Why There Is Only One Christian Faith

Modern Christianity assumes that disagreement about doctrine is normal, harmless, and even healthy, yet the New Testament presents a radically different vision of faith.

Galatians 1 provides the framework for this teaching, especially St. Paul’s insistence that the gospel he preached was not shaped by human reasoning, private judgment, or theological creativity, but received through revelation and confirmed within the apostolic Church. After his conversion and baptism, St. Paul did not trust spiritual experience alone, but went to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles, submitting his understanding to ensure that what he believed was in full harmony with the faith handed down by Christ.

This apostolic pattern exposes a sharp contrast with modern assumptions about Christianity, where disagreement about baptism, communion, salvation, grace, and the work of the Holy Spirit is often treated as inconsequential. These disagreements are not merely differences of emphasis, but fundamentally different descriptions of who God is and how He acts. A sacramental God and a non-sacramental god cannot be reconciled, just as a God who universally wills salvation cannot be the same as one who selectively withholds grace.

The unity of Christian teaching is presented as a direct consequence of the unity of God Himself. The faith is not preserved through personal interpretation or evolving opinion, but through continuity with the apostles and the saints who have guarded the same theological harmony for two thousand years. Where doctrine becomes personal and theology becomes plural, coherence is lost and confusion takes its place, revealing why the Church has always insisted on one God, one faith, one Church, and one gospel.