Where Christian Traditions Agree and Divide: Creed, Church and Sacrament

The Trinity is the shared starting point: one God in three coequal persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a doctrine defined in the early creeds and stated in the articles of faith of Methodist and Nazarene churches.

The bodily rising of Christ on the third day is named in the Nicene creed and in the Methodist, Anglican and Nazarene articles, and Christians treat it as the ground of their hope for forgiveness and eternal life.

Every tradition agrees that God's initiative comes first in salvation as an unearned gift; where they differ is how grace, faith and works relate, which the later stops take up.

The first great division: the Latin addition of "and the Son" to the creed, which appears in Spain by the sixth century, reached Rome in the eleventh and figured in the mutual excommunications of 1054. Orthodoxy objects to the content and to the unilateral change.

Catholicism holds that the bishop of Rome has jurisdiction over the whole church, and the First Vatican Council of 1870 defined his ex cathedra teaching as preserved from error. Orthodoxy grants only a primacy of honour, and Protestants reject the office.

Defined at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and reaffirmed at Trent, this holds that the substance of bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ. Lutherans, the Reformed and Baptists each answer differently, and the Westminster Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles reject it.

The Reformation principle that Scripture is the final norm over councils and popes. In its classical form it does not reject tradition or make each reader the judge, which is a later idea. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy reject the principle.

Luther taught that the sinner is declared righteous through faith, not works. Trent condemned the formula in 1547, and the 1999 Joint Declaration between Lutherans and Catholics recorded substantial convergence without ending the difference.

The question of whether God has eternally determined who is saved runs from Augustine against Pelagius, through Calvin's double predestination, to Arminius, who made election conditional on foreseen faith.

Most Christians baptise infants, for different reasons: Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that it confers regeneration, while the Reformed argue from covenant continuity with circumcision.

The closing division: Anabaptists, Baptists and most Pentecostals baptise only those who profess faith, a conviction for which sixteenth-century Anabaptists were executed by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike.