I, for one, know where Protestants are coming from, historically: I read the languages necessary to follow sixteenth-century history. I’ve lived in bastions of Protestantism for most of my life now, have close friends who are Protestant, as are a few family members, published on a few Protestant thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, respect Protestant (or whatever) efforts to uphold Biblical morality and to emulate Christ’s example.
Without time to reply to all of the replies, there is one fallacy I would want to point out:
That believers can be divorced from belief.
I think that Protestants make this mistake because of a climate: they are further and further moving away from dogmatic religion–their own, with its ultimate source in the RCC–to use other means which flatly contradict not only one and another but also the NT in passages impossible to mistake and requiring next to no ‘interpretation.’ This is why the C of E looks more like a bad hollywood movie of the RCC than it does a genuine Christian religion.
What is the nature of that divorce? In essence, claiming there is a a church of believers, no matter the belief.
Yet, a church makes no sense–as the passage from Romans makes clear–apart from belief, as specific and explicit as can be, and that belief resides in doctrine, the word which Paul himself uses here. For the polyglot Paul, adept at Greek and Roman philosophy, to say nothing of Jewish law, doctrine was a great, essential, and delicate thing to be handled with utmost care, as only one church could ever do.
In other words, contrary to one passage (there are plenty of others) obviously a cornerstone for dogmatic and credal religion, self-identifying Protestants claim a church based on belief, unspecified and forever, since the sixteenth century, changing, contradicting, self-contradictary, even to the denial of the divinity of Christ.
I’ve heard all the proviso clauses: as long as you believe in x, you still get to be a Christian. But the x is variable, ad infinitum, but obviously. Nor is there any NT support for that proviso arrangement.
I think Paul was Spirit-filled in his pronouncement, which fits Protestantism about perfectly.