Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Church, Sacraments and Authority gathers thirty five doctrines about who may lead a religious body, what its rites require and mean, and how each question has split communities that agree on almost everything else.

Authority is the largest thread. Apostolic succession grounds Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican ordination in an unbroken chain from the apostles, while congregational, presbyterian and episcopal polity name three different answers to where binding authority sits, and papal primacy and infallibility state Rome's own most contested claim within that debate. Orthodoxy answers differently again, ranking Constantinople first in honor rather than jurisdiction, a settlement tested by the 2019 Tomos granting Ukraine its own autocephaly. Twelver, Ismaili and Zaydi Shia Islam each locate authority in the imamate through a different line from Ali, and the Latter-day Saint Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood, once restricted by race until 1978, names a third model again, delegated authority rather than inherited office. The Baha'i Faith and Christian Science abolish the office outright, one refusing any priesthood, the other ordaining a book as pastor.

Sacraments raise their own disputes: believer's baptism against infant baptism, the real presence in the eucharist as the sharpest Western division of all, and open against closed communion over what shared bread announces. Indulgence and simony name two ways the medieval church monetized grace and office. Worship rules close the group, the regulative principle and a cappella practice insisting on positive scriptural warrant, against the Wesleyan and Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilaterals, which test doctrine by scripture, tradition, reason and historic order together.