Divisions in Christianity are mostly pointless arguments over doctrines that have little to do with things that matter. Who knows for sure about the rapture? I my thoughts. I'm not going to start a denomination over it. Has no one ever thought of agreeing to disagree? It seems at least 30,000 could not accept that idea.
In the year 200, I have some scripture but not all of it has been assembled into the Bible as we have it now. Certain writings are beginning to be accepted as inspired. I need the guidance of the Holy Spirit in all things. Funnily enough, that works for me now. There are spiritual men that preach and teach things that are edifying and encouraging. And that is true now. Apart from the fact that the Bible has been mostly agreed to (some accept the apocrypha, I do not), I don't see much difference between 200 and 2000 AD.
Today you can read Scripture for yourself.
In 200 AD you couldn't. Not because it was being hidden from you, but because there was no printing press.
That's what I was trying to get at. In 200 AD you would have to rely on your community, your church, you'd have to rely on the hearing of Scripture read in the course of the liturgy.
You had to rely on those trained in Scripture and in Christian teaching to deposit Christian truth to you, as an individual.
This idea that the individual has a direct line of access to God, and the Holy Spirit just dumps revelations and truth into us individually is an idea that is thoroughly foreign to Christianity.
Jesus didn't say the Holy Spirit will lead you, Aussie Pete, to all truth. No, Jesus was speaking to His Apostles specifically, and the Church as a whole broadly. It's not that you, the individual, will be given special divine insights by the Holy Spirit; but that you, as a member of the Body of Christ, can trust upon the word of God that has been entrusted to the Apostles and confessed since the beginning--that what has been given from the beginning is true.
So you, reading the Bible, will not have the Holy Spirit reveal special things to you; instead you having the modern day luxury of being able to read the printed word have unprecedented access to the reading of Scripture which Christians in the past would never have even imagined as even possible. And so you have a responsibility not to misuse this opportunity by turning this way or that way, thinking you have more truth than what has already been given; but instead to be humble and listen to what has been said down through the ages, to take advantage of the great amount of scholarship and academic work that has been accomplished over two thousand years of history, to take these sacred words you read with the utmost seriousness they deserve.
You do not read the Bible alone, you read the Bible surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses.
-CryptoLutheran
