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

by Gavin Ortlund

“Nobody can be saved, no matter how much he has given away in alms and even if he has shed his blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”22 Again, post–Vatican II Roman Catholics have to interpret this passage differently from the way virtually everyone interpreted it when it was written. For example, people will speak of being unknowingly within the church. But medieval Christians had no more conception of the possibility of being unknowingly in the true church than they did that those drowning in the flood could be unknowingly on the ark of Noah. If hardly any Roman Catholic Christians held this view prior to the modern era, why should it be allowed as an authentic interpretation of the doctrine “no salvation outside the church,” rather than a change in its meaning? This is a significant problem with the Roman Catholic notion of doctrinal development: its tendency to move the goalposts in order to make the goal.