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

by Gavin Ortlund

On prudential grounds, one could make a case for elevating one presbyter into a unique role above others or even calling such a presbyter a different term. But requiring such a structure—as well as limiting valid ministry to those churches adhering to it—unnecessarily injures and divides the church.

To be “deep in history” was the whole rationale for Protestantism.

Protestants argued that on the primary matters of the Christian religion, the early church supported their cause while also undermining the overly ambitious historical claims of their opponents in the Church of Rome (and, we would say today, of several of the Eastern traditions as well).

the Protestants understood themselves to be reforming an imperfect thing, not resurrecting a dead thing or creating a new thing.

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.”

The reform effort was new, claimed Turretin, but not the religion being reformed.

We must distinguish between particular contemporary expressions of Protestantism versus Protestantism as such.

The difference, then, between the various sectors of Christendom is not whether we need reform. The difference is this: Protestants are able to reform themselves because built into the Protestant system at the outset is a mechanism of self-reform (semper reformanda, always reforming). By contrast, the practices that need reform in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts result from what is held to be infallible teaching and are thus irreformable.

definition of Protestantism as the removal of accretions in pursuit of catholicity.

One way of envisioning historical depth is by focusing on what is most visible, most prominent, and/or most widely represented throughout church history. On this view, to be “deep in history” has a more diachronic thrust: It is more oriented toward the trajectory and overall result of church history. Thus, historical depth will focus more on what eventually becomes mainstream, widely accepted, or officially selected along the way of history. I will call this understanding of being deep in history “majority depth.”

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. On this view, what is deepest is what is oldest and thereby most plausibly rooted in the first-century apostolic deposit. 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.

Errors can become mainstream. Anyone who studies church history knows how easily this can happen.

Imagine someone saying to you, “To be deep in history is to cease to affirm the salvation of unbaptized babies who die.” How would you respond? As you think through an answer, you are likely on the road to understanding why Protestants want to clarify the meaning of the word deep.

Christians in the non-Protestant traditions will often argue that God has promised to watch over his church in ways that distinguish her from Israel. For example, 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.44 If a wrestling coach promised one of his wrestlers that “your opponent will not prevail against you,” this means his wrestler will ultimately win, not that he will avoid making any mistakes during the match. Furthermore, this is a promise to the church as such, not to one particular teaching office or hierarchy within her. Therefore, that Christ will never abandon his church to hell no more substantiates claims of ecclesial infallibility than God’s Old Testament promises to Israel validated the Pharisees’ teachings and claims. 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.

It is hard to even begin to fathom how different the church might have looked had Constantine never converted to Christianity.45

Honestly, to be truly in history is, before anything else, to cease making simplistic appeals to history.

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.”

It is highly significant that the earliest known attestation to Mary’s assumption in church history comes in a heterodox context

Roman Catholic scholar Walter Burghardt writes, “The investigation of patristic documents might well lead the historian to the conclusion: In the first seven or eight centuries no trustworthy historical tradition on Mary’s corporeal Assumption is extant, especially in the West.”12

Levering instead argues that Mary’s assumption could have been unknown to the apostles but taught by the Holy Spirit “in the Church beginning in the late fifth century as part of unfolding and developing the deposit of faith.”18

in patristic literature there are many lists of those believed to be translated to heaven, but Mary is never among those listed.

In my mind I can just hear some readers screaming: “Argument from silence!” But arguments from silence have plausibility value to the extent that you expect the sources in questions not to be silent on the matter at hand. Perhaps some of these texts could be explained in that the author simply chose not to include Mary as an example, or was speaking strictly of those assumed to heaven without an intervening death, or simply wasn’t aware of the oral tradition. But all of them? If Mary was as important in the early church as she is in Roman Catholic theology, is it really plausible that so many church fathers would discuss bodily assumptions to heaven and simply fail to mention that it happened to the most important creature?

Silence affects plausibility to the degree that you expect the sources not to be silent. In this way, the complete and unmitigated silence of the early and mid-patristic witness on Mary’s assumption in the context of lists of those believed to be bodily assumed to heaven undermines the plausibility of the idea of a commonly known oral tradition about Mary’s assumption. If such a belief was apostolic and known in the early church, it is scandalous that it would never be referenced by Tertullian, Irenaeus, Methodius, Origen, the Apostolic Constitutions, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, etc., when their whole goal is to provide examples of who was bodily assumed to heaven.

The fact that the earliest attestation of the bodily assumption comes in a Gnostic text has led many scholars to conclude the assumption is a heterodox intrusion into mainstream Christianity.

Why should anyone accept Mary’s assumption as apostolic when it (1) is completely absent in the church for several centuries, even when one would expect it to come up (for example, in Epiphanius’s search, in lists of those bodily assumed, etc.), (2) seems to originate in heterodox contexts, like The Book of Mary’s Repose, (3) is recognized as tardy when it does finally arise, and (4) comes into view simultaneously with seemingly countless alternative accounts of Mary’s end? The bodily assumption of Mary gives every impression of being a postapostolic accretion that only gradually wormed its way into the piety and imagination of the church.

The manner in which belief in Mary’s assumption developed in the early church also raises challenges against the idea that the Holy Spirit gradually taught it after the fact. We can justifiably wonder why the Holy Spirit would teach about a specific historical event so many centuries after its alleged occurrence, and only after it was circulated first in heterodox contexts, and alongside so many competing alternative beliefs that arose simultaneously. It seems difficult to locate any reason to conclude that the source of such a process is really the Holy Spirit.

We mention the anathemas of Nicaea II here at the outset because both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches are committed to this council as infallible in its essential theology (exactly which parts are infallible are disputed). For this reason, icon veneration is, like the bodily assumption of Mary, a watershed issue in ecumenical debate.

In this chapter we will uncover the shocking truth that the position anathematized as damnable heresy at an ecumenical council was, essentially, the universal position of the early church. Not only does the veneration of icons manifestly not date back to the first century, the only question is whether it originated in the sixth or seventh century.

Icons are works of art—most commonly paintings depicting a person, such as Christ, an angel, Mary, or another saint. But they are not merely art. Icons have a mediatorial role in liturgical practice (e.g., prayer). The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America defines an icon as follows: “In the Orthodox Church an icon is a sacred image, a window into heaven. An image of another reality, of a person, time and place that is more real than here and now. More than art, icons have an important spiritual role.”

What is important to understand now is that it was this theology—not general use of religious art, but specifically the veneration of icons in connection to a theory of figural representation between the icon and its prototype—that provoked the iconoclast controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries.

And this is also deeply tied to the theory that salvation is deification that icon use enables and helps

the term iconophile (or iconodule) referred to those who affirmed the veneration of icons, while the term iconoclast was used for those who opposed the practice.

Price, himself a Roman Catholic priest, finds iconoclasm an isolated view today; but he is honest about what the historical evidence suggests: The iconoclast claim that reverence towards images did not go back to the golden age of the fathers, still less to the apostles, would be judged by impartial historians today to be simply correct. The iconophile view of the history of Christian thought and devotion was virtually a denial of history.14

The ante-Nicene Christians were not usually iconoclast in the sense of opposing all religious art whatever. It is true that a few early Christians (like Tertullian or Clement of Alexandria) were more rigorously aniconic. But from at least the third century we also find paintings on tombs in the catacombs, symbolic engravings on lamps, carvings on furniture, (eventually) sarcaphogi, and so forth.26 The primary concern of the early Christians was the cultic uses of images that were so ubiquitous in the surrounding pagan culture. Their wholesale rejection of such practices formed a distinctive point of contrast between early Christian worship and pagan religious practice.

Lactantius, for example, who followed earlier Christians in asserting that cultic images are lifeless and yet presided over by demons, and that to worship the true God, we must lift our eyes up from the things of this earth. He concluded: Wherefore it is undoubted that there is no religion wherever there is an image. For if religion consists of divine things, and there is nothing divine except in heavenly things; it follows that images are without religion, because there can be nothing heavenly in that which is made from the earth. . . . There is no religion in images, but a mimicry of religion. That which is true is therefore to be preferred to all things which are false; earthly things are to be trampled upon, that we may obtain heavenly things.37 Can anyone seriously imagine Lactantius speaking like this if the theology of Nicaea II had been alive in his day?

In their criticism of cultic images, some of the early Christians almost sound as if they are anticipating the distinctions that would later be made at Nicaea II to justify them. In his attack on pagan use of images in the early fourth century, the apologist Arnobius deals with the objection that it is not the images that are worshiped, but what they represent: “What then? Without these, do the gods not know that they are worshipped? . . . What greater wrong, disgrace, hardship, can be inflicted than to acknowledge one god, and yet make supplication to something else—to hope for help from a deity, and pray to an image without feeling?”40 He proceeds to scorn the practice of relating to a deity through a physical object, comparing it to seeking a human opinion by asking “asses and pigs” what should be done.41 Again, it is difficult to fathom Arnobius arguing like this if he had been aware of the idea that “what is given to the image passes to the prototype,” which (as we will discuss) was a linchpin in later iconophile theology.

If Christians had their own cultic use of images in worship, they could have simply said that. They were perfectly capable of articulating, had they wished to do so, a distinction between bad (pagan) cultic use of images and good (Christian) cultic use of images. Instead, they said that Christians are “those who have rejected all images and statues” (Origen) and have “no acknowledged images” (Octavius) and that “there is no religion wherever there is an image” (Lactantius), and so forth. It is impossible to fathom that such statements could be made if in fact the early Christians were bowing down to images and praying through them to their prototype.

In 313, the Edict of Milan provided Christianity legal status in the Roman Empire. Then in 380, under Theodosius I, Christianity officially became the state religion. The fourth century was thus a time of seismic changes for the church as she adjusted to what James Breckenridge calls “the mountainous wave of new converts from idolatrous paganism following the Edict of Toleration.”45 At this time art and statuary dramatically increased in churches, and we see the first pictures of Christ and Mary and other saints. As Robin Jensen notes, “Iconic portraits of apostles, saints, and Christ mostly appeared only toward the end of the 4th century.”46 Although portraiture art was still rare and not yet used for veneration or prayer, now there was at least the possibility of new temptations that had been completely unthinkable in the ante-Nicene period.

This is a good example of how understanding history opens our eyes to understand theology—this development is why people’s minds could change so quickly on a theological topic. Scripture did not change; the cultural makeup of the church did.

Apparently, Constantia had requested an image of Christ. Eusebius harshly rebuked her for this request, stating that any attempt to depict Christ either in his glorified state or in his human state prior to his glorification is both impossible and unlawful, akin to pagan idolatry. He wonders at how Constantia can even make the request: Can it be that you have forgotten that passage in which God lays down the law that no likeness should be made either of what is in heaven or what is in the earth beneath? Have you ever heard anything of the kind either yourself in church or from another person? Are not such things banished and excluded from churches all over the world, and is it not common knowledge that such practices are not permitted to us alone?47 It is evident that Eusebius regards avoiding images of Christ to be common knowledge among Christians, since (according to him) it is the universal Christian practice in obedience to the second commandment. He proceeds to recount another episode in which he had to confiscate an image purported to be of Paul and Christ: “I took it away from her and kept it in my house, as I thought it improper that such things ever be exhibited to others, lest we appear, like idol worshippers, to carry our God around in an image.”48 Elsewhere Eusebius also makes reference to Christians paying homage to statues, commenting that he is not surprised since they are acting out an old habit they retained from their former pagan world.49 It is hard to ...

But have they mouth, and yet speak not? have they eyes, and see not? Do we pray unto them, because through them we pray unto God? This is the chief cause of this insane profanity, that the figure resembling the living person, which induces men to worship it, hath more influence in the minds of these miserable persons, than the evident fact that it is not living, so that it ought to be despised by the living.54 As we will see, the notion of transmission through the image to the prototype is the entire foundation of the theology of Nicaea II; yet Augustine finds not merely the pagan exercise of this but also the idea itself to be “insane profanity.”

The Council of Hieria, attended by some 338 bishops in 754, condemned the iconophile position on christological grounds, arguing that images of Christ tend to either separate his human and divine natures (leading to Nestorianism) or confuse them (leading to monophysitism).67 Hieria had claimed ecumenical status. The bishops at Nicaea II would dispute this on the grounds that it lacked representation from the five major patriarchates of the early church (Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria). However, Nicaea II also lacked this, since the supposed oriental legates were not actually representing the Eastern patriarchs.68 Noting this fact, Richard Price observes that “the oriental patriarchs did not know the decrees of Nicaea II and presumably did not recognize it as the seventh council. And indeed, for centuries afterwards Nicaea II was not added to the list of ecumenical councils in Syria-Palestine.”69 Despite this, Nicaea II eventually prevailed in obtaining ecumenical status.

the Carolingian theologians were able to point out some real weaknesses in the theology of Nicaea II. In the first place, they noted the abundance of forged, spurious, and apocryphal documents upon which Nicaea II depended. Some of these were obvious at the time, such as the letters supposedly from Jesus to King Abgar of Edessa.73 Other forgeries have been only more recently discovered.

It was not until 880, more than a century after Nicaea II, that Rome affirmed the ecumenical status of Nicaea II.

John Henry Newman himself offered strict criteria for distinguishing a valid doctrinal development from a corruption, stipulating that developments “which do but contradict and reverse the course of doctrine which has been developed before them, and out of which they spring, are certainly corrupt; for a corruption is a development in that very stage in which it ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisitions gained in its previous history.”82 In light of the early church’s clear opposition to icon veneration, the word “disturb” is a mild one for the relation of Nicaea II to prior history.

There is not a single example of bowing down to images for any purpose that is portrayed positively in Scripture or the early church.

In actual practice, it is impossible to tell the difference between a person who is bowing before a nonliving object in veneration, and a person who is doing so in idolatrous worship.

There is simply no biblical basis for icon veneration. Rather, it gives every appearance of being an intrusion of idolatry into the life of God’s people, as so often happens throughout redemptive history.

Is to be deep in history to cease to be Protestant? When it comes to the venerating of icons, to be deep in history is, emphatically to the contrary, to cease to be Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. For the witness of the early church is unanimously and thunderingly opposed to the practice, in consistency with the witness of Scripture. Yet the seventh ecumenical council, which both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions regard as infallible, casts anathemas widely and liberally at all who abstain from the practice (or “knowingly communicate” with those who do!). This is not a case of doctrinal development, but doctrinal U-turn: The seventh ecumenical council reversed the view of the early church on the veneration of icons.

We also have concerns that the freedom and certainty of the gospel is at times obscured in these other traditions—for example, in the theology of indulgences, or the necessity of confession to a priest. While we can share the core gospel message with many of the traditions outside Protestantism, certain of their practices and beliefs have the unfortunate effect of both blurring it and adding on to it. Protestantism keeps the gospel central and clear. The net result is clarity and assurance.

First, take your time.