Floods Upon The Dry Ground by Charles P. Schmitt

Study Questions: Chapter 3

1. Show from evidence within the New Testament that by the end of the first century we are witnessing a movement on the decline.
   
   
2. What reason does historian Lars P. Qualben give for this spiritual decline?
   
   
3. Discuss briefly the government of the churches of the apostles. How does Church government of the second century differ from this?
   
   
4. What one prevailing condition in the first-century church made government by a college of elders workable?
   
   
5. Discuss several of the errors of Gnosticism and the entrenchment of these errors in early Catholic Christianity.
   
   
6. Discuss briefly how the outbreak of Gnosticism in the second century affected the structure of the Christian Church.