1: Self-Understanding 2: Identity > 3: Doctrine >> 4: Priorities >>> 5: Definition >>>>
The Protestant Self-Understanding
What is Protestantism—and can it help bring about the unity Christ prayed for?
These are not merely academic questions. They cut to the heart of our divided Christian witness. Gavin Ortlund has offered a recent and thoughtful account of Protestant identity and catholicity. It serves not only as a catalyst for reflection but as a representative summary of how many Protestants understand their tradition.
In what follows, I engage Ortlund’s proposal as a window into Protestant self-understanding. To evaluate the contribution that Protestantism may make to unity, we must examine it on three fronts: its identity, its doctrine, and its priorities. Each of these domains shapes its capacity for unity, reveals something about Protestantism’s underlying structure—or its lack thereof, and helps illuminate the challenge of achieving visible, ecclesiastical unity. Along the way, I compare Ortlund’s portrait of Protestant distinctives with the Catholic vision of the Church and explore whether Protestantism offers a viable path forward.
In the introduction to What It Means to Be Protestant, Gavin Ortlund argues that Protestantism is a renewal of the gospel within the church, a return to the authority of Scripture, and the removal of historical accretions.1 In Chapter 1, “Protestantism’s Core Identity”, Gavin adds doctrinal texture, including the five solae of the Reformation, belief in two sacraments, priesthood of the believer, shorter Old Testament canon, church discipline as a mark of the church, an emphasis on preaching in worship, lay participation in communion of both kinds, the right of clergy to marry—though he gives particular emphasis to sola scriptura and sola fide.2 From this description, we can discern three major ways of portraying Protestantism: as a common identity, a body of common doctrine, and a set of common priorities. Each of these calls for closer examination.
1: Self-Understanding 2: Identity > 3: Doctrine >> 4: Priorities >>> 5: Definition >>>>
- Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024), xx. Gavin commends Philip Schaff’s condensed perspective that Protestantism is best conceived as a renewal movement within the one true church (4). ↩︎
- What It Means to Be Protestant, 3-4. The editors of the recent reprinting of Schaff’s “What Is Protestantism?”, an essay upon which Ortlund relies, characterize Protestantism as the two-fold principle “the primacy of scripture and salvation by grace through faith.” See David R. Bains and Theodore Louis Trost, eds., The Development of the Church: “The Principle of Protestantism” and Other Historical Writings of Philip Schaff, edited by W. Bradford Littlejohn, Lee C. Barrett and David W. Layman, The Mercersburg Theology Study Series (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 27. ↩︎
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