After the Dice Rolled
Once you look at Christian Church history long enough, belief stops feeling like standing on rock and starts feeling like standing on the outcome of a thousand quarrels.
People are told “the Church teaches” as if the teaching arrived intact, like a sealed crate delivered from heaven. But the Church did not receive a crate. It assembled a library while arguing about which books belonged in it. It developed a vocabulary while fighting over what words were allowed to mean. It built an institution while insisting it was merely guarding something timeless. Then, after the smoke cleared, it called the surviving version inevitable.
Start early, before the system hardened: In the first centuries, there is no single Christianity. There are many Christianities, some wild, some sober, all convinced. Origen in Alexandria reads Scripture as layered, symbolic, open-ended. History is education. Souls are on long journeys. Meaning unfolds. It is expansive, even reckless. Later Origen is condemned, not because he was incoherent, but because he left too many doors unlocked. Institutions hate unlocked doors.
Then theology becomes a matter of state. Constantine does not invent doctrine, but he changes the physics of the room. Once emperors care, councils stop being debates. They become instruments. A theological formula becomes a loyalty test.
The fault line sharpens with Arianism. Named after Arius, it holds that Christ is exalted but not fully God. The appeal is obvious: unity preserved, hierarchy intact, mystery reduced. Against it stands Nicene theology, insisting the Son is fully divine. Athanasius fights not with abstractions but with exile, alliances, pressure, survival. He wins. Orthodoxy wins with him.
It is easy now to treat Arianism as obviously wrong. But it spread widely, made sense to many, and fit a basic religious instinct. It is not hard to imagine a world where it won. Had that happened, we would now be told that outcome was inevitable. The victors always say inevitability.
Move East and West and the claim to absolute truth begins to wobble in plain sight. The Greek Fathers speak in the language of healing and transformation. Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor treat sin as sickness and salvation as healing, the end as participation in divine life. Precision exists, but mystery remains allowed.
The Latin West develops a different temperament: juridical, administrative, order-oriented. Augustine of Hippo becomes the hinge. Sin acquires inherited guilt. Grace becomes decisive intervention. The Church becomes clearer mediator. The imagination turns courtroom-shaped. You can feel Rome in its bones.
If Christianity is one absolute truth, why does it arrive in two such different psychological and metaphysical forms? Why does the East sound like a hospital and the West like a tribunal? You can harmonize this, but the need to do so already tells you something. This is history, not geometry.
Even the Bible is not a neutral object dropped into the world. The canon was fought over for centuries. Texts competed. Some were cherished locally and rejected elsewhere. Criteria emerged, but criteria are applied by people with incentives and fears. The Church did not simply recognize the canon. It stabilized it. Stabilization is not discovery.
Then comes the Filioque, contributing to the Great Schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity: One phrase, added in the West, rejected in the East. Same God, same Christ, same Scriptures, yet fracture follows. Not because new truth was found, but because language, authority, and power collided.
As the Church grows empire-sized, it behaves like every large organism. It defends itself. It polices speech. It prefers unity to ambiguity, closure to openness. Spiritual possibilities are trimmed away, not always because they are false, but because they are unmanageable. A machine emerges. The machine works. It scales. It survives.
And then you are asked to call the machine identical with absolute truth.
Some people cannot do that. Not from chaos-seeking or immaturity, but because they understand systems. Institutions do not only preserve truth. They manufacture stability. Orthodoxy begins to look like whatever survived the administrative bottleneck.
At this point, the standard answer appears: the Spirit guided the process. Councils, creeds, canon, schisms. Not random, but providential.
This sounds reassuring. It is also intellectually weak. An explanation that can bless every possible outcome explains nothing. If Arianism had won, it too would have been declared Spirit-guided. If Origen had shaped orthodoxy instead of being sidelined, the same language would apply. A claim that validates all results after the fact does not help us understand why this one occurred.
Worse, the framework quietly shifts. When individuals sin, the Church emphasizes free will and responsibility. When institutions prevail, it speaks the language of guidance and inevitability. Human freedom assigns guilt. Divine guidance assigns legitimacy. The rules change depending on what needs defending.
If the Spirit guarantees outcomes, history could not have unfolded otherwise and human agency becomes decorative. If human agency is real, outcomes are contingent, mixed, and morally complex. You cannot have both without contradiction. Invoking the Spirit here does not resolve the tension. It covers it.
A more serious position admits the discomfort: that history is open, that institutions close off real possibilities, that survival does not equal truth, and that guidance, if it exists, does not operate like quality control for power. But that position gives up certainty, and certainty is what institutions crave.
So belief begins to feel like pretending the dice never rolled.
You can admire the beauty, the ethics, the mysticism, the brilliance of the Church Fathers. You can even love parts of the tradition. But you cannot honestly claim that the version that won was the only version that could have existed.
The dice rolled. People fought. Empires leaned on bishops. Bishops leaned on texts. Texts leaned on philosophies. Philosophies leaned on cultures. Out of this came something vast, influential, sometimes noble, sometimes grim, often contradictory.
Call it a tradition. Call it a civilization. Call it a monument.
But if you call it the one and final form of absolute truth, you are asking an honest person to deny what history is plainly showing them.