Doubting Thomas… you said “True, and you can look at how the earliest Christians in the Apostolic Churches consistently interpreted Scriptures on the key doctrines of God, Christ, and salvation and find a consistency across time and space.”
True. But there was not lock step conformity among the earliest Christians.
However the larger point here is that there was disagreement on many doctrines, and each person had to decide for themselves which teaching (say for example Arius versus Augustine) best fit the whole counsel of God. The “Church” was divided on it, for a time Arius gaining the upper hand, so was the Holy Spirit infallibility guiding the church then? Or were fallible men reading the Scriptures with the help of the Holy Spirit? Plainly, it is the latter. Otherwise you are forced to conclude that the Holy Spirit—if the Holy Spirit is to be so identified with the Church as that which be the ground and pillar of truth, as you seem to want to claim-- was wrong at one time or another as the church wrestled through various doctrines, and that the Holy Spirit has to depend on fallible man to decide what is true in doctrine and what is not. For if the Holy Spirit be equated with the church, and the church sometimes, even often, decided matters of doctrine on votes, then the Holy Spirit had to wait until a vote was over in order to proclaim what the doctrine of the church was. Or, if you want to say that the Holy Spirit moved men to vote in one way or another to decide on doctrine, then all the men who voted in the minority must not have had the Holy Spirit within them, and those in the majority had the Holy Spirit. Is this what you want to say? That everyone who errs doctrinally does not have the Holy Spirit?
Fallibility extends out beyond the apostles, infallibility on certain matters belongs to the writers of the NT as they faithfully recounted the teachings of Jesus. It was these (the apostles) that Christ promised to bring to their remembrance all the things He had said and done, not the general church.
Joh 14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
So you can point to 1 Tim 3 all you like, but will not find the doctrine of papal infallibility or infallible apostolic succession, rather the pillar and ground of the truth is spoken of as referring to God; “that ὁς εστι, who is, should be supplied as referring immediately to Θεος, God, just before…. the passage will read thus: That thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, Who Is (ὁς εστι) the pillar and ground of the truth.” (Clarke) This must refer to God for the following reason; that men are prone to error. That is, if it were referring to the church, then the pillar and ground of truth would be found to have error in it, but if it had error in it, it would cease to be the pillar and ground of truth. Therefore that which is referred to must be God, the only true and absolute truth. It is this truth that supports and under girds the truth.
Paul was all too familiar with the error of the church taken as a whole, look at the Galatians and the Corinthians for example. They were filled with believers that were in serious doctrinal error, sometimes being outside the church altogether, and sometimes not. For those errors that did not place someone outside of the faith altogether, they were in error nonetheless. Why then would Paul refer to that as being the ground and pillar of truth that was itself filled with all sorts of doctrinal error? This makes no sense at all.
blessings,
Ken
