I don’t mean yet another schism within a Protestant denomination or something, I mean a new faith that calls itself “Christian” but is fundamentally different in doctrine from Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christianity – like LDS, or JW, or Seventh-Day Adventism or Christian Science – all American in origin, all dating from the 19th Century, and I know of no such thing dating from later. Will that ever happen again, to the extent people will hear of it?
Yes. Only a fraction are Christian, and only a fraction of those will survive, but if you think major changes are not continuing to happen within Christianity, you’re not paying attention.
In particular, the Charistmatic movement (which isn’t exclusively Evangelical) is growing. While it might not be that different doctrinally, it sure is in practice, and a 19th-century European or white American Christian would probably think it was a different religion at the same level as those mentioned in the OP.
Edit: if you haven’t heard of them, it might also be that it takes time to grow.
If you think of your five solas, the definitive Catholic summaries of the ways in which Protestants and Protestantism differs from Catholicism, what is your question? Whether any new variants will be different in some of the five? or all of them? Because, if it’s the latter, there are only two possible states, both already occupied. If it’s the former, then there should be thirty or so slots left to populate (I say “or so” because of my admitted ignorance of how Orthodox differs from Catholicism as westerners see it).
Protestantism and Catholicism agree on a lot, actually, at least as much as they disagree on. They agree on the creeds and on the contents of the New Testament, for example. And there are a lot more questions on which Christians might disagree than the five solas.
Eastern Orthodoxy disagrees with both Protestantism and Catholicism on a lot of issues (the nature of original sin, for example), and they reject both sides of the ‘faith vs. works’ debate as defective.
In response to the OP, yea I have zero doubt that there will be radically new forms of Christianity that will arise in the coming century. Modern communications technology, and the lack of ability for churches to forcibly repress dissent, is only going to make religious innovation easier.
But also less relevant. A phenomenon like Joseph Smith and LDS happened because nothing was more important than Christianity to most Americans in the 19th Century; but faith as such is now on the decline throughout Christendom.
There is also more scrutiny. Any new movement is going to start out small and cultish. If they want to expand beyond a small insular core (such as the Branch Davidians) they need to either have impeccable backgrounds and sanitary beliefs and practices. Either that or some truly cynical marketing methods, e.g. Scientology.
No it isn’t. The percentage of the population deeply committed to Christianity may be declining in countries such as the USA and Western Europe, but it’s increasing in many parts of the world, particularly South Korea and much of Latin America and Africa.
The Branch Davidians, BTW, derive ultimately from the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Then, perhaps a new kind of Christianity might emerge in one of those places?
Does Moon’s Unification Church count?
There are new branches of Christianity forming right now, at this very instant. Few will go beyond their founder but sometimes when circumstances are just right, we get, I dunno… Westboro Baptist, I guess.
Prosperity Gospel is fairly new and strong in the USA.
So is Republican Jesus (as a form of Christianity that seems to preach a vastly different version of Jesus and his teachings than the one in the bible), which is an off-shoot of Prosperity Gospel.
On the opposite end you have the Liberation movement.
There was the Taiping movement in China. That was a major new Christian religion arising in the 19th century outside of America. Hong Xiuquan was a contemporary of Joseph Smith, Ellen White, and Mary Baker Eddy.
It may be that some form of Progressive Christianity, such as taught by Bishop Spong may thrive.
What does he call baptism, a spong-bath?
Didn’t the Taiping Rebellion also result in the deaths of twenty million people and rank as the world’s bloodiest conflict until World War I?
That’s the reason you don’t see many followers of the faith around today.
People usually put the start date of premillenial dispensationalism in the 1830s with John Darby, but I’d say that it gets a big boost with Scofield and his reference Bible in 1909, and really comes into its current form with Hal Lindsay’s “Late, Great Planet Earth” in 1970. YMMV, though, and I’m not any kind of expert on Christian theology, so I can’t really defend this point of view.
It’s not just “19th century America” from which those groups sprang. It was from two specific periods in American religious history called Great Awakenings. The Mormons and the Adventists both came about in the 1830’s during the Second Great Awakening and the JW’s and Christian Scientists came about in the last decades of the 19th century during the Third.
Some religious historians say there is also a Fourth Great Awakening that took place at some point in the post-war US and may or may not still be ongoing. The difference is, though, that even though Christianity in the US has undergone some fundamental shifts, the move has mostly been non-denominational and has shifted focus away from the nuts n’ bolts of doctrine. I think there WAS potential for something like the Jesus Movement in the 60’s and 70’s to evolve into a genuinely novel form of Christianity, but as the “awakening” has progressed it’s mostly led to various changes within and across the existing sectarian lines.
Not really. Christianity is increasing in Korea and Africa (and China, actually) but it’s mostly holding steady in Latin America. Those countries were almost entirely Christianized when the Spanish & Portuguese took over. Some of them are now undergoing a lot of conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism, but they aren’t becoming more or less Christian.
Russia is actually another part of the world where Christianity is regaining some ground it lost under the Soviets.