“I’ve never met a single believer, nor a single church that believed that the people you list are the authority on interpreting the Scriptures.”
You’re mostly correct, I think, except for a few of the ones listed, as they were founders of cults, not mainline denominations (Charles Taze Russell founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example). Cults do hold to the teachings of men over the teachings of Scripture, which is one of the things that makes them a cult.
Of course, that is not true for the vast majority of Protestant churches, despite Catholic confusion over the matter. In fact, the Catholic church’s insistence on a strict adherence to its hierarchy’s doctrinal interpretation is closer to the practice of the cults than the mainline Protestant churches are. Both the Catholic church and the cults impose an interpretation of the totality of Scripture, claiming absolute authority and brooking no dispute or deviation. Mainline Protestant churches, on the other hand, generally only require assent to a few creeds and perhaps a short foundational document that sums up the most important doctrinal beliefs about the nature of God and salvation.
Now, what is interesting to me about this line of attack is how self-contradictory it is with other anti-protestant attack points. After all, we are constantly told that a weakness of protestantism is “everyone is allowed to personally interpret scripture”, and that this is bad because it causes us to have no uniformity of belief. It simply can’t be true that protestants are all freely interpreting Scripture on a whim, while we are also slavishly following the interpretations of some dead guy or another at the same time. I wish the anti-protestant brigade would clear up these conflicts among themselves, so I wouldn’t have to point them out for them.
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No, what the Church does today in regard to doctrines on "faith and morals" is exactly what the Apostle Paul did too, over and over again.
If you took away Paul's exhortations in his epistles to the Church in various locations to get back to strictly adhering to the Church's (the Holy Spirit's) teachings on faith and morals, you would lose most of the New Testament.
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(Just wanted to respond to this point too.)
There is no conflict.
All Calvinists pretty much rigidly adhere to Calvin's teachings, while all Methodists (for example), or Adventists, do not. All Seventh Day Adventists, for example, pretty much adhere to the teachings of Ellen G. White (which are directly opposed to Calvinism), as Adventists -- and Methodists -- believe one can lose one's salvation.
When you have thousands of different denominations, they can all be rigidly adhering to their own beliefs, while those beliefs widely diverge between the different denominations.
There is no conflict with that.
When someone starts interpreting everything for themselves, and believe they understand it better than the founder of their denomination, they go off and start another denomination. That's why there are so many of them.
(Pinging a couple folks who may be able to explain that a bit more clearly than I have, if they have the time.)