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

by Gavin Ortlund

The church never died. Jesus had faithfully preserved her for every nanosecond of church history. We may call this Protestant doctrine “the preservation of the church.”

Protestants understood themselves to be reforming an imperfect thing, not resurrecting a dead thing or creating a new thing. On this basis they resisted terms like new or novelty to describe their historical position. The Reformed theologian Francis Turretin put it like this: “It is one thing to purge an ancient doctrine of its corruption and recall men to it; another to devise a new doctrine not as yet delivered and propose it for belief. The former, not the latter, was done by the Reformers.”

Ultimately, Turretin reversed the charge of novelty against the Catholics. Listing as examples the veneration of images, the supreme authority of the pope in both temporal and spiritual matters, transubstantiation, purgatory, and communion in only one kind, he argued that “it could easily be shown both that they were unknown to the apostolic and primitive church and were introduced afterwards at various times and so are novel and more recent.”34 Turretin sketched out a timeframe for the development of each of these doctrines, highlighting when they fully blossomed in the medieval period.

I often press this definition of Protestantism as the removal of accretions in pursuit of catholicity. Sometimes the response is, “But Protestantism has accretions, too!” This I happily concede. Accretions are inevitable. In an imperfect world, the intrusion of errors will be a constant possibility and frequent occurrence. The difference is that Protestant accretions are not enshrined within allegedly infallible teaching.

To be clear, Protestants do not regard “majority depth” as insignificant or unimportant. On the contrary, it is a behemoth, a force to be reckoned with. But they do maintain that what is finally decisive is the original teaching of the apostles, and that there are practices and beliefs that occasionally become mainstream despite departing from apostolic teaching.

This view is also interested in what remains most constitutive of basically all Christians throughout church history (what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity”). We can call this “ancient depth.”

So we have two different kinds of depth: majority depth and ancient depth. The Protestant position is that the majority must be measured by the ancient, not vice versa.

When you have muddy water in a stream, you have to go back to see where it came in. The pure water will be found before the muddy water started. When you hear Protestants speak of being “deep in history,” picture the deeper (earlier) parts of the channel of water. “Deep” means early.

Another reason to be uneasy with “majority depth” as our criterion is the history of the people of Israel. If anything emerges from the story of the Old Testament, it is surely this: God’s people continually fall away and need to return to the Lord.

The people of God have never enjoyed unbroken spiritual steadiness from one century to the next. On the contrary, the entire history of the Jewish people prior to Christ can be summarized as a recurrent pattern of idolatry and reform.

Christ promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the church in Matthew 16:18. But this is a promise that the church will never die or fail to accomplish her purpose, not that she will never sin or err. The verb “prevail” can be translated “overpower” or “overcome”;43 to be “prevailed against” by the “gates of hell” refers essentially to death.

God has promised many things to his people, but he has nowhere promised that they will not fall into sin and error. This is why Protestants, in the face of some frankly brutal historical realities, consider majority depth to be a frequently superficial criterion.

The church can and does take many different outward forms and expressions and yet remain the true church because what makes her the church is the presence of Christ in word and sacrament.

Protestants absolutely reject the claim that the non-Protestant churches have preserved the faith untainted. No contemporary church looks just like the early church.

C. S. Lewis put it like this: “The Roman Church where it differs from this universal tradition and specifically from apostolic Christianity I reject. . . . The whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is.”46 Thus, when Protestants are told by other Christians that their church looks different from the early church, Lewis’s reply probably provides the best brief retort: So does yours.

While ecumenical dialogue has made progress in other areas, with respect to Mariology we are arguably further apart today than we were in the sixteenth century—particularly since the immaculate conception of Mary was defined in 1854 and her bodily assumption was defined in 1950.

When a church claims a particular teaching to be infallible and obligatory, and yet it is actually neither catholic, ancient, biblical, nor apostolic—indeed, when it is completely unknown to the early church fathers—this is obviously relevant to claims about being “deep in history.”

Protestantism does not reject tradition or other authoritative norms in the church. It simply subordinates them under the superior authority of Scripture.

The New Testament clearly stipulates the offices of the church, and the idea of a supreme, infallible head of the church identifiable with the Roman bishop isn’t one of those offices.

Protestantism is not the creation of a new church, but simply the ancient faith in the posture of dynamic change and reform. That the true church never died is the consistent perspective of the magisterial Protestants—so often so that it has a label: the preservation of the church.

The early Protestants sought nothing other than to pare off novel deviations from catholicity and to return to those mainstream practices and beliefs that can be plausibly related back to apostolic teaching. At the heart of what the Protestants sought to recover was the Pauline teaching that “one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom. 3:28).

The great, shining glory of Protestantism—that which stands out above all else, perhaps—is its radical focus on the simplicity of the gospel. Protestantism is relentlessly and structurally focused on the all-sufficiency of the person and work of Christ himself.

Protestantism keeps the gospel central and clear. The net result is clarity and assurance.