hi this is Matt Baker welcome to episode three in my series on the family tree of Christian denominations so far in this series we've looked at the origins of Christianity as well as its four oldest branches Roman Catholicism Eastern Orthodoxy Oriental Orthodoxy and the Church of the east from this point forward we're now going to shift the focus toward Protestants we'll start by looking at three of the earliest branches of protestantism Lutheranism anglicanism and reformed all of which arose During the period known as the reformation and once again I'm collabing with Joshua from ready to harvest he has prepared a video comparing these three denominations in more detail along with an even older Protestant group known as the moravians so after watching this video be sure to check out his by clicking on the link in the description or pinned comment now one thing I want to point out is that if you're watching this video during the first half of 2023 the chart that I'm showing you is not yet available from our store that's because I'm basically building it as I go and I sometimes make changes based on comments that I get however the goal is that by the time the series is finished you will be able to buy the completed chart as a poster [Music] [Music] so let me Begin by showing you a few changes that I made based on comments I received on episode 2 last time I incorrectly stated that the marinite Catholics Coptic Catholics and syak Catholics all broke away from the Eastern Orthodox Church the maronites were actually independent and became affiliated with Rome during the 1100s after the first crusade and the Coptic and syak Catholics they broke away from the Oriental Orthodox Patriarchs not the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchs also I previously had the Georgian Orthodox Church stemming from the Russian Orthodox Church which is kind of true because eventually they did fall under their jurisdiction for a while however they also have very deep roots going all all the way back to the year 1010 so I've changed their position to indicate that origin instead also note that I've added dates throughout the chart in order to make the timeline of each Church's Independence more clear finally I added the old believers who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666 because they did not like certain reforms that were made at that time okay let's now talk about the Protestant Reformation which is usually said to have started in the year 1517 this was the year that the German priest Martin Luther published his 95 thesis in which he challenged the Catholic Church on several issues however it can be argued that there were actually Protestants before this date or at least Proto Protestants a good example are the waldenian named after Peter Waldo who lived in the 12th century the waldensians lived a life of poverty and believed that anyone could preach from the Bible not just priests there are actually still waldenian churches today mostly in Italy although nowadays they can be seen as being part of the reformed branch of protestantism another group of Proto Protestants were the hites named after Jan hus who lived about 100 years before Luther he sparked the Bohemian Reformation in what is today the Czech rep rep public out of this movement grew the Moravian Church which operated underground for many decades in Moravia before moving to Germany and then spreading to the US it too still exists to this day and has since adopted certain features of Lutheran pism but originally neither the waldenian nor the moravians were large enough to change the religious landscape of Europe that didn't happen until the 1500s when people like Luther and celvin arrived on the seene now the first thing you need to know about the Protestant Reformation was that it was not a single United movement instead it was a bunch of movements occurring in different places and in different ways however overall we can say that the Reformation created three initial branches of protestantism Lutheran Anglican and reformed all three resulted in the creation of new state level churches which shared Authority with secular rulers there was also a fourth Branch the anabaptists associated with what's been called The Radical Reformation they are quite different though so I'll be covering them separately in a later video so let's start with a lutherans who obviously get their name from Martin Luther four years after Luther published his 95 thesis the Catholic Church declared him to be a heretic and put a ban on sharing his ideas those ideas can be summed up with the phrases Sola FID and solar scriptura Sola means by faith alone you see Luther was angry that certain Catholic priests were abusing something called indulgences basically if you or a relative had committed a bad Sin you could just pay money to the church and get a special certificate that said if you do such and such a good deed your punishment in the afterlife will be reduced Protestants argue that the only thing that makes a person right with God is having faith in Jesus not doing good works Sola scriptura means by scripture alone according to Protestants the Bible is the ultimate Authority not the pope or the church or anyone else so like I said Luther was made an outcast and at first it looked likely that the church would find some way to have him killed however one of the main German princes offered him protection and then several other German princes supported his ideas as well you see you have to realize that there was no such thing as a United Germany at the time instead the whole area consisted of a bunch of mostly independent states that formed a loose Union called the Holy Roman Empire so what happened was that some states adopted Luther's ideas and some did not starting around 1521 now one thing I want to make clear is that the new Protestant states did not shut down all the Catholic churches and open new Lutheran ones priests and churches that were previously Catholic simply became Lutheran and more and more reforms and changes were implemented over time two of the earliest German states to embrace Lutheranism were Saxony and Hess they eventually formed a military alliance called the schmal calic league to defend themselves against the Catholic emperor during the 1530s the three main Scandinavian countries Denmark Sweden and Norway aligned themselves with Lutheranism as well cutting ties with the papacy and creating State churches instead to this day these three churches are still the largest churches in their respective countries although the only one that is still in official state church is the Church of Denmark now if we Zoom forward about 300 years to the time just after Napoleon's defeat we get the formation of the Prussian Union of churches in 1817 at this point Prussia which was Lutheran was now the dominant German State and it ended up annexing a bunch of smaller German states some of which had been calvinist which we'll be discussing in a bit so basically the Lutheran churches and the calvinist churches were merged together to form a single denomination now not everyone was happy about this especially on the Lutheran side because some felt that their beliefs were going to have to be watered down in order to accommodate the Calvinists so during the remainder of the 1800s there was a quite large migration of German lutherans to the American Midwest initially there were dozens of different Lutheran councils and synods in the US some Danish some Swedish some Norwegian Ian and some German but over time the various Church groups merged so that by the 1960s there were just three major Lutheran denominations the American Lutheran Church the Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church Missouri synot however during the 1970s a controversy arose within the Missouri synot that involved their Seminary a seminary being a place that trains clergy basically the church felt that the school was becoming too liberal so the president of the church had the president of the school fired this led to the creation of seminex meaning seminary in Exile as well as a new denomination called the aelc standing for the association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches but then during the 1980s the aelc merged with the alc and LCA to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America so nowadays there are two main Lutheran denominations in the US there's the more conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which to many people is a bit confusing because in the US the word Evangelical is generally associated with conservatives however in a Lutheran context it simply means Protestant so just keep that in mind now there is a third Lutheran denomination in the us known as the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran cot but it's quite a bit smaller than the other two generally speaking it's even more conservative than the Missouri cnot now back to the Lutheran in Germany during World War II the majority of the Prussian churches supported the Nazis due in large part to a movement known simply as German Christians Martin Luther himself had been very anti-semitic so it wasn't hard for the German Christians to use his writings to support their cause however not all Lutheran in Germany were pron notzi the lutherans who opposed Hitler led by Dietrich Bon hoofer and others eventually broke away and formed the confessing church although Bon hoofer himself was eventually captured and sent to a concentration camp where he was later executed shortly before the end of the war after the war the Prussian church was reunited and P Ed of Nazi supporters in 1948 several other German State churches joined together to form the Evangelical Church in Germany or ekd initially the Prussian church now known as the Evangelical Church of the Union remained separate but in 2004 It joined the ekd as well today the ekd which consists of both lutherans and Calvinists is the largest Protestant denomination in Continental Europe the second largest Lu denomination worldwide is actually the McAn Yus Church in Ethiopia which was founded by Swedish missionaries let's now look at the anglicans first of all I should mention that some people don't actually consider anglicans to be Protestants they actually see them as being a sort of middle position instead between Catholicism and protestantism this is because on the surface their overall structure and traditions often look a lot like Catholicism and when it comes to their beliefs they don't really have a founding Theologian such as Luther or Calvin but considering that the anglicans split from Rome around the same time as the Lutheran and reformed branches I think it is fair to say that they are indeed a type of protestantism now the main Church in this Branch was and still is the Church of England you're probably familiar with the story of King Henry VII and his Six Wives and how he argued with the Pope over whether or not he could get out of his first marriage because it had not resulted in a son because the pope would not help him Henry decided to break ties with the Catholic church and have himself declared the head of the church in his country Instead This occurred in 1534 and hence that's the date that's usually given for the birth of the Church of England now again I want to point out that it's not as if all the Catholic churches in England were simply shut down in 1534 or that new Anglican ones were established not at all the same churches and the same priests actually just continued on as usual the only difference was that they no longer reported to the pope for a long time the most senior Catholic bishop in England had been the Archbishop of Canterbury therefore when the Church of England broke away from Rome the Archbishop of Canterbury became the new spiritual leader of the church currently that person is Justin Welby but please note the Archbishop of Canterbury is by no means the pope of the Anglican Church like The ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople he's more of a first among equals the actual head of the Church of England is whoever the monarch of the United Kingdom is So currently that person is Charles III now at the time that the Church of England broke away the king of England was also the king of Ireland so around the same time the Church of Ireland came under the control of the English king as well but unlike in England most of the Irish remained loyal to the pope so what happened was that from 1536 to 1869 the Anglican Church of Ireland was the state Church even though protestantism was the minority religion nowadays most of Ireland is a republic and there's no State church and most of the Irish are still Catholics Wales by the 1500s was simply a part of England so they came under the Church of England although I should point out that in 1920 an independent church in Wales was formed when it comes to Scotland well that's actually a whole other story which we'll get to in a bit now as the English started to develop colonies all over the world they took anglicanism with them initially churches and colonies were simply part of the Church of England but over time they gained independence of special note is the Episcopal Church Church in the USA basically when the American colonies split away from Great Britain the Anglican Church there split away as well becoming known as the Episcopal Church Episcopal meaning led by Bishops over time the Anglican churches in South Africa Canada Australia Etc became independent as well so that today rather than just the Church of England there are now 42 autonomous churches that together form the Anglican communion after the Church of England the two largest are actually the Church of Nigeria and the Church of Uganda and I should note that Al together the Anglican communion is currently the third largest division within Christianity the largest being Catholicism and the second largest being Eastern Orthodoxy however that might be about to change because it looks as though the Anglican communion is on the verge of splitting in two the reason is that most of the leadership in the western churches in places like the UK US Canada and Australia support blessings for same-sex couples whereas most of the leadership in the rest of the world do not so for example the Church of Uganda and the Church of Nigeria are part of an organization called the global South Fellowship of Anglican churches just a few weeks ago in February of 2023 they voted to no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as their spiritual leader so it's yet to be seen whether the global South Fellowship will leave the Anglican communion altogether or whether some other resolution will occur and I should point out that there are even some conservative anglicans in the west who are also not happy with the current communion either so for example some Churches belonging to the Episcopal church and the Anglican Church of Canada have split away to form the Anglican Church in North America which is in communion with the global South Fellowship but not with Canterbury okay let's now look at the reformed branch which is strongly associated with the French Theologian John Calvin in fact the word reformed is often used interchangeably with calvinist now most people associate Calvinism with its purest form also called fivepoint Calvinism and often summarized by using the acronym tulip however I want to point out that there are actually several different versions of Cal Calvinism and that not all Calvinists hold strictly to the Five Points generally speaking the main difference between Calvinism and other forms of Christian theology is that Calvinists believe in some sort of predestination meaning that some people are destined for salvation and some people are not but in this video we're mostly concerned with denominations not theology so let's now look at the reformed tree although the reformed movement started in Switz Land one of the main places where it really took hold was in the Netherlands in 1571 the Dutch Reformed Church was established and for over 400 years it was the main Protestant Church in the lowlands also spreading to other countries wherever Dutch settlers traveled such as South Africa in 1892 there was a major Schism in the Dutch Reformed Church resulting in the creation of the reformed churches in the Netherlands however in 2004 they merged back together with the main Church along with a few Dutch lutherans to form the Protestant Church in the Netherlands in France those who embraced Calvinism became known as hugenots however in France Protestants remained the minority and were often persecuted they do still exist though and most of them now belong to a denomination called the United Protestant Church of France which brings us to the church of Scotland which ended up following a very different path than that of the Church of England there a theologian named John Knox LED Scotland to embrace Calvinism as well as a type of church government in which groups of presbyter or Elders make decisions thus this branch of reformed Christianity became known as presbyterianism it spread to Ireland and then also to the American colonies where eventually the Presbyterian Church of the US a was formed because of the nature of Presbyterian Church governance there were a lot of splits and mergers within American presbyterianism I won't show most of them however I do want to point out that because of the US Civil War the church was pretty much split in two in 1861 resulting in a new southern-based denomination called the pcus that division stayed in place until 1983 when the two parts were merged back together to form the Presbyterian Church USA however a decade before the merger a group of conservatives split away from the pcus to form the Presbyterian Church in America another type of Christianity that is associated with Calvinism is congregationalism in the next episode we'll be looking at the English Puritans and separatists who were among the first Europeans to settle in America they had a theology similar to the Presbyterians but had an even more democratic form of church governance basically in congregationalism every local church is independent and can make its own decisions several of the early American colonies had congregationalism as their official state religion including Massachusetts Connecticut and New Hampshire in fact three famous Ivy League schools Harvard Yale and Dartmouth were all founded by congregationalists over time though other denominations eclipsed congregationalism in the US so that nowadays it's actually one of the Lesser known branches of protestantism in 1957 the largest congregationalist denomination merged with the enr church which was a mixed Lutheran Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ okay so that's where we're going to end this episode in about 3 weeks time I'll be releasing episode 4 in which we'll mostly be looking at the anabaptists and Baptists two groups with similar names but very different histories for now I encourage you to check out the video by ready to harvest in which he Dives deeper into some of the differences between moravians Lutheran anglicans and reformed thanks for watching [Music] [Music]