The Reformation began around 1517. Martin Luther had no intention to rebel against the Catholic Church. His writings show that his intention was only that the doctrine of justification by faith would be made clear to the people. However, after Luther many reformers began to leave the Catholic Church. Luther made a mistake when he supported the establishment of state churches in Germany. This mistake resulted in the formation of many state churches in Germany and abroad. The state churches separated from the Catholic Church, yet they kept many organizational aspects of the apostate church, especially the hierarchy of the clergy. This organization kills the function of the members. Today in the Catholic Church and in the state churches, the members do not all function. Hired clergy carry out spiritual functions for the lay people.
After the state churches were formed, seeking saints began to see certain aspects of the truth through their reading of the Bible. For instance, some saw that baptism should be by immersion rather than by sprinkling, the Catholic practice. Those who saw baptism by immersion in the Scriptures stood up for this truth and even suffered persecution for it. This is the source of the Baptist Church, which is a private church. Other examples of private churches are the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church. These also failed to cut off all aspects of organization. The state churches and the private churches inherited organization from their “mother,” the Catholic Church.
From the second century the church fathers began to argue, debate, and fight over their different concepts concerning the Trinity and the person of Christ. The church was divided by these doctrinal disputations. Then Constantine the Great came to power. Because he did not want to see religious fighting in his empire, he summoned all the great teachers to a council in Nicaea in A.D. 325. That council produced the first creed, which is recognized today by the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches. However, the first Nicene Creed was not complete, and a later council amended the creed by adding that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.” However, this creed still did not stop the disputation and division. Thus, from the beginning, the church has been damaged by organization, which kills the function of the members of the Body, and division, which is brought in by doctrinal disputation. Since the sixteenth century, division after division has come in among the private churches. After the Second World War, especially in the United States, the independent groups began. Today there are thousands of divisions among Christians.
God’s purpose is to have a proper church—full of life and constituted with Christ—to be the expression of God on the earth. Today the church has been fully deadened by organization and divided into many different groups. Most Christian groups hold the basic items of the faith concerning the Bible, the Person of Christ, and salvation, but the fulfillment of God’s purpose has become impossible. Organization and division prevent the church from being a living organism—the Body of Christ as the fullness of the One who fills all in all—to express God.
The degradation of the church through the centuries has been a result not only of organization and division but also of mixture with heathenism and paganism. After Constantine the Great accepted Christianity, many pagan things were brought into the church and given a Christian name, including Christmas, Easter, and the worship of Mary. G. H. Pember clearly defined the pagan things brought in by Catholicism in his book Mystery Babylon the Great. In Matthew 13:33 the Lord likens this mixture to leaven, “which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened.” This woman is the apostate Roman Catholic Church, called Jezebel in Revelation 2:20. Today nearly every truth has been leavened. The leaven of Christmas has been added to the truth of the incarnation. Easter has been added to the resurrection. The purity of the truth has been lost in degraded Christianity.
The recovery of the truth began when Martin Luther recovered the truth of justification by faith. Two centuries after Luther, seeking Christians in northern Europe were under persecution and forced to leave their countries. Many went to Germany, where a brother named Zinzendorf, who genuinely loved the Lord, allowed them to settle on his large estate. These persecuted ones came to Zinzendorf’s estate with many differing opinions, and their dissension and fighting increased after their arrival. One day in 1727 Zinzendorf called them together and convinced them to drop their disputations and to hold only to the items of the common faith. That Lord’s Day, at the Lord’s table, they experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and there was a great revival. This began the first practice of the church life in the Lord’s recovery, but the light that these Moravian Brethren saw was not very clear.