Why I am … Protestant

So far in this series celebrating (what I see as) the strengths of different Christian traditions and movements, I’ve spent time with two of the three major ‘groups’ of Christian traditions, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Today I’ll be turning to the third, those movements which grew out of the Protestant Reformation. I’ll get into more specific movements in subsequent posts, but today I’ll be looking at the value of the Reformation itself.

It’s a bit of a funny question for me. I’m of a general belief that any schism in the Church is a tragedy. The East-West schism makes some sense, grounded as it was in differences of language and culture and centuries of slow drifting apart. But the schism resulting from the Reformation stings more because it seems entirely based on the two sides doubling down on their positions instead of working together in good faith. But that said, the Reformation was also a badly needed reform movement, and one that had several key points that I think are vital for Christian life.

I am Protestant because the Church is semper reformanda — always in need of reform. There was nothing unique about Luther’s call for change. The Western Church had reformed itself several times over the previous thousand years, and the Roman Catholic Church has reformed itself several times since, most notably at Vatican II in the 1960s. And from our perspective today, there can be no doubt that the Church Luther was trying to reform was incredibly corrupt, a bargaining chip in the power struggle between Renaissance Italy’s leading families, and at its worst little better than a massive Ponzi scheme. (It says a lot that the Pope in the lead up to the Reformation named himself after Julius Caesar!) In this context, Luther protested things that absolutely needed to be protested. If we love the Church, not only should we be allowed to, but we absolutely have to, criticize it and demand positive change. And where deep corruption is involved — especially corruption which lines the pockets of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, or protects in the Institution at the expense of its members — we need to be loud about it. At the end of the day, no institution containing humans will ever be perfect; therefore, it will always be in need of reform.

I am also Protestant because I believe strongly in its battle cry of ad fontes — back to the sources, which is to say, to the Scriptures. As much as I am traditional, as much as I understand that there is no such thing as an ‘unbiased’ or ‘literal’ reading of any text, I also understand that we must always go back to our starting point. And as Christians today, our starting point must be the Scriptures the first Christians received from their own Jewish traditions, and the Christian Scriptures they discerned as being “inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3.16). As my hermeneutics professor put it well, we uphold the value of sola scriptura (by Scriptures alone), not because it is possible but because it reminds that there is always the need to separate text from interpretation.

Finally, I am Protestant because the Reformers rightly understood that faith is a matter of the heart and mind. I may not always like the particular ways they expressed this idea, but the idea itself is sound. It’s not good enough to belong to the right team, let alone just cheer for it because our parents and grandparents did. We need to participate, to play the game. Christianity is in the living of it. And no one can do that for us.

So then, I can proudly say I am Protestant because the Church — like any institution comprised of human beings — always needs reform, because the Scriptures always stand as our sources and the final arbiter (even if we’ll never agree on how to interpret them!), and because faith is something for which we each have to take responsibility.