Reformation Italy » Archive » “Protestant Fatigue” by D.G. Hart

Reformation Italy » Archive » “Protestant Fatigue” by D.G. Hart

Several years have passed since Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom co-authored, Is the Reformation Over? An Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism (2005) but their recognition of Rome’s growing appeal to evangelical Protestants is no less true today than it was when the book appeared. In 2007 the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, a philosophy professor at Baylor University (a Baptist institution in Texas), converted to Rome partly because the Roman Catholic church had history on its side and also because Rome apparently explained biblical teaching on justification as well as if not better than Protestantism. According to Beckwith, “I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.” And part of the wisdom informing Beckwith’s decision, as Noll and Nystrom point out, is that Roman Catholicism takes more seriously the creeds, liturgy, and institutional church than born-again Protestants do.

The shift in Protestant attitudes to Roman Catholicism may seem remarkable. But going back to the first effort of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” a 1992 gathering of Protestants and Roman Catholics led by Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson to arrive a common areas of theology and practice, evangelical Protestants have been indicating that they are tired of fighting Rome. This is an echo of the old Tareyton cigarette ad, “I’d rather switch than fight.” For some Protestants, especially those no longer willing to put up with the bad taste and triviality of megachurches, seeker-sensitivity, or emergent experimentation, they would rather become Roman Catholic than remain part of a loose, fragmented, and sometimes irreverent branch of Christianity.

Noll and Nystrom do raise an interesting point. If evangelicalism is the logical outcome of Protestantism, does it make sense to remain Protestant? If born-again Protestants are as unreliable on justification and Scripture as many supposed Rome to be, why not join a communion where a believer can receive a more comprehensive and coherent account of Christianity?

The problem with this view obviously is that going from one set of problems to another batch is hardly a solution. For all of evangelicalism’s problems its weaknesses do not constitute a reason to be Roman Catholic. In fact, most of the reasons for being Protestant, those articulated in the sixteenth century at the time of the Reformation, are as much at stake today as they were when Martin Luther first objected to Roman Catholic teaching on purgatory. What is more, those reasons for not being Roman Catholic are also good excuses for not being evangelical. Noll and Nystrom are correct to observe that the differences between Rome and evangelicalism are increasingly insignificant. But Reformed Protestants, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Anabaptists all still have good reasons for not being under the oversight of the Bishop of Rome. Those reasons will be the subject of future posts.