Found recently:
“The simple but nonetheless important point to emerge from this is that it is not God's will for us to exist merely as individual Christians. We are meant to gather together as the people of God.”

It struck me while reading the web-article where I found this quote, that there was nothing actually wrong with it, but that it was answering a wrong-headed question; or that it wasn't saying anything necessarily false, but just not saying the entire truth.

In other words, the person writing this assumes that we are first individuals, and then we have to make the effort to join the church. Reality is that we are not members of Christ without being members of His body, and so if any move is made, it is the move to separate. We aren’t primarily lone Christians with the individual lifeline to God, who then have to be sure and join the Church. We are baptized into Christ, Head and Body. Not to participate in the life of the Church isn't just maintaining status quo, it is to act contrary to the existing reality. It is not God’s will for us to exist as individual Christians, as the article mentioned, and so God didn’t make us individual Christians.

I realize slowly how deeply ingrained this individualistic paradigm is in myself, and in Americans in general.

My latest question has arisen from my two history classes. In one we have been studying the beginning of German pietism in the early 1700's; in the other, reading Augustine's Confessions.

Augustine of Hippo could write typological exegesis with a vengeance. Out of the first thirteen verses of Genesis, he gets the triune nature of God, the tripartite nature of man, and the comparison of the unformed void of the earth before creation to the the unformed void of our souls before God shines His light on us. And that is not to mention the discourse on time and eternity and the discourse on sound and song.

But why exactly do some modern Christians seem to fear the typological interpretation of Scripture? Do they believe they will lose the "plain meaning" of the text if they admit that it may have more than one meaning? Is this just plain old pietistic dislike of theology, or is there a more specific connection between pietism and a distrust of typology? Or maybe it's simply so foreign to anything many are taught today, that they have to acclimate.