All the following religious currents, considered that it will come an age of the Holy Spirit, when men will be linked to God through the Holy Spirit, not trough the Church. I believe we are at the dawn of this age. Read and think for yourselves.

156-172 A.D. - Montanists proclaim the Age of the Holy Spirit in Phrygia of Asia Minor.  Montanism arose in Phrygia [c.172] under the leadership of a certain Montanus and two female prophets, Prisca and Maximillia, whose entranced utterances were deemed oracles of the Holy Spirit. They encouraged ecstatic prophesying and strict asceticism.

Phrygia was the center of the ecstatic cult of Cybele, and Montanus, according to one tradition, had been a priest of Cybele.

Montanus normally referred to the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete (the title Jesus used in John's Gospel). He was strongly influenced by Jesus' promises about the future work of the Paraclete, and sometimes claimed to be the direct mouthpiece of the Spirit, speaking in the first person.

According to Epiphanius, Montanus began preaching about 156, saying the Spirit had seized him. He often spoke as if he were the Holy Spirit, thus giving his pronouncements a divine sanction greater than that of established church authorities...

Tertullian, its greatest convert, joined the movement shortly after A.D. 200. He wrote about a woman who was blessed with 'various gifts of revelations' and received visions and secret communications by the Spirit during the church's services of worship. (Women played an important role in Montanism.)

The lifestyle of the Montanists was regulated according to strict standards: they were to fast often, eat only dry food and abstain from sexual intercourse, even within marriage. In their, the Paraclete summoned Christians to a much stricter way of life than before. He urged Christians never to try lo escape from persecution and death. Martyrdom was very important for the Montanisls. They believed the Paraclete told Christians to hope for a death 'not in bed but in martyrdom’.

Joachim of Flores (c1145-1202), a Cistercian monk from Calabria, Italy, became famous as a prophet began to spread after he had two visions that ‘gave him the gift of spiritual intelligence enabling him to understand the inner meaning of history. He foresaw in the early thirteenth century the total transformation of the Catholic Church and a new form of spiritual life in which the Holy Spirit would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation.

Joachim wrote, in his Expositio in Apocalypsia, that history was to be divided into three ages: The Age of the Law of Moses (the Father), The Age of the Gospel (the Son), and the final Age of the Spirit. He had indicated at the end of the 12th Century that the Antichrist was already born in Rome.  The abbot describes a conspiracy by saying, "The external evil they did was a sign of the greater evil they conceived within, that is, to snuff out the spiritual understanding and bury it in the belly of the letter so that its voice might be heard no more in their streets nor have any further place in their possessions."

For Joachim, the Christ-centered interpretation of the bible fails to take into account Jesus' extensive references to the Holy Spirit. When Jesus articulates the coming of the Holy Spirit as an extension of his own work, the inference is that the Holy Spirit is to complete what he began. He said that in the age of the Holy Spirit, the Church "becoming superfluous would in time dissolve." Joachim prophesied the coming of a new stage of history, established by a group of powerful spiritual beings, in which human beings would consciously participate in the revelation of the Divine numen described as "that which leaves the flesh completely behind and passes over into the spirit."

Writing in 1297, the friar Petrus Olivi predicted Antichrist's coming between 1300 and 1340, after which the world would enter the Age of the Holy Spirit, which itself would end around the year 2000 with Gog and the Last Judgement.

Petre