Mumblings on Doctrine

Lately I've been reading the bits of apostolic-era creeds, found mainly in Paul's letters.  Occasionally that leads me to think about "current" hot topics, and to think about what earlier hot topics were.  In other words, what did the Church focus on in various periods of time?

During the Apostolic period, the focus was first on refuting the Judaizers: believers who believed that Christianity was Messainic Judaism, simply expanding on what it means to be a Jew.  In other words, the first crisis-driven focus was on what it meant to be a Christian.  Paul fixed that misconception in short order: it wasn't for the Jew, it wasn't for the Greek, it was for sinners.

From there it quickly moved to focus on refuting the Gnostics, who denied that Jesus was a man.  So doctrinal thought diverted to Christology -- and more or less camped out on that topic for a few hundred years.  Some of the Orthodox churches basically opted out at Chalcedon, thereby postponing ecumenical dialogue for a thousand years, and before the end of the first millenium the shaky communion between the eastern and western church pretty much ended that conversation as well.

Topics have come up since then, but not on an ecumenical basis.  In fact, you might simplistically say that denominationalism arose due to very poor communication.  The ecumenical dialogues haven't yet happened.  That it has taken about 1500 years so far to stew over these issues shouldn't be surprising; if it took 400 years to figure out (mostly) who Christ is, then the velocity suggested (by that one data point) appears to agree with our progress so far.

The church hasn't really had the time and energy to talk about what the church is.  Each church has an idea as to what the church is, and some are staunch about it.

The church hasn't really had the time and energy to talk about what salvation is.  Again, each church has an idea, and most are quite serious about it.

I suspect that ecumenical dialogue will have to happen like it is happening now: with pairs of organizations talking things through and getting the language down, then having everyone look at what they've done and figure out what to disagree with.  Then iterate, perhaps with a different pair of organizations.  A painfully slow, bottom-up process.  But there's no emperor this time who will order all the church leaders of the world to meet and argue things out in one marathon bull session.