Part II: On the Man Called Christ, Chapter IV: The Witness of the Heretics Summary and Analysis

When Christ founded his Church, he described the authority he gave to his Apostles with the metaphor of a key. This metaphor is actually incredibly fitting for the Christian faith. Like a key, the Christian faith promised to unlock the chains that bound mankind to sin. Further, like a key, the Christian faith had a very specific shape which, if it was lost, would compromise the whole. In other words, Christianity was fundamentally committed to the notion of orthodoxy, that every belief had to be just so or the entire system fell apart and it is cause for some wonder that this commitment to orthodoxy was not a development which occurred centuries after its creation...