Truth Unites - The Biggest Misunderstanding About Protestantism

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Gavin Ortlund explains that Protestantism attempted not to create a new church, but to reform an already existing church. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

In this video I want to address what I think is one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about Protestantism. I hear this a lot, especially in our context in the 21st century today. You hear it from critics of Protestantism, but you also hear it from a lot of Protestants. And my main goal in this video is to speak to Protestants and try to give reminder of what our historic understanding has been, rather than to give an argument for this, it's more descriptive as a video. I'll explain that. But the idea I want to address is this idea that Protestantism left the church. and started a new church.

But either one of those and both are often conjoined together, okay? Protestantism is a departure from the one true church, and or it began a new church. In other words, in the 16th century, there's a kind of ontological rupture that happens with Protestantism. I'm going to call this according, this is a term from Philip Schaff, we'll get into, a revolution model of Protestantism. In a revolution, one government is overthrown and a new one is set in its own. place. And this is how a lot of people think of Protestantism, or you can call it an ecclesial

restarting or a relaunching of the church. Often the idea will be the church died and then was resurrected with Protestantism, but it can exist in milder forms as well. You don't need to believe in a death of the church. This is any model where the church is relaunched or restarted in any way with Protestantism. And a lot of people erroneously think that's what Protestantism is. The alternative, more accurate model that I want to commend in its place is a reformation model of Protestantism. In a reformation model, there's no ontological rupture. The church exists before, the church exists after. Rather, what you have is a renewal within the church. And this is how historic Protestant ecclesiology, or the doctor of the church, always articulated itself as a reform effort.

Specifically, a reform in, I like to put it in three buckets, a revitalization. A revitalization. understanding of the gospel, a removal of historical accretions, and a re-centering on the apostolic deposit as recorded in scripture. So you got all these R-words, re-centering, revitalization, renewal, et cetera. But what all of these are trying to get at is that there's a reforming of an already existing church, not a creation of a new church. Now, I'm getting these labels from the renowned Protestant historian Philip Schaff, who also had a lot to say about Protestantism, And I've talked about him in previous videos. You can see this one, for example, and you're doubtless familiar with his name if you do much study in church history.

He's kind of a pioneering scholar in church history. But he cast a vision for Protestantism as an alternative to two different extremes on either side. Quote, to be true to its own idea, a reformation must hold its course midway, or through the deep, rather, between two extremes. In opposition on the one side to revolution or the radical and violent overthrow of an existing system, it must attach itself organically to what is already at hand and grow forth thus from the trunk of history, in regular living union with its previous development, in opposition to simple restoration on the other side, or a mere repetition of the old it must produce from the womb of this,

the birth of something new. So I'm going to focus, especially on those first two models there, revolution versus reformation. There's also the restoration idea, and that's a third option that needs to be kept in mind as well. It's true that Protestantism is certainly not just a repetition without any change. But the point here is that the nature of this change is of reform, in which an already existing thing is renewed and redirected and re-centered and so forth. It's not a recreation or a resurrection or a revolution. we can use R words in either direction, right? But let's just stick with shafts labels.

Reformation versus revolution. Here's some metaphors, just to completely cement and hammer home as clearly as we can the difference between these two ideas. Let's suppose you get into a car accident and your car is taken to the shop and they might say it's totaled. You need to get a new car. Hope you have good car insurance. On the other hand, they might say you need the following repairs.

Here's what they will cost. Okay? The first of those is a revolution. It's an ontological rupture. You're just getting rid of one entity and creating something new or getting, acquiring something new. The second of those is more like a reformation or repairing. You've still the same car, but you're just making replacements and repairs and so forth.

Well, clearly those are two different kinds of ideas, although if the reform is severe enough, and start to come close. And that's where we get into kind of basically the philosophy of identity of how much can something change and still be itself. But we're not even going to get close to that line because we're going to say they're very clear

in the kind of reform that Protestantism represented. Another metaphor. You have a tree in your yard and you notice, uh-oh, a lot of the branches look diseased. So you have an arborist come out to your house. Now they might say in the one hand,

the disease has made its way into the trunk and even down into the roots. You have to dig out the tree and plant a new tree. Or they might say the disease is isolated to just some of the branches, so you just chop off the diseased branches, but the tree itself can stay and remain alive. Clearly, those are different kinds of changes.

Hopefully the point is kind of getting clear about this. We're going to basically say, when we apply these categories to Protestantism and ask which is correct, that we're talking, Protestantism is a reformation. It's not, the Protestants were not coming along and saying the trunk and the roots are bad and we need to start over. They were not saying the car is totaled.

They were saying, we have errors, and we need to reform the errors, but the church itself is alive and well. And I think misunderstanding about this is so important. You know, the difference between these two models, reformation versus revolution, can seem kind of maybe subtle at first, but it's actually quite decisive, and it bears upon the whole legitimacy of Protestantism itself. if Protestantism did intend to depart from the church and or create a new church that would be an illegitimate move.

Okay? But that's not what Protestantism is, as I'll try to document in this video. And the reason it's so important is that misunderstanding about this, I think, is a huge cause of people leaving Protestantism. Candice Owens recently converted to Roman Catholicism. One of the questions she articulated that she was struggling with as a Protestant is this idea of whether Christians can be saved prior to Martin Luther. And the discussions have gotten interesting because my husband planted a seed in my head that won't go away. And I would not yet describe me as being in a place where that seed has fully bloomed. But it is a question that I am struggling with as somebody with Protestant beliefs.

And what he essentially said to me, he was also formerly Protestant and now he's a Catholic, was, do I believe that in the 1,500 years following Jesus Christ, leading up to, Martin Luther stapling his thesis that nobody went to heaven. So essentially, Jesus saved us, and then for about 1,500 years, nobody went to heaven until Martin Luther stapled his thesis and corrected things. I don't believe that. I struggle with that question, and it has been something that I have been sitting with for a very long time, of course, because that would almost imply, in my mind, that Martin Luther is the Savior and not Jesus. Now, I assume that her thinking has continued to grow and develop between when she said that and her conversion. And I'm not trying to,

that was from like a year ago, and I'm not trying to single her out. She's representative of how a lot of Protestants approach church history, where they've never really looked into historic Protestant thought about how you think about these things and the doctrine of the church, basically. And so you get these ideas like no one is saved into Luther, which is a caricature of Protestantism. So what I want to try to do in this video is kind of walk through Protestant sources and explain a Protestant view of the church and basically just walk through how they were clearly saying the tree is not diseased all through. There's just some bad branches. And this is similar, of course, to what Shaft was arguing. In fact, if I put up that quote again, you can see he even used the metaphor of the tree trunk.

And this, and it's like a very organic metaphor. And this is the historic Protestant claim that there's no new church that is coming into being in the 16th century. All you have is something very simple. People are saying, hey, we have some issues. We have some accretions. We have some errors and we need to fix them. It's as simple as that. There's one church, one ancient church, but it needs reform. And now two quick responses. Even though this video is for Protestants and it's explanatory and descriptive, I'm aware that lots of Christians from other traditions watch my videos, and I anticipate some of them will be very impatient with even entertaining this, and they'll say, of course it's a rupture, of course you left the church and so forth.

Even though I'm not arguing against that here, but trying to explain what Protestants historically claimed, I've done that, of course, in other videos address these things. At least give two quick responses to this. The first is just to explain that, you know, I'm speaking to Protestants here, I'm just trying to explain what historic Protestant theology is. It's a descriptive video, but if you disagree with this and you, You say, no, it's not a reformation. It is a revolution.

At least, hopefully, watching this video, you'll be able to better identify what it is that you disagree with. Because you always want to disagree, not just with, you know, your observation of this or that contemporary phenomenon. You want to disagree with the steel-manned historic and official expression of any view. That's what I'll try to unpack in this video. The second thing I'll say is, at the very least, this is a complicated question. This whole question of, is it a revolution or a reformation? And people glide by this so fast sometimes. I think people are very quick to just assume that, of course, Protestantism broke off from

the one true church. And if you think that's easy, and if you think you can just sort of say that and just throw that out there and not really develop that, then I think probably the complexity of this is not being grasped, and probably an institutional view of the church is simply being assumed. A lot of times in our different traditions, we struggle to. to understand the other side's paradigm. And I think this happens a lot where people just assume an institutional paradigm for what the church is,

and they don't really realize that's the very thing in question. One of the reasons this is definitely complicated is if you say, well, of course Protestantism broke off from the one true church. You have to say, well, which one true church are we talking about? Because by the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, you have at least four groups all claiming to be the one true church, as well as some separatist splinter little segments as well. You also have other Protestant, proto-Protestant separatist groups. So when Protestantism hits the scene, you've already got the church broken up into institutional pieces,

each side claiming, no, it's us. We are the one true church. So if you say Protestantism obviously left the one true church, you have to at least make a case for which one. Which one is the one that they left? And that, there's answers to that, but that's not simple. You know, that's a really complicated question.

The other reason this whole revolution versus reformation question is at the very least, very complicated, is that the authority structures that the Protestants left, like, say, the papacy, are themselves the very disputed point that we think needed reform. So if you say, well, of course the Protestants left the church, they didn't adhere to the authority of the papacy,

you need to make a case that the papacy, that the papacy is legitimately apostolic in its origins, because that's the whole point. You know, so I'm just trying to say, like, I just know, I'm used to doing this, you know. I know people are going to come in the comments, like, just like with a one-sentence comment, that just thinks they can sum it up in one sentence, like, of course Protestants left the church. I'm just trying to say, like, this is complicated. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to get into in my other videos, like, is the papacy legitimate? I mean, you could see my case on capturing Christianity about that, or for a broader

case that Reformation was needed. You could see this video that I've done. That's just called why Reformation was needed. So I've done videos on those kinds of topics. In this video, I just want to basically explain what was the Protestant intention and mentality and ethos. And basically, what was the Protestant ecclesiology or doctrine of the church with respect to church history? And how did they see themselves? What was there? You know, at least let the, at least let the, the full-blown historic and official position be put on the table, because a lot of Protestants don't even know that very well. So I'll address that by asking three questions. First, did the Protestants think they were starting something new? Note how Francis Turriton addresses this point.

He's the great reformed theologian. He's responding to the same charges we get today, the charge of novelty. You guys started something new, and he's complaining of this same criticism in his own day in the 17th century. quote, the newness of the Reformation is urged as showing the newness of the religion. Okay, so you see what he's responding to here. He's saying basically, because the Reformation happened in the 16th century, therefore your religion is started in the 16th century. And he's saying, no, that doesn't follow. Quote, Reformation is nothing else than the purging of the errors and corruptions

brought by the papacy into the doctrine of faith and practice delivered by Christ. The Reformation is indeed new, that is recently made as supposing the preceding state of the church to have been corrupt, but not on this account by this reformation was a new religion or church instituted which had not existed before. Rather, that which existed already was made better by the ancient rule to wit the word of God. So you see the distinction he's saying there. He's making there. No new church is created in the 16th century. It's the ancient church that is reformed and improved by scripture. There's no ontological replacement. There's no ecclesial restart or revolution model where you throw away what was there and start with something new.

It's a reformation model purging away errors and corruptions. The trunk is still healthy. William Perkins wrote against Rome under the title, A Reformed Catholic. This is a common label in historic Protestant traditions, reformed Catholic. And basically he was saying this is why a lot of us don't want to cede the word Catholic to any other one side for any one institutional church. Because he's basically saying, we're the ones who are Catholic. Quote, by a reformed Catholic, I understand anyone that holds the same necessary heads of religion with the Roman Church, yet so as he pairs off and rejects all errors in doctrine whereby the said religion is corrupted. So pairing off there, that's, we're thinking branches, not the trunk. I'll come back to these

heads of religion in a second, say, okay, you know, what's the trunk and what are the branches? What are the accretions versus the heads of religion? And how do we distinguish between those two? But first, let me show this isn't just the reformed ethos. This is Lutheran and Anglican and others as well. Because, of course, people love to say that Protestants don't agree on anything, and we do. You know, some people don't like that I defend Protestantism wholesale. I never quite understand that.

I guess I'll just always kind of push back on that and say, look, you can just break it down point by point and say, we have different layers of identity. And you can say, here's where Protestants all agree. and there are things we all agree upon, like the five solas. And in my book coming out on Protestantism in two months from recording this, it's June 1st today that I'm recording this. Wow. I go through a whole bunch of doctrines that are common to these classical Protestant traditions. This is one of them, this idea of reformation rather than revolution. So in the Anglican tradition, for example, John Jewell began his apology for the Church of England by using this same term, a reformed Catholic

Church. He's talking about Anglicanism as the Reformed Catholic Church. And the whole thesis of this book is that the Church of Rome has departed from Catholicity. Catholicity means the wholeness of the faith and church. And he documents this with issue after issue of where the Roman Catholic Church of his day was trying to defend traditions that were recent and novel, like communion in one kind or papal supremacy or ecclesial infallibility, or withholding the scripture from the laity in the vernacular language, or indulgences, and so on and so forth. He goes through all these examples.

He's basically saying, we're not inventing something new. we're returning to what is old. We have not yet. We have not without just cause left these men, that's the Roman Catholic Church, but rather, he says, have returned to the apostles and old Catholic fathers. He uses a lot of old-fashioned language, so it's hard to read sometimes. He says, no man can now think our doctrine to be new unless the same thing, either the prophet's faith or the gospel or Christ himself to be new.

So you see what he's saying. He's saying, it's the ancient substance of the faith. He is constantly, all throughout that book, if you read through that book, the Davenant Institute does a good edition of it. The constant appeal is church father after church father after church father after church father to ground historic Protestant views. And like Luther and Calvin, he points to the Eastern Orthodox. And John Jewell basically says, if we are schismatics for leaving Rome, why isn't Rome

schismatic for leaving the Greeks? And the Greeks are the Eastern Orthodox. You can read that passage if you want. I'll pause the video and do so if you want to. I'm not going to read it here. He clearly thinks that the Eastern Orthodox are not as fallen into error as the Roman Catholics. And he gives examples like the way indulgences and purgatory were functioning and so forth. So that's Anglicanism.

In the Lutheran tradition, same appeal to Catholic being, they don't always use the term reformed Catholic, but it's the same appeal to Catholic. You see this in the Augsburg Confession right out of the gate. the Churches Among Us, dissent in no article of faith from the Catholic Church, and only omit a few of certain abuses which are novel. So, omitting a few novel abuses, Augsburg Confession, pairing off errors, William Perkins, purging corruptions, Turriton, this doesn't sound like a revolution. This doesn't sound like the car is totaled or that the tree trunk needs to be dug out of the ground. Sounds like we're talking about branches, right? Paring off and so forth. As for Luther

himself, I've often cited these words of his from the 1520s where he's basically saying, the papacy is truly the body of Christ. Can you believe Luther said that? Reconcile that with all of his other statements about the papacy is the Antichrist, and what do you find? You find that he's saying the hierarchy is corrupt, but he's not saying the trunk is all bad. He even says, we do not reject everything that is under the dominion of the Pope, for in that event, we should also reject the Christian Church. Much Christian good is to be found in the papacy, and from there it descended to us. Luther was not claiming the church died. He was not claiming there needs to be a resurrection. He's saying there's disease, there's errors and accretions floating about, and they're in the

hierarchy that is now basically putting us to death and financially abusing us, as I've talked about in my Why Reformation was Needed Church video. Here's how one of his interpreters puts it. It was not Luther's idea to set over and against the ancient Catholic Church a new Protestant creation. He desired nothing more than that the old church should experience an evangelical awakening. So if we're saying that if the negative claim is a removal of accretions or a pairing off of corruptions, the positive way to say it is a renewing of the people of God or an evangelical awakening, a revitalization of the gospel among the people of God. The reformers didn't want a brand new church, what they wanted was renewal.

within the church. This is how Calvin puts it in his famous 1539 dispute with Cardinal Satteletto. All we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the church from the 4th and 5th centuries. I've talked about that quote a lot as well. Okay, so second question now. If the church needed to be renewed, does this mean the church had died? And the answer to that is no. A renewal is different from a resurrection. The church needs renewal constantly. Protestant churches need renewal today. you know, we're constantly falling away into relative laxity or error and needing to reform ourselves by the Word of God, by the Spirit of God. The reformers did not think that the church had died or passed out of existence or been forsaken by Christ. They explicitly and repeatedly affirmed

the church has not died. The idea that the church died, you can find in contemporary context, you can find in some outlier historic views, like definitely the Anabaptists, but the historic mainstream Protestant traditions all were pretty consistent and unanimous in affirming the indefectibility of the church. Okay, indefectibility is the property of being unable to die or fail to achieve one's purpose. The Augsburg Confession, one holy church is to continue forever. Westminster, there shall always be a church on earth. Calvin, in the context of this charge of, are you saying the church died and needed to come back? His answer is quite clear. The Church of Christ has lived and will lived so long as Christ reigns at the right hand of the Father.

I talked about that quote a lot as well. Now, some Protestants might wonder, okay, if you're saying the church that God, the Holy Spirit, has always preserved the church for every nanosecond of church history, there's always been regenerate people on earth. The church never died. That's Luther's view as well. What about all the doctrinal corruptions?

What about, you know, in the year 1475 when things are pretty bad, you know, as I've talked about in my why reformation was needed church? Are people still getting saved then? You know, this is the kind of thing that comes up from Candice Owen's question about how are people saved before Luther and so forth. And the answer is, yes, people are saved then. Yes, the church is still alive, and yes, God, the Holy Spirit is still at work. If you want to get the best treatment of this, check out Francis Turriton's Institutes of Atlantic Theology, 18.10. If anybody out there actually does that, you will make me happy and make me feel like my videos are actually serving a purpose.

if it's too big. I think those are pretty expensive. I also have basically a summary of this in my book Theological Retrievable for Evangelicals when I talk about Turriton on the preservation of the church. That's in that book. Shouldn't be hard to find. He's building a pretty sophisticated case answering this question. Okay, he's saying, we must distinguish between the substance of the faith and the corrupting accidents in doctrine and worship. You've got a lot of corrupting accidents in doctrine and worship. You've got a lot of superstition. You got a lot of idolatry. You got a lot of ignorance of the Word of God.

You got a lot of violence. You got a lot of just weird innovations, like the communion and only one kind idea. But the substance of the faith endures at all times. God, the Holy Spirit, always preserve the substance of Christianity. Okay. And he, of course, distinguishes that substance from the external expressions and forms of the church.

So what's the substance? Well, he talks about this is basically what's reflected in the scriptures the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. And he says, by a special providence, God willed always to preserve this in the church. And he goes through and documents this. And he's walking through the medieval era and documenting like five different ways that you can see how God is preserving the knowledge of the gospel, the knowledge of the truth for every moment. All that's happening is there's an addition on top, layers of accretions on top of that substance of the faith

that are corrupting it and mangling it. and sometimes choking it, but it's still there. So, you know, basically, how to put this, are people getting saved in the year 1450? Yes, it does not follow. He mentions the corruption, so he says it does not follow, the believers did not have and the doctrine received for that time the necessary food for salvation. And so here he makes this distinction between people sort of languishing under the papacy in this time and groups like the Sosinians, which deny the Trinity.

And he's saying the Sosinians have rejected even the substance of the faith. So they have an error of subtraction. Because you no longer have the Trinity. You don't have a sufficient food for salvation. You don't have the basic shell of the gospel as the substance of the faith, which you get in the Apostles' Creed. Whereas a Christian living in Western Europe in the year 1400 or 1450, they have the substance of the faith. The errors are not subtractive. They're additive.

You just got a lot of accretions on top of it. And those are bad, but they're not so much that you can't be saved. That's what Turriton is saying. So that leads to the third question. Turriton's emphasis upon the Trinity there is, what specifically was that substance of the faith? What did the Protestants see as the trunk, as distinct from the branches that needed to be lopped off? And there's, of course, way too much to be exhaustive here.

But I'll just give as representative examples the doctrine of God, which would include the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ, both his person and work. the early Protestants were self-consciously following in the tradition of the first several ecumenical councils, and early creeds like the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Article 1 of the Augsburg Confession in the Lutheran tradition explicitly affirms the council of Nicaea, as well as a tradition of patristic usage of the term person. I won't read through that entire quote. And then it goes on after that to basically criticize all these heretics in the early church and saying,

It's basically saying, we're with the Council of Nicaea, you know. Luther himself is very clear. The decrees of the genuine councils must remain in force permanently, just as they have always been in force. That's from his on the councils and the church. He even in 1538 published his own edited version of the apostles in Athanasian creeds, along with the Deum and the Nicene Creed appended to it. Calvin as well affirmed the importance of,

I think it's in a section on the Trinity in his draft of the French Confession, talks about the importance of the early creeds and councils. The Belgic confession, similarly, has a very similar to the Augsburg Confession. This is a reformed confession. Basically, it's saying the Trinity has always been, well, I'll just read it. There are three persons in the one and only divine essence. This doctrine of the Trinity has always been maintained in the true church from the time of the apostles until the present against Jews, Muslims, and then he mentions amongst of heretical groups.

And then this document affirms these three creeds, Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian. Those three creeds were often included in various iterations of the Book of Concord, Lutheran, and the 39 articles, Anglican. So these historic Protestant confessions of faith are including the Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed. Also, the reformer's concerns had nothing to do really substantively with Christology or the doctrine of the person and work of Christ. You can see in Article 2 of the 39 articles, this is very explicitly Chalcedonian. You see the position of two natures and one person, and then qualifying language to describe that, like never to be divided. This is deriving from the 5th century Council of Chalcedon, 451, which propounded that view of Christ.

Same with other Protestant traditions. I'll put up some examples from the Lutheran, Reformed, and Methodist traditions. I'm just trying to give some representative examples. We could do just the same with Baptist or congregationalist and so forth. So while the Protestants believe that reform was desperately needed in the church, this did not concern what church and calls the substance of the faith or what Perkins calls the heads of religion, this core foundational, classical, creedal consensus of the gospel message,

it concerned really important areas of soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation, and ecclesiology, or the doctrine of the church. But there was a core commitment, that there was a core trunk that was still there. Even when it comes to the work of Christ, even the descent of Christ into hell, you know, that's disputed a little bit in what it means, but that's there in all the historic Protestant confessions. It's in the 39 articles. It's in the Augsburg Confession.

It's in the Heidelberg Catechism, etc. So the concern was with diseased branches. The concern is with legalism. The concern is with abuse. the concern is with worldliness, the concern is with idolatry, the concern is with superstition, and the concern is with erroneous doctrines that have intermingled with the faith and piety of the church. So the theology proper, Christology, the basic narrative facts of the gospel, Christ's death, resurrection, etc. That's not the battlefront. The battlefront is in these really important areas

of the doctrine of salvation and ecclesiology. I don't mean to minimize those. Those really matter for the clarity of the gospel, for the experience of the gospel among the laity, and even just the knowledge of scripture, you know, having it in your own language. But the concern is with these accreted beliefs and practices that are coming along the way. And, you know, Mariology, for example, that's a branch. That is not the trunk. That is not something the apostles could have envisioned, would develop like that. Indulgences and the Treasury of Merit and all the financial abuse. That's a diseased branch. That needs to go.

That's not how Christianity should function. And in my various videos, I go through lots of points of distinction and try to make that case. I'm not trying to make the case here. I'm trying to just sort of cast the Protestant effort. So people see what the intention is to do. It's not a departure from the church. It's not a departure from Catholicity. It's the historic Protestant position that the church never can die.

God has always preserved and he always will. And the Protestants gratefully received the substance of the faith from previous generations like the doctrine of the Trinity. All the Protestants were saying is, look, we have some bad branches. Indulgences are bad, you know, massacring whole people groups because of the promise of reduced time in purgatory to those engaging in this violence is bad. The people need both the bread and the wine. They need the scripture in their own language.

all the scandalous idolatry and superstition and so forth look into the late medieval West and see how bad at God. That's what they were concerned about. And this is what Protestantism is, a reform effort within the true church rooted in Holy Scripture. The one true church in a dynamic posture of reform under the Word of God. And basically, reforming yourself according to the Word of God is a good idea and a modest and reasonable idea because Christianity is a revealed religion. You know, as Protestants, we basically just want to be faithful to God. And so we want to look to what God said.

And so to do that, it's a good instinct to look to the period of divine revelation, divine public revelation. We have no promise that, you know, what's going on in the 13th century, 14th century, that's a completely different ballgame than what God has spoken explicitly in his inspired word. If you want a little bit more on Soliscriptura, this six-minute video might be of use to you. So really where the discussion needs to go from here. Again, this is not an argument.

This is descriptive of the performer's aims. Then the question becomes, well, basically, now what we get into next is to make the argument of whether this is ultimately correct, you get into an institutional versus non-institutional view of the church, and then you get into the question of what are the authorities of the church. And that's where you get into things like the papacy, things like apostolic succession, which I'm hoping to do another video on at some point. I've done a couple already, but it's in the queue. I'll get to it at some point. It's kind of buried. If you're going to cite

Matthew 16, may I make one appeal, you might be interested in this video that I made, where basically, because people will often say, you know, the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, as though that meant every single Roman Catholic accretion in the late medieval era must be correct. But that's not what Matthew 16 means. And that video might be of relevance to that. So this is hopefully setting up the conversation where it needs to happen. I'm afraid that too many people leave Protestantism without even envisioning where the line of demarcation is. What is the conversation that should be had?

Because they have a caricature of Protestantism. They think it's like, you think the church died or something like this. It's not the idea. The idea is diseased branches, but the trunk is still healthy. Hopefully that clarifies modest video in the goal here. But I'm making it because I think it needs to be. be clarified because I think a lot of people misunderstand this. What do you think? Do you think this is a legitimate issue that I'm addressing here? The people don't get this and that miss this. And how do we

help the conversation move forward? I'm curious what other people's thoughts are. At any rate, thanks for watching. And look out for a video on apostolic succession, hopefully later in 2024. And if there's other particular things you think need to be addressed in this conversation, let me know in the comments. All right, thanks, guys. See you next time.