Missteps along the way

My thinking has been going along these lines.  Step one, Jesus taught the disciples how to live a life that is faithful to man’s original created state, love of God and love of neighbor.  Step two, the disciples/apostles took this faith and began to spread it around the known world, for the next fifty years or so, establishing churches and teaching the new followers of Jesus, what he taught them. This teaching was written down, in what we know to be the epistles.  

Step three, that which the apostles taught continued to transmitted, orally and in written form.  As the centuries progressed, dogma was clarified and explored, for further depth and further understanding.  Those directions taken, that did not follow the apostolic teaching, was identified and rejected. One example of this is seen in the various ecumenical councils of the 4th through 8th centuries.  The church was not creating doctrine, but clarifying what the church had always believed.

So what happened next?

Somehow we moved from an authoritative yet organic church life to what we see today.  A fragmented, broken and schismatic collection of people calling themselves “Christians” yet varying drastically from one another.  They cannot all be right. Only one can be right or they can all be wrong.

What is the right response to our current socio-theological state?  There is only one body of Christ. How can there be three (or four depending on how finely you define it) branches of Christianity?  How can there be thousands of denominations within one or two of those branches? It seems to me that at some point, a definitive definition of Christianity must be formulated that clearly identifies what defines Christianity.  The end result will be that one of these branches will take that title and the remainder will need to choose something else.

Let’s call a spade a spade.