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This is the vision of Protestantism I wish to commend in this book: not an unqualified rejection of the rest of the church, but rather a movement of renewal and reform within the church.
Protestantism is actually the tradition best positioned to retain and cultivate catholicity (that is, the wholeness of the church throughout space and time).
Schaff maintained that the Reformation would be illegitimate if it did not stand in organic continuity with the early and medieval church.
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.
As Catholicism toward the close of the Middle Ages settled into a character of hard, stiff objectivity, incompatible with the proper freedom of the individual subject . . . so Protestantism has been carried aside, in later times, into the opposite error of a loose subjectivity, which threatens to subvert all regard for church authority.
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.
On the contrary, tradition is the necessary context and correlate for Scripture because Scripture “flows forward in the church, and comes there continually to clearer and deeper consciousness.”21
In short, Protestantism has a superior orientation toward catholicity than its rivals because it lacks their institutional exclusivism.
This does not mean Protestants are universalists. The vast majority of Protestants are exclusivists in the sense of believing there are boundaries to the church; not everyone is within it; and not everyone will be saved. The point is they are not institutional exclusivists: They do not restrict the “one true church” to a single, visible hierarchy.
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.
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.
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.
From this it is evident that exorcisms generally constitute positive spiritual fruit that reveal the genuine advance of God’s kingdom.
