The Sean McDowell Show - Why I am Protestant (and You Should be Too)

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

What does it really mean to be Protestant? Is it simply “not Catholic,” or does it stand for a positive, historic, and biblically-rooted vision of Christianity? Today, I'm speaking with my Biola University colleague Dr. Fred Sanders. We discuss the meaning, history, and theological distinctives of Protestantism. Sanders explains why the term “Protestant” is often misunderstood, how the Reformation connects to the entire Christian tradition, and what Protestants believe about Scripture, grace, justification and good works. READ: "Union with Christ and the Life of Faith," by Fred Sanders (https://amzn.to/49soUTn) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easier to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study, KJV, and download the app today. So what does it mean to be Protestant? And what do you think might be a better name for our movement? There can be a tendency to use Protestant as a default setting for, if you're not Catholic, you must be this other thing.

And that must mean anyone who finds a Bible in a hotel room and gets an idea out of it must be Protestant. What that term leaves out is the idea that we are holding forth a positive teaching about Christianity. And that we're part of the one Christian church of all ages, and we have an idea for how to reform it. According to Protestants, what is the gospel, and why do we believe that? Protestants teach their doctrine of salvation by emphasizing justification, the declaring to be righteous of sinners. Apparently internalizing the idea that if you be Protestant, all I do is read the Bible and nothing else. Well, there actually is a wonderful rich Protestant history. And if you want to dwell deep in the entire Christian history, one way to do it is by focusing on that middle distance of great Protestantism.

What does it mean to be Protestant? are we Protestant. What is a Protestant view of the sacraments, the gospel, and the scriptures? Back to discuss these issues is author and Biola University professor Fred Sanders. This is an episode of the Think Biblically podcast. I'm your host, Sean McDowell. I'm your co-host, Scott Ray. Fred, this is a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time, and you're the perfect person to talk about it in my estimation. You have argued in blogs and in other forms that Protestant is not the most helpful name for our movement, because it doesn't stand for anything positive but just implies protest.

So what does it mean to be Protestant? And what do you think might be a better name for our movement? Yeah, so we're stuck with the name. You can't really rebrand at this point. It goes way back into the 1500s. But something has changed in the English language since then, where the word Protestant used to mean from the Latin protestari to hold forth, to have a view, to add. for it passionately. That's not a word we use in English in any way. If we say protest,

it means mainly you're mad about something and you're going to protest it and that's the reason you're talking at all is to say no to something. So protesting has just kind of poisoned our use of the word. Is there a better word? The problem with thinking about Protestants as mainly protesters, and again, let me make clear that's a bogus etymology. That's not where that word comes from. We're not anti-Catholics as our defining identity. What that term leaves out is the idea that we are holding forth a positive teaching about Christianity and that we're passionate about it. And that we're part of the one Christian church of all ages. And we have an idea for how to reform it.

So you could link up to the word reformation and say, reformation Christians is a nice helpboy to kind of historically tag it. It'd be cool to say we're in the reformed church. But again, branding-wise, that. That means the magisterial Calvinists who are not Lutheran or et cetera, et cetera. So that words out. So, Fred, how, given the Reformation was in the 1500s and that sort of the birth of Protestantism was around that time, how should we view the church before the Reformation? Yeah, that's a great question.

And really important, too, because it's possible to sort of install a denominational grid on how you think about these things before you have a historical grid. And I think you're right to say, oh, you know, they've got 2,000 years of history here, divide it up into four quarters. And if you just want to think of your church as only starting in the fourth quarter, you're already sort of cattywamp us to use the technical term, right? Because you need to install the historical grid first and say, oh, this goes all the way back. And the church I'm in is the church founded by Jesus Christ carried out by the apostles.

And it didn't sort of go into a time capsule and vanish for 1,500 years. and it wasn't a thin trickle of marginal kind of weirdos that were my church all the way back. I bring you good news that the entire Christian tradition belongs to Protestant Christians. Now something big happened in the 1500s, of course, and then that's where it's legitimate to talk about distinct sorts of confessions or denominations. At that point, you could put the denominational grid in place and start thinking that way. But you don't want to let that grid trick you out of owning three quarters of the Christian tradition. So say a little bit more about when you said basically most of church history is essentially the Protestant tradition. We spell out a little bit more what you mean by that.

Yeah. So if you're trying to get your bearings on this, you can think, okay, at some point in the early 1500s, somebody kicked out Martin Luther for teaching justification by Grace alone through Faith Alone and Soul the Scriptura. Someone heard him teaching that stuff, which I like, and said, Anathema, you're out. We're not going to reform and take that on board. we are instead expelling you. Now, whoever did that is not on my team to speak denominational, to speak in terms of teams and that. But if you try to think back before that, well, okay, that was 1517.

What about 1417? What about 1317? What about 1217? Are all those people also not on my team and against the Reformation teaching? Well, and then you start realizing, oh, well, Thomas Aquinas was 1274. Now, denominationally speaking, he agreed with some things that we would call Roman Catholic now. But historically speaking, he was before the Reformation turning point. And so I'd like to say, I think Aquinas is mine.

And you see where this is going. You go further back. Hey, Bernard of Clairvaux. I think he's mine. Says some things about Mary that are not the way I would put things. But that guy is completely my intellectual property. Part of my Christian heritage, part of my birthright. If you jump all the way back to like Augustine of Hippo, you know, Athanasius of Alexandria, Irinaeus of Leon, the apostles.

You kind of see where this goes. There's a turning point in 1517, but you shouldn't absolutize that and say everything before it doesn't count as mine. The default for a good Protestant is that all counts as mine. So if I could like sum up what you're saying and make sure I'm tracking me, there's a big split in the 1500s between Catholics and Protestants. But what we understand to be Protestant, which we're going to get to, scripture, grace, sacraments, et cetera, even though there are some differences with some of these leaders you said, like maybe Irinae, maybe Aquinas, you're saying they're a part of the larger global church, and you think Protestants get the answers right to these questions, which go back to the beginning, Jesus, the apostles, and the scripture itself. Is that fair? Yeah. So one of the charges against Protestants in the

1500s was that they were not patristic, that they were not traditional, that they were not historical. You think about different ways to address that charge? That's what Cardinal Sadoletto, who I think was the Bishop of Geneva, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Geneva, said to John Calvin, I think about how to respond to that. Calvin's response and the standard Reformation response was, no, we're the ones being traditional and patristic and in touch with the great tradition. There have been some recent deviations from that where things have hardened into a Roman Catholic deviation from the great tradition. The Reformation was attempt to get back to the Church Fathers, and a lot of the reformers were great scholars of the church fathers.

So that's what you mean by making the church more Catholic lowercase C. Talk about that a little bit, if you will. Yeah, if you take the word Catholic and its original meaning, it's from the Greek through the Latin according to the whole, holistic, universal, total. Then you can, once you define it that way, once it means that in your mind and not the name of a particular denomination, you can kind of pick up on how paradoxical it is to call something Roman Catholic. And you know, not to be snarky, but the question would be something like, well, which is it? Is it Roman or is it Catholic? Like, is it local and tied to one particular organization? Or is it universal? I could start calling my church, the total church. And then you'd say, well, yeah, but that's a brand name, right? Yeah, I mean, almost every week, I affirm that I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. Yeah. Again, in English, we've had semantic drift over the last four or five centuries. But I think it's important for our listeners and viewers.

to be aware that there's a big difference between capital C Catholic and lower C Catholic. Yeah. And what we are affirming is the lower C Catholic in that universal aspect of the church. Yeah, yeah, which is to say we're attempting to reform and correct by Scripture, the one church. All right, so tell us what a unique Protestant view of Scripture would be. And of course, when we say a Protestant view of Scripture, you don't mean as opposed to a capital C Catholic, but in terms of what the scriptures view about themselves, what Jesus and the apostles taught. And how does that maybe pair with things like reason, history, tradition, and other sources of knowledge?

Yeah. Yeah. And it's nice to kind of catch yourself there and say, well, the main thing I want to say about a Protestant view of scripture is it's a Christian view of scripture. So thank God. Roman Catholics also believe that scripture is the Word of God and is authoritative. Amen. From a Protestant point of view, we'd say, okay, so let's tease out the different. though. Protestants are better at describing it as the authoritative word of God and as the norm that norms other norms, you know? There are various ways that we get our doctrine right and we would want to use tradition and reason and all kinds of things like that in thinking well and thinking connectedly. But when it comes to scripture, we say, oh, this is in a whole different category.

This is not one of the norms that mutually norm each other. This is the norm above all other norms. This is where we would use the phrase sola scriptura, obviously a Latin phrase, which doesn't mean all I read is the Bible, or I can't get a bad idea out of the Bible, no matter how hard I try. It certainly does not mean those things. What it means is, actually, if you think about the phrase sola scriptura, it implies that there's a range of influences on our theology, but that scripture alone is the one that stands above them all. And so again, to put the Protestant edge on that, you'd say in those places where tradition develops sort of odd little excrescences and oddities, you'd say we can correct these not by just appealing to more tradition,

but by appealing back over tradition's head to scripture itself, which stands out with a clearer profile as having authority. My understanding is that that's often misunderstood to refer to scripture as the sole source of valid knowledge. Yeah. And that's why there can be skepticism about the other disciplines and how they might inform our theological understanding. But that you're saying that has nothing to do with the notion of Sola Scriptura.

Right, yeah, the phrase Sola Scriptura, sometimes people will try to substitute something like, well, you're describing as Solo Scriptura or Nuda Scriptura or something like that. So people will pick up this motto and read into it things like, You don't need anything ever but the Bible to tell you anything about anything. Also, it's a question of how information-rich your way of confessing scripture is. If you've never read any of the church fathers, if you've never read anything but the Bible, well, it doesn't really matter much that you say scripture alone because you don't have any other options even on the table.

It's when you're dealing with the entire Christian tradition, all the pre-Reformation exegesis of Scripture, all the riches of the entire Christian faith, they are able to say, I've got all of this on the table. And when it's decision-making time, scripture is what guides and norms and controls what I do with all of that. If the table's empty,

so it means less. What's the distinction then between, how do the Roman Catholic traditions see scripture differently? Yeah, that's a good question. And again, I would want to say it's great that Roman Catholics believe the Bible is the Word of God. if I could put that in an edgy way, I'd say they just believe it badly. That is to say they clutter up the confession of Scripture's authority with all kinds of competing norms and...

Such as. Such as an appeal to unwritten tradition, which they would claim goes all the way back. So if you ask you know why, seems to me that Mary, as described in Roman Catholic devotion and doctrine, is very different from the minor character of the New Testament. And they would say, yeah, but there's an ancient tradition that gives to Mary. a certain level of veneration. And so that's an appeal to unwritten, extra-biblical ancient tradition. So things like Mary, purgatory, other differences that Protestants have with Catholics,

that's different than questions of like the historicity of, say, the Exodus or the intersection of science and faith where people say there's a tension between scripture and between some other field of knowledge. Is there a difference in general between how Protestants and Catholics would say soul a scripture when science seems to be in conflict or history seems to be in conflict with Catholics? Or what would it look like to be a Protestant view of scripture in light of challenges that come from other fields? So in my view, in my opinion, that's not a sorter between the two. You get various kinds of Protestant ways of dealing with, say, the claims of science or of reason. and you get various kinds of Roman Catholic ways of doing that.

Just because there's a magisterium and a stronger defined tradition in Roman Catholicism doesn't mean they have one particular way of dealing with those rival claims or those other ideas. Let me give you an example on this. Sure. I think might clarify this. When I was a doctoral student, I took a couple courses from Charles Curran, a very prominent Catholic theologian. We didn't agree on hardly anything. but he was very kind to me and we got to be friends.

And for the first time, I read really carefully a number of Catholic encyclicals, which are the papal documents that sort of govern the way that the Catholic faithful view their doctrine and its application. What I noticed throughout almost all the ones I read until very recently is that they started with an appeal to reason. And it's what made sense rationally. That was sort of the main argument to carry the day. And scripture was almost like an appendix at the end.

And it was clear that they viewed, at least in the encyclicals, they viewed scripture as supplementing what they had established by reason. And I wonder, would it be fair to say that a Protestant view of scripture might view that somewhat in reverse? Need a daily spark of hope and direction? Let the Daily Bible app from Salem Media be that spark. This free Android app delivers an uplifting verse each morning, plus reading plans, devotions, and trusted podcasts from leaders like Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren. Prefer to listen instead?

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They tended to do that just quite differently. Would that be a fair recognition of the role of reason vis-a-vis Scripture? Well, I think it might be. Again, I don't think it's a total sorter because you get some very reason-first Protestant apologists. It might also be that you're speaking out beyond my expertise. You mean like us? It could also be that in fields like ethics, where you're going to be way ahead of me on this reading, that there might be more of a – the Protestants might have a cleaner shot because of their – careful attention to confessing the authority of Scripture, that they might be able to leverage that more effectively than Roman Catholics. Okay, fair enough.

Yeah, I sense more that there's just more of a weight and a tradition within Catholicism of valuing like natural law and general revelation than within Protestants, but it doesn't have to be a dividing line. I think that's something Protestants can and should do better, but you're probably right, it doesn't divide. Now, let's get to the one that arguably does divide. according to Protestants, what is the gospel and why do we believe that is the gospel? Yeah.

So even here in the doctrine of salvation or so teriology, we're going to come to some real divisions. I think this is really what the fight is all about or the difference between Protestant Catholic. Even here, you can start by talking about what we have in common. Roman Catholics believe that we're saved by the grace of God. Again, I would want to say they just believe in it badly in a cluttered way. that the various ceremonies and works and things have sort of gotten between them and a clear confession of the totally unmerited favor of God. And that's why, as you kind of drill down into this, you would say Protestants teach their doctrine of salvation by emphasizing justification, the declaring to be righteous of sinners, justification by grace alone through faith alone. And that's where you start bringing in these alones again to say, as compared to, say, a medieval Catholic doctrine, which would be you're introduced into sort of a state of the grace of God.

But within that state of grace, you ask for God's help and power to make you do good works. And those good works set your soul in order. So you're increasingly sanctified and sort of brought into alignment with God. You get rid of vices. You take on virtues. picture the way Dante has people climbing Mount Purgatory in the afterlife, something like that. But now, like in this life, you're getting rid of vices, taking on virtues. At the end of that, God looks at you and says, well, you have been made just by my assisting power.

And therefore, at the end of the process, I call you justified. You might consider the whole process justification. That's the edge where Protestants say, no, that's not how it works. We're forgiven, freely forgiven by the grace of God and justified at the beginning. of it, then we do get rid of vices, take on virtues, and live that life of sanctification. But it starts with justification by grace alone through faith alone. So, Fred, would it be fair to say that Protestants make a cleaner distinction between justification and sanctification, then they don't tend to be – it sounds like in Catholic teaching,

they are more fused together rather than seen as more separate and distinct. I think that's a fair way to say it, and even to take the word justification on the Catholic side, to take it to mean actually being made just. Whereas Protestants have had to dig that out of Romans and Galatians and kind of hone it and say, no, it actually is being used in scripture to mean declared just. Then we go on to be made holy, and at the end of that there's a kind of justification, but the key use of the word is at the outset. You might have answered this, but I want to ask you about a unique Protestant view of grace,

which is obviously at the root of the gospel, what's a unique Protestant view of grace, and then what would the relationship look like, we think scripture teaches, between grace, faith, and works. Yeah. So Protestants, you know, reduce everything to the grace of God. This is what salvation is,

and they want a clean shot at it. So there's a kind of a, I don't want to call it nervousness, but there's a caution about introducing anything in between just free forgiveness and the grace of God. You don't want any of your works or of your alignment or submission to church authority or any of those things to sort of get between you and saying, I'm saved by grace. As a result, we then have to emphasize that the life we're introduced into by grace is a life which has a particular shape to it, that has a form,

and that we're going to obey God because God continues. to have the authority to command our moral lives. We don't remove the just authority of the rulemaker when we say that we are forgiven for breaking those rules. And then we can go on to say, and this is the classic Protestant view. I could cite lots of sources here that works are in fact necessary as part of the Christian life. One example, the Heidelberg Catechism, which is like a reformed document on Lutheran territory in the 1500s. The Heidelberg Catechism says, since we are saved by grace through faith alone, why must we do good works? That's the question. Just the fact that you can put that question in a properly Protestant document alerts you to the fact that, oh yeah, works are necessary.

Works don't constitute our salvation, but the Christian life has to include a transformation in which you do good works. Okay, so necessary in what sense? Not necessary for salvation, but necessary to reveal to the world we're actually saved? what's that necessary component? Yeah, that's properly Protestant and vigilant of you to get in there. Never necessary as a condition, right? Never as a condition. Like you must do these works and when you have satisfied the condition of doing these works, then you are saved. That's not how that works.

That would be, again, the Heidelberg Catechism question puts it, since we are saved by grace, why must we use good works? And that means it can't come first as a condition. It certainly does help to testify to the world that we're not just imagining that God has forgiven us, but that that forgiveness has entered our lives as a factor and a principle and how we live towards the righteous lawgiver, God, the Holy One. But also because this is not a fantasy, we're actually aligning ourselves with God and taking on the character of Christ. And that's going to have the form of Ephesians 210, you know, doing good works, which God has prepared beforehand

that we should walk in them. Ephesians 210 is, of course, right after. By grace, you are saved through faith, and that is not your own doing so no one can boast, but we are his workmanship created for good works in Christ. If I start quoting Paul, I'm going to get kind of carried away here because if you take on all of Paul's letters, especially including like his letters to Timothy and Titus, where he's not writing to a church but to pastors of a church, he's constantly using the phrase good works in a very positive sense. Remind them to do good works. Remember the point of the Christian life is to do good works, to be transformed and renewed to do these things. I wonder, just to clarify this maybe a little bit further, I wonder if one of the major differences would be where a believer would get the assurance ultimately of their salvation.

Because I'd be nervous if the assurance of salvation was coming from my good works. I'm inclined to say that the scripture teaches that that comes at the foot of the cross. Yes. And that's what assures me of my salvation and my eternal security. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Is it D. James Kennedy who had that question in evangelism explosion? If you stood before God right now and he said, why should I let you into heaven? What would you answer? Yeah, the Protestant impulse following the biblical teaching is never going to be, I've had a pretty good couple of years here, you know. It's always going to be only for the sake of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ counted to me on, you know, by God. So it's a Protestant view of the sacraments. This is another one where we see a lot of debate. and disagreement. So you can compare and contrast with Catholics if you want to, but what are the Protestant sacraments? What are they? How do we practice them? Why do we practice them? What do they

mean? Yeah. So to tag that base of unity first, because this is a point where it's easy to do, not only a comparison between Protestants and Catholics, a contrast, but also among Protestants, the various different views that we would have of baptism in the Lord's Supper. We've learned some real habits of disagreement and distinction, and we could pursue that. But it's worth saying, we all agree that the sacraments are special ordinances of Christ to be observed in the church that mean we die with Christ and rise with him and are nourished by faith in him. So dying and rising obviously localized in baptism and being nourished by faith in him, localized especially in the Lord's Supper. Now I use the word ordinance there, not to avoid the word sacrament. though I do often when someone says sacrament, I kind of get professorial and say that,

could you please define your term? Sure. What content did you just add to our discussion by using that word, et cetera? Ordinance is just a way of saying these are things ordained by Christ. And so it brings us back to the life of the church as a body of believers sort of that we didn't invent our own ordinances. We didn't come up with some like cool stuff we would do in order to be in this club. we're actually following directly the commands of Jesus Christ that he ordained baptism and the Lord's Supper in the church. So is it fair to say as Protestants, since we don't have, as in Roman Catholics, kind of a top-down authoritative structure apart from the scripture?

We're clearly called to baptism, for example, clearly called to practice the Lord's Supper. But how we practice them, there can be some in-house differences among Protestants. and we have seen that, historically speaking. Yes. And there have been in-house differences in the history of the church in what we would now retroactively call the Roman Catholic tradition. It was not always transubstantiation developed in Aristotelian categories as in the 13th century. So there's been some difference there. The other thing I'd say, and I think you indicated this, we'll start counting sacraments, that is, ordinances of Christ, and stop it too, because, you know, mission accomplished. That's what we're doing.

union with Christ and fellowship with Christ. That's what we're organized around. What you get in the Roman Catholic system, in addition to that, so we agree about that, but they go on to sort of link it to the sacerdotal or the sort of church system of how you would get the right sacraments by the right person at the right time. Once you admit that principle of what's going to count as a sacrament, you're going to have to go for about seven because you've got to have a sacrament to make sure that the priest is ordained to do the sacraments. Then you're going to have to have a baptism and that's going to have to be followed up by confirmation. And then you're going to have to have marrying and burying and all of the things that sort of go with the sacramental churchly

system. And that's just to have admitted a different principle of what you're going to use for sacraments. So is there something distinctive that's Protestant in the view of the church? You know, you've talked about some of the practices, some of the ordinances that are different. but is there something is distinct about a Protestant view of the church? Yeah, I think it's meaningful to talk about a kind of a mere Protestant view of the church. So again, you could get out into all the differences

between Lutherans and Anglicans and Methodists and all that kind of stuff. But this Protestant view is actually a strength because it's the community of people called by the word into fellowship with God. So it's that calling and gathering and gathering of a people of God around the Word. The way this sort of shows up in contrast to Catholicism is you'll often hear Roman Catholic

apologists say something like, you wouldn't even have the Bible if it weren't for the church handing you the Bible. That's considered a knock-down argument. But of course, if you think about it, theologically, the church was always that group of people gathered around the Word of God, right? They had the books of Moses. They had the Bible Jesus had. And when Jesus himself said, follow me, that is the word of God gathering the people of God.

And so Protestant ecclesiology or doctrine of the church just takes that fully seriously, that the word gathers the people of God. So there's a few concerns or objections that are often raised to Protestants. And I love your take on them, Fred. One is what's I'm called individualism, that Protestants shift the locus of authority from the church to scripture. which elevates the individual reader such as you and me or every other reader to the authority of interpretation. Is that true and is that a fair concern we should pay attention to? Yeah. Well, the first part of it is great.

How did you put it? The Protestantism shift the locus of authority from the church to scripture. Yep. Totally on board with that. It does not follow from that that we therefore ought to enthrone the lone and interpreter as the actual authority there. So that's a little bit of sleight of hand. I'm not blaming you for it.

But when someone does that and thinks, well, if the Bible's in charge, that means I'm in charge. That's where I would really encourage people to study some actual Protestant theology. You know, there can be a tendency to use Protestant as a default setting for, if you're not Catholic, you must be this other thing. And that must mean anyone who finds a Bible in a hotel room and gets an idea out of it must be Protestant. Well, that's, we're going to need some quality control here, right?

I'm not a control of brief, but read the actual Protestantism of the 1500s. It was never about handing someone a Bible and leaving them all alone to figure out what they could get from it. It was a movement of catechizing, of teaching, of scriptural preaching, of intense guidance to help instruct people. And by the way, that intense guidance included the Bible interpretation of the previous 1500 years. So it wasn't a lopping off everything and starting afresh with a Bible I happened to find. It was always about giving authority to the Word of God and doing so with proper guidance. Okay, so the key is to talk about authority. The authority is not in the individual interpreter to say this is what it means to me.

Although individuals can do that. The authority is the scripture, and there's a tradition of doing theology well, pointing to scripture, debating what the text means. So just because there's differences, doesn't mean we have this individualistic strain that leads to a kind of relative. Right. Is that fair? That's right. But just to be clear, is there some place in Catholic theology that encourages the individual to read Scripture? Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's Word every day? The Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with Scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor.

A fun way to learn and share a smile while growing in your faith. Get the daily Bible devotion app for free on both iOS and Android. Start and end your day with God's Word. Search for the Daily Bible Devotion app in the App Store or Google Play Store and download it today. ...and to come to some of their own conclusions? I mean, it's not prominent in the way Catholicism teaches. They have a thing called the Magisterium, which means the teaching office. And supposedly in Roman Catholicism, if the Bible is unclear, then you would go to the Magisterium who would tell you what it means. And supposedly they would be clear. I say supposedly because if you've spent any time looking at magisterial teaching,

you realize you need a Magisterium for the Magisterium. And also you want to drop back to the classic Protestant way of teaching, the clarity of Scripture. We're not denying that there are difficult passages. It is a biblical doctrine that there are hard passages, right? Peter says that of Paul. Some of that stuff he writes is hard to read. but we don't think that scripture is so radically unclear that you must install a magisterium to give you a supposedly clear interpretation of it.

So the first concern that's often raised is individualism, and you said that scripture itself is the authority. The other one is often called fragmentation that we've seen the church fragment since the 1500s. There's now dozens. That's probably a radical understatement. I don't know how many denominations there are, but tons of Protestant denominations and divisions across and within those denominations seemingly with minimal unity.

So have we lost unity, which is a theme scripture like Ephesians, talks about and is vital as shifting towards this Protestant movement. Yeah. Well, the main thing I want to talk about there is unity. But let me first say, dozens is probably a pretty good answer to how many denominations there are, unless you take Protestant, again, as a default setting to mean anyone who finds a Bible and finds a doctrine in it has to count as Protestant. Even if they swear out loud, I am not a Protestant.

Like I am from Pastor Bob's Doctrine Emporium, and we are not Protestant. It'd be weird to count them as Protestant and sort of count them against us. I'm not looking for some global Protestant counsel to declare who's in and who's out. I'm just saying if you define Protestant as anyone who finds anything in Scripture and doesn't want to be Catholic, and then you ask why they're fragmented, well, you're sorting men. mechanism was by definition fragmenting. And so at some point you want to say, I can't be held accountable for, well, I was going to say, if I turn on the TV and see someone saying things from the Bible, I can't say,

there's Protestantism, right? I guess the modern way to say that would say, I can't just find any YouTube channel and say, this counts as Protestantism. So that's one thing. The other thing I want to say is Roman Catholicism has invested in external forms of unity. In many ways, you know, you could think about Roman Catholicism as. investing in externals rather than internals. And I don't mean that as a put-down. I mean, that's a strategic move to say the Roman Catholic Church is one because it's based in one city with one head

and it's got brand control and everybody knows what a Roman Catholic is. And so that counts as one. You turn from that to Protestants who do not have that external sort of investment, but who often consider themselves spiritually one in lots of ways, right? So I'm in the Evangelical Free Church of America denomination. I've got friends in town in Baptist denominations. They invite me to preach to their church. I don't think I'm doing something weird. I think obviously we're like the same, we believe the same doctrine. We believe the same ways. We might have a couple minor disagreements. We are fundamentally unified. So there's a big difference there between an external criterion of unity and an internal criterion. Speaking as a Protestant, as a fairly low church evangelical

Protestant, I could say, we might be able to steal a few cool ideas from the Catholic investment in external unity. It would be neat if my secular neighbors driving down the street didn't think, didn't drive by two churches in a row and think, those are competing franchises in a religious food court and they must hate each other. It'd be cool if they were in on the secret that that's actually two different ways of getting the same thing. And our distinction from each other is not a big division. Anyway, one other thing I want to say about that Catholic investment in external unity, though, is it's merely external unity.

And if you spend any time with lots of different kinds of Catholics, you know that inside, behind that facade of oneness, a lot of Catholics hate each other for a lot of deep-seated reasons. You know, I did my graduate work in Berkeley, hung out with a lot of Catholics there. The theological union I was part of included Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. Now, I don't know what their global situation is, but in Berkeley they don't get along, right? Like the Dominicans are pretty conservative Thomists, and the Franciscans are a little wild and crazy, and then the Jesuits act like the Boston Jesuits. It's really not clear how they're Catholic.

And if you ask them, what do you think about the last few popes? Who! Fights breakout, right? John Paul II, I think, was a pretty cool pope. But a liberal Catholic is going to think, no, that's the guy who stopped Vatican too from doing its perfect work. And so just to say, there's a bunch of disunity behind the investment in external unity. But it's a neat strategy. And again, speaking as a Protestant, I'd like to borrow a little bit of that appearance of unity toward the outer world. Fred, let me tackle one more, I think, maybe significant difference. And that is the understanding of Peter and the, you know, the papal succession part.

that comes from Matthew 16. Yeah. And the statement that, you know, the declaration that on this rock I will build my church. And what exactly that rock refers to? So clarify for us, where does the Catholic view on this come from? And then how is the Protestant view of that different? Yeah, well, the Catholic view takes that as a definite proof that Peter has a special leadership role that he exercises in the church.

And, and this is crucial, first you have to focus it on Peter so that whatever wordplay Jesus is doing there, and we could spend some time on that passage because it's really interesting, the binding and loosing and all of that, that Jesus is, on the Catholic view, focusing on Peter himself, picking him out from the others, but in such a way that, to make the Catholic view work, he's actually being installed in an office which is inheritable.

So it's kind of a push and pull there. We have to see him like, it's mainly about Peter to the exclusion of the other disciples. but not just Peter himself, but the office that's being instantiated there. That's an unusual view, and that's sort of, if you interpret that view as instantiating the papacy for all time, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, by definition that makes you Roman Catholic. The Orthodox don't think that. Protestants don't think that. So that is a uniquely Roman Catholic view. Yeah, that is.

And you can't, it's not, you don't have 1,500 years of unity about how to interpret that. So Augustine looks at that and says, well, I think what's going on there is Jesus is picking out what the rock here on which the church is founded is the confession of Peter, Sifas, Rocky, about the identity of Jesus Christ as the foundation of the church. So there's a complex thing going on there. To develop the Protestant view there, we don't look for an apostle who then passes apostolicity down to a successor. We consider an apostle to be that first generation. And we have that apostolicity in our church in Scripture, not in an office that inherits scripture. So the rock there would actually be Peter's confession of Jesus as the Son of God,

not anything personal to him. Right. And the main way to treat that is you could, if you decide that it's a hard passage, because people have made certain claims about it, then you interpret it in light of clear passages, and you simply don't have Peter stand out with a profile of a leader. He calls himself a fellow elder. He just doesn't behave in a way, and no one behaves toward him in a way that puts him forward as an authoritative center. So this highlights one of the differences before, is that Protestants are going to say this passage at best is debatable, but doesn't give us the uniqueness

of Peter as the first pope in a way that maintains that authority. and passes it on from generation, generation, something so significant and distinctive to the nature of church should have been found in the scriptures. Catholics are going to find it somewhere else, which they consider authoritative, and this would be sufficient to open up the door to that. Is that a fair way to put it? Yes, and that is another place where unwritten tradition is going to loom pretty large in their argument for why you should read that passage in Matthew a particular way. That makes sense. Now, back to my question earlier about fragmentation, I was just preaching in a church, Tremont Temple Baptist Church, just an incredibly beautiful church in downtown Boston. And they told me they're like all the big figures like Moody and Billy Graham have preached here, which is pretty cool.

And now it's your turn. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, fair enough. And which was humbling. Don't mess it up. Don't mess it up. Fair enough. But I was talking with some people there.

Like I walked inside and there was this sense of just like beauty and it's transcendent. And history is built into that. I go to a church in San Clemente. And it's called the shoreline. Basically, people can surf in the morning. And then if they want to just come not literally in their bathing suit, but it's meant to be like meeting people where they're at. And I actually think it's a strength of Protestantism that we have a range of ways you can worship. have the church. But it makes me wonder, what do you think is the draw to Roman Catholicism or

even maybe to orthodoxy outside of the evangelical church? Yeah, I think there's a Methodist theologian William Bert Pope who talked about some of these objections to Protestant theology and said, these should all be entertained not as defeaters, but as cautions to remind us how to be better Protestants. So he would take on these criticism and want to really own. them, but say, we use these as tools as Protestants to think about how to improve how we're being and what we're being. So the rules are something like, if you're living a Christian life and you get the sense from your church that this really just started in the 70s or in the 90s, and there weren't

Christians before that, and that it's really just us, or that the casualness of our ability to approach God is a casualness that goes all the way to the gates of heaven. and like there's never any room for formality or a sense of awe or majesty in coming to the presence of God. If that's sort of your experience, then the argument I would want to give is, well, step up the kind of Protestantism you're doing. Cultivate an awareness of the entire heritage of the whole church and develop that. But you can understand how if somebody has never experienced that and they visit a church that does have some of those things, they would pretty quickly be drawn to those. And so, yeah.

Did you say the guy's name was Bird Pope? Oh, B-U-R-T. Oh, Bert. Two names, William, Bert Pope. Bert Pope, and he's a Protestant theologian. Yeah, Methodist theologian. Interesting. I got a million comments about that one, but I'll let it go.

Oh, yeah, the Protestant name Pope. Yes, that's right. So you've seen, I think, some students from your Tory program, for example, I think, desire a bit more formal, maybe a bit more liturgical tradition. And I know some have started attending Orthodox churches, some Anglican, have some turned to Catholic tradition as well? And if so, what would you say to them about that movement? Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So we recruit sort of high-achieving Protestant high schoolers and we introduce them to the great tradition. And one of the dangers is if they have never heard of anyone, I used to say before Luther, but what's the real situation on the ground, right? If they have never heard of anyone before the year 1990, then the danger there is when you open the riches of the great tradition up to them, they see that and think, I never got this at my church.

There must be another organization that I can go to to find that. Then that's a problem. They tend not to go Roman Catholic because Roman Catholics are so clear and explicit. about what's different about them and how much the change is. Orthodoxy has a lot of the same issues as Catholicism, but it's just vaguer about it and has a different sort of apologetic or proselytizing kind of pitch. And life is too short to describe the situation with Anglicanism. Fair enough.

Properly speaking, Anglicanism is a Protestant movement based on the 39 articles. But local results may vary in how they describe that. That's right. I am still Protestant. There you go. Good. My main advice for students like that is think hard about this. Consider blooming where you're planted and consider being the person for the next generation of people in your church who does talk about

Irenaeus and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas. If everyone who discovers that stuff decides it's not available at their local outlet and leaves, then they're perpetuating the poverty of that local outlet. And especially if your church managed to get you saved, that's a serious thing to consider, like how that happened and what are you going to do about that? Fred, I have a last question for you. I think this is the first episode we've done on kind of Catholic Protestant differences on the podcast. It's certainly the first one I've done on YouTube because I'm an apologist and evangelist. I don't spend a lot of time on these conversations.

To be completely honest, they don't interest me as much as the evidence for God, proof for the story. scripture just because the way I'm wired. But you've been in some of these conversations. So two-part question, how have you seen this conversation shift in the time you've been a part of it over the past few decades? I guess we could say the 90s since that's come up a few times. And where would you like to see these kind of conversations go? What would be most productive for the kingdom to see these kind of conversations head to? Yeah. And, you know, I'm not an apologist, but I'm a Trinitarian theologian. And so you think about the choice there to focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. It's a zone of tremendous

convergence and unity among all kinds of Christians. So I can say I have a high tolerance for all kinds of Christians. But mainly... Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's word every day, the Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor, a fun way to learn and share a smile while growing. in your faith. Get the Daily Bible Devotion app for free on both iOS and Android. Start and end your day with God's Word. Search for the Daily Bible Devotion app in the App Store or Google Play Store and download it today. That's because we agree on the doctrine of the Trinity and there's something

really powerful about that fundamental unity about belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Speaking as a Protestant, who really, really loves being Protestant and considers it a positive thing and is the most helpful way of being a member of the one church, you know, in a way that has a clear confession of the authority of scripture and of salvation by grace. Some really promising areas are a greater development of Protestant self-consciousness, of kind of an awareness that this is a 500-year-old tradition now, even as a sub-tradition, even as a reform movement within the one church. And what that means is if you think you know what a Protestant is, but you've never studied

it, there's reason to wonder if you actually have an intelligent adult understanding of what it is to be Protestant. We talk about the dark ages, you know, which is kind of a humanist propaganda about the time when Christianity was a major influence in the world. But we talk about, oh, these dark ages, you know, before the Reformation and Renaissance. And they're mainly dark because we don't read anything from them and don't know anything about them, right? Actually, lots of great things were happening there.

We are currently in danger of having cultivated a second dark ages between Luther and Calvin and the 90s. Between the early 16th century and the 21st century, there's this period where lots of brilliant Protestants were doing great things. Gigantic tomes of theology. They're all locked away in Latin, and that's why we haven't been reading them. But just in the last 10, 20 years, more of those books are now available in affordable paperbacks and readable English, and you can actually look at the Leiden synopsis, Petrus van

Maastricht. Increasingly, you can find all kinds of great Protestant. theology from those middle centuries, which I just want to say is most of Reformation theology's history. It's kind of surprising when you look at it to realize, when I tell you, I grew up Protestant, what I really mean is what the views of my youth pastor were, right? And Luther as like someone I dress up for on Reformation Day, dress up as on Reformation Day, but really zero content, like apparently internalizing the idea that to be Protestant,

All I do is read the Bible and nothing else. Well, there actually is a wonderful rich Protestant history. And if you want to dwell deep in the entire Christian history, one way to do it is by focusing on that middle distance of great Protestantism. Fred, thanks for coming on. I've got a ton more questions for you about this. I'd invite our listeners and viewers. If you want a follow up on this, let us know how we could do it in a way that would be helpful.

Appreciate what you're doing at the Tory Honors College. It actually started in the 90s back. to the 90s. When I was here and had it started earlier, I would have done it in such a heartbeat, the conversations you guys are having, teaching people how to think, read not only great literature, but great church history and just wrestling with it and thinking about it, learn to think theological and scientifically and philosophically, I think is one of the great undergrad programs in the country and beyond. So we appreciate, really appreciate it, telling what you're doing. If you are listening on the Think Biblical podcast, send your questions in

to think biblically at biola.edu. Let us know what you think about this episode. This has been over eight years we've been doing this, Scott, and we haven't weighed into a topic like this. We'd love to know if you want more of this topic. If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you hit subscribe, and let me know if on my channel you would enjoy more of this kind of dialogue

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