Early in church history there was a challenge to organize and share the same beliefs Many doctrinal questions arose that needed to be addressed. Even leadership itself was an issue. There were five important cities for a time, including Jerusalem, that had important church centers.
Human social organizations including church organizations have unmathematical vectors of growth and proliferation. They are not clean, simple, linear structures easy to formulate. Post cold war Russia faced a comparable challenge, as did the USA to a lesser extent that needed resolution via civil war. Boris Yeltsin passed on the rump of the former Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin. How was Yeltsin to know the west would invest in snatching Ukraine from Russian hegemony and in effect launder Ukraine as stolen property and use it as a military spearhead against Russia? The Russia-Ukraine war is another example of civil conflict following the formation of massive social organizations.
The church had schisms and actual heresies like that of Arius, Mani, Marcionism, Montanism, and Sabellianism etc. One may tend to feel that Plotinus was treated badly. Even Augustine left off being a neo-Platonist and accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior.
Plotinus described his experience of transcendence and an intense, deeper, personal encounter with what Christians call the Shekinah Glory of God. It is an immediate experience of the transcendence of realty. Some of course would say that it is just an inward, psychological event, yet to those that experience it, reality itself and the boundaries of subject-objective being are briefly overcome, That is an experience of the super natural or super reality.
What Plotinus called heyschasm is an unforgettable experience yet it too fades somewhat with time, as it must for the individual need exist in reality until the end of his life. Plotinus incidentally was regard as a heretic by the early church for claiming to have directly experienced God
Compare a Chinese heresy where a rebel leader believed, misunderstanding scripture, that he was the actual brother of Christ, and his leadership of rebels in a civil war produced 20 million deaths. Hong Xiuquan
He perished after spending his last days detached, in a harem, while war raged outside his palace. Lack of doctrinal agreement and consensus is a problem inherently possible in the foundation of social organizations - in addition to similar issues arising from future revisions, upgrades and corruptions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19977188
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