And they must also agree that God has CRUELLY DENIED this opportunity to billions of Christians throughout history, that God effectively said to billions, "You can read the Bible and be Saved OR you can have food, clothing and shelter, your choice."
I have a lifelong love of history and my favorite period is medieval Europe and the reality is that during the Middle Ages all of Europe was under feudalism and well over 90% of the population was impoverished and this didn't begin to change until the social upheaval brought on by the Black Death in the mid-14th century. Nearly every person had to work land that they didn't own in order to earn enough to eat and live in a hut that they also didn't own. Depending on the crops, starvation was a very real concern on a daily basis. It was IMPOSSIBLE for these people to own a Bible, because even if that was their choice, they would starve before they saved the money.
Right! I have a book on medieval manuscripts somewhere....it tried to calculate how much a full Bible would have cost in the High Middle Ages. I forget most of the details, but it basically came out to about as much as a house.
Yet they had the “catechism of the poor” in those beautiful paintings and stained glass windows.