Consider closely the biblical witness, how the words of Jesus and Paul exhort believers toward the unity of the faith, how the Old Testament presumes the unity of the people of Israel, and how God punishes and all but destroys his people for their sins through division. The Bible nowhere justifies schism; it nowhere says that the body of Christ ought to be rent for one or another reason; it nowhere says that the people of Israel ought to seek division rather than regard one another in friendship and brotherhood. It says that followers of God must love one another and give to one another, humbling themselves before God and serving the neighbor. The Bible’s teaching on these points is unqualified.
Consider now the history of the church in the West. As we move briefly through this history, we shall see that at juncture after juncture the body of Christ has divided, that men who claim the name “Christian” have turned against one another, sometimes killing one another because of their faith. Can this scattering and eventual demise of the body of Christ be directly harmonized with the gathering that is his purpose?
For approximately a millennium the church was one, spanning roughly from Spain to the Middle East, fighting heresies and enduring contrary religions with an ostensibly unified front. About 1054, with the excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople, this attitude changed in the Catholic West. The papal circle saw the Eastern leader as schismatic, a view that eventually took hold throughout Western Christendom. The Crusades, carried out over the course of the twelfth century, greatly widened the division that was growing between East and West, until after the sack of Constantinople (1204) the Eastern Christians could not affirm communion with their Western counterparts.
Who was at fault for the Great Schism? Modern Christians do not like to ask such questions. Surely there was blame to go around, surely the fault was not entirely on one side. Therefore, all were equally guilty and consequently all are equally innocent, and therefore no one can judge the guilty from the innocent, and there is no judgment to be had. One can nonetheless raise another question: who was punished for the Great Schism? God’s punishes his people’s sin through division, as shown above.6 Their pride precedes the destruction that is scattering. In the wake of the Great Schism, who suffered the scattering? Who bore the wrath of God in the likeness of the Israelites who turned from him? The Roman Catholic Church alone can claim this distinction.
In the centuries following the finalization of the Great Schism, the Catholic West suffered amazing peril to its unity and authority. In successive order, it endured exile from its land in Italy and the internal debacle of the Great Western Schism. For roughly 70 years in the fourteenth century, the Church relocated from the Italian peninsula to Avignon, on the French border. At this point the papacy, which had garnered international respect and power particularly through Innocent III (1198–1216), became a pet of the French monarchy. The popes who reigned from Avignon often lived in luxury, enjoying a court whose splendor surpassed that of kings and emperors. They did not tend to mourn the loss of their homeland, but the testimony of history stands against them. Has any other church been exiled from its home for such a duration?
Upon the return to Rome things went from bad to worse. Pope Gregory XI had brought the papacy back home, but he died soon after this in 1378. The election of the new pope faced the challenge of a divided group of cardinals and the potentially negative reaction of the Roman people, who desired that a Roman should become pope. The candidate originally chosen was Barolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari. The cardinals chose him because they outranked him, and seeing him as their inferior, they believed that they could govern him. Prignano was elected and enthroned as Urban VI, and his power went instantly to his head. The cardinals had badly miscalculated when they considered him governable and he became such a nuisance to them that they claimed that the original election was invalid and moved, as a group, outside of Rome. There they formally repudiated Urban VI and elected a new pope, Robert of Geneva (also known as the “Butcher of Cesena” and the “Man of Blood”) as Clement VII. But Urban would not step down as the cardinals had hoped. Two popes claimed authority at the time, with each elected by the same college of cardinals.
Rather than resigning, Urban created a new college of cardinals and went to war against his enemies. At this point the schism was an acknowledged fact throughout Europe. With one pope and college of cardinals relocated to Avignon (Clement VII) and another pope and college of cardinals in Rome (Urban VI), the nations were forced to take sides for one or the other. This state of affairs divided national rulers and their clerics in some places, while it in others it separated the clerics from the people. The monarchs on the side of Urban included England, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia. Those on the side of Clement included France, Scotland, and eventually Spain and Portugal.
The effect of the schism on the general public was horrendous. Each pope had excommunicated the other and those who followed him. Every Christian, then, found himself excommunicated by one or the other pope, with little way of being sure that he followed the correct one. Imagine baptizing one’s child in the hope that God will have mercy on his soul, but being told that God will not have such mercy because the pope one recognizes is invalid. Therefore one’s child will endure perdition if he dies in such a state, and this despite being baptized. In some areas, there were two bishops who proclaimed the ceremonies performed by each other as sacrilege. The soul of Catholic Europe could hardly have been more divided.
The Great Western Schism continued for roughly 40 years, well beyond the adversarial claims of the original pair. The councils called in the early fifteenth century sought to invalidate both lines of popes by introducing a new ruler, but the introduction of a third pope only caused more confusion, so that for a time there were 3 claimants to the papal throne. The Schism eventually died by attrition, with one line of popes outlasting the others. Coupled with the exiling of the papacy to Avignon, the Schism testifies against the Catholic Church as scattered, divided from both its land and its people.7
Perhaps more than any other event, the Schism provoked the various movements of reform that welled up in the fifteenth century. These sought a new foundation for authority, occasionally looking to the Scripture alone rather than the popes, and often raising cries of heresy from defenders of the Catholic status quo. These movements eventuated in the Reformation, the most important occurrence in Western Christianity in the second millennium. Many Protestants look on the Reformation as the saving of the church from Catholic crimes and doctrinal errors. They see it as the birth of all that is true and good in Christianity, as the transformation and revitalization of the church away from what had ailed it. To these I respond by looking again to the words of our Lord, “You shall know them by their fruits.” What is the fruit of the Reformation? How should we assess its effects?
The most forthright defender of the Reformation, who lists the perversions of medieval Catholicism with confidence, must also admit that the Reformation was schismatic. Before the Reformation one church stood in the West, and in it the one gave way to the many. This schism did not divide the church in two or three but into multiples of two or three. Rather than competing Catholics, one finds denominations divided by leadership, belief, and practice, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Zwinglians, various strands of Anabaptists, and eventually Anglicans in addition to smaller groups forgotten by history. The Western church became the Western churches, a collection of houses of worship without communion or collegiality, divided by assertions of truth. All that bound the Protestant sects was their rejection of Catholicism and often the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but beyond this they splintered as a ship crashed upon rocks. If one affirms that the Reformation saved the church, he must simultaneously affirm that this salvation fractured the body of Christ, intensifying the tragedy of the Great Western Schism.
In the Reformation the body of Christ suffered from a deeper schism, that between the body and the soul as between works and faith. Justification by faith alone, the doctrinal anchor of the Protestant revolution, announced that what is outward has nothing to do with what is inward, that the works of the body have no relevance for the state of the soul. Faith alone belongs to salvation,