Denomination

A denomination is an organized body of local congregations sharing a common confession, name, and form of government, existing within the one visible church of Christ rather than constituting a separate church. The term names a reality newer than the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession’s own vocabulary, which speaks instead of the catholic or universal church and the many particular congregations in which that church takes visible form. Denominations differ in doctrine, worship, and government, sometimes over matters central to the faith and sometimes over matters the Reformed tradition has long left to conscience.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 confession has no chapter titled “denominations”; the plurality of named, self-governing Protestant bodies that word now describes took shape mostly after the confession was written. What chapter 26, “Of the Church,” does address is the underlying reality behind it. It distinguishes the “catholic or universal church,” invisible, “consist[ing] of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ, the head thereof,”¹ from the visible church, made up of “particular congregations” gathered out of professing “visible saints.”² Christ alone holds “all power for the calling, institution, order or government of the church”; no denomination, and least of all the papacy, can claim that headship for itself.³

Biblical Basis

Scripture treats the church’s underlying unity as already secured in Christ, and any division within it as a departure to be repented of rather than an arrangement worth celebrating. Paul rebukes the church at Corinth for splitting into factions gathered around admired leaders and asks pointedly, “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:10-13). Ephesians grounds the church’s oneness in what it already shares rather than in an institutional form yet to be built, “one body, and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:4-5), a unity believers are called to maintain (Eph. 4:3), not manufacture. Christ’s own prayer that his people “may all be one” (John 17:21) names the same reality: a unity secured in him and only progressively made visible, not falsified by the plurality of congregations history has in fact produced.

At the same time, the New Testament’s letters address distinct, locally gathered congregations, at Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and Colossae, each with its own leaders, discipline, and besetting errors, rather than a single undifferentiated institution. Calvin draws a similar conclusion from Christ’s promise that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20):

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence… [it] comprehends single churches, which exist in different towns and villages, according to the wants of human society, so that each of them justly obtains the name and authority of the Church.⁴

Paul’s own distinction between essential and disputed matters, “if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you” (Phil. 3:15), supplies the biblical warrant Calvin draws on to tolerate real differences of judgment among churches without treating every such difference as a breach of the church’s unity.⁵

Historical Development

Apostolic and patristic roots

Real division within the church is not a modern development. Paul and the Jerusalem apostles disagreed sharply enough over the terms of Gentile inclusion to part ways for a time (Acts 15:39; Gal. 2:11), and the Corinthian church split into competing factions during Paul’s own ministry (1 Cor. 1:10; 11:18-19).⁶ This early division registers less sharply than what followed once local churches “moved from a purely spiritual bond of union to a hierarchical, institutional body that viewed itself as ‘the essence’ of the church,” a development that, on the Reformed reading, alienated believers and provoked the very heresies and schisms it aimed to prevent.⁷

The Reformation’s true/pure distinction

Out of the Reformation’s rejection of that hierarchical claim came a distinction Reformed theology still uses to describe a plurality of legitimate churches: between a “true” church and a “pure” one. “True” was never meant exclusively; it named “an array of churches that upheld the fundamental articles of Christian faith” while differing, sometimes considerably, “in degrees of purity.” “False church” was reserved for something else entirely, a hierarchical power that set itself, and its own ordinances, above the Word of God.⁸ On this accounting Rome was never simply written off. Reformers who rejected its hierarchy still recognized “vestiges of the church” and “ruins of a disordered church” within it, holding that the duty to leave a church arises only once “the foremost doctrines of religion” have themselves been exchanged for a lie.⁹

Post-Reformation multiformity

The plurality that followed took more than one shape. Bavinck groups together, as expressions of a related impulse, the Münsterite radicals, “the gentler Anabaptism of Menno Simons,” the sectarian piety of Jean de Labadie and Nicholas von Zinzendorf, the English Independentists, and the Quakers, movements in which “the church is seen as a fellowship of the spiritual who are separated from the world” by their own voluntary practice rather than by the ordinary marks of word and sacrament; similar impulses reappeared among the Methodists and, later, the Salvation Army.¹⁰ John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalism went further still, rejecting “every church and all ecclesiastical forms” as corrupt and calling believers to withdraw from organized church life to await Christ’s return.¹¹

Not every church moved the same direction. The Russian Orthodox church of Bavinck’s own day claimed to be “the only true Orthodox church” and pursued religious unity across the empire by suppressing rival sects, and the Roman Catholic Church, he observed, “still in principle cannot recognize and tolerate churches besides itself.”¹² Bavinck traces part of the Protestant impulse toward multiplication to something it shares with the Catholicism it otherwise rejects: “the same motives of distinctive piety which lead in Catholicism to the creation of new orders tend in Protestantism to produce new sects.”¹³

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy each hold that the true church is bound to a single visible institution, so that a plurality of denominations cannot itself be a legitimate arrangement of Christ’s church. Bavinck observed that the Roman Catholic Church “still in principle cannot recognize and tolerate churches besides itself,” and that the Russian Orthodox church of his day likewise claimed to be “the only true Orthodox church,” pursuing religious unity across the empire through the suppression of rival sects.¹²

Sectarian exclusivism inverts the same claim without the institutional apparatus: rather than locating the true church in a single hierarchy, it locates the true church in one’s own gathered body and treats every other body, denominational or otherwise, as no church at all. Calvin named this tendency in the ancient Cathari and Donatists and found it recurring among “some of the Anabaptists” of his own day, groups persuaded of their own “absolute holiness” who “spurn the society of all in whom they see that something human still remains,” concluding that wherever visible fruit falls short of sound doctrine, no true church can be present.¹⁴ Darby’s total rejection of “every church and all ecclesiastical forms” belongs to the same family of response, carried to the point of abandoning organized church life altogether.¹¹

Indifferentism answers the same problem from the opposite direction, treating confessional and denominational differences as ultimately unreal, so that every named body becomes some version of the same thing. Bavinck rejects this move without denying real differences in purity among churches: professing bodies do differ, “sometimes considerably,” and the purest ought to be sought, but “fundamental and non-fundamental articles of faith” must still be distinguished, “with this we do not intend to foster indifferentism and syncretism.”¹⁵ Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of the church as simply “a system of mutual interaction and cooperation” among “regenerate individuals” draws the same criticism from Bavinck: an account that, for the sake of accommodating the church’s plurality, “has lost sight of the church as a divine institution.”¹⁶

Objections and Responses

Does the sheer number of denominations disprove Christ’s prayer that his people “may all be one” (John 17:21), undermining the gospel’s own credibility? Reformed theology answers by distinguishing the church’s spiritual unity, already secured in Christ, from any single institutional or organizational form. Unity is not found in “the hierarchy and the papacy but in the spiritual unity of the church with its head… and further, with the unity of faith, hope, and love, and of baptism” (Eph. 4:3-5), a unity that “is not simply invisible” but “comes to expression in that which all Christians have in common in spite of their divisions.”¹⁷ Division is real, and is a sin history has repeatedly committed rather than an arrangement Scripture commends, but it does not falsify a unity Christ himself secured and that, on the Reformed reading, God’s own providence is still governing and completing.¹⁸

If churches that differ from one another in doctrine can still count as true churches, does that concede that no confessional difference really matters? Here the same true/pure distinction applies: an array of churches can hold “the fundamental articles of Christian faith” while differing, sometimes considerably, “in degrees of purity,” without collapsing the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental matters altogether.⁸ Calvin drew the same line earlier: the church is not to be abandoned “on account of every minute difference,” provided it “retain sound and unimpaired that doctrine in which the safety of piety consists” and keep the sacraments Christ instituted; only the exchange of “the foremost doctrines of religion” for a lie dissolves that duty to remain.⁵

Is founding, or belonging to, a denomination distinct from others always an act of schism? Because Scripture, the church’s own mark, has no infallible interpreter, “Christ gave to everyone the freedom to understand that Word personally… and to separate from bodies deemed unfaithful,” a freedom open to serious misuse but not one Reformed theology has thought should be abolished on that account.¹⁹ The same principle cuts the other way against imposing uniformity by force: “Protestantism denies its own first principle if it seeks to maintain the unity of Christianity by any form of hierarchical coercion.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 1, sec. 9. ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 1, sec. 12. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “when the churches moved from a purely spiritual bond of union to a hierarchical, institutional body that viewed itself as ‘the essence’ of the church, it was this development that alienated many true believers and provoked heresies and schisms. Protestantism denies its own first principle if it seeks to maintain the unity of Christianity by any form of hierarchical coercion.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: on the distinction between a “true” church, describing “an array of churches that upheld the fundamental articles of Christian faith” while differing “in degrees of purity,” and a “false church,” a hierarchical power that set itself above the Word of God. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “there were still left in it ‘vestiges of the church,’ ‘ruins of a disordered church’… the duty to leave only when the… ‘foremost doctrines of religion’ have been exchanged for a lie.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “the excesses of the Münsterites; the gentler Anabaptism of Menno Simons; the sectarian impulses of Jean de Labadie, Nicholas von Zinzendorf, and the English Independentists; or the Quakers, the church is seen as a fellowship of the spiritual who are separated from the world… Similar views were found among the Methodists and later in the Salvation Army.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “John Darby, the founder of modern dispensational premillennialism, proceeded, openly and decisively, to reject every church and all ecclesiastical forms.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: on the Russian Orthodox church’s claim to be “the only true Orthodox church” through “the suppression of sects,” and on the Roman Catholic Church, which “still in principle cannot recognize and tolerate churches besides itself.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “The same motives of distinctive piety which lead in Catholicism to the creation of new orders tend in Protestantism to produce new sects.” ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 1, sec. 13. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “there are no true and false churches in an absolute sense. While there are great differences in the purity of confessions and churches, and we must aim and strive for the purest, we must distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental articles of faith. With this we do not intend to foster indifferentism and syncretism.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality,” quoting Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of the church as “a system of mutual interaction and cooperation” of “regenerate individuals,” and responding that such an account “has lost sight of the church as a divine institution.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “Unity is not found in the hierarchy and the papacy but in the spiritual unity of the church with its head… This spiritual unity is not simply invisible, it comes to expression in that which all Christians have in common in spite of their divisions.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “because God loves diversity in unity, it is a mistake to reject all diversity in the church.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “Christ gave to everyone the freedom to understand that Word personally as he or she interprets it and to separate from bodies deemed unfaithful.” ↩