All Christian denominations explained in 12 minutes

There's so many different forms of Christianity, so how do we tell them apart, aside from like, stereotypes that may or may not be true? To put it simply, they're all called Christian because they all worship Christ. They all agree who Jesus Christ is. He's truly human and truly God. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He died for our sins. He rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and will return to judge the living and the dead. These are the essentials of Christianity, which are contained in the Nicene Creed, the early church document that all these different churches use. So they're similar in that they're all Christian, but they still have a lot of differences. Let's start with the Baptists. There's a lot that makes Baptists unique, but the main thing is baptism. Wait, no, not like that. Like that, yeah, they don't baptize babies, because they think baptism is a personal and individual choice. Most other Christians say baptism is what makes you Christian, but they think baptism is how you proclaim that you've already become Christian, by having a personal born-again experience, where you go from not Christian to Christian. So they're very individualistic, which is why they're most common in the southern United States, and it's all about a personal relationship for them. So that means the church itself and its religious rituals matter a lot less than having a personal relationship with Jesus. And the religious rituals the church does do, like the Lord's Supper, are really just symbolic. This is called being low church, where the church as an institution doesn't really matter that much. So because the church is really just a fellowship of individual believers, it doesn't really matter how the church is structured, as long as they're following the Bible. So that means most independent or non-denominational churches are really just Baptist in terms of their beliefs. Yeah, so that's low church. An example of something more high church would be Anglican, or Episcopalian. Episcopal just means they're run by a hierarchy of bishops, because the church is very structured. So they try to hold a balance between tradition, reason, and scripture. They're very eclectic, meaning they try to take the best parts from various other traditions, and that means they have a lot of diversity of belief. Some Anglicans seem more Catholic, and others seem more Protestant. And a lot of Anglicans see themselves as like a middle way between the two. So it's difficult to understand what Anglicanism really is, but don't worry, they don't understand it either. But yeah, so Anglicanism still has a very rich tradition, and a lot of the prayers and hymn books that people use come from Anglicanism. In fact, a whole new branch sprung out of the Anglican tradition. The Methodists, or Wesleyans. You know that little triangle the Anglicans have of reason, scripture, and tradition? The Methodists add a fourth point and turn it into a quadrilateral. They add spiritual experience, because John Wesley's whole deal was he wanted the Anglican church to be more spiritually active. Fire represents the Holy Spirit, which is why a lot of Methodist logos have fire in them. And of the three persons of the Trinity, Methodist thinking is centered a lot around the Holy Spirit, who empowers us on the path, or the method, that leads to righteousness. And we all have free will to join or leave the path. Free will is very important for Methodists. And at the end of the path is entire sanctification, where in this life we can improve so much that we stop sinning completely. And along this path, there's a lot of service to the poor and working for justice, as we strive for spiritual perfection. And certain groups arose out of Methodism that really focused on that part. The Holiness movement says that if you really have the Spirit, you're going to pursue holiness. And the Pentecostals go a step further and say that that includes speaking in tongues. So groups that spawned from these movements include the Salvation Army, the ones that are always doing charity and stuff, the Church of the Nazarene, a big holiness denomination, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, another big holiness denomination from Nigeria, the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal group, and the Church of God in Christ, a historically black American denomination. All right, next up are the Lutherans. They're So basically, Luther thought the Bible had two messages, really. Law and gospel. The law explains that you're not good enough, but the gospel says that's okay because Jesus is. So Lutheran thinking of the three persons of the Trinity is centered a lot around Jesus and his gospel. And they want to make sure that the gospel message is pure. Are you looking to your own personal experiences to know if you're saved? Don't do that. You need to be looking to Christ. How do you know that what Christ did is for you? It was given to you in baptism, because baptism saves. Want to experience Jesus now? Again, don't look to your personal experiences. You need to look to something outside of yourself. Specifically, the Lord's Supper, where the body and blood of Christ are really present and given for you. That's right. When Jesus said, this is my body, he meant it because is means is. Seriously, you do not want to start a fight with a Lutheran about this. Now, some Lutherans didn't like how the Lutheran tradition was so skeptical of personal experience, and they wanted to focus more on it. So they became the Pietists, and that's how you get things like the Evangelical Free Church. Presbyterians are up next. They're also straight out of the Reformation, and their beliefs are called Reformed. Reformed thinking is very God-centered, so they probably focus most on God the Father. Specifically, God's sovereignty and God's covenant. What? Sorry. The way God's in control of everything and the promises that God makes. Yeah, Reformed people use a lot of big theology words, like infralapsarian, but the reason they'd use big theology words is because they're very focused on theology, because theology is the study of God, and they're very focused on God. They're theology nerds, and they're also kind of stereotyped as the nerdy Christians in general, and they're the most likely of all Christians to study science and stuff. But yeah, anyway, God's sovereignty and covenant are the lens through which the Reformed view all of Christianity. If God's in control of everything, that includes who will and will not be saved. Yes, Reformed theology is Calvinism, which is the idea that God's already decided whether or not you'll be saved. However, everyone forgets about this part of Calvinism, which is that baptism is a covenant promise that saves as long as you don't reject the promise. So salvation's still by faith alone. Reformed worship is also very regulated, so if you like speaking in tongues, altar calls, wild worship music, and images of Christ, don't expect to have fun at a Presbyterian church. Instead, you'll find very orderly worship, psalm singing, people sitting in the back of the church, and of course, Holy Communion, where we do receive the body and blood of Christ, but he's not physically in the elements, we receive him spiritually. And Presbyterians aren't the only Reformed churches, there's also the Dutch Reformed, the Swiss Reformed, and maybe even the Puritan Congregationalists, who have basically the same theology, they're only different in terms of geography and history. There's also a big group of people that call themselves Reformed, but they're only defining Reformed as believing in predestination and not necessarily the other parts of Reformed theology. There's also a group of Protestants that were Protestant before Protestants existed, and speaking of which, all these groups that I've talked about so far are called Protestant. But what does that even mean? Is there anything that unites all Protestants? Yes, there are the traditional Protestant beliefs, but a lot of modern Protestants don't really believe those anymore, especially because each Protestant tradition has liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning denominations that each have their own liberal and conservative factions within them, and the most radically liberal ones don't believe anything Christian anymore at all. There are some Protestant churches that have lesbian pastors and leftist political symbols, and there's others that make the news for their right-wing beliefs. Some Protestant churches look very traditional and similar to Catholics, other Protestant churches look very contemporary and don't resemble a traditional church at all. So is there anything that all of these different Protestant groups agree on? Yes, there actually is one thing. It's that the Bible has more authority than the church. A conservative Lutheran would say both the Bible and church tradition have a lot of authority, but the Bible has slightly more. A fundamentalist Baptist would say the Bible has a lot of authority, and church tradition doesn't have any authority at all, really. A progressive pastor would say neither the Bible nor church tradition have much authority at all, but the Bible still has a little bit more given the church's history of patriarchy and colonization. And that's why there are so many different Protestant denominations, because if the ultimate authority is the Bible and not the church, it's okay for the church to split if people have different interpretations of parts of the Bible, and for Protestants, that's okay. They can still be united spiritually as the church, and they can usually still take communion with each other. Now this idea is rejected by all the churches I'm about to go over because they all claim to be the one true church founded by Jesus and his apostles, and they think that the church assembled the Bible so the Bible can't possibly have more authority than the church. The most famous of these churches are the Catholics. They think that St. Peter was given the keys to the kingdom by Jesus, making him the leader of the church, or the pope, and that ever since him there's been an unbroken chain of popes leading all the way up to the current pope, and the authority that Peter had is currently held by the pope because of apostolic succession. It's all about authority for the Catholics. They think the church has the authority to forgive sins, cast out demons, and interpret the scriptures. So the church itself is the kingdom of God here on earth, and salvation is about participating in the church. So that's why they reject salvation by faith alone. They'd still say salvation is by faith, but faith includes cooperating with grace and participating in the church, specifically through the seven sacraments, the most important of which is Holy Communion, where the church has the authority to do a miracle called transubstantiation, where the bread and wine literally change into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. This is how we commune with Christ and all of his church on earth and in heaven. Yes, they believe that saints that have died and gone to heaven are still part of the church, which is why they pray to the saints and the Virgin Mary, not out of worshiping them, but just like asking them to pray for us. What else do they teach? Well, it's a lot, so I can't really tell you, but you could look it up for yourself because Catholics have an answer to basically everything. Catholicism really wants to figure out everything about everything, and that's how they helped contribute to the development of modern science. Now, the Eastern Orthodox are the exact opposite. They leave most things up to mystery, and they even try to define God in terms of what he isn't, and they say we can't even really understand what God is, we can only perceive God's energies through our mystical spiritual experiences. The Eastern Orthodox also claim to be the one true church, but they had a big nasty divorce with the Catholics about a thousand years ago. It was about a lot of things, but the biggest one was about the Trinity. You see, all the churches I've already talked about have this model of the Trinity, where the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But the Orthodox reject that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, saying that the Holy Spirit only proceeds from the Father. Why? It's complicated, but the biggest reason is that it's not part of their tradition, and in Orthodoxy, tradition matters most. That's why all the trad people online often end up becoming Orthodox. So how does salvation work? Now, the Orthodox reject Western ideas of original sin, and they don't like to talk in legal terms the way that the Catholics and Protestants do, so instead they talk about theosis, where salvation is about oneness with God and uniting ourselves to God and sort of partaking in the divine nature itself. And that happens through the holy mysteries of the And there's another group of churches that claim to be the Orthodox churches, the Oriental Orthodox ones, these churches. You don't hear about them as much because they've spent most of their existence as islands of Christianity in a vast sea of Islam, and they're pretty similar to the Eastern Orthodox, so why have they been separate for almost 1600 years? Well, you see, the Eastern Orthodox, along with all the other churches we've already discussed, say Jesus has two natures, a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. The Oriental Orthodox say that Jesus has one nature that's fully human and fully divine. I know, it's completely different. Okay, so that's pretty much all of them. There's some that I didn't include because it's unclear whether they believe the essentials of Christianity, and there's also some I didn't include because they very clearly do not believe the essentials of Christianity, but the vast majority of the churches do believe the essentials. And that's what's really important, because they do disagree on a lot, and there's a lot of diversity within these churches, but the fact that they all can agree on these essentials suggests that the essentials are true. And all this diversity is what we should expect from a religion that has covered the entire world over the course of 2,000 years.