Why Did Christianity Develop So Many Denominations?

Anyone looking at Christianity from outside soon notices the signs on church buildings: Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Catholic, Orthodox and countless independent fellowships. Jesus prayed that his followers would be one. Why, then, do they appear to be so many?

The question is asked in good faith by skeptics, new believers and Christians of every tradition. It is also asked less innocently: a figure of "33,000 Protestant denominations" has circulated for years in Catholic and Orthodox apologetics as proof that Scripture alone leads to chaos, and skeptics use similar numbers to argue that no church can know the truth. This article traces the main lines of division, checks what the famous statistic measures, and sets out how the Orthodox Church understands unity, with Protestant and Catholic replies stated fairly.

In brief

Christians have quarrelled since the apostolic age, but lasting separations came in stages. After the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), communities in the Persian Empire and in Egypt, Syria and Armenia ended up outside the communion of the imperial Church; modern dialogues have concluded that some of those breaks rested partly on different uses of the same terms. The estrangement of Rome and the Eastern churches grew over centuries, and 1054 is a conventional date for it. The Reformation produced several Protestant families at once, because its appeal to Scripture as final authority did not settle disputes such as the Eucharist; national churches, revivals and moral crises multiplied church bodies further. The "33,000 denominations" figure comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia (2001), which counted all of world Christianity, not Protestants alone, and counted each church separately in every country where it exists. It measures organizations, not distinct doctrines. The Orthodox Church holds that the Church's unity is a given reality, kept in one faith and one Eucharist, and that it is not a federation of denominations. Orthodox Christians also have to admit their own schisms.

Thesis: Christianity's divisions arose from real disputes over doctrine and authority, compounded by language, politics and culture; the popular statistics exaggerate them, and the Orthodox case for visible unity is best made with honesty about Orthodoxy's own failures and without caricaturing Protestants.

Division is as old as the Church

The New Testament does not describe a golden age without conflict. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: "each of you says, 'I am of Paul,' or 'I am of Apollos,' or 'I am of Cephas,' or 'I am of Christ.' Is Christ divided?" Later in the same letter he wrote that "there must also be factions among you, that those who are approved may be recognized among you."¹ Division was treated as a wound, never as a normal state of affairs.

The same writers insisted on unity. Christ prayed "that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You," and the letter to the Ephesians urges Christians to keep "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," because there is "one body and one Spirit ... one Lord, one faith, one baptism."² Christians disagree about what kind of unity is meant: a visible communion sharing one Eucharist and one faith, or a spiritual fellowship that can survive outward separation.

The first lasting breaks: Ephesus and Chalcedon

The oldest separations still existing came out of fifth-century debates about how Christ is both God and man. In 431 a council at Ephesus condemned Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, who objected to calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos, the one who gave birth to God. As an Orthodox Church in America (OCA) history notes, Bishop John of Antioch and his bishops arrived four days after the council had opened and did not accept the decision, and the quarrel was resolved only in 433 by the Formulary of Peace.³ Christians in the Persian Empire, whose church is known today as the Assyrian Church of the East, came to stand outside the communion of the imperial Church as these controversies hardened.

Twenty years later, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon confessed Christ as one person in two natures, united "without change, without confusion, without division, without separation." Many Christians in Egypt, Syria and Armenia refused this definition, holding to St Cyril of Alexandria's phrase "one nature of the Word of God Incarnate." The OCA's history records that the Chalcedonians called them "Monophysites"; today they are usually called the Oriental Orthodox churches, among them the Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian churches.⁴ The site's article What Did the Council of Chalcedon Actually Define About Jesus Christ? explains the definition itself.

The modern dialogues are striking. In 1989 the official joint commission of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches agreed: "We have inherited from our fathers in Christ the one apostolic faith and tradition, though as churches we have been separated from each other for centuries." A second statement in 1990 said both families had maintained "the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith ... though they have used Christological terms in different ways," and recommended lifting the old anathemas.⁵ In 1994 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church of the East went further, saying that past divisions "were due in large part to misunderstandings."⁶

These statements are not the last word: full communion between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox has not been restored, and questions remain about the later councils and the figures each side once condemned. Still, {{moderate: some ancient divisions rested partly on different uses of the same theological terms rather than on wholly different faiths.}}

East and West: why 1054 is a conventional date

Textbooks often date the split between Rome and Constantinople to 1054. As the OCA's church history tells it, Cardinal Humbert placed a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia on July 16 against Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who answered with his own excommunication of the legates. The same history stresses that relations between some Eastern churches and Rome "continued to be relatively friendly for quite some time," and that the schism "gradually deepened and spread," above all after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204.⁷

When Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I lifted the mutual excommunications in 1965, their joint declaration observed that the censures of 1054 "were not intended to break ecclesiastical communion between the Sees of Rome and Constantinople," and that the actual rupture came from "lack of understanding and mutual trust" over a long period.⁸ The underlying disputes over papal authority and the Filioque were real (see Why Did the Orthodox and Catholic Churches Split?), but 1054 symbolizes a slow estrangement between two communions, each claiming continuity with the ancient Church, not the founding of either.

The Reformation and the question of authority

The great multiplication of separate churches began in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther's protest of 1517 began as a call to reform the Western Church, but within a generation Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist and Anglican churches stood apart from Rome and often from one another. (See The Protestant Reformation: What Happened and Why It Still Matters.)

At the centre was the question of authority. The Reformers held that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith, a principle later called sola scriptura. The Westminster Confession (1647) teaches that "the whole counsel of God" necessary for salvation is "either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture." It admits that "all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all," but holds that what is necessary for salvation is clear enough that "not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them." When a passage is disputed, "the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself."⁹

The difficulty showed itself early. In October 1529 Luther, Zwingli and other Reformers met at Marburg to unite the Protestant cause. They agreed on fourteen articles and on most of the fifteenth, on the Lord's Supper, but that article recorded that "we have not been able to agree at this time, whether the true body and blood of Christ are corporally present in the bread and wine." Each side was asked to "display towards the other Christian love, as far as each respective conscience allows."¹⁰ Both sides appealed to the same Bible, and the Lutheran and Reformed churches went separate ways.

The Reformers believed they were recovering the one Church, not founding many. The Augsburg Confession (1530) defines the Church as "the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered," and says that "to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments."¹¹ That is a serious account of unity, but it left open who decides, when sincere believers disagree, what the Gospel rightly taught is. The historian Alister McGrath has described the Protestant "dangerous idea" as the conviction "that all Christians have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves." McGrath sees in it the source of Protestantism's capacity for renewal; critics of Protestantism see in it the root of its divisions.¹² For a fuller treatment of the doctrine, see What Is Sola Scriptura?

Revivals, nations and new churches

Doctrine was never the only factor. State churches followed political borders, emigration carried them to America, where new groups could form freely, and revivals produced Methodists, Holiness churches, Restorationists and Pentecostals, many of which divided again. Where Did Non-Denominational Christianity Come From? traces the line to today's independent congregations.

Moral crises split churches too. In the Methodist Episcopal Church, the question of slavery "came to a head in 1844," when a bishop's marriage to a slaveholding woman led to a plan of separation; the southern conferences organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in Louisville in 1845, and the division "lasted until 1939."¹³ The historian Mark Noll has argued that in the American crisis a "fundamental disagreement existed over what the Bible had to say about slavery," with both sides confident that Scripture was on theirs.¹⁴ A shared Bible did not by itself produce a shared judgment. Yet much modern division is organizational rather than doctrinal, and that distinction matters when we turn to the numbers.

How many denominations are there really?

The figure most often quoted comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia (second edition, 2001), edited by David Barrett, George Kurian and Todd Johnson. As quoted by the Catholic writer Scott Eric Alt, the encyclopedia states that world Christianity "consists of 6 major ecclesiastico-cultural blocs, divided into 300 major ecclesiastical traditions, composed of over 33,000 distinct denominations in 238 countries" (vol. 1, p. 16).¹⁵ {{strong: The 33,000 figure counts all of world Christianity, not Protestants alone.}}

Two features of that count change its meaning. First, it is not a Protestant total. Alt's breakdown of the encyclopedia's categories gives about 22,000 "Independents," 9,000 Protestants, 1,600 "Marginals," 781 Orthodox, 242 Catholic and 168 Anglican bodies. Among the Independents and Marginals, Alt notes, are Latter-day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses. His verdict on 33,000 Protestant denominations: "There are not anywhere close to it."¹⁶ Second, a "denomination" is counted country by country. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell, which compiles these figures, defines a denomination as "an organized Christian church, tradition, religious group, community of people, aggregate of worship centre, usually within a specific country," and explains that "the presence of the Catholic Church in the world's 234 countries results in 234 Catholic 'denominations.'" On this method the Center reported "45,000 Christian denominations in the world in 2019."¹⁷ The Pew Research Center, which used the Center's data, warned that such totals are "the global sum of the total number of denominations in each country" and that "many denominations are present in more than one country."¹⁸

So the statistic measures organizations, not rival creeds. By the same method the Orthodox Church, which understands itself as one Church, appears as 781 "denominations." Most Christians belong to a few large communions: Pew estimated that about half of all Christians are Catholic, 37 percent Protestant and 12 percent Orthodox.¹⁹ Protestant fragmentation is real, but the "33,000 Protestant denominations" line does not describe it accurately.

An Orthodox view of unity

The Orthodox Church does not see itself as one denomination among many. Its dogmatic conviction, stated in the Creed, is that there is "one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," and that this Church is a visible communion of local churches sharing one faith, one Eucharist and the apostolic ministry of bishops. The 2016 Council in Crete put it this way: "The Orthodox Church founds the unity of the Church on the fact of her establishment by our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the communion in the Holy Trinity and in the sacraments." It added that, "in accordance with the ontological nature of the Church, her unity can never be perturbed," yet it "accepts the historical name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions that are not in communion with her."²⁰ That document is significant but not universally received: four autocephalous churches, including the Russian Orthodox Church, did not attend the council.²¹

The nineteenth-century Russian lay theologian Alexei Khomiakov gave a classic account. "The Church is one," he wrote, because its unity "follows of necessity from the unity of God." Division is a fact only in relation to us: "The Church is one, notwithstanding her division as it appears to a man who is still alive on earth." He was sharp about the Protestant principle ("The man who takes Scripture only, and founds the Church on it alone, is in reality rejecting the Church"), but he was equally clear that the Church "does not judge the rest of mankind," leaving those outside her, "whether alien from the Church, or united to her by ties which God has not willed to reveal to her," to "the judgment of the great day."²²

Three levels should be kept apart. As dogma, the Orthodox Church confesses that the Church is one and cannot be divided into denominations. As common teaching, it holds that the Church is found in its fullness in the Orthodox communion, which keeps the faith of the Ecumenical Councils (see How the Orthodox Church Knows Which Councils Are Ecumenical). As a matter of theological opinion, Orthodox writers differ about the status of baptisms, sacraments and grace outside Orthodoxy, and the Crete document itself calls for clarification of "the whole ecclesiological question," especially other churches' teaching on sacraments, grace, priesthood and apostolic succession. Many Orthodox writers regard Protestants not as strangers but as believers baptized in the name of the Trinity, separated from the fullness of the Church's life.

From an Orthodox perspective, the main reason for so many denominations is the loss of a shared, living authority to interpret Scripture: the Church's Tradition, councils and eucharistic communion. Once Scripture was set against the community that received it, disputes over its meaning had no ordinary way to be resolved. That is an argument, not a proven historical law, and it faces serious objections.

The strongest objections

"Sola scriptura does not mean every man for himself"

Classical Protestants reject the charge that their principle is individualism. The Reformed theologian Keith Mathison distinguishes the Reformation teaching, in which Scripture is the final authority interpreted within the church and its creeds, from a later populist version he calls "solo Scriptura." He writes: "The reformers' appeal to 'Scripture alone,' however, was never intended to mean 'me alone.'"²³ Lutheran and Reformed churches kept confessions, synods and ordained teachers.

Response. This is a fair correction, and Orthodox writers should not attack a position classical Protestants do not hold. Mathison himself says that "in many segments of the evangelical world" the revisionist view is "by far the predominant view now." And the question remains where final authority rests when confessional churches disagree, as Lutherans and Reformed did at Marburg.

"Unity is spiritual, not organizational"

Many Protestants argue, with the Augsburg Confession, that true unity lies in agreement on the Gospel, not in one institution, so believers who confess the same Christ are already one.

Response. Orthodox Christians agree that unity is first spiritual, a gift of the Holy Spirit. But the New Testament ties that unity to visible things: one baptism, one bread ("we, though many, are one bread and one body," 1 Corinthians 10:17, NKJV) and a common apostolic teaching. Christians who cannot share the Eucharist are not yet one in the early Church's sense, however warmly they love one another.

"The Orthodox are divided too"

This objection is the strongest, and it should be admitted plainly. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox have been out of communion since the fifth century. In October 2018 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church broke eucharistic communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate after Constantinople moved to grant autocephaly to a church in Ukraine.²⁴ The Council of Crete met without four churches.

Response. These are real failures and an Orthodox apologist should not hide them. The Orthodox claim is that the Church keeps one faith and treats schisms as wounds to be healed, not as acceptable options. Still, the argument "Orthodoxy is visibly united, Protestantism is not" is weaker than it often sounds.

"Unity requires the successor of Peter"

The Second Vatican Council taught that the one Church of Christ "subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure."²⁵ Catholics argue that without a universal visible head, even the Orthodox have no final means to settle disputes, as Ukraine shows.

Response. Orthodox Christians answer that the early Church settled its great disputes through councils received by the whole Church, not by papal decision, and that the papal claims were themselves a major cause of division in the West and between East and West. This disagreement remains unresolved.

"So many churches prove Christianity is false"

Disagreement among interpreters does not show there is nothing true to interpret, any more than scientific disputes show the world has no structure. And the inflated statistic overstates the disagreement: Catholics and Orthodox alone, about six in ten Christians on Pew's estimate, confess the Nicene Creed, as do most historic Protestant churches.

What we can say confidently

• Division among Christians is as old as the New Testament, and Scripture treats it as a wound, not a norm.
• The oldest surviving separations date to the fifth century, after Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). {{very-strong: Modern official dialogues have concluded that some of those breaks involved different uses of the same terms.}}
• 1054 is a conventional date for a long East-West estrangement; the 1965 declaration said the censures were aimed at persons, not churches.
• Protestant division began early, as the Marburg Colloquy (1529) shows, and multiplied through national churches, emigration, revivals and moral crises such as slavery.
• The "33,000 denominations" figure covers all of Christianity, counts church bodies country by country and measures organizations, not distinct doctrines.
• The Orthodox Church confesses one undivided Church but has real schisms of its own.

What remains disputed

• How far sola scriptura itself, rather than politics, culture and individualism, explains Protestant fragmentation. {{debated: Whether sola scriptura is the main cause of Protestant fragmentation.}}
• Whether the Christological divisions of the fifth century were wholly or only partly verbal.
• The status of non-Orthodox baptisms and churches, on which Orthodox theologians and local churches differ.
• Whether visible unity requires a universal primate (the Catholic view), conciliar communion (the Orthodox view) or agreement in the Gospel (the classical Protestant view).
• How many genuinely distinct Christian bodies exist; any count depends on definitions.

Conclusion

Christianity has many denominations because Christians have disagreed about real things: who Christ is, what the Eucharist is, where authority lies. Those disagreements were sharpened by empires, languages, nations and sin, and sometimes by plain misunderstanding. Orthodox Christians should stop repeating a statistic their own tradition would fail by the same method.

The Orthodox Church still offers a distinctive answer. It does not invite Christians to choose the least objectionable denomination, but to return to the one Church of the Creed, the communion of the Fathers and Councils that Orthodoxy believes it has kept. It can do so credibly only with humility, admitting its own divisions and honouring the faith of Christians it is not yet in communion with. The Crete council described the Orthodox Church as one which "prays unceasingly 'for the union of all.'" That prayer, in the end, is the Orthodox response to the question: unity is Christ's gift before it is our achievement, and it is received in repentance on every side.

Notes

1. 1 Corinthians 1:12-13; 11:19 (NKJV). ↩
2. John 17:21; Ephesians 4:3-5 (NKJV). ↩
3. Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 3, Church History, "Fifth Century: Third Ecumenical Council," oca.org. ↩
4. OCA, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 3, "Fifth Century: The Fourth Ecumenical Council" and "The Monophysites," oca.org. ↩
5. Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, First Agreed Statement (Anba Bishoy Monastery, Egypt, June 1989); Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, September 1990), §§9-10. ↩
6. Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, Common Christological Declaration (11 November 1994), vatican.va. ↩
7. OCA, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 3, "Eleventh Century: The Great Schism," oca.org. ↩
8. Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration (7 December 1965), §§3-4, vatican.va. ↩
9. Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 1.6, 1.7, 1.9, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (ccel.org). ↩
10. The Marburg Articles (3 October 1529), art. 15, trans. Ellen Yutzy Glebe, German History in Documents and Images, from WA 30/3:160-71. ↩
11. Augsburg Confession (1530), art. 7, in Triglot Concordia, trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau (St. Louis: Concordia, 1921), bookofconcord.org. ↩
12. Alister McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 2, as quoted in Mark E. Durrett's review, Presbyterian Outlook, 5 October 2008. ↩
13. General Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church, "Site of the Organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South," gcah.org. ↩
14. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 29, as quoted in Kent T. Dollar's review, Journal of Southern Religion 9. ↩
15. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2001), 1:16, as quoted in Scott Eric Alt, "We Need to Stop Saying That There Are 33,000 Protestant Denominations," National Catholic Register, 9 February 2016. The encyclopedia itself could not be opened. ↩
16. Alt, "We Need to Stop Saying." ↩
17. Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, "Quick Facts About Global Christianity" (FAQ), "How do you define a 'denomination'?", gordonconwell.edu. ↩
18. Pew Research Center, Global Christianity (December 2011), Appendix B, n. 24. ↩
19. Pew Research Center, "Global Christianity: Christian Traditions," 19 December 2011, pewresearch.org. ↩
20. Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete, 2016), "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World," §§2, 4, 6, orthodoxcouncil.org. ↩
21. Sergei Chapnin, "Russia's No-Show at Pan-Orthodox Council Reveals Hopeless Lack of Unity," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 29 June 2016. ↩
22. A. S. Khomiakov, "The Church Is One," §§1, 2, 5, in W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church During the Last Fifty Years, vol. 1 (London, 1895), ch. 23. ↩
23. Keith A. Mathison, "Solo Scriptura: The Difference a Vowel Makes," Modern Reformation 16, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 25-29. ↩
24. "Russian Orthodox break communion with Ecumenical Patriarch," Vatican News, 16 October 2018. ↩
25. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium (1964), §8, vatican.va. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Marburg Articles (1529). Translated by Ellen Yutzy Glebe. German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute. From D. Martin Luthers Werke, vol. 30, part 3 (Weimar, 1910), 160-71.
• Augsburg Confession (1530). In Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Translated by F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921. bookofconcord.org.
• Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). In Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3. New York: Harper, 1882. ccel.org.
• Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I. Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration. 7 December 1965. vatican.va.
• Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV. Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. 11 November 1994. vatican.va.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete, 2016). "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World." Official English text, orthodoxcouncil.org.
• Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. First Agreed Statement (Anba Bishoy, 1989) and Second Agreed Statement and Recommendations to the Churches (Chambésy, 1990).
• Khomiakov, A. S. "The Church Is One" (Essay on the Unity of the Church). In Russia and the English Church During the Last Fifty Years, vol. 1, edited by W. J. Birkbeck. London, 1895.
• Orthodox Church in America. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 3, Church History: "Third Ecumenical Council," "The Fourth Ecumenical Council," "The Monophysites," "The Great Schism." oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Barrett, David B., George T. Kurian and Todd M. Johnson, eds. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. (Not opened; cited through Alt.)
• Alt, Scott Eric. "We Need to Stop Saying That There Are 33,000 Protestant Denominations." National Catholic Register, 9 February 2016.
• Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. "Quick Facts About Global Christianity." gordonconwell.edu.
• Pew Research Center. Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population. Washington, DC, December 2011. Including Appendix B.
• Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. (Cited through Kent T. Dollar's review, Journal of Southern Religion 9.)
• Chapnin, Sergei. "Russia's No-Show at Pan-Orthodox Council Reveals Hopeless Lack of Unity." Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 29 June 2016.
• "Russian Orthodox break communion with Ecumenical Patriarch." Vatican News, 16 October 2018.
• General Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church. "Site of the Organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South." gcah.org.

Sources from the traditions discussed (Protestant and Catholic)

• Mathison, Keith A. "Solo Scriptura: The Difference a Vowel Makes." Modern Reformation 16, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 25-29. See also his The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2001).
• McGrath, Alister. Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution, a History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. New York: HarperOne, 2007. (Cited through Mark E. Durrett's review, Presbyterian Outlook, 2008.)
• Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. 21 November 1964. vatican.va.