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Let me put it plainly: The issues that divide Christendom are rarely if ever so obvious that everyone will come to the same conclusion about them if only they would study them long enough with a good will. Rather, sincere and intelligent people will and do disagree about them because they are not simple. They are enormously complex—historically, theologically, and in terms of the range of values and concerns represented on each side.
happens in other areas as well). Sadly, I believe imprecise conceptions of Protestantism are a huge factor in defections from it. For instance, people often compare a particular experience in a Protestant context to what they read about the church fathers on an apologetics website. They are in effect comparing the worst of Protestantism to the best of the non-Protestant traditions, and as a result, they leave Protestantism for other traditions without an authentic grasp of what Protestantism really is (and often without fully looking into the other traditions).
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.
This is a compelling articulation that non-prots, in my experience, miss. Protestants want to protest accretions in the universal church, not reject and anathematized all who claim the name of Christ.
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.
The approach I seek in this book and in my YouTube ministry is to encourage candid and robust argumentation about our differences, downplaying or minimizing nothing, while at the same time seeking to maintain a conciliatory relationship.
Noble and good. How enriched we would be to have careful, humble conversations—but where humility does not cause one to hold back his true thoughts!
Ultimately, I am deeply convinced in my conscience that the claims of traditions like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to be the “one true church” that Jesus founded are wrong. Further, I maintain that the Protestant Reformation represented a genuine recovery of multiple biblical and apostolic truths. 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. I also maintain, as will become evident, that Protestantism (despite its many imperfections) is
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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).
This is true as Protestants hold to one ultimate authority, Scripture, as opposed to holding to other infallible authorities as non-prots do
Principle 1: Protestantism Can Affirm the Good in the Pre-Reformation Church and in the Non-Protestant Traditions
the Reformation would be illegitimate if it did not stand in organic continuity with the early and medieval church. This continuity, in Schaff’s vision, must be rooted in catholicity—as he calls it, “catholic union with the past.”
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.
Protestantism is not a mere assertion of itself over and against the rest of the church; rather, Protestantism takes its peculiar shape and character in order to serve the renewal and betterment of the entire church.
Principle 2: Protestantism Can Acknowledge Its Own Eccentricities, Errors, and Sins
where God builds a church, the devil erects a chapel by its side.”
“Ecclesiasticism, as held by Rome and also by Oxford, is indeed a terrible error; but it does not follow that the mere negation of ecclesiasticism is the truth.”
Authoritarianism in the church should not lead us to reject authority in the church.
only Protestantism even has a shot at catholicity.
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.
Principle 3: The Glory and Strength of Protestantism Lies in Continual 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,
This has much to do with the doctrine of sola scriptura. If scripture is the ultimate authority, you are able to reform according to scripture instead of being stuck with man made error
Principle 4: The Principles for Reformation Are Sola Fide and 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.
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.”
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. It gave her the power to yoke the consciences of the laity to error, effectively removing them from meaningful accountability to Scripture
Imbedded at the very heart of Protestantism lay an instinct toward revitalization and catholicity.
Calvin bewailed the rampant idolatry, superstition, and error in the Church of Rome in his day but then qualified his critique: “When we categorically deny to the papists the title of the church, we do not for this reason impugn the existence of churches among them.”
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.
For Jeremiah, unity with the Lutherans necessarily involved institutional incorporation within the Eastern Orthodox Church. For the Lutherans, by contrast, the criterion for unity was adherence to the gospel of Christ, as held forth in the Scriptures.
This is a clear statement on different ways to view unity: institutional or confessional
Protestantism does not restrict the church to one institution.
The highly institutional character of each of these churches developed in large measure in the context of union with the Roman (and later Byzantine) Empire, starting in the fourth century.
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.”
Essentially, the historic Eastern Orthodox position is that perceived Western innovations such as the filioque are heresy and that heresy places you outside the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church. To be outside the church is to be cut off from the grace of the Holy Spirit given in the sacraments and therefore cut off from salvation. The basis for this claim is rooted in a particular construal of the unity of the church: Orthodox ecclesiologists taught that the church is ontologically one such that there are no schisms in the church, only schisms from her.
Which is a fair illustration, but it leads you into error if you have an institutional view of the church instead of a confessional view
the 1672 Synod of Jerusalem
“Now, therefore, we declare, say, determine and pronounce that for every human creature it is necessary for salvation to be subject to the authority of the Roman pontiff.”
What a restrictive statement!
changes in the “no salvation outside the church” doctrine raise a practical concern about the actual value of an allegedly infallible magisterium. For example, we are often told we need an infallible magisterium to interpret the Bible, but much less appreciated are the intractable problems of interpreting the magisterium itself.
Protestantism has a superior orientation toward catholicity than its rivals because it lacks their institutional exclusivism. Protestantism acknowledges true churches within multiple institutions. 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.
Does it miss the point? Mormons can claim to display the fruit of the Spirit. You need a stronger confessional guardrail, as Jesus goes on yo give in the next verses of Matthew 7. There he says that you must know him even if you display great works and call him Lord.
Satan can occasionally work miracles, as we see with Pharaoh’s sorcerers (Ex. 7:11), and as Jesus warns concerning false Christs and false prophets (Matt. 24:24). 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.
Does it miss the point? Mormons can claim to display the fruit of the Spirit. You need a stronger confessional guardrail, as Jesus goes on yo give in the next verses of Matthew 7. There he says that you must know him even if you display great works and call him Lord.
Our Savior commands us to regard those who do mighty works in his name as for us, not against us. This is an exclusivism, but it is a radically Christocentric exclusivism. It is not an institutional exclusivism or an exclusivism based on human distinction or pride.
we are commanded to discern the work of the Holy Spirit based on the fact that it results in an affirmation of the lordship of Christ. Once again, this is an exclusivism, but it’s a Christocentric exclusivism. Both a Roman Catholic and a Calvinist could pass the test, but a Buddhist or a Mormon could not, since neither would affirm that Jesus is Lord as Paul understands and teaches in his letters.
The confessional test that sits next to the fruit/virtue test. Good. That fixes the problem of only considering virtues
Protestantism is prepared to discern the true church wherever Christ is present in word and sacrament.
Sola fide must be understood in historical context. 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.
indulgences became interconnected with the crusades, the expansion of papal power, and the financial revenue of the Roman Catholic Church.
A spiral, interconnected abuses that built on and played off each other. Seeing one in isolation develop is hard to imagine and understand. Seeing them play off each other and grow makes sense of how it got so bad.
In the early thirteenth century, the concept of the “treasury of merit” was first articulated,
we will never grasp why the Reformation was good news for Christian laity in the 1400s and 1500s unless we appreciate what they were up against.
Hus’s death is crucial to consider because it represents an illuminating vignette into the larger world of late medieval Western Europe. 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
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It is against this historical backdrop—ever-expanding indulgences and persecution of those opposed to the practice—that Luther’s articulation of justification by faith alone must be understood. In no small measure, Luther championed sola fide specifically in response to this commercial and ecclesiastical system.
indulgences had commonly come to function as a substitute for repentance.
Justification was, for Luther, a forensic declaration of our status before God, grounded solely on the imputed righteousness of Christ, received by the empty hands of faith.
The thief on the cross is paradigmatic, not exceptional. All this is grounded in the promise of Christ himself: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24).
