Branch theory
Branch theory is an ecclesiological proposition that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church includes various different Christian denominations whether in formal communion or not.
"[3] For Anglicans of evangelical churchmanship, the notion of apostolic continuity is seen as "fidelity to the teaching of the apostles as set out in scripture, rather than in historical or institutional terms" and thus they place focus on "the gospel, and the means by which this is proclaimed, articulated, and reinforced--namely, the ministers of word and sacrament.
So, for example, Roman Christianity is characterized by filial love and obedience expressed towards the fatherly authority hypostatized in the first Person of the Trinity: the Church is there to teach and to obey.
[2] For Anglicans of Evangelical churchmanship, the notion of apostolic continuity is seen as "fidelity to the teaching of the apostles as set out in scripture, rather than in historical or institutional terms" and thus they place focus on "the gospel, and the means by which this is proclaimed, articulated, and reinforced--namely, the ministers of word and sacrament.
[10] In 1870, English bishops attending the First Vatican Council raised objections to the expression Sancta Romana Catholica Ecclesia ("Holy Roman Catholic Church") which appeared in the schema (the draft) of the First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican's Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius.
While the council overwhelmingly rejected this proposal, the text was finally modified to read "Sancta Catholica Apostolica Romana Ecclesia" translated into English either as "the holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church" or, by separating each adjective, as "the holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church".
And on this theory rests the "Corporate Reunion of Christendom," which entirely ignores all Apostolic teaching concerning schism and heresy!
[28] The "Evangelical Church" was to be distinguished from what he termed the "three heresies of Neoprotestantism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy".
[28] What has been called another version of the branch theory was propounded in the wake of the Second Vatican Council by some Roman Catholic theologians, such as Robert F. Taft[29][30] Michael A. Fahey,[31][32] and others.
[36] Solovyov "felt that eastern Christians could learn from the Western church's relatively active presence in the world.
Pope John Paul II, according to Bird, "adopted Ivanov's imagery of the two 'lungs' of the universal Church" but John Paul II's "image of the full Church seems to presume their equal coexistence, supposedly without the submission of the East to papal authority.
"[38] John Paul II used the two lungs of a single body metaphor in the context of "the different forms of the Church's great tradition" in Redemptoris Mater (1987).
[44] John Paul II elaborated the metaphor, in Sacri Canones (1990), "the Church itself, gathered in the one Spirit, breathes as though with two lungs – of the East and of the West – and that it burns with the love of Christ in one heart having two ventricles.
"[47][48] Ion Bria wrote in 1991 that the metaphor "may be attractive as an aid for understanding the formation of two distinctive traditions in Christianity after A.D.
