THE DEVIL HAS ATTACKED THE VERY STRUCTURE OF THE CHURCH AND DILUTED IT'S MEANING, TO EVEN INCLUDE SATANIST

The History of the Church: From Apostolic Foundation to Modern Dilution

1.  From its founding around 33 AD, the Church established by Jesus Christ was visibly apostolic, structured with bishops in succession from the Apostles, and marked by a clear Petrine primacy. Christ personally designated Peter as the rock on which He would build His Church, granting him the keys of the kingdom and the authority to bind and loose (Matthew 16:18–19). This primacy of Peter and his successors in Rome was recognized across the early Christian world as a unifying principle of governance and doctrine, ensuring the Church’s visible unity amid persecution and expansion.

For over a millennium, the universal Church maintained this apostolic structure with the Bishop of Rome exercising a primacy of honor and jurisdiction. The great ecumenical councils, from Nicaea (325) to Constantinople IV (869–870), operated within this framework, affirming Rome’s role as the final court of appeal in matters of faith.

2.  In 1054, the East-West Schism fractured this unity. Mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople formalized the divide. The Western Church, which became known as the Catholic Church, retained the Petrine apostolic primacy centered in the successor of Peter. The Eastern churches, developing into what is now Eastern Orthodoxy, adopted an autocephalous model in which individual bishops (patriarchs or metropolitans) became the supreme heads of their respective territories, coordinating in synods but without a single visible head possessing universal primacy.

3.  The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century introduced a further redefinition. Rejecting the visible hierarchical authority of the papacy and the apostolic succession of bishops, many Protestant communities redefined the Church as primarily an invisible spiritual body consisting of all true believers across denominations and locations, known only to God. Visible structures—congregations, sacraments, and ministry—were retained in varying forms, but the essence of “Church” shifted from a visible, unified society to an invisible communion of the elect.

4.  In the modern era, particularly in secular legal contexts, the term “church” has broadened dramatically beyond any historical Christian understanding. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service defines a “church” broadly for tax purposes, focusing on characteristics such as regular worship services, a distinct legal existence, and a recognized creed and form of worship—criteria that do not require belief in God or alignment with traditional religion. This expansive interpretation has led the IRS to grant 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a church to organizations such as The Satanic Temple, which explicitly promotes nontheistic, adversarial symbolism and activism rather than Christian doctrine.

Thus, what began as a divinely instituted, visible, apostolic society with Petrine primacy has, over centuries of division and secular redefinition, become a term applied to widely divergent and even contradictory realities.

For further historical factual information on the one true church: https://jesseromero.com/store/one-lord-one-faith-one-church