In academic circles, it is nowadays unnecessary to prove that the teachings of the Christian churches have a history, that the doctrines of the Trinity, of the union of two natures in the incarnate Christ, of the fall and the atonement, of the real presence in the sacrament and of the church itself as the body of Christ were not communicated as a system to the apostles, even by the risen Jesus.
Again it is unnecessary to demonstrate that the growth is in part the result of the incubation of the gospel in a particular environment, and not merely the unfolding of an embryonic pattern according to some instinctive or organic principle.
Indeed the prevailing notion seems to be that there was at first no line in the development of doctrine, that for three centuries a plethora of antipathetic tenets and speculations fought to maintain themselves until at last the world proved hospitable only to one variety.
We might say that a teleological theory of evolution has been succeeded by a Darwinian one, except that the discriminating forces in the evolution of Christian doctrine are generally supposed to have been adventitious rather than endemic.
In recent years the narrative has been modified to suggest that the multiplication of ‘Christianity's’ was accelerated rather than arrested by the Council of Nicaea in 325, which is often supposed to have inaugurated the process of unnatural selection which has left us with orthodoxy.
Yet since the majority of these experiments too are assumed to have been abortive, the prevailing story is still one that recounts the destruction of a superfluous harvest, a constrained or guided dwindling from the many to the one.
