Truth Points Toward Protestantism

The year I turned 30, after a lifetime as a secular Jew, I experienced a crisis that led me to investigate in earnest the existence of God. As any card-carrying academic would do, I read a lot of books.

I read such Christian apologetics as C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (which was intriguing), Tim Keller’s The Reason for God (more powerful), and N. T. Wright’s majestic The Resurrection of the Son of God (most powerful of all). Ultimately, my conversion moment came overnight—literally, as I was stuck in the Amsterdam airport, with a copy of the Gospels to keep me company, on my way home from an academic conference. That moment also didn’t feel intellectual at all; it felt like an out-of-body experience—which, I suppose, it was.

Considering in retrospect how thoroughly Protestant my approach was, I was surprised to read in Gavin Ortlund’s book What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church that “on the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox side (especially Catholic), there is a huge body of literature, social media presence, and apologetics ministries that are unmatched on the Protestant side” (xv). In this book, he sets out to balance out the field.

Apology for Protestantism

What about the massive number of books like those of Lewis or Keller, and so many other works of apologetics written by Protestants? Their purpose is different from the kind of apologetics Ortlund does here.

Lewis and Keller wrote to skeptics—to people like me at age 30. Their invitation was to mere Christianity, as the title of Lewis’s famous apologetic book indicates. But Ortlund’s audience is different. Rather than skeptics, he addresses Protestants who feel confused and are questioning not God or Christianity but Protestantism, wondering if Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy got things right. Both traditions had been around for nearly 1,500 years by the time Luther nailed up the Ninety-five Theses. What if Luther was wrong?

Considering how many prominent converts from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism dominate the current intellectual and political scene in the U.S. (including J. D. Vance, the vice-presidential Republican candidate), it’s clear something is afoot. Is this something, though, based on truth?

This question is at the heart of Ortlund’s popular YouTube ministry, and it undergirds this well-researched book. Convinced the Bible and history provide a clear case for Protestantism over both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Ortlund has put a sort of FAQ into this readable and compact volume. This isn’t an academic book that presents an exhaustive analysis of any of the many key doctrines he discusses, on which educated people have vehemently disagreed over the past 500 to 2,000 years. Rather, the strength of this book is that it doesn’t get lost in the weeds; it recognizes that people can investigate those further for themselves.

Reformed Catholicity

Though Ortlund is obviously arguing for a robust Protestantism, part of his mission is to pursue Reformed catholicity. He argues the reformers weren’t trying to do anything new but instead stripped various accretions and abusive practices (e.g., the selling of indulgences) that had corrupted the medieval church. Rather than trying to split the church and attack its spirit of togetherness—the original sense of “catholicity”—Protestantism aimed to restore wholeness and truth by pointing people back to God and the gospel.

Thus, Ortlund argues, “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” (68).

The church’s source of authority is at the heart of the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide. Ortlund argues for the authority of sola scriptura over and against the papacy and apostolic succession. There are certainly efficiencies in that model of church government, but we must understand they’re not present in the Bible and arose in fits and spurts. He quotes Anthony Lane’s point: “Sola Scriptura is the statement that the church can err” (72)—but obviously, Scripture can’t.

One of the pressing concerns of papal authority against Scripture’s primacy is the obvious development of new Roman Catholic doctrines over time. Ortlund provides two detailed case studies of Catholic doctrines that were historical accretions: the bodily assumption of Mary and the veneration of icons. The novelty of these doctrines provides a potent counterpunch to Roman Catholic accusations of Protestant innovation and to arguments that the papacy functions as a buttress against doctrinal change.

Evenhanded Critique

What It Means to Be Protestant is obviously making an argument that Protestant Christianity is to be preferred. However, this is no anti-Catholic screed. Even while making the case for Protestantism, Ortlund joins thoughtful evangelicals like Tim Keller and Mark Noll in the affirmation that some Roman Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ.

No less important, in my view, is Ortlund’s discussion of how some contemporary Protestant churches miss the mark. He writes,

Many critics of Protestantism will immediately dismiss the interpretation of the Reformation as a historical retrieval and a removal of accretions because of the general sense of historical shallowness in many contemporary Protestant churches. This brings up a point that represents a theme of this book: We must distinguish between particular contemporary expressions of Protestantism versus Protestantism as such. (147)

Apologetics as a method of strengthening faith leans on facts and persuasion based on information—not feelings or vibes. This requires educating God’s people much more thoroughly in both theology and history. We need to show Protestantism’s connection with the true center of the Christian tradition. Better biblical literacy is essential too.

And yet vibes and feelings too often carry the day for decisions in the 21st century. Anemic evangelical understanding of theology got us here, as surveys like Ligonier’s “The State of Theology” remind us. My mantra lately in response to so many contemporary crises has been this: we must all become better theologians. For any evangelicals seeking to understand Protestantism better, Ortlund provides a valuable resource.

A review of ‘What It Means to Be Protestant’ by Gavin Ortlund, available now wherever books are sold.

Nadya Williams (PhD, Princeton) is book review editor at Current and a contributing editor at Providence Magazine. She and her husband, Dan, are parents to one adult son and two children still at home. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.