So someone commented on my YouTube video on the rise of the pope on YouTube with “So in your view, Christ had no plan for how His Church would survive for the rest of time and unending? How old is your church and what is your bishop’s name? Serious questions. Not trolling.”

I wrote:

I have answers for those questions, but my video does not require me to answer them. I need to make that clear first. My video is simply history. It is accurate history.

I have been puzzling over Jesus’ plan for his church ever since I wrote Decoding Nicea. The fact is, if “the Church” is a big organization like the Catholics and Orthodox, then Jesus began disassembling his church in the 5th century. He sectioned off Egypt and Syria at the 3rd and 4th ecumenical councils. The Persian and Indian churches were separated, though not excommunicated like Syria and Egypt, in the same century. Worst of all was the descent of the Roman Catholic church into irreligion and immorality in the tenth and eleventh centuries with the popes being selected by powerful Italian families (see my book, Rome’s Audacious Claim). In the 1300s, French families and cardinals became even more powerful than the Italian families, and the bishop of Rome, “the pope,” reigned in Avignon, France for 70 years. Then there were two popes, and for a very short time, there were 3!!

Oh, and I skipped the official mutual excommunication between the pope and the bishop of Constantinople in 1054.

Obviously, Jesus plan was not to keep the big organization that claimed to be “the Church” together. It is still not together. Most Orthodox consider the pope a heretic, and the pope’s titles make him, by definition, an antichrist. It is Jesus who is the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, not the pope.

So, my conclusion is that Jesus never wanted a unity of organization, but a unity of Spirit. We have a biblical command to “diligently” preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, to love one another, to build one another up (Eph. 4:1-16). I know of no command to adhere to the one, true church organization.

In the beginning, the foundation of unity was churches all adhering together to the one faith delivered once for all to the saints (Jude 1:3, see also Apostolic Tradition at Christian-history.org). You can find this in all the second-century “fathers” of the church. In the third-century fathers, the foundation of unity slowly shifts to the unity of the bishops. This is a big difference since Jesus is the Truth (Jn. 14:6), our one foundation (1 Cor. 3:11). Bishops are not “the Truth,” and they are not our one foundation.

The fruit of this shift can be seen in the divisions I described above. Jesus clearly is not standing with the big organizations and their apostolic succession. Instead, he continues to call us all to truth, commands us to unite, and most of us just ignore him putting our eternal destiny in danger (Gal. 5:19-21). In Galatians, note the numerous references to divisions and schisms in that passage.