What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church

by Gavin Ortlund

Most of the Reformers affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and opposed transubstantiation on the grounds that it represented a departure not only from Scripture but also from patristic testimony.

In sum, I commend Protestantism as first, a renewal of the gospel in the church; second, a return to the authority of Scripture; and third, a removal of historical accretions.

I do not maintain that these various non-Protestant traditions have entirely lost the gospel, but I do believe, with conviction, that the gospel has been both obscured and added on to in them.

Protestantism is best understood as a renewal movement within the one true church.

Protestantism is actually the tradition best positioned to retain and cultivate catholicity (that is, the wholeness of the church throughout space and time).

Protestantism was new in one sense and ancient in another: It represented a new movement of life in the church, but on the grounds of retrieval and catholicity.

Those traditions are bound to their magisterial pronouncements (and anathemas); thus, only Protestantism even has a shot at catholicity.

Thus, a Protestant today can celebrate the doctrinal recoveries that led to separation from Rome while grieving some of the long-term results of this separation and the overall fact of division itself.

Further, a Protestant today can work freely and cheerfully toward the renewal and healing of divisions within the church—particularly because we are not bound by dogmatic claims that cement boundaries between different Christian traditions.

This is the glory and strength of the Protestant doctrine referenced in the subtitle of this book: semper reformanda (always reforming). Protestantism has a built-in capacity for course correction, for fixing errors, for refining practice. To put it colloquially, when you get stuck, you can get unstuck. This opens up pathways for catholicity that are closed for those churches that hold their own pronouncements as infallible,

For Schaff, the heart of Protestant identity lies in two affirmations: justification is by faith alone (sola fide), and Holy Scripture is the only infallible rule for the church’s faith and practice (sola Scriptura).

The way I like to put it is that sola fide is the “what” of the Reformation; sola Scriptura, the “how.” The first is an object, the second a method. The first is a precious jewel; the second, the safe that protects it.

Schaff thus argued that the Council of Trent ultimately represented a departure from catholicity. By making herself the final arbiter of Scripture and tradition, the Church of Rome not only blocked communion with any and all Christian traditions dissenting from her pronouncements, but also removed the possibility of any meaningful internal reform of her own prior magisterial teaching.

Thus, sola Scriptura brought both a renewed contact between the Bible and laity as well as the possibility of ongoing accountability and reform in the church according to the Word of God.

the general perspective of the magisterial Reformers—the Church of Rome had fallen into gross sin and error, but she was still a church.

To summarize Turretin’s view: the Church of Rome is a true Christian church insofar as she has Christian people, Christian sacraments, and Christian doctrines.

The major Christian traditions outside of Protestantism—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Assyrian Church of the East—all claim to be the “one true church.” Each of these churches sees itself, to the exclusion of the others, as the original church Christ founded.

the core idea of institutional exclusivism—that the real church is Christ is restricted to one visible, institutional church with its own unique hierarchical structure—permeates all of them.

Protestantism represents a different approach to discerning the true church. It is not that Protestants deny that the church is visible. This is a common misunderstanding. Historically, Protestants have distinguished between the visible and invisible church, drawing from St. Augustine—but this distinction does not entail a denial of the visible church.

We can count the number of baptized Christians (the visible church), but only God knows who is truly united to Christ (the invisible church). For example, Judas Iscariot was a member of Christ’s church in one sense, but not in another sense.

What distinguishes the Protestant view of the church is not a denial of the visible church but rather the claim that this visible church coheres within multiple institutions. To put it negatively, Protestantism denies the claim that any one institutional hierarchy constitutes the “one true church.”

As we look at the church today, we cannot help but see the fruits of the church in multiple institutional expressions of the church. Glory unto the Trinity, glory unto the name of Jesus Christ, spiritual fruit and virtue wrought by the Holy Spirit, the pushing back of demonic powers, and the saving knowledge of the true God—all this occurs in more than one institution. We see saints in the medieval East and saints in the medieval West. We have exorcisms in Roman Catholic contexts and exorcisms in Pentecostal contexts. We find testimonies of spiritual transformation in the name of Christ in Congregationalist churches, and we find the same in Coptic churches.

We are seeking to obey the command of Christ, and Christ was not advancing religious pluralism or playing on our sentimentality. By the word “fruit,” Christ did not mean generic religious experience but the spiritual result of the Holy Spirit’s work in and through the Christian gospel. This is the same word used in Matthew 3:8, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance,” and John 15:5, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” Paul uses this term to refer to the virtues wrought in a believer by the Holy Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23).

But Satan cannot produce virtues. He is incapable of producing joy, peace, goodness, kindness, love for Christ, love for God, love for the Holy Spirit, love for the Scripture, love for truth. Only Christ produces these things. Therefore, such fruit testifies to the genuine work of Christ.

Protestantism was a renewal of the gospel not in recovering a bare doctrinal formula or slogan, but in upturning and opposing the legalism, superstition, and financial abuse of the laity that sadly characterized much of European spirituality in the late medieval era.

In the subsequent medieval development, indulgences became interconnected with the crusades, the expansion of papal power, and the financial revenue of the Roman Catholic Church.

This general timeline—an eleventh-century emergence of indulgences proper (as distinct from prior penitential reductions), with aggressive expansion and development over the next four centuries—is the common narrative represented in the scholarship, including among Roman Catholic historians.

Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, put it: “The indulgence has neither a model in the New Testament nor in public church penance found in the first millennium, be it in practice or insofar as theological grounds are concerned.”

“If things were really that bad, why did no one notice and object?” The answer is that they did, but they often got slaughtered for it. The Protestants Reformers, far from being original dissenters, were the inheritors of a long and bloody tradition of protest.

It is often hard for modern readers to take in how bad things got. Some of the medieval crusades classify as genocide.22 As painful as it is to come to terms with the gratuity and scale of violence in church history, it is absolutely essential to appreciate the context of the Reformation. Protestantism cannot be understood apart from it.

Why did the Protestant Reformation represent, for so many, a breakthrough and renewal in the understanding of the gospel? The answer is not only that the gospel had been obscured by the financial scandal of ever-expanding indulgences but also that opposition to this abusive practice was viciously persecuted by the highest levels of leadership within the Church of Rome.

What must be grasped is that Hus’s execution was not a violation of medieval Roman Catholic theology, but its expression. This sounds shocking to modern ears, but it is true to history. The medieval Roman Catholic Church claimed the authority to exterminate heretics, and to do so through the secular authority, over which she claimed jurisdiction.36 Boniface VIII’s 1302 bull Unam Sanctam, for example, distinguished between the “temporal sword” (wielded by the secular authority) and the “spiritual sword” (wielded by the church), insisting that the temporal is subject to the spiritual: Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest. However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other and temporal authority, subjected to spiritual power.37

The important point to note is that in the “two swords” theological framework, although the church does not herself wield the temporal sword, the civil authority does so at the church’s discretion (“at the will and sufferance of the priest”).

Thus, Canon 3 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 threatened civil authorities with excommunication if they neglected their responsibility: “If however a temporal lord, required and instructed by the church, neglects to cleanse his territory of this heretical filth, he shall be bound with the bond of excommunication by the metropolitan and other bishops of the province.”

This is why it is so offensive and wrong when people claim it was secular authorities rather than the Roman Catholic Church who killed Hus. Roman Catholic prelates jailed Hus, tried him for heresy (at an ecumenical council), and then handed him over for execution in consequence of their guilty verdict. On the day of Hus’s sentence, the proceedings opened with a sermon from the bishop of Lodi, who preached from Romans 6:6, “that the body of sin must be done away,” in which the bishop proclaimed—using lurid imagery like rotting flesh, cancer, and poison—that the extermination of heretics was pleasing to God.

What was the truth Hus proclaimed that led to his conflict with Roman Catholic hierarchy? Hus’s deepest grievances were ecclesiological and moral. He was horrified by ungodliness in the clergy, especially the rampant practice of simony, the tendency of priests to have mistresses, and the use of indulgences to motivate military action. Hus also opposed the theology of exterminating heretics, appealing to Augustine to argue that heretics should be appealed to with Scripture and reason. From the pulpit, Hus railed against these practices, proclaiming that we must bless our enemies rather than kill them and that money cannot procure forgiveness.

Hus’s criticisms also touched on the authority and nature of the church. Toward the end of Hus’s trial, thirty-nine articles summarizing his beliefs and teachings were put into evidence. Two prominent themes can be drawn out: First, Hus defined the church as all the elect; second, Hus maintained that ecclesiastical authorities must not be followed when they depart from Scripture.

Hus was summoned to meet with papal delegates, to whom Hus declared his intention to obey the “Apostolic mandates.” When this was interpreted as an intention to submit to the pope, Hus clarified, My lords, understand me; I said that with my whole heart I am minded to obey the Apostolic mandates and to obey them in all points, but what I call the Apostolic mandates are the doctrines of Christ’s Apostles, and so far as the mandates of the Roman pontiff are in accord with the Apostolic mandates and doctrine, that is, according to the rule of Christ, so far I intend most certainly to obey them. But, if I find them to be at variance, I will not obey them even if you put before my eyes fire for the burning of my body.

This is at the nerve center of what got Hus into trouble: the question of authority. Like Luther after him, Hus insisted that popes and councils were fallible and thus subordinate to Scripture. Scripture was the highest authority. Hus also insisted that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular language for the laity to read.

There is much more that could be said about Hus, but the important point to recognize at the moment is simply this: as an example of what happened to those who opposed indulgences and ecclesiastical abuse in late medieval Roman Catholicism, Hus is not rare.

Many of Hus’s followers, such as Jerome of Prague, were burned at the stake in a very similar manner.44 The Roman Catholic Church waged a total of five crusades against the Hussites alone, startin...

The Waldensians opposed indulgences and denied the existence of purgatory; they were charged with maintaining that “offerings for the dead benefit the clerics who devour them, not the souls who do not need them.”

In 1487, four years after the birth of Martin Luther, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull calling for the extermination of the Waldensians and offering a plenary indulgence to all who should engage in a crusade against them.

The doctrine does not deny the necessity of good works, as it is often caricatured. Luther insisted that good works will issue forth from a genuine faith. But he also maintained that good works contribute nothing to how a sinner is actually made right in the sight of a holy God.

There are no additional offerings or sacrifices to be made (least of all through money), no further punishments to be meted out through purgatorial fire, and no other rites to be performed.

Thus, the historic Protestant position is that good works are necessary for salvation as the fruit of a true saving faith. As Calvin put it, “It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone: just as it is the heat alone of the sun which warms the earth, and yet in the sun it is not alone, because it is constantly conjoined with light.”

Protestants today can happily recognize many justified brothers and sisters within the Roman Catholic Church. As J. I. Packer emphasizes, we are not justified by our theology of justification, but by genuine trust in Christ and his saving work, which both sides affirm.

A frequent criticism of sola fide is that it is inconsistent with James 2:14–26. But here again, carefulness about terminology is important. In Protestant theology, “faith” does not mean bare intellectual assent. That appears to be how James is using the term; otherwise he could not state that “even the demons believe” (James 2:19). But for the Reformers, faith meant a disposition of trusting assent and consecration.

Historically, the Reformers spoke of faith as expressing itself through love, following the language of Galatians 5:6. Thus Calvin: “We confess with Paul that no other faith justifies ‘but faith working through love’ [Gal. 5:6].”15 Further, as we have seen, while the Protestant position maintains that this kind of faith is the instrumental means by which we are actually made righteous in God’s sight, it also holds that good works must follow as the fruit of that faith. So the Protestant position is not what is being targeted by James.

Although Luther was ultimately excommunicated and much of Protestant theology was met with anathemas at the Council of Trent, the subsequent Catholic tradition recognized that Luther (and Protestantism generally) cannot simply be rejected. This is evident not only in the lifting of anathemas and the affirmation of sola fide in recent ecumenical dialogue but also in the willingness to acknowledge that something valuable was recovered in the sixteenth century.