I’m going to go out on a limb and say that virtually all mainstream Protestants will agree with what you’ve just written, with the caveat that the Church need not be centred on an infallible bishop of Rome in order to be the pillar and foundation of the truth, but rather that that status comes from,
and only from, the faithful preaching of the Gospe
Bu then…which gospel according to whom? According to Luther? Calvin? which of the several thousand protestant denoms out there-all claiming to teach the right gospel according their interpretation of the bible?
freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1858224/posts
And finally, the Protestant notion of sola scriptura (the Bible alone) fell apart each time I tried to test it. I began to see that Evangelicalism’s insistence on going by the Bible alone led continually into division and problems. Worse yet, claiming to go by the Bible alone didn’t really provide any certitude of belief for believers
I asked myself where was the “one body, one faith, and one baptism” St. Paul spoke about so passionately? I began to fear that the answer could not be what American missionaries were peddling, at least it couldn’t be the whole answer.
I thought about this choose-your-own-church syndrome constantly. While all of us missionaries from these various denominations proclaimed the purity of our gospel, the truth was, there was no way for any of us to know for sure which of us had it “most right.”
With all the competing voices, how was one to know who was right? What mere man could stand up with a clear conscience before a group of illiterate people and say, “This is what the Bible means?” The sheer arrogance of what was going on made it difficult for me to listen to sermons after a while. All of them were “preaching the gospel.” But whose gospel? I wondered. Around that time, a more fundamental question loomed: What is the gospel?
Still, I wanted to be able to tell a new Christian where he or she could go to church and really learn the truth about God. I began to ask myself, “What exactly is my personal theology?” I felt if only I could firm up my own beliefs, I’d be able to find the answer. The more I thought about this, the scarier my conclusions became, because the bottom line for me and for every other individual Protestant Christian was this: Theology for the modern Evangelical is a matter of his own opinion about what Scripture means.