WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A PROTESTANT
By Gavin Ortlund
Zondervan. 261 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 0 310 156 345
‘Should I, indeed must I, as a Protestant, convert to Roman Catholicism?’ I suspect that is not a question most readers of en or most evangelicals have asked themselves. However, there is a significant and influential minority of evangelicals, especially in North America, who are asking that question and answering it positively.
Also, with the revival of interest in cultural significance of Christianity, some unbelievers are looking to Rome. In this middle length and accessible book Gavin Ortlund brings together much of his thinking on the matter that can also be found on his excellent YouTube channel and podcast, Truth Unites.
The book consists of 11 chapters divided into three sections. In the first section, he deals with the catholicity of Protestantism, affirming that it is more genuinely catholic than churches such as the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox who define the church as an institution. Genuine catholicity is about faithfulness to the gospel and has at its heart sola fide or the doctrine of justification by faith alone as rediscovered at the Reformation.
In the second section, Ortlund deals with the matter of authority in relation to the Papacy and its claim of infallibility and apostolic succession. Here he makes the case for and deals with objections to sola scriptura, or the foundational claim of classical Protestants that Scripture alone is the supreme authority in the church because it alone is infallible. For that reason, unlike Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Protestant churches can always be reforming.
The final section is about Protestantism and history. John Henry Newman claimed that to be deep into history was to be Roman Catholic. Far from it, asserts Ortlund. The Reformers did not set out to establish a new church, but to restore and renew the truly catholic church according to the teaching of Scripture and the best teaching and practice of the early church. To illustrate his point, Ortlund helpfully examines the issues of the assumption of Mary and icon veneration, and shows them to have no basis in either Scripture or the teaching and practice of the early church.
Ortlund’s plea is not to compare the worst of evangelical Protestantism with the best of another tradition. The former has much that is good and the latter much that is bad. His key point, threaded through this excellent book, is that orthodox Protestant Christianity is essentially a renewal movement in the truly catholic church, that the exalted Lord Jesus Christ is building on the foundation of the gospel. The challenge of the book to contemporary evangelicals is to work out in our lives, churches and engagement with the world a richly compelling catholic Protestantism that captures hearts as well as minds of people so that they and the world are changed for good.
