In a world where humans rather than seraphim run the churches, perhaps the best we can hope to do is to pit conflicting claims against one another in an orderly way.
The idea was checks and balances applied to men who were not angels might prove superior to British kings and other persons of quality if the standard was external to both. This notion has carried over into modern blockchain systems, where every step is unambiguously identified, consensus enforced by explicit rules and reproducible by any party. A maximum of trust is delegated to a verifiable system and as little as possible is left to the virtue of the participants.That's a sensible generalization of "it is not from the benevolence of the baker ..."
I like the idea of the Donatist heresy, which might have taken seriously the instruction that only those without sin get to cast stones. As a practical matter, though, throwing out any institution that was not conceived without sin isn't going to turn out well absent careful thought about what replaces it. "Not so long ago it was an article of faith that the road to salvation was thronged by sinners and was in fact designed for sinners alone. Perhaps it still is. The difference was that then we knew it." Notice that the Preamble to the Constitution reads "form a more perfect Union." Better, I submit, to attempt incremental improvements, rather than deconstruct everything and hope to do better from scratch.
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