Jesus founded One Church. Today, an incredible 40,000 individually identifiable schisms claim to be “Christian”.
All 40,000 groups profess a unifying doctrine: “I believe in Jesus and The Bible.”
Most Christian groups believe in The Holy Trinity. They believe there is One God in Three Persons, The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. That, too, is a unifying belief.
Nearly all of the 40,000 groups also believe that God blessed prophets in the Old Testament with a knowledge of coming events. Over three hundred prophecies refer to the coming of The Messiah. The predictions are so specific and numerous as to be beyond coincidence. The possibility of forgery was eliminated by the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls. They validated the ancient documents of The Old Testament.
The fulfillment of the prophecies by Jesus can be known by people from every educational and social background. All have the ability to see how the prophecies come true through Jesus. Each person may understand that the accounts of the New Testament are truthful because they were written by men who voluntarily suffered painful deaths rather than lie. Anyone of sufficient humility may choose to see the connection between the prophets and Jesus.
There is a great deal of unity on those points among the 40,000 Christian groups.
Jesus diverged from conventional reality to separate His most faithful believers. At the Last Supper/First Mass, He made it clear that He was bringing into Institutional Form the bizarre words He’d previously spoken: “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” At The Last Supper/First Mass, He provided His Church with the power to ordain priests who could transform bread and wine into His actual Body and Blood.
After His Resurrection, He spent forty days on earth with His Disciples. He worked with His Mother and The Disciples to provide The Church with an organization empowered to allow His Church to provide The Sacraments. When He finished, He ascended into Heaven. He left One Church, led by the Apostles under the direction of St. Peter.
The Holy Spirit descended to provide guidance after Jesus rose to Heaven. With The Holy Spirit’s help and protection, His Church developed and refined the necessary Doctrines as early Catholics spread throughout The Roman Empire. Over time, various groups left The Church He Founded to form their own groups of “Christians”. They came and went.
A hundred years ago, 1,600 separate churches identified themselves as “Christian”. Their beliefs were generally similar. All were appalled by abortion. Nearly all proscribed artificial birth control. They did not approve of divorce.
Today, 40,000 separate groups have varying opinions, or specialize in having no opinions at all, on divisive issues. Most of the people in most of these groups say “Our denomination is guided by The Holy Spirit.”
An often overlooked contradiction in many of the schisms must be recognized and analyzed to judge their credibility.
Can any Christian believe that The Holy Spirit, Third Person of The Holy Trinity, would say: “The Second Person of The Holy Trinity was wrong to only found One Church. I think there should be 40,000.”?
Those in the schisms have to answer “Yes.” What does that tell us? It manifests their undeniable belief that God is not One.
