spaminator,
I think that you are a sincere Christian trying to clarify and understand your beliefs and those of other Christians. So I put a question to you. If you had been taught the Christian faith only through word of mouth and did not have the bible, and wanted to be sure you got it all right, where would you look for guidance? Obviously to anything written by the apostles, but I have said you don't have the bible. Or even having the bible, you want to be sure you intrepret it correctly when there are so many different and conflicting interpretations. So where would you look for it? Wouldn't it make sense to be guided by what the majority of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation disciples of the apostles taught and wrote? Wouldn't this be considered highly authoritative since it was so chronologically close in time to the actual life of Jesus, similar to oral traditions of the american civil war passed down in families for the first 100 years or so after the deaths of those who participated (which brings it down to our grandparents' time)? And I mean the letters and books written by those people and not so-called new testament apochrypha purporting to be scripture such as the Gospel of James.
If you think that this seems a reasonable approach, then why not study the writings of the early Christians. Those who wrote before the date that protestants consider the start of the institutional catholic church that exists today. Search the net under "early church fathers" and "patristics" and see what you find. To be sure, there were disagreements and heresies even then, and as early as the time of St. Paul as he recounts in his letters in the new testament. But find out what the majority view of the early christians was. If you do this, along with prayer for God's grace of discernment, it will greatly advance your faith even if you never accept the catholic doctrines that I believe. I put it to you that you cannot really know what protestant doctrine is, without also understanding what preceded it. And since protestant denominations claim that the reformation recaptured the beliefs and practices of the early church before the "institutional" catholic church came into being around 350 A.D., then the proof of whether that is the case should be found in the writings of those early christians prior to that date. You might be surprised at what you find.
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