“They allege that we have fallen away from the holy church and set up a new church. We are the true ancient church… You have fallen away from us.”
Martin Luther
Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians view Protestantism as a historical deviation and oddity. For many who depart Protestantism to go to Rome or go East, there’s a predictable error of comparing the worst of Protestantism to the best of the non-Protestant traditions. But the solution to our present Protestant disenchantment “is to dig deeper into the Reformation, not to run from it.”
The following teaching on Protestantism is primarily a summary of Gavin Ortlund’s insightful book entitled What Does It Mean to Be Protestant?, with additional material drawn from The Reformation as Renewal by Matthew Barrett and Why Do Protestants Convert? by Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo.
People don't leave Protestantism for theological reasons alone. They also leave for "soul-ish" and sociological reasons. In 1994, at the opening of his classic work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll said: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." That’s something that, by God’s grace, Protestants have been correcting, but understanding why we need to do the work of renewal and retrieval will help us do better work.
The following teaching on Protestantism summarizes Why Do Protestants Convert? by Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo, with additional material drawn from Os Guinness's Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to Do About It.