No. That’s only true if the Coptic split happened off of Roman Catholicism. Lets say hypothetically, Catholicism is defined by three things:
Jesus is the Son of God
Jesus had two natures
We really like the Pope
So, Christianity starts out with just the “Jesus is the Son of God”, thing, and that’s not Catholicism yet. Then the whole Monophysite controversy starts, the Copts split off, and then the non Coptic Christians believe, after the split, “Jesus is the Son of God” and “Jesus had two natures”, but they’re still not Catholics, because nobody really likes the Pope yet. If “We really like the pope” developed after the Coptic/non-Coptic split, the Coptic church predates the Catholic one.
Yes, but Catholics by definition trace their Church all the way to Peter. They classify the early church as Catholic, and that they just got more clear on their beliefs as time went on.
Every time I ask a Catholic about the founding of their church, they will point to Matthew 16:18: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
I mean, the very word Catholic means universal. For it to be truly universal, it had to be available for all who call themselves Christians to partake in.
They do, but so do the Orthodox. So do some Episcopalians. I’ve heard Pentecostals trace their church back all the way to Jesus (with the whole, “After Constantine set up his church, “real” Christians went underground until the Reformation” theory.)
The fact that a church claims that its beliefs are identical to that of original Christianity doesn’t mean its true. There’s obviously a certain cachet within Christianity to be able to say, “What my group believes is the real, uncorrupted teachings of Jesus and the early apostles, unlike all those other denominations which believe unbiblical things.”
I don’t think that the claim of the Catholic church to authenticity - i.e. to being the authentic continuation of the “orginal” church rests on a claim that its beliefs are identical to those of the original church. It is manifestly the case that the early church spent some centuries nutting out exactly what it believed, and some of the earlier denominational splits - e.g. with the oriental churches - can in fact be traced to this process. I think the Catholic claim it is that its identity with the original church rests on shared communion, shared apostolicity and shared sacramentality as well as on a shared (but developing, and therefore not always identical) corpus of belief. Orthodox churches would make a similar claim and so, I suspect, would oriental churches. Defining a church exclusively by what it believes is in fact a fairly Protestant way of looking at the matter.
IMO this is on target. Catholicism often speaks of “developed doctrine”, by which they mean that a given bit of theology was implicit from earliest days, but only spelled out when necessary to refute heresy. In other words, they don’t come up with explicit answers until the questions to which they’re the answers have been asked – but they can point to how those answers were implicit in what was actually said in earlier times.
Two examples, one from general Christian belief and one from specifically Catholic doctrine, may illustrate this. The early Christians believed there was only one God. They believed the Father of whom Jesus spoke was that God. But they also believed Jesus Himself to be theos epiphanes, God present among us in human form. And they believed the Holy Spirit to be God present within us, pointing us to God above and beyond us. They believed these to be three separate and distinct persons. And yet they believed in one God. This apparent paradox was a Holy Mystery until such time as various heresies began defining Jesus and the Holy Spirit as somehow less God than the Father or denying the equivalence of the man Jesus with the eternal Logos Christ. At that point nailing the concept down with the doctrine of three hypostases in a single ousia – “three Persons in one Godhead” – became needed. This was an early-Fourth Century development. But the bishops at Nicaea (and other Councils) in defining it pointed to scripture written within a generation after Jesus’s time on Earth that showed each of the three Persons termed as God and re-enunciated the Sh’ma --God is One – of Judaism. So the concept of the Trinity was implicit from earliest days, but only elaborated and spelled out when it was needed in order to combat heresies.
The Immaculate Conception – the belief that Mary was preserved free of every taint of sin, by a retroactive application of Jesus’s Atonement – is specifically Roman Catholic. For it to be meaningful, it requires as prerequisite the concept of “original sin” – the common shortcoming of all mankind, requiring a Savior to overcome. Anybody can, at least hypothetically, ramain in a state of grace, refraining from any willful sin and acting as led to cure any sins of omission as one becomes aware of them. But the common concupiscence, tendency to sin, of all human beings, is something one cannot oneself overcome. That requires divine intervention. Without the idea of original sin, Mary becomes just another good person, one more saint among many, who lived a righteous life. But according to Catholicism Mary was uniquely kept from all sin, including original sin, by the special intervention of God, in order that she be a fit vessel for bearing Christ. Here again they are able to point to generations of Marian devotion before the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated in the 1850s, and in particular to one word in the Angelic Salutation (what Gabriel said at the Annunciation) that is quoted in the Hail Mary – kecharitomené, “full of grace”. The particular form of this word implies a permanence, much like the difference between Spanish ser and estar, the latter being “to be” with reference to a transitory state and the former to a permanent attribute. Likewise this particular participle implies Mary to have always been replete with grace.
I’m certainly not advocating any of this as absolute truth to whose self-evidential validity everyone ought to subscribe. But I am presenting it as logical inferences given the presumptions of Catholicism, as examples of how they conceive of implicit doctrine being “developed” – in the sense of elaborated, spelled out – in response to disagreements with it.
However, none of any of that in any way is a logical argument against the original Christian churches seperating at the same time. Which they did in fact more or less do: the Orthodox-Catholic split was a case ofdivergent development (though not very divergent) over the filioque clause. And the Orthodox now mostly accept it.
Agreed, up to the colon. But the divergence is far from being that minuscule. Among the issues:
[ul][li]Catholicism has a centralized authority in the Vatican; Orthodoxy defends the autonomy of the individual bishop.[/li][li]Catholicism explicates everything it can; Orthodoxy prefers seeing many things as ineffable Holy Mysteries.[/li][li]Catholicism is theologically innovative; Orthodoxy theologically conservative.[/li][li]For most of its existence, Catholicism called for conformity to a single standard praxis; Orthodoxy set limits and allowed freedom within them. A broad range of issues are subsumed here, from language use to proper ritual to personal piety.[/li][li]Their ecclesiology differs in so many ways that instead of comparing apples and oranges, it’s like comparing larynxes and Dutch monarchs.[/li][li]The approach of the two groups to granting exceptions to the rules is amazingly different.[/ul][/li]
To delimit it to a few specific differences, such as teh filioque, leavening of the Eucharistic breads, and mode of crossing oneself is to miss an important difference in the two churches’ approach to the whole broad issue.
Interesting that Mary is used as an example of moral purity when she is “artificially” shielded from sin by God turning off the original sin inheritance gene. It’s a shame God could not do that for the rest of humanity, it would save him and us a great deal of trouble.
One could make the case that the Catholic Church, properly so called, originated with the first schism (as did the sect that formed the other side of that schism). But it’s kind of hard to argue that any other sect predated the Catholic Church. At the time of the schism that formed that other sect, what do you call the other branch, if not Catholic?
