The Unity of the Church

Abstract

The fashionable trend in academic circles of the last decades has considered the unity of the Church a later product of development, a unity forged through the suppression of alternative (and even heretical) Christian communities. In the beginning, many scholars maintain, there was no unified Christian Church, but rather, diverse groups of Christians with often opposing views, each of them claiming to derive their teaching and legitimacy from Jesus of Nazareth. What later became the early Catholic Church was the result of a power struggle in which one group prevailed and excommunicated the rival groups, in particular those with various forms of Gnostic tendencies. Thus, in the general contemporary climate of celebrating diversity, the unity of the Church is looked upon as a later, purely accidental result, as is the traditional distinction between orthodox and heterodox Christianities; the ancient Church, in other words, “sinned” against the tacit but all-pervading contemporary