Every self-labeled Christian believes that their theology is at least sufficient. In addition, culture, language, and politics are at times hard to disentangle from theology proper.
While it can be entertaining to count the discrete number of denominations out there -- and in theory you could say that each individual could represent a unique denomination -- in reality there are only a few key discriminators by which one might figure out where one sits in the spectrum of faith. To find these discriminators, one need not go any further than to peek at the major inflection points of Christianity itself.
Theology is never in a vacuum; it only gets stirred up when there is a conflict within the church about the practice of faith. As an item of theology is squared away with the Bible, the church encourages practices that support it, and suppresses practices which contrast it. It's not an easy process, and it's definitely a long road with twists and turns. That's because the church in general is not good at staying on the straight and narrow, apparently.
The main issue, always, everywhere, is what the Bible is: i.e. how to interpret it, and how authoritative it is. What you think about it fundamentally shapes what your faith is. From these stem all other considerations. This informs (and is informed by) your view of where the Christian finds his Regula Fidei, his supreme authority for determining faith and practice.
Stepping a bit further, however, we can spot the key issues with which the church has wrestled. These appear to be: Law, Christ, and Faith.
The earliest is the place of the Jewish Law. There were questions from the start over how authoritative Judaism was in the place of believers. This old chestnut still crops up, proving that dying to self is hard indeed. Some sectarian churches define themselves on an intermediate position in this camp.
After the first or second generation of believers died, there came fundamental questions about how Christ's divinity can possibly mix with his human nature, and indeed how it can mix with God's nature as well. This spawned all sorts of heresies -- again, not in a vacuum, but as a consequence of ideas systematized into competing practices of faith. It seems that Christian churches are typically, minimally, defined by the conclusions of Athanasius in the 4th century, which put the term Trinity on the map. It's how we generally might label a church as not-really-Christian.
Fast forward a thousand years. By this time we've ruminated a LOT on the nature of faith. The reformation was not a freak occurrance, nor was it sudden -- there were precedents before it; the history of the church is one of continuous attempts to correct and reform. It was the result of hundreds of years of contemplation and the consideration of the nature of faith versus the slow development of practice, and in fact is just a link in the 2,000-year-long chain. For example, what we think about our faith largely defines what we think the organization of the church should be. If faith is more personal, hierarchy is less useful in matters of faith, and removes itself to specifically a governing mechanism. And one starts to wonder at what point there is too much authority invested in too few men.
There's a false tension between personal and corporate faith. Christians have generally always worshipped corporately; and yet faith is always personal. Confusing the two results in abuses of both.
So, taking those three issues (Law, Christ, and Faith), how many denominations can you come up with?
Anabaptists, Baptists, and Congregationalists are essentially similar: low Law, autonomous, and trinitarian. Only hermeneutics distinguish their dogmas.
Calivinist (Presbyterian and Reformed) and Lutheran churches are more similar than not, low Law and trinitarian, with differing hermeneutics, but synodic governments.
Anglicans, Methodists and Holiness churches are (generally) low Law and trinitarian, differing mainly only in Faith (Anglicanism is episcopal, Methodism is synodic, and Holiness is autonomous). In this respect these related traditions mimic the reformation's slow movement away from episocopal government to congregationalism, or some sort of accountability system that's in between congregation and synod.
Orthodox and Catholic churches are essentially the same: medium Law, trinitarian, and episcopal.
Restorationists and Adventists are essentially similar to each other: high Law and autonomous, but divided by hermeneutics.
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