Gavin Ortlund's Case for Protestantism

Introduction

Protestant Christianity is often misunderstood and mischaracterized by both its friends and its foes. This is in part due to the many varieties of Protestantism, but it is also because Protestants themselves often have a poor apprehension of their tradition and significant aspects of their identity. As a result, Protestantism is quite easy to criticize and caricature, and many are inclined to think that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are much more venerable traditions full of history, great saints, and aesthetic marvels. If one wants to be part of a “real” church, the thinking often goes, one must head for Rome or the East.

It is to address this situation that Baptist theologian Gavin Ortlund has written his latest book, What It Means to Be Protestant. This timely and accessible volume sets forth the author’s view of what Protestantism is at its best and commends it to those who may be questioning whether they ought to be Protestant. His discussion includes strong defenses of core Protestant principles and critical examinations of certain Roman Catholic and Orthodox tenets. Much of what Ortlund says is invaluable and will be beneficial for anyone thinking about how to understand the various Christian traditions and how they relate to one another. For those who have doubts that Protestantism is a “live option,” the book demonstrates that there are significant reasons to prefer it to its ecclesial rivals. Not everything in Ortlund’s book warrants approbation, however. I believe his framework for discussing the nature of Protestantism, which is highly indebted to the nineteenth-century Reformed theologian Philip Schaff, is untenable. This means that while his doctrinal expositions are clear and helpful, and his criticisms of Roman and Eastern doctrines are on target and often devastating, his explanation of what it means to be Protestant is ultimately unsatisfactory. In what follows, I will briefly note many of the laudable aspects of the book before outlining my problems with Ortlund’s Schaffean perspective and providing an alternative answer to what it means to embrace Protestantism at its best.

A Strong Apology for Protestantism

Ortlund rightly acknowledges that there is much to criticize in contemporary Protestantism. Protestant churches rarely provide a strong contrast to the surrounding culture; their music, messages, and activities only superficially differ from what one can find outside the church. Many people feel like this is a watered-down and lightweight form of Christianity, one that fails to deliver what the church has provided in the past. Ortlund mentions that “there is currently an enormous amount of interest in church history. Many evangelicals, in particular, are currently exploring more sacramental, liturgical, and historically conscious traditions. It’s hard to convey how strong this hunger for historical rootedness is right now. People are aching for the ancient, the transcendent, the stable, the deep.”[i] Because evangelicals often cannot find these things in their own churches, they are often tempted to look at Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and many eventually convert. The question, of course, is whether these problems with Protestantism are part of its essence or are only accidental features that might be avoided. Ortlund correctly believes that the shortcomings are not in any way essential to Protestantism. The truth is that not all varieties of Protestantism are created equal; some are much more historically rooted and theologically rich than others. Additionally, he sees that people often compare Protestantism at its worst with Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy at their best, which obviously gives the latter traditions an unfair advantage. “It is sadly commonplace,” he writes, “for Protestantism to be characterized in terms of the street-level practice at contemporary evangelical churches and ministries, rather than in terms of historic, official, confessional doctrine.”[ii]

For Ortlund, Protestantism should be seen as a renewal movement within the larger church catholic. It is not the only genuine form of Christianity, nor is it an independent tradition without ties to the churches of Rome or the East. The Reformers understood their mission as one of restoring and purifying the one ancient church that had existed since the time of the apostles. They did not believe that the Gospel had been lost to this church, but they did believe it had been obscured and polluted by various developments in doctrine and practice. The goal of their efforts, then, was to run these developments through the sieve of Scripture so that only the pure Gospel remained. Since the Reformers did not intend to start a new church, Ortlund believes there is no reason that Protestants today should feel alienated from the ancient or medieval church. This history, with its theology, spiritual practices, and great examples of faithfulness, belongs as much to them as it does to Roman Catholic and Orthodox believers.

Seeing the Reformation in this way allows us to understand why the Reformers never claimed that only Protestants are true Christians. They believed that the pre-Reformation church had become corrupt, but they did not believe it had ceased to exist. It still had the Scriptures and the Sacraments, and many people in it had trusted in Christ for their salvation. Faith in Christ, not membership in a particular institution, was what placed one in the universal church. Since this was the sole criterion, the Reformers held that even those who still belonged to Rome could be saved. Ortlund believes it is a great advantage of Protestantism that it “denies the claim that any one institutional hierarchy constitutes the ‘one true church.’”[iii] He notes that both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches do make such claims about themselves, and as a result they historically have refused to acknowledge believers in other churches. From Ortlund’s point of view, this is not only uncharitable but also unjustifiable. There is no scriptural warrant for believing that the church can only be found within a specific visible institution. In contrast to these views, “Protestantism is prepared to discern the true church wherever Christ is present in word and sacrament.”[iv]

After clarifying how Protestantism is related to other traditions, Ortlund spends several pages discussing the historical developments and trajectories that led to the Reformation. He covers the ways the Roman church violently suppressed dissent in the late medieval period and explains why indulgences were resisted by Luther and others. The indulgence controversy of course provided the immediate catalyst for the Reformation, and Ortlund believes it was Luther’s efforts to clarify what was wrong with indulgences that led him to eventually see the necessity of sola fide and sola Scriptura, the material and formal principles of Protestantism. Since both of these doctrines are absolutely essential to Protestantism, Ortlund rightly devotes a few chapters to their defense.

In discussing sola fide, the first thing Ortlund does is clarify what it seeks to express. Sola fide, he writes,

does not deny the necessity of good works, as it is often caricatured. Luther insisted that good works will issue forth from a genuine faith. But he also maintained that good works contribute nothing to how a sinner is actually made right in the sight of a holy God. 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.[v]

Ortlund next addresses two significant objections to sola fide. One is the claim that the Protestant view of justification by faith alone is incompatible with the teaching of the Epistle of James. In fact, many Roman Catholics and Orthodox would say the Protestant position on justification is precisely what James is intending to criticize and exclude. However, Ortlund rightly points out that the sort of faith James is calling worthless is simply not what Protestants mean by faith. Faith for the Reformers was always something living and active. The other objection Ortlund responds to is the claim that there is no precedent for sola fide in church history. He remarks that “though the Reformer’s articulation of justification and sanctification as distinct was fresh, this basic distinction is implicit in the prior tradition (indeed, it seems entailed by the very nature of forgiveness).”[vi]  “The pre-Reformation church,” he adds, “did not speak with one voice about justification. Thus, both Roman Catholic and Protestant positions can find precedent in the pre-Reformation church.”[vii] From Ortlund’s perspective, there is enough ambiguity in the teaching of the church fathers on justification that sweeping claims about what they did or didn’t teach are illegitimate. The ambiguity only makes it clear that later Reformation-era clarifications of this topic were necessary. At the conclusion of his discussion of sola fide, Ortlund avers that “this is the single greatest contribution of Protestantism to the Christian church: its insight into the gracious heart of God revealed in the gospel, by which God offers to us as a free gift the righteousness we cannot attain through our own efforts.”[viii]

Sola Scriptura is just as ably explicated and defended by Ortlund as sola fide. He notes that the doctrine is often misunderstood, but writes that “sola Scriptura is a modest doctrine. The core idea is that Scripture is the church’s only infallible rule. A rule is a standard that governs the church’s faith and practice. Infallible means being incapable of error. So sola Scriptura is essentially the claim that Scripture is the only authority standing over the church that is incapable of error.”[ix] He notes that sola Scriptura is not opposed to the view that creeds, confessions, and councils can be authoritative, but only to the idea that these things are infallible. Many people, institutions, and documents exercise authority without being infallible, and sola Scriptura does not raise any objections to the existence of such authorities in the church. It only excludes the position that any of these authorities could be seen as on the same level as Scripture. Ortlund believes this makes sense because only Scripture contains God’s speech to us. Church traditions, in whatever form they come, cannot and do not claim to be the very words of God.

Like sola fide, sola Scriptura has been the object of much criticism. One of the key problems Ortlund addresses is the issue of the biblical canon. The Bible itself does not contain a list of books that should be in it. Those outside the Protestant fold typically claim that the church must determine which books belong in the canon, and if this judgment is not infallible, there will be no way to know if the canon is composed of the right books. Critics thus hold that sola Scriptura is fatally flawed, and an infallible church is clearly necessary. Ortlund defuses this objection by noting that one does not have to be infallible to recognize what is infallible. The Holy Spirit working through the Word witnesses to the truth and divine character of Scripture. The church only needs to acknowledge this testimony, and that does not require infallibility. Moreover, it is a matter of historical fact that the canon was not formed through an authoritative decree of the church. No official determination of the books to be included in the canon took place until over a millennium after the boundaries of the canon were already established. Arguments that the canon somehow presupposes the infallible authority of the church are belied by the truth that the canon existed without any exercise of such authority.

Ortlund also ably responds to claims that the Bible teaches us to obey traditions, that sola Scriptura is not a teaching affirmed before the Reformation, and that sola Scriptura leads to a limitless variety of conflicting interpretations. Such criticisms generally fail to come to terms with what the Bible itself and the history of the church reveal about such matters. There is no good reason to think that the traditions referred to in the New Testament were something distinct from the apostolic teaching preserved in the canonical books. The conviction that Scripture is the highest and final authority was actually held by more than a few church fathers. And the idea that sola Scriptura encourages an endless number of idiosyncratic interpretations is disconfirmed by the fact that many Protestants find themselves able to rally around common confessions. Ortlund also claims that a plurality of interpretations is preferable to the alternative to sola Scriptura, which is placing infallible authority in an institution that can require people to believe and practice things that have no foundation in Scripture.

Another significant objection to Protestantism that Ortlund answers is encapsulated in John Henry Newman’s famous statement that “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”[x] Ortlund points out that there are multiple things that can be said in response to this claim. One is that there are plenty of church historians and experts in historical theology who have carefully studied the history of the church and have not seen any reason to question their commitment to Protestant principles. A second is that the Reformers were greatly interested in church history and understood themselves to be engaged in a retrieval project. They were not starting something new but restoring something very old. As Ortlund puts it, “to be ‘deep in history’ was the whole rationale for Protestantism.”[xi] A third is that if one gets really deep into history, so that one looks to the earliest centuries of the church, then one will find a form of Christianity that at least in some respects looks more like Protestantism than Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. In later centuries, particularly in the medieval period, many doctrines and practices emerged that are absent in Protestantism, but this is hardly a reason to think that Protestantism lacks any significant relationship to what came before then. Protestantism therefore arguably has more “ancient depth” than its contemporary ecclesial rivals.[xii] In light of these considerations, Newman’s declaration cannot be taken seriously.

These cogent defenses of Protestant principles and the mission of the Reformers make Ortlund’s book well worth reading, but he also goes on offense against certain tenets of Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and does so with impressive results. Much of the second half of the book is devoted to critical evaluations of the papacy, apostolic succession, the assumption of Mary, and veneration of icons. I will not attempt to summarize what he says on these topics, but I will say that virtually everything in these chapters is convincing and well argued. He makes it abundantly clear that there are no compelling reasons to accept these doctrines, and shows that the historical record instead gives us good reasons to reject them. The common problem with all of them is that the available evidence indicates that each of them originated well after the time of the apostles. This entails that there is no justification for regarding them as true. Ortlund’s discussions of these matters should be of use to anyone engaged in Protestant apologetics. It is hard to understand how anyone could read his case against these things and think they still retain any plausibility.

The Problem of an Always-Reforming Church

Although these well-made arguments and insightful observations constitute the bulk of Ortlund’s book, I do see a few significant problems in his vision for Protestantism. One of these is Ortlund’s advocacy for “mere Protestantism,” which appears to mean a common-denominator Protestantism defined primarily by sola fide and sola Scriptura. The problem with this is that these doctrines, as important as they are, are not sufficient to address the hunger people have for “the ancient, the transcendent, the stable, the deep.” To find these things, one must find a church with roots deep in history, ancient forms and customs, a high view of the Sacraments, and permanent and enduring confessions. Mere Protestantism may in some ways be preferable to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, but I do not think it will suffice to pull many back who feel the attractions of Rome or the East. If mere Protestantism is all we can offer when encouraging people to remain Protestant, then we should not be surprised if people are still tempted to depart for other traditions.

Another problem I have with Ortlund’s vision derives from his reliance on Philip Schaff’s theology of church history. Schaff was a brilliant and learned theologian and church historian who blessed the church in many ways with his scholarship. Unfortunately, he also adopted the ideas of the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel to understand the development of the church, and in my opinion this led him to try to fit church history into a scheme that is artificial and implausible. Schaff held that each period in church history has contributed enduring truths to our understanding of Christianity, but each has also been marked by significant errors. In every epoch, these errors have produced opposition, and this in turn has led to the formation of a new era of theological understanding with its own distinctive truths and errors. Schaff believed that both medieval Catholicism and Protestantism had followed this pattern, and that Protestantism itself would eventually be superseded due to its errors of rationalism and sectarianism. Because he saw church history in these terms, Schaff thought the church must be open to the possibility of achieving a higher and fuller understanding of divine revelation in the future. He believed that eventually some form of synthesis of the distinctive truths of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism would occur, with the errors of both left behind.[xiii]

Ortlund seems to follow Schaff with respect to most of these views. He apparently believes the church should always be open to further reformation, and thinks it is problematic to hold that a doctrinal position is absolutely settled and unchangeable. He agrees with Schaff that Protestantism is “interimistic,” and holds that as it stands it is “incomplete.”[xiv] In espousing such a standpoint, he raises important questions for his readers. Should Protestants see themselves as engaged in a project of ongoing and perpetual reform? Does this make sense of the facts of history available to us now? In disagreement with Ortlund, my own view is that these questions should be answered in the negative. Schaff wrote nearly two centuries ago, and in the time since nothing has suggested that the church is moving into an era of greater truth or understanding. Quite the opposite is the case; efforts to revise old doctrines and practices have been a blight on the church and have disrupted its ability to fulfill its mission. In fact, there is no good reason to think Protestant theology has progressed or improved in any substantial way since it was initially worked out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We certainly know more about many things than people did back then, but we have not found ways to make our theology better. It thus makes sense to think the church was successfully reformed or recatholicized at that time, and there is now only a need to preserve and pass on the truth that has been handed down to us.[xv] Schaff did not appreciate this position and saw it as promoting a dead orthodoxy. It seems to me, however, to be the only view actually supported by the evidence of modern church history. Moreover, I believe it is evident that only a Protestantism that believes the church is no longer in need of reform will be able to provide the permanence and stability desired by people who are tired of the ceaseless and mindless flux of our postmodern world.

The Lutheran Alternative

What then are we to commend to those who are wondering if they should remain Protestant? It will probably come as no surprise that I believe the answer is confessional or orthodox Lutheranism—the genuine Lutheranism of the Book of Concord. This kind of Lutheranism has virtually everything that is truly good about Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy while also being free of their many unscriptural errors. It has history, tradition, liturgy, a rich theology of the Sacraments, and an unchanging and unchangeable book of clear confessional statements. It also has artistic, musical, and literary treasures. It may not have some of these things on the scale of Rome or the East, but it does have them, and what it has is truly wonderful. Most importantly, it has the Gospel of free forgiveness by grace alone through faith alone in its utmost purity. Those who are satisfied with mere Protestantism may be happy elsewhere, but for those who want the best of Protestantism, Protestantism at its fullest, deepest, and most catholic, Protestantism that will not change an iota of doctrine until Christ’s second advent, confessional Lutheranism alone will suffice.[xvi]

[i] Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024) xii.

[ii] Ibid., xvii.

[iii] Ibid., 22.

[iv] Ibid., 37.

[v] Ibid., 60.

[vi] Ibid., 65.

[vii] Ibid., 67.

[viii] Ibid., 68.

[ix] Ibid., 69 (italics in original).

[x] Quoted in ibid., 135.

[xi] Ibid., 138.

[xii] See ibid., 150.

[xiii] Schaff sets forth his views on the historical development of the church in The Principle of Protestantism, ed. Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). 

[xiv] See Ortlund, 11. Schaff believes ongoing improvement is possible for the church in “doctrine, life, constitution, and worship.” Schaff, 76.

[xv] This is not to imply that the Reformers got everything right, only that what they got wrong was largely tangential to their program of reform.

[xvi] Schaff expressly notes his opposition to seeing orthodox Lutheranism as the true visible church. He writes “we come into collision also with the stiff confessionists, the hyper-orthodox Lutherans of the old stamp, the sons of Abraham Calovius and Valentin Ernst Loescher. These indeed acknowledge the divine character of the Reformation, at least in its Lutheran form, and in this respect we stand on common ground with them. . . . But they will not allow the development of the church to extend beyond this point. Whatever progress may have had place before, all must be considered complete with the orthodoxy of the sixteenth century; circumscribed and made fast in the narrow bounds of the Formula of Concord. With blind misestimation of the rights and prerogatives of the Reformed Church, and of the special wants precisely of our time, they make Lutheranism to be the same thing with the ideal or absolute church itself, and fall thus into an error as bad as that of Rome, to whose view all that lies beyond its own borders is but damnable heresy and schism. This form of thinking bears, it is true, the name of Luther; but with his boundlessly free spirit it stands in no affinity whatsoever.” Schaff, 167. I believe Schaff fails to accurately characterize some things in this passage, but he certainly is correct that confessional Lutherans see the Reformation as complete.

Nathan Greeley is the managing editor of The Conservative Reformer and Fellow of Apologetics and Philosophical Theology at the Weidner Institute. He also teaches apologetics at American Lutheran Theological Seminary.