What It Means To Be Protestant is mostly about not being Catholic

What is Protestantism?

It seems a straightforward thing to answer. Protestantism is the affirmation of Scripture as the ultimate, unparalleled authority of Christian faith and practice. Protestantism is the “five solae” of the sixteenth-century Reformation: Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, and Soli Deo Gloria. And Protestantism is not Catholic (or, as many Protestants insist, Roman Catholic, claiming that the Church is not really universal, since it excludes Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox).

Which Protestantism?

Yet many Protestants—typically of a traditionalist, confessionalist variety—believe a significant number of those raised in various traditions do not understand Protestantism. This, they assert, explains why many are becoming Catholic or Orthodox. It’s also what Protestant theologian and apologist Gavin Ortlund argues in his recent book, What It Means To Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church. “They leave Protestantism for other traditions without an authentic grasp of what Protestantism really is (and often without fully looking into the other traditions,” he writes in the introduction. “We must distinguish between particular contemporary expressions of Protestantism versus Protestantism as such,” he urges elsewhere.

Yet what is “Protestantism as such”?

At least in What It Means To Be Protestant, the answer more or less includes the definitions I’ve cited above. Certainly, many self-identifying Protestants across a variety of Protestant communions would probably agree with much of that—but not all, and possibly not even a majority. According to Pew, about one-third of self-identifying Protestants affirm either sola fide or sola scriptura but not both, and another third do not believe in either doctrine. Perhaps Ortlund would protest, saying such persons are precisely the problem, and do not get to define what Protestantism truly is. But, then, who does?

It’s a problem that has beguiled Protestantism since the earliest decades of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, of course, sparked the theological (and, in time, ecclesial) movement with his protests against the late-medieval Catholic Church. Many across Europe aligned themselves with Luther, though that alignment was by no means total or monolithic—indeed, disagreements abounded, including on the very question of what defined the true Reformation. Some, such as Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans, often referred to as magisterial Protestants because they enjoyed state support, flourished. Others, such as Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Karlstadt, the Zwickau prophets, the Hutterites, and the Mennonites—often termed the radical Reformers—were either suppressed or pushed to the fringes of Europe.

In time, the various magisterial Protestant churches issued the kinds of doctrinal confessions that Ortlund and other Protestant apologists appeal to as representative of “authentic Protestantism”: the Westminster Confession of Faith of English Calvinists, the “Three Forms of Unity” of Dutch Calvinists, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicans, and the Augsburg Confession of Lutherans. Yet all of those confessional documents necessarily excluded other self-identifying Protestants who disagreed with them, “dissenters” often labeled heretics. Many Calvinists, for example, such as seventeenth-century Reformed English theologian John Owen, viewed Arminianism as a manifestation of the Pelagian heresy and in opposition to sola fide.

The very nature of Protestantism, with its historic emphasis on the individual Christian reading his Bible and protesting against a corrupt Catholic Church filled with “doctrinal accretions,” means that there is, by default, no way of adjudicating different assertions of what is “Protestantism as such.” Appeals to Scripture or church history help little, given there is no agreed-upon arbiter within Protestantism regarding disputes over what the Bible means or which theologians or confessional documents are authoritative, besides recourse to the Bible itself.

What we’re left with, then, is typically a presentation of Protestantism that is merely contra the Catholic Church. And that is certainly the case with Ortlund’s book, which argues that “Protestantism is the most catholic and the most biblical of all the major streams of Christianity.”

Which mere Christianity?

Ortlund’s “too catholic to be Catholic” mantra—popularized by such Protestant thinkers as Peter Leithart, Kenneth Collins, and Jerry Walls—is intended to mean that the Catholic Church is exclusive in various ways that are not actually catholic in the universal sense.

For example, so they argue, the Church demands its adherents hold to a wide variety of doctrines that have little if any biblical support; it refuses to recognize various aspects of Protestantism as legitimate, such as ordination, and will not allow Protestants to receive the Eucharist at Mass. Protestantism, in contrast, is said to be more accepting of other ecclesial traditions and allows for a diversity of religious belief and practice. “Protestantism has a superior orientation toward catholicity than its rivals because it lacks their institutional exclusivism,” writes Ortlund. “Protestantism offers the most promising pathways by which to cultivate and pursue catholicity.”

Such thinking is premised on a specific definition of “catholic” that presumes a certain ad hoc “mere Christianity” that supposedly Protestants, Catholics, and others share. But who decides what encompasses that “mere Christianity”? The one making the definition, of course. Thus, all those whose beliefs fall outside that definition (as defined by Ortlund or whoever) are necessarily excluded.

This hints at a second problem: the “too catholic to be Catholic” argument, despite presenting itself as somehow more inclusive, cannot help but also be exclusive according to someone’s terms.

Third, on what grounds is inclusivity even an appropriate category for determining what is the best Christian tradition?

Fourth, if Christ established a visible, institutional Church to which Christians are expected to submit, then “too catholic to be Catholic” amounts to nothing but question-begging. If Christ did establish such an institution, and if the Catholic Church is that very institution, then a self-identifying Christian is not being more universal by refusing to submit to it. He is being a heretic or a schismatic.

Problems with history and authority

The “Protestantism is the most biblical” argument also has its share of issues. Ortlund claims that the Catholic position “has had the overall practical effect of placing the church over Scripture,” and that “the church is ultimately untethered from accountability to the inspired Word of God.” While it’s true that the Catholic position holds that the magisterial church has a God-given authority to interpret Scripture, it is misleading to claim that the Protestant position, in contrast, holds that Scripture is acting as the supreme authority. In truth, in the Protestant paradigm, it is the individual self-identifying Christian who is effectively “over Scripture” by deciding what it means. Authoritative interpretation is inescapable — the question is who has it, and on what grounds.

Unsurprisingly, Ortlund thinks the evidence for an ecclesial institution such as the Catholic Church wielding interpretive authority is weak, as he articulates in chapters critiquing the papacy and apostolic succession. He claims there is no precedent for an infallible institution in the Old or New Testaments, nor in the early Church. Underlying this argumentation is the unproven premise that unless there is a proximate, if not identical correlation between Holy Scripture and the early Church on the nature of religious authority—or any doctrine, for that matter—and what the Catholic Church teaches today, then the Catholic Church’s position must necessarily be an accretion, rather than a development. The concept of development, which of course takes time, must thus be written.

This makes the passage of time do a lot of the rhetorical work in Ortlund’s argumentation. “Testimony from a century after the fact is obviously more liable to err than the evidence of the testimony from the time in question,” he writes when discussing certain patristic sources. He dismisses magisterial infallibility and Mary’s Assumption in large part because several centuries pass before there are explicit articulations of these doctrines. Similarly, in refuting the veneration of images, he argues: “The relevant point right now is that the seventh ecumenical council took place in 787, which is farther from the apostles than we are from the Reformation.”

Yet Ortlund’s use of time is inconsistent and arbitrary. Ortlund seems to have no problem with chronological distance when it comes to events described in the Old Testament, many of which happened many centuries before they were recorded. Moreover, Ortlund gives no objective criteria to judge what is an acceptable amount of distance between events and when they are described in writing.

One might just as well claim that the distance between the Gospels and the life of Christ—at least 30 to 50 years—should undermine our trust in those documents. Or consider the chronological distance when it comes to doctrinal formulation that Ortlund affirms. It took the Church three centuries to formulate a doctrine of the Trinity at Nicea, and 650 years to hammer out the major specifics of the Christological doctrines.

Further weaknesses

An alternative (i.e., Catholic) approach proposes that it is possible for there to be principles that remain constant across salvation history, even if the manifestation and texture of those principles adjust and develop over time.

To cite an example that presumably many Protestants concede, there are significant adjustments regarding the nature and extent of religious authority within the biblical narrative. We move from the patriarchs to Moses and his successor Joshua; from the Judges to prophets to simultaneously divinely anointed kings who write Scripture; to more prophets, to the scribes and Pharisees who do not write Scripture but sit on the “chair of Moses” (Matt 23:2); and to Jesus and then to the Apostles. All are complex, unprecedented developments in salvation history that do not follow an easily discernible progression.

We need a principled reason to discount the possibility that such developments occur even after the closure of the biblical canon. Especially since there were probably decades of ecclesial history before a single New Testament book was written and widely circulated, and centuries before any ecclesial body offered a determination on the contents of the New Testament canon. Simply put, the Church was founded and grew without a universally accepted biblical canon. In the Catholic paradigm, this is a story of apostolic authority and Holy Tradition, which included a slowly growing consensus over which books enjoyed apostolic approbation. If we are willing to at least entertain this type of development as possible, issues such as, say, the Assumption, can be explained: Marian devotion appears very early in Church history, and over time that devotion describes Mary as full of grace, without sin, ever virgin, and, eventually, assumed into heaven. Many of these descriptions are found in the writings of those who claimed apostolic authority.

Ortlund dismisses apostolic succession by an appeal to authority, saying it is “rejected virtually everywhere in the scholarship” and opposed to “the mainstream scholarly view.” This is more than a little ironic, given that the “mainstream scholarly view” on a wide variety of issues related to biblical scholarship, such as the historicity of the biblical texts, also repudiates beliefs held dear by Protestants such as Ortlund.

Moreover, one can find evidence of apostolic succession as early as the writings of the first-century St. Clement I, second-century St. Hegesippus, and St. Irenaeus of Lyons, and third-century Tertullian and St. Cyprian. Ortlund claims that affirmations of apostolic succession in St. Irenaeus and Tertullian are suspect because they “functioned in a highly polemical context,” as if Christian history has ever not been “highly polemical.”

A highly contested and evolving question

Speaking of the “scholarly view,” Ortlund has a tendency to cite Catholic scholars whose opinions on various subjects undermine Catholic teaching. Thus, readers are favorably introduced to Hans Küng—a theologian who was barred from teaching as a Catholic theologian in the 1970s after denying the doctrine of papal infallibility—on the subject of justification. Ortlund summons Johann Döllinger to his side, who is another Catholic theologian excommunicated for rejecting papal infallibility. Further, Eamon Duffy is trotted out for his skepticism regarding Mary’s Assumption.

I suppose this is intended to achieve a certain rhetorical effect, but it is, in fact, deeply misleading. Why not cite the arguments of the many Catholic scholars who have written defending the Catholic view on justification, papal infallibility, or the Marian dogmas? For someone who, in his book’s conclusion, urges readers to “engage the best of each tradition”—which one would presume would include the best defenses of each tradition—these are curious decisions, to say the least.

Finally, as much as Ortlund (like many Protestants) argues that there is no means of determining what in the Catholic paradigm constitutes authentic magisterial teaching, his entire work implicitly acknowledges that many things about Catholic teaching are seemingly clear-cut and easily identifiable as decidedly Catholic doctrine. In truth, the Church has on many occasions explained the nature and extent of magisterial teaching, including at Vatican I, Vatican II, the 1983 Code of Canon Law, Ad Tuendam Fidem, and several documents issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1983 and 1990.

The same cannot be said of Protestantism, as I’ve argued here and in my book The Obscurity of Scripture. Since the Reformation, “what it means to be Protestant” has been a highly contested and evolving question, both within and outside self-identifying Protestant communities.

Pace Ortlund, little seems to unite Protestants besides a general opposition—if not antipathy driven by inconsistent and invalid argumentation—towards the Catholic Church.

What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church
By Gavin Ortlund
Zondervan, 2024
Paperback, 284 pages

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