Christianity. Within this particular set of Christians, you have the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church. There are also a couple of break-away groups from these three churches such as Old Calendarist groups and Old Believers from the Eastern Orthodox Church, Old Catholics and various sedevacantist groups from the Roman Catholic Church and groups such as “tsega” and “kibat” from the Oriental Orthodox Church. While both Old Calendarists and sedevacantists have had many internal schisms, very few of these schisms have amounted to significant doctrinal change to constitute a new and distinct tradition, so won’t be counted as a different denomination. So while MHFM and the Roman Catholic Institute are distinct sedevacantist groups with different histories, their origin in Roman Catholicism and lack of doctrinal distinction puts them under the same denomination in my books. A person could theoretically attend both without doctrinal compromise.
From that view, we can estimate there are around 15-20 denominations of conciliar Christianity if we have an average of 5-7 denominations for each of the 3 major groups of conciliar Christianity. We can also include the Church of the East among these as they share an extensive history with the rest. So an upper limit of 20 is the number of denominations among these.
Protestantism
Protestantism, contrary to what you might hear in some apologetic circles, is not just any Christian group that is down the line from Rome, but groups who trace themselves to the Reformation. By this definition, we have Lutherans, the Reformed Churches (Calvinists), Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists as the main Reformation movements. Anabaptists can also be considered protestants even though their movements were more radical and on the margins. The way in which Protestantism is distinguished is slightly different from what conciliar Christian groups do as their forms of church government tend to be less authoritarian as they do not put as much of an emphasis on conciliar authority with some Baptists sometimes putting almost no emphasis on conciliar or church authority outside the local church. Even with Protestant groups which maintain an episcopal form of church government similar to conciliar Christianity, there is very little open condemnation of other groups outside of the Roman Catholic church. The Synod of Dort condemned Arminianism and the Formula of Concord says that churches that contradicted any doctrine within it were not recognised as members of the catholic church. However, Baptists have a very localised ecclesiology and believe in a universal Christian church as an invisible spiritual entity and recently some Lutheran groups such as the ELCA recognise the Reformed as orthodox.
In my book, I believe they’re around 4-5 major distinctions within Lutheranism. If we look at the major Lutheran Federations, we see that some Lutheran Churches choose not to participate in some, but participate in others, such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) being part of the International Lutheran Council (ILC) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) being a part of Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (CELC). Even though there are exceptions such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya being a part of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the ILC and the Global Confessional and Missional Lutheran Forum (Global Forum) we are going to use these federations as a basis point to view Lutheranism in the 21st century. Since conservative churches regardless of the denomination are unlikely to join groups, federations or conventions that do not represent their beliefs. This is what led me to the conclusion that there are 5 major distinctions that would be considered *really* denominational according to the definition put forth in this article. Given the distinctions between conservative and progressive churches within Lutheranism, this seems like a fair number.
The Reformed have perhaps the hardest job classifying as they are mostly divided by national churches, however, the same conservative/progressive distinctions exist within them. For the shortness of the article, we’ll assume that there are 5 major distinctions in the Reformed church if we not only take into account conservative/progressive church disagreements such as the ordination of female clergy but also historical doctrinal innovations such as the South African Dutch Reformed church adopting the Hamitic hypothesis this number seems more or less fair.
Anglicanism includes the Continuing Anglicans and the Anglican Communion also known as the Episcopal church. Continuing Anglicans have a great amount of diversity doctrinally, despite *generally* being conservative churches. There are several Continuing Anglican jurisdictions, some are high church, broad church, and low church. Some are Anglo-Catholics and belong to the high church, with elaborate liturgical customs, others belong to a more Evangelical tradition. We can estimate around 10 or so Continuing Anglican denominations, so let’s give the whole of Anglicanism 12 denominations.
Methodists, probably have the least diversity among Protestants. By my count, there are 3 distinct Methodist churches, United Methodist, Free Methodist and African Methodist Episcopal Church. I won’t go into expanding on their differences here but based on the history of Methodism and the mergers that have occurred this seems to me to be the right answer.
Baptist ecclesiology being generally congregational while believing in an invisible universal church makes numbering real distinctions hard. If we start with the General Baptist and Particular Baptist distinction, then take into consideration various groups like IFBs and other Independent Baptist groups the number could be anywhere from 5 to 20 or more. I think we can estimate a number around 20 given that progressive infiltration has also affected Baptist groups while their ecclesiology focuses almost exclusively on the local church.
We’ll take Anabaptists to be 4 or 5 given that there is a case to be made of their origin being from multiple starting points.
Adding this up gives us as many as 50 Protestant denominations worldwide.
Restorationism
Restorationism refers to churches which, in the post-Reformation period and following various revival movements in the Anglosphere came to believe that the church either had lost much of the purity it had in the early church or had fallen into a great apostasy following the Apostolic Age and needed to be restored. These churches include Adventists and Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Much of the perceived diversity within Christianity can be attributed to these groups, as I believe that it would not be unfair to take the kind of numbering World Christian Encyclopaedia (source of the 33 000 number), used. This is because their theological diversity is genuinely caused by the mindset of “solo Scriptura” which is distinguished from the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura which acknowledges the wisdom in using insights of earlier Christians such as the Church Fathers in interpreting Scripture while ultimately submitting all traditions to Scripture whereas solo Scriptura just ignores all these
So given that count, we can say that there are perhaps 200 Restorationist groups, especially if we use them as the “other” category for other Trinitarian groups as many Pentecostals also have Restorationist beliefs.
Therefore, by my count, there are around 270 Christian denominations in the world today.
Significance
So, what does this mean for Christianity? Is it that the beliefs contained in Scripture are so obscure regarding salvation that we are hopeless in understanding it and therefore undermining the entire faith? No, this is just an example of human beings wanting what they want over the truth. Human beings are intelligent creatures, but our intelligence allows us to deceive ourselves into ignoring simple what is simply said and reading whatever we want into what we read. A popular tweet illustrated this clearly.
I genuinely believe that this much doctrinal diversity is because of the fallenness of man, and this answers both against those who would use the presence of doctrinal diversity as a case against Christianity and hyper-ecumenists who might use this as a reason to forego emphasis on core doctrinal issues in the name of Christian unity.
Regarding those who use it as an argument for their own Church, the presence of breakaway groups for practically each group makes that argument difficult to make as you’d have to ignore that other groups can make that argument. For example, a Roman Catholic may make the argument that the presence of so many Protestant denominations is an argument for Catholicism, an LCMS or WELS Lutheran could point to sedevacantists, Old Catholics and others as examples of Catholic denominations and say that the same argument would a apply. If the Roman Catholic says that they are not part of the RC communion so they do not factor in, the LCMS Lutheran could make the argument that anyone that is not a confessional Lutheran is not really a Lutheran and therefore does not factor in. These arguments do not make the case for any church over and above others as the type of unity that would be characteristic of the True Church does not prohibit breakaway groups. A person would have to show that the kind of unity they have within their church is different from others in such a way that making the case from unity is logical and not ad hoc.
Ultimately, the presence of multiple denominations does not change the truth of Christianity or make doctrinal differences between Christian groups meaningless. Rather, we like all Christians who have ever lived, have to strive for unity while also maintaining orthodoxy.
