How many of these can you identify? Marcionites, Montanists, Sabellians, Donatists, Quartodecimans, Pneumatomachians, Apollonarians, Monophysites, Nestorians, Waldensians. These are all groups that broke from the Church, insisting that they were the true Church while others were somehow less pure or less faithful. Even if you could identify some or all of them, where are they now? At one point, they welcomed thousands. Now, they’re just names almost no one knows.
Many of them had interesting arguments and complaints. The Donatists, for example, had a rigorous moral code and were understandably opposed to bishops who had been traditores, “traitors,” who had handed holy things over to the Roman authorities during the persecutions. The Monophysites rejected the notion that in Christ there were two natures, divine and human, believing that they were defending the teaching of the Council of Ephesus that Christ was not two persons, but “one physis of the incarnate Word.” So too, Martin Luther was right to complain about the corruption in the Church, the misuse of indulgences (many of them to build St. Peter’s in Rome), and he was right to defend the priority of grace.
The great irony of history is not only that the number of
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