The liberal ecumenical response is to downplay truth claims in favor of a kind of universalism. All religion, they say, is really nothing more than different manifestations of the same basic human impulse to find significance in the universe. The denominations, even the different religions are nothing more than different expressions of the same impulse. If only we could see (as they have) that we all want the same thing, we could see that all the denominations are misguided. Of course, this sort of ecumenism is built on false premises. 

Comes the question,

Has the splintering of the Protestant church into thousands of denominations become a hindrance to our witness to the world? What can we do?

This is an important question that we may not dismiss. Our Lord warned the visible church about the danger of scandals, i.e., doing things that cause the “little ones” to stumble:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And he called a child to himself and set him before them, and said, “Amen I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one such child in my name receives me but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire. If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell. See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven (Matt 18:1–10; revised from the NASB95).

To be sure, our Lord’s principal point in this discourse is to explain the nature of the kingdom. It is not a realm of self-seeking, of grasping for control, authority, and power. The kingdom is to be populated by child-like trust and humility but contained in this instruction is a stern warning about giving unnecessary offense to those seeking the kingdom. The biblical word for giving offense is “scandal.” It is a great question what constitutes a scandal and that is the question before us. Does the existence of denominations constitute the sort of scandal, the sort of cause of offense about which our Lord warned?

In short, I think not. In my experience, as a practical matter, believers are much more offended by denominations than are non-Christians. Speaking as one former non-Christian, I can say categorically that I was not offended by denominations. Indeed, I was only vaguely aware of them. I think that my experience was not unique.

As a historical matter, we should not think that there was a time when all was unified, e.g., before the Reformation, only to have that blessed unity disrupted by the Reformation. Beneath the surface, the medieval church was a roiling cauldron of theological, political, moral, practical, and spiritual disagreements. There is not space here to chronicle the real state of the pre-Reformation church but it was not at peace. Indeed, just a century before the Reformation, there was legitimate doubt as to which of three men was truly the Pope, the ostensible representative of Christ on the earth. Before that, the Eastern and Western Churches had split in an ugly schism. Thus, against the broader scope of church history, the Reformation was arguably a disruption within the Western church but not as great as some of the earlier crises.

Further, it is often casually assumed that the Reformation gave us the plethora of denominations but as they say on the internet (correctly) correlation is not causation. The Reformation gave us a split between the Papists, i.e., those who acknowledged the Bishop of Rome as the “head of the church,” the “high priest,” and universal representative of Christ on the earth and the Protestants who rejected those claims as contrary to God’s holy Word and who rejected the Roman doctrines of salvation and scripture. Twenty years after the onset of the Reformation the Protestant churches divided between the Lutheran and the Reformed, with the Reformed typically recognizing the Lutherans as churches and the Lutherans rejecting the Reformed as “sacramentarians.” In other words, the Reformation properly gave us two denominations not thousands. The vast number of denominations arose much later. Their cause was not the Reformation. Their cause was Modernity.

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