A tease from Ross Douhat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.
The way orthodoxy synthesizes the New Testament’s complexities has forced churchgoers of every prejudice and persuasion to confront a side of Jesus that cuts against their own assumptions. A rationalist has to confront the supernatural Christ, and a pure mystic the wordly, eat-drink-and-be-merry Jesus, with his wedding feasts and fish fries. A Reaganite conservative has to confront the Jesus who railed against the rich; a post-sexual revolution liberal, the Jesus who forbade divorce. There is something to please almost everyone in the orthodox approach to the Gospels, but something to challenge them as well. A choose your own Jesus mentality, by contrast, encourages spiritual seekers to screen out discomfiting parts of the New Testament and focus only on whichever Christ they find most cogenial. And our religious culture is now dominated by figures who flatter this impulse, in all its myriad forms — conservative and liberal, conspiratorial and mystical, eco-friendly and consumerist, and everything in between.”
Reading Freely 
Its long seemed to me that, after the *great* schism, you’re just going to get denominations splitting and splitting again until, eventually, you have millions/billions of individuals with their own singular belief system rather than accepting their churches dogma. But then again. I’ve never really managed to get my head around the ‘whole thing’ in the first place, so what do I know….
The great schism was chiefly about papal authority (with the pope’s unilateral addition to the Nicene Creed, serving as the breaking point) although there were also cultural differences between the western and east at that point, just as there were in the empire in general. One area of research I want to get into is finding out close/far the Oriental churches (i.e. those who were already distinct from the Ortho-Catholic union) are from eastern Orthodoxy today. I don’t think the denominations splitting was inevitable at all: it was the primacy placed on the individual that started that, whereas before you had organizational authority that was a moderating force — which could be wise or oppressive depending. I think there’s a delicate balance to strike: a tradition has to be cohesive and conservative-oriented, with a margin of leeway for adopting to severe circumstances. Liberal religions simply evaporate away: there’s a reason it’s Mormonism and Pentecostalism are spreading while mainline protestatism, and the post Vatican II Catholics, are withering. This is especially interesting given that the Mormons and Pentecostals are novel themselves, but in the case of the Mormons they developed a strong organization. Pentecostals are more fractured and may be a flame that burns out, but they do give people something — lines on the ground not to cross, a belief that there’s something worth fighting for and building, etc.