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Church history

2,000 Years of Theology

Christ's free churches, called Anabaptists by their enemies, have never ceased from the earth. Follow them alongside the rise of Rome, the Reformers, and the errors of every age.

Apostolic & Post-Apostolic
c. AD 49 Free churches · Council

The Jerusalem Council

The church at Jerusalem, with its apostles and elders, received messengers from the church at Antioch to settle whether Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to be saved. After hearing Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James, the apostles, the elders, and the whole church agreed that Jews and Gentiles alike are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, and they sent a letter to the churches. Acts 15 records it. Unlike the later councils of bishops called by emperors, this was a local church under the apostles, receiving messengers from another.

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Early Church
c. AD 157 or 172 Free churches · Movement

The Montanist Churches

In rural Phrygia, a new convert named Montanus began prophesying in ecstasy, joined by the prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla. They claimed that the promised Paraclete was speaking through them with new authority, called for stricter discipline, and expected the New Jerusalem to descend at Pepuza. Believers in Asia met repeatedly to test the oracles and rejected them, and catholic bishops and other writers answered the movement. The Montanist churches stood apart from the bishops' party and its growing laxity, and were later suppressed by Roman law. They were separatist churches, though not accurate in every doctrine: their claim of new authoritative prophecy was a real error.

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c. AD 180 Catholic Church · Publication

Irenaeus Writes Against Heresies

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon in Gaul, whose writings Catholic tradition counts among the church fathers, wrote five books exposing and refuting the Gnostic systems, especially the school of Valentinus. He answered them from the Scriptures of both Testaments and the rule of faith, insisting that the one God who made the world is the Father of Jesus Christ. He also appealed to the succession of bishops in churches founded by apostles, especially Rome, an argument later used to support the claims of the Roman see.

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AD 251 Free churches · Movement

The Novatianist Churches Separate

After the Decian persecution, Novatian of Rome and those with him refused to restore lapsed members on easy terms and formed separate congregations. They called themselves Katharoi, the pure; older Baptist charts render the name Cathari or Puritans (not the medieval Cathars or the English Puritans). They held orthodox doctrine on the Trinity, rebaptized those who came to them from the catholic party, and lasted for centuries.

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Patristic
AD 303–311 Free churches · Historical event

The Great Persecution

Beginning in 303, Diocletian and his fellow emperors issued four edicts to destroy the churches: meeting places torn down, Scriptures burned, clergy imprisoned, and at last every believer ordered to sacrifice. The persecution was harshest in the East under Galerius and Maximinus Daia. Galerius yielded in 311 and Constantine's favor followed, but within a few years the newly favored catholic party was using the state's power against other Christians.

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AD 311–312 Free churches · Controversy

The Donatist Schism

After the Great Persecution, a party of North African bishops refused to accept Caecilian as bishop of Carthage because one of his consecrators was accused of having surrendered the Scriptures. They consecrated a rival bishop, later succeeded by Donatus. When they appealed to Constantine, councils of bishops at Rome (313) and Arles (314) ruled against them, and the state-favored catholic party began to use the empire's power against the separatists. The Donatists taught that ordinances given by unworthy clergy were invalid and rebaptized those who joined them. The division lasted for centuries. They refused to join the state-favored party and were persecuted by it, yet they kept bishops and sacramental errors of their own. Separatists were not perfect, and the line between Christ's free churches and the institution was sometimes muddy.

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AD 411–431 Heresy & error · Controversy

The Pelagian Controversy

Pelagius and his disciple Celestius taught that Adam's sin harmed only Adam and that people can obey God fully by their own free will. Augustine, catholic bishop of Hippo, answered in a long series of writings. Councils of African catholic bishops condemned the teaching, decisively at Carthage in 418, where they also condemned anyone who denied that newborns should be baptized for the remission of sins. The state church council at Ephesus condemned the Pelagians again in 431.

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AD 416–418 Catholic Church · Council

Councils Condemn Those Who Deny Infant Baptism

In the Pelagian controversy, North African councils at Carthage and Mileve (416) rejected Pelagius's teaching, and a council at Carthage (418) condemned anyone who denied that newborn infants should be baptized for the remission of sin. Some later collections credited that canon to Mileve, which is why older histories date it to 416. Infant baptism became binding church law in the catholic West, and the free churches that baptized believers only were increasingly treated as heretics.

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AD 431 Catholic Church · Council

The Council of Ephesus

Emperor Theodosius II summoned bishops of the state church to Ephesus to settle the dispute between Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril's party met before the bishops from Antioch arrived, deposed Nestorius, and affirmed that Mary is Theotokos, the bearer of God, because the one she bore is God the Son in the flesh. The Antiochene bishops met separately and deposed Cyril, and a reconciliation followed only in 433. Baptists affirm what the title first protected, that the child of Mary is God the Son, because Scripture teaches it, without the later devotion to Mary.

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Medieval
AD 1054 Catholic Church · Historical event

The East–West Schism

Papal legates laid a sentence of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia against Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who answered in kind. Long-growing differences over papal authority, the Western addition of the filioque to the Creed, and practice hardened into a lasting division between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. It split the institutional church of the old empire into Latin and Greek halves; it was not a division of Christ's churches.

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c. AD 1382 Reformers & Protestants · Publication

John Wycliffe and the English Bible

Oxford theologian John Wycliffe set Scripture above popes and councils, rejected transubstantiation, and attacked the wealth and power of the clergy. His associates produced the first complete Bible in English, translated by hand from the Latin Vulgate, and his preachers, the Lollards, carried it across England. Parliament answered with the stake, the Council of Constance condemned him, and in 1428 his bones were dug up and burned.

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Reformation
October 31, 1517 Reformers & Protestants · Publication

Luther's Ninety-Five Theses

Martin Luther, a professor at Wittenberg, challenged the sale of indulgences in ninety-five theses for academic debate. Printed copies spread across Germany within weeks. The controversy that followed led Luther to proclaim to much of Europe that sinners are justified by grace through faith alone and that Scripture stands above popes and councils. The Reformation it began reformed doctrine within Roman Catholic Europe, but it kept infant baptism and churches joined to the state.

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January 21, 1525 Free churches · Historical event

Believers Baptized in Zurich

Days after the Zurich council ordered all infants baptized and silenced those who objected, a small company of believers met in the city. Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock on his confession of faith, and Blaurock baptized the others. These Swiss Brethren held that baptism belongs to believers and that the church is a gathered company of disciples, separate from the state. Catholic and Protestant authorities alike persecuted them: Protestant Zurich drowned Felix Manz in 1527, and Catholic Austrian authorities burned Michael Sattler the same year.

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AD 1526–1536 Reformers & Protestants · Publication

William Tyndale's New Testament

Refused a bishop's patronage in England, William Tyndale went abroad and in 1526 printed at Worms the first English New Testament translated from the Greek. Smuggled copies were burned at St Paul's, and Thomas More attacked him in print. He went on to translate the books of Moses and other parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. Betrayed in Antwerp in 1535, he was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536. Through Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible, much of his wording passed into the King James Version.

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AD 1545–1655 Catholic Church · Historical event

Massacres of the Waldenses

Rome's persecution of the Waldenses did not end with the Reformation. In 1545 Waldensian villages in Provence were destroyed and their people slaughtered; in 1561 the Waldenses of Calabria were wiped out; and in 1655 the Duke of Savoy's troops massacred Waldenses in the valleys of Piedmont, a crime that stirred all of Protestant Europe. Exiled in 1686, they marched home in 1689 and received civil rights only in 1848.

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Post-Reformation
Baptist History
1609 Free churches · Historical event

An English Baptist Church Enters the Record

In Amsterdam, English Separatist exiles led by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys concluded that the New Testament gives baptism only to believers, and the congregation was baptized on profession of faith. This is when an English Baptist church enters the documentary record, not when Baptists began: Novatianists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, and Anabaptists had stood apart from Rome and baptized believers, or rebaptized converts, long before. In 1612 Helwys led a remnant home and gathered a church at Spitalfields near London, the earliest Baptist church on English soil that the records show.

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1610; synod 1618–1619 Reformers & Protestants · Council

The Remonstrance and the Synod of Dort

In 1610 followers of Jacobus Arminius presented five articles to the States of Holland: election based on foreseen faith, a redemption provided for all, the necessity of grace that may be resisted, and an open question on whether believers can fall away. The States General then called the Synod of Dort, a synod of the Dutch Reformed state church joined by Reformed delegates from abroad. It rejected the articles, Remonstrant ministers were removed and banished, and its Canons became the source of the later five points of Calvinism.

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1638 or 1639 Free churches · Historical event

A Baptist Church Enters the Record in America

In Providence, the colony Roger Williams founded on liberty of conscience, Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams, who then baptized Holliman and about ten others, forming a church of baptized believers. It is the earliest Baptist church in the American record, not the beginning of believer-baptizing churches. Williams left the church within months, but it continues today as the First Baptist Church in America. The church John Clarke gathered at Newport also traces its founding to those years.

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1644 Free churches · Publication

London's Baptist Churches Confess Their Faith

Seven Particular Baptist churches in London published a confession of faith, putting on the public record what these churches believed. Its title protested that they were falsely called Anabaptists, a name their enemies tied to the violence at Münster. Its articles affirmed the Trinity, salvation by grace through Christ's work, the gathered church of believers, and baptism by dipping the whole body under water.

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1792 Free churches · Movement

William Carey and the Modern Missions Movement

William Carey, an English Baptist shoemaker and pastor, argued in his Enquiry that Christ's commission still binds His churches. That year Baptist ministers at Kettering formed a society to send missionaries, and in 1793 Carey sailed for India, where he labored for forty years and helped translate the Scriptures into many languages. His example helped launch a century of missions by Baptist and Protestant bodies alike.

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Modern
April 6, 1830 Heresy & error · Movement

The Founding of the Latter-day Saint Church

Less than two weeks after publishing the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith organized the Church of Christ in New York, later named The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It claimed that the true church had been lost after the apostles and was now restored through a living prophet and new scripture, and it later taught doctrines of God and humanity that differ fundamentally from the biblical faith. Baptists reject the premise: Christ's church never disappeared.

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Why Theologica tells church history this way