Pop Protestantism is stupid, but here is the real thing. My name's Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Uh, full disclosure, I am a Protestant, but I'm a Reformed Catholic Protestant, I'm an Anglican, and uh I I think it's just uh worth declaring uh my priors as I speak to these things. But because I'm a Protestant, I know from the inside how stupid pop Protestantism is. The kind of paperback Protestantism uh that sells in the millions, the kind of Protestantism that many people leave behind, either in order to deconstruct their faith entirely or to jump ship to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. It is very popular at the moment to be an exvangelical. It's very popular right now uh to deconstruct the Protestantism of one's youth. But then usually what happens is you compare the worst of your teenage uh appreciation for the evangelical past that you once had, and you compare that to the great tradition of the Eastern or Western Fathers of the Church, and you find pop Protestantism uh to be wanting. Well, kel surprise, as the French say. Uh of course, if you are going to compare um your teenage appreciation for what your youth pastor said on a Friday night, if you're going to compare that with what St. Athanasius said, uh, you are going to find your experience of Protestantism to be lacking. But um I do think that there is a real thing that you can experience that is itself the best defense against these ten stupid things that Christians can sometimes believe. Uh true Protestantism is the best antidote to pop Protestantism. And then at the end, stick around at the end because I'm going to give you three reasons why uh it really is worth your while. Becoming Protestant or remaining Protestant. But let's do what Protestants do best. Let's do semper reformanda, okay? Always reforming. The reformers did not think that in the 16th century it was a one and done deal, but that with Scripture above us, we should be constantly uh reforming our faith and practice to make it more consonant with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Therefore, Protestants uh can be self-critical in ways that other more institutionally defined forms of Christianity cannot. If you enjoy critiquing your own tribe, then um be a Protestant because that's kind of the whole shtick. I'm gonna rattle through ten things uh that really grind my gears, as they say, uh, about pop Protestantism. Um I'll try and give some solutions to these really annoying features of pop Protestantism along the way, uh, and then I'll give the the three reasons why I am Protestant. Um The first thing I really dislike about pop Protestantism is an unthinking anti-Catholicism. I remember a few years back I was in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and I was doing some mission among students, and it happened to be Ash Wednesday, and I was among a whole bunch of Protestants, young Protestant Christians in Belfast as they were watching a whole bunch of Catholic students walk by with ash on their foreheads, and they were fuming and they were muttering to one another about the awful ritualism and the dead works of it and the empty traditionalism of it and just going through the motions and how it was just all done for show. And they were seething at a practice that uh I, as another Protestant, an Anglican kind of Protestant, was familiar with. And I was trying to get alongside them and say, look, in the Anglican tradition, we do Ash Wednesday, you're you're told, you know, dust you are, and to dust you will return, and then you receive the bread and wine. It's this wonderful picture of kind of death and resurrection. There's nothing more beautifully evangelical than being reminded of your own mortality and frailty and finitude and fallibility, and then given Christ when you are nothing. What a wonderful gospel proclamation. But but these particular students, they just couldn't get their head around that. And then out of a kind of an unthinking anti-Catholicism, there was wrapped up a whole bunch of other views about Lent. And of, of course, the the typical pop Protestant response to Lent is what are you giving up for Lent? Legalism. That's what I'm giving up for Lent, right? That's the pop Protestant response to anything that is in any sense ritualized or even vaguely sacramental or even vaguely traditional or even vaguely ascetic or even vaguely, you know, reaching towards formation in the image of Christ that requires fasting and those sorts of things. We throw out that baby with the bathwater of we are just the anti-sacramental people. We are we are anti-Catholic. And you end up jettisoning so much if your position is that you are definitionally anti-Catholic. That is, that is a negative position to take. Protestants should not take negative positions. I know that you can be fooled by the name Protestant to think that we are the reactionaries. Actually, that's just a quirk of language. To protest something is to put forward your testament. To pro put forward, test your testament. It is to make a solemn avowal. It is to make an affirmation. It's actually a very positive thing. Now we think of protesting as you're the naysayer off to the side with the placard saying, no, that is not what protesting actually is meant to be. It's meant to be setting forth your testament. It is to affirm something, it's to be positive. The trouble with pop Protestantism is that it becomes this negative reaction against Catholicism or against Eastern Orthodoxy, and you're defined by an allergic reaction to tradition or sacrament or liturgy or history, and you can lose the testament of faith that you are meant to be forwarding out into the world because you're just being reactionary against the people you disagree with. So you ask your average pop Protestant, you know, what do you feel about prayer beads or that kind of thing? And I get why you wouldn't want to pray the rosary because you don't want to pray the Hail Mary, but what's wrong with prayer beads? Prayer beads are an amazing thing. The average pop Protestant is very happy swiping on a prayer app, and they would be mortified to be seen praying through prayer beads. Why? I would say that's just a silly ick factor that we have developed in this reactionary sense, and we've become more anti-Catholic than we have truly Protestant in that sense. Or think about something like signing yourself with the sign of the cross. Like what's wrong with signing yourself with the sign of the cross? What's wrong with discipling your body in a way that remembers Jesus Christ and him crucified? Um, there ought to be some very Protestant reasons why people would sign themselves with the sign of the cross. But we we as pop Protestants don't like that. We get the ick factor because that's just Catholic, and we just do the opposite of what's Catholic. That leads to a certain kind of spirituality as pop Protestants, but it also leads to some unthinking heresy. I was at seminary 20 years ago training for Anglican ordination, and our lecturer in church history asked a lecture hall of about 80 people. He said, Who here believes that Mary is the mother of God? I had my hand up, there was probably one other hand up. Out of 80 students, many of whom were training for Anglican ordination, some were training to be youth pastors and other kinds of things, um, church leaders in the making. Um, you know, like less than 5% of them believed that Mary is the mother of God. Now, thankfully, this lecturer in church history knew his church history and taught us all that of course Mary is the mother of God. Who do you think she's carrying in her womb? It is a heresy to deny that Mary is the Godbearer. Of course she is the godbearer. And yet 95% of people in training for Protestant kinds of ministry were tempted to deny or were in fact denying Orthodox biblical Christianity largely because to call Mary the Godbearer sounds a little bit Catholic, right? Let me float an idea with you. I'm not 100% sure I agree with myself on this, so we can we can thrash it out in the comments. But I think an unthinking anti-Catholicism could lead you to more heresy than an unthinking Catholicism. Because Catholics believe the creed, right? Roman Catholics believe the creed. And if I just have an allergic reaction to anything that a Roman Catholic says, then I will be strongly tempted to actually deny the creed. Unthinking anti-Catholicism, I think, could lead you into at least as many heresies as an unthinking Catholicism. I've gone way too long on point number one, but you get the idea. Um, I really don't like the knee-jerk reaction against Catholicism that can define some of pop Protestantism. That's not what true Protestantism is, but it is what pop Protestantism can become. And I really don't like it. Number two, I really dislike the ahistoricism. Pop Protestantism can be tempted to believe a timeline of history that says in 1517 the church was born when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door. And there was just at least a thousand years of darkness before then. And then maybe by the time we get back to, well, probably, probably we just have to get back to the Book of Acts. And that's sort of we we had the true church, we lost the true church, Martin Luther gave us back the true church, and we've suddenly lost a millennium or a millennium and a half of uh the wisdom of the saints down through church history. I really dislike the ahistoricism of pop Protestantism. Now that's not true Protestantism. Luther and Calvin and others were reacting against the accretions of the medieval church, and especially in the high medieval period, but they were always trying to say, we are being faithful to the fathers, we are being faithful to the theologians of East and West in the early church. What John Calvin said to the Roman Catholic cardinal, Cardinal Sadoletto, uh, was all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the church, which at first sullied and distorted by illiterate men of indifferent character, was afterwards flagitiously mangled. I'll use that in a sentence today, flagitiously mangled, and almost destroyed by the Roman pontiff and his faction. His position is that the Protestants were being more historical, and Rome had left, had departed from historical orthodoxy. He writes, our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours. The magisterial reformation was not a historical at all. It was trying to recapture historical orthodoxy from what they saw as the accretions of the late medieval Roman church. But in pop Protestantism, we become reactive and we just say everything prior to 1517 was a dead loss and we're starting again. And let's be honest, um, if we actually went back to 1517, that would be that would be something. Uh in fact, pop Protestantism is so ahistorical that we're constantly enamored of the new thing. And we've inherited a view of history that unthinkingly jettisens the past as though the past is the dark ages, and we are constantly stretching towards the light. And the chronological snobbery that C.S. Lewis writes about, um, that is uh a feature really of pop Protestantism. And I don't like it, and I don't think you should like it either. We need to resist an unthinking anti-Catholicism, we need to resist an unthinking ahistoricism. The third thing I really dislike is memorialism. One of the things that the Protestants were reacting against were the accretions of the medieval church, and ever more sacraments and the sacramental system that seemed to mechanize the dispensing of grace from heaven through the institutions and the sacramental system of the church. And the Protestants wanted to do a couple of things, and one was to center ourselves on the dominical sacraments, those that the Lord Jesus Himself instituted, the Lord's Supper and Baptism. They wanted to recenter us on the personal presence of Christ in communion, in baptism, that he has really offered to us in these divine mysteries. So they wanted to recenter us from the institutional mechanization of grace dispensed through the sacramental system of the church, and therefore to refocus us on the real presence of Jesus in the sacraments that have been laid down in Scripture as the Lord's institution. The other thing, obviously, they wanted to do is to counter the error of the mass being an unbloody re-sacrifice of Christ upon the altar. That was and is a denial of the once and for all sacrifice of Christ upon the cross at Calvary. And the reformers insisted that we are not offering the sacrifice of Christ up to the Father again. Rather, we are being fed by Christ. And we participate in the body and blood of Jesus as a sheer gift that is coming down from heaven, rather than us offering it up to him in a re-sacrifice. The reformers got very exercised about communion not being a re-sacrifice to Christ, but they got so exercised about that because the sacraments really matter, and this really is a participation in the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And so when Luther hears about Zwingli and his teaching that the sacraments are mere memorials, remembrances of Jesus Christ, Luther goes and debates against this memorialist called Zwingli, and he is baffled and bemused and indignant. And eventually he says, Zwingli is of another spirit. Luther was against Rome, and he was against Zwingli in kind of the same way. He sort of saw that the Roman era was to re-sacrifice Christ again and the arrow was going up at communion. But he feared that with memorialism, the work that you need to do is you need to remember Christ. The work now becomes a mental, internal work, but again it's it's you do the thing, rather than be the recipient of a sheer gift. Luther was against Rome, he was also against memorialism, and the magisterial reformers were all about a movement of word and sacrament, and that the church is meant to gather around word and sacrament. Pop evangelicalism loses the sacramental side of things. And with it, we we often lose the liturgical and the embodied and the worshipful. And then it's just me and my Bible trying to have the right thoughts about God. That is not what Protestantism ought to be about, but it is what pop Protestantism can become. It can become memorialist. Fourthly, there can become an enthusiasm to pop Protestantism. If we get rid of the sacraments that the scriptures speak of, we find ourselves inventing other sacraments. And we find ourselves being the sort of the Zwinglian memorialists who have to offer up the right thoughts and get into the right state of heart and mind before God ourselves. Rather than receiving Christ in word and sacrament, we become an enthusiastic movement of trying to stir up our own spirits through word and worship music and experiences and altar calls and ever more sub-biblical sacraments that we invent for ourselves. And we become enthusiasts for whom the phrase going through the motions is anathema. And again, this is part of being reactive. If if we don't like more traditional forms of worship, then what we end up doing is in reaction to them, we say, ah, the problem with the sacramental system of the medieval church is that it was embodied, is that there were rituals that happened constantly. And so we identify the wrong problem, and so we reject anything embodied or ritualized, and instead we must be enthusiastic and spontaneous, which can be very exhausting. And I do wonder how much of the hashtag exvangelical movement is downstream of burnout. Enthusiasm burnout. I certainly experienced that in my teenage years as a Protestant evangelical Christian. And that relates to the fifth thing that pop Protestantism gets wrong is there's this conversionism. If I know the right things about God, now what I need to do is to get other people to affirm the right things about God. And so the moment of conversion becomes absolutely everything. And mission becomes trying to get people to have that experience. A few years ago, I wrote a poem called I Gave My Life to Jesus. It's all about how, in especially youth ministry, pop Protestantism is trying to generate these kinds of experiences, and it's exhausting. Here's what I said. They'd blare delirious, then dare obedience. I'd swear allegiance, soul bed and serious, each prayer more daring than the previous. On stage the preacher saw we staunch hardcore flocked to the fore to knock, knock, knock on heaven's door. He claimed salvation's like he was keeping score. Yet none was sure but he. None doubted more than me. You see, pop Protestantism rejects the sacramental system of the Roman Church, um, but ends up generating some of its own kind of systems in which you generate your own kinds of sacraments and you make your own kinds of offering to God and it turns the gospel on its head. And the thing that is meant to inculcate faith? Well, what was my line? Uh none doubted more than me. Okay. Um, the enthusiasm and the conversionism leads to burnout and leads to the opposite of the gospel assurance that a true Protestantism, a true evangelicalism is meant to assure us of. Uh, but that's the fifth thing. There is a conversionism to pop Protestantism. Um, there is also a pragmatism to pop Protestantism. And so you will have a seeker-sensitive church movement in which the megachurch puts on a monster truck Sunday in order to get the people in. And it's this this pragmatism, this whatever will work. We can strip away anything churchy because all we need to do is get people to have this heart and soul moment, and everything else is instrumentally used. So that mission is this conversionism, and conversionism leads us to incredibly pragmatic ways of doing church. And that can be stupid. That can be really, really stupid. And I get that, I get I get why people reject that. Once again, though, I I think the answer to pop Protestantism is the real thing, but I I get the dislike. I feel it in my bones. The seventh thing to dislike about pop Protestantism is the splintering. Um, I don't know what taxonomy of church denominations is used, but sometimes people will cite a figure like 20,000 denominations in the world, or 30,000, or 40,000. Now, take those figures with a very large punch of salt, because uh when you press into those taxonomies of denominations, you'll find that there's at least 250 Catholic denominations, which is wildly inflated compared to what most people would say. If you ask them how many Catholic denominations they are, most people would say one. And this kind of taxonomy, whatever they're doing to count to those numbers of denominations, um, they are inflating that number by about 25,000 percent. It's a safe bet that the 40,000 figure is also uh an inflation of the order of 25,000%, probably. But having said that, schism is a sin. And not obeying and dividing the body is a dreadful, dreadful thing, and is a thing that the initial reformers only did on pain of execution. Now we'll start a new church planting movement because we like our kind of music, and that is grievous. I I do think the splintering of so many Protestant denominations is uh a stain on our history. I completely take the pro-Protestant point, which is that our unity is not an institutional unity, and that we are able to name a far deeper unity than either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christians can name. If we center our unity on Jesus Christ himself by the Spirit, then a Protestant account of the unity of Christians worldwide. Is a much more hopeful picture of unity. I get that, and that is true. But there is also a pop Protestant spirit that says, I don't want to submit to my bishop. And in my part of the wheat field, to use the analogy from Matthew 13, there are some weeds, and so I am going to try to pull up the weeds or to start my own wheat field. We far too readily make that move when Jesus said explicitly in Matthew 13, don't make that move. If you get dug up from the field where you're in and tossed out of that field because you are faithful to Christ and that field has excommunicated you, then if indeed you have been faithful to Christ in all that, you are truly blessed. And that has happened historically, and that does happen historically. But if your temperament, and the pop Protestant temperament is this, if your temperament is to find only the pure church, just you and the people who are like you, and you therefore break off from what is a true church, even if a mixed church, if you break off from a true church in search of a pure church, you will keep on splintering and keep on splintering and keep on splintering. And that is not of God. That is something I dislike about pop Protestantism. That's number seven. Number eight. I really dislike the reductionism that can happen within Protestant hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of scripture. How do you interpret scripture? And again, there can be a kind of a reactionary thing that happens with pop Protestants. We might look at some fanciful allegorical interpretations of scripture from the medieval period, and instead we just prefer, I just want to go through verse by verse the grammatical historical method, and the main thing is the plain thing. That can become a kind of a pop Protestant instinct that is brought to bear on the scripture, and then it can become like a straitjacket. And some pop Protestant interpreters say, don't whatever you do, look for symbolism. Don't whatever you do look for allegory. Don't whatever you do look for the patterns that keep on repeating within scripture. Don't read the whole Bible canonically, just read it verse by verse. That is a reductionism, that is a flattening of the scriptures, um, which is ironic because we're meant to be the Bible people, right? We wanted a free Bible, and we've imprisoned it. Well, pop Protestantism has imprisoned it in systems that aren't even taught within the Bible. Within the Bible, the Bible's very free and happy with allegory and analogue and patterns that go across the canon. The Bible itself would teach you to read it actually in a different way to the way that pop Protestantism does, because pop Protestantism falls for a kind of a reductionism. I don't like that, but the answer to that reductionism is not to throw away all Protestantism. There are wonderful Protestant interpreters. There are the Peter Lighthearts of the world and the Alistair Roberts of the world, or Michael Morales, or Chris Wright, or like the Bible Project does a great job of showing patterns all throughout the canon. Um there are lots of things within genuine Protestantism that that fight against the reductionism of pop Protestantism, but pop Protestantism is there, and I don't like it, you probably don't like it either. Number nine, I really dislike the individualism that pop Protestantism can kind of engender in people. I I was out um for dinner with my wife recently and sort of spotted another couple from another church. They don't go to our church, but I sort of asked them, how's how are things going in your church? They said, Oh, we don't go anymore. We've found this really good podcast. And and, you know, that's that's how they were gonna, it was just like, me and Jesus, we don't need church, right? Me and Jesus, we can just, it's just I can just sit on the edge of my bed with my Bible, my personally owned Bible, where I've underlined the bits that I like. And I can listen to my favorite worship music on Spotify, and it just becomes, it can become very, very individualized. It ought not to be this way. Real Protestantism doesn't have to take you this way, but pop Protestantism absolutely does. It's a me and my Bible. No priest for me just standing alone before God. This should not be. And then the tenth thing that should not be is the prosperity gospel. Uh now, certainly not all Protestants fall for the prosperity gospel, and in fact, the people who speak out about it uh the most tend to be Protestants because they're addressing their fellow Protestants. And noticing that the prosperity gospel can flourish more under Protestant or Pop Protestant conditions. Why would that be? Well, because of the individualism, and because faith in pop Protestantism becomes the thing that you work up enthusiastically in order to get the blessing of salvation, it's a hop, skip, and a jump from there to name it and claim it, and then you're basically into manifesting. I just need to believe for this thing. I need to whip up within myself the heart and mind response, and my faith will be rewarded. And the prosperity preacher says, yes, rewarded with a Mercedes. Now, within pop Protestantism, what we do is we say, No, how dare you? That's vulgar. You don't earn a Mercedes by whipping up a certain feeling within yourself. You win everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God by whipping up a feeling within yourself, right? That's what pop Protestantism often does. Pop Protestant evangelism is basically a prosperity gospel with a farther horizon. And instead of being rewarded in this life with health and wealth, you will be rewarded in the next life with a heck of a lot more health and wealth. So do the thing. Do the thing of have faith in Jesus, and uh you will get prosperity, but not yet. So that is the pop Protestant uh kind of approach to things. But the answer to pop Protestantism is the real thing. Um, and and here is where I'll tell you why I am a Protestant. I've got three things for why I am a Protestant. There are many, many more, but let me let me boil it down to three because we've gone on uh for long enough already. And and the first thing to say about why I am a Protestant is because I think it's really important to be able to self-critique in the way that I just have, and Protestants are able to do that. So the first reason why I am Protestant is I can acknowledge errors wherever they are found, including within my own tribe. This is such an important point. Like if you are hashtag exvangelical, because of all that silliness that I just you know enumerated, and you've and you've got more than 10 reasons to kind of say, I hate pop Protestantism. Um, if you want the right to be able to properly self-critique, I would suggest remaining a Protestant Christian, because self-critique is baked into the very idea of being a Protestant. We are the Semper Reformanda people, always reforming. It's just that we also think every Christian, no matter their denomination, needs to be always reforming as well. Which is why Article 19 of the 39 Articles, kind of like the doctrinal basis of the Church of England, Article 19 says this. As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred, so also the Church of Rome have erred, not only in their living and matter of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith. That is such a basic point, it's such a modest point, it's such an easily accepted point, it's such an obvious point. Of course, if you embrace it, you cannot be Roman Catholic. The Protestant is able to self-critique and other critique in a way that a Roman Catholic can't. The Roman Catholic has to say, at some point, the Church of Rome hath not erred, if you squint your eyes and cock your head and kind of look at it in this way. The Roman Catholic has to say, yes, the Church of Jerusalem and Alexandria and Antioch and Wittenberg and Geneva, they have all erred, but the Church of Rome can't. And there is a papal infallibility. And of course, there are all sorts of arguments about at what stage is papal infallibility invoked, and people can get into those conversations, but at the end of the day, if you want to say that the Church of Rome hath erred in the same way that the Church in Antioch can err, you can't be a Roman Catholic. Instead, you can be more Catholic than Roman Catholic. One of the reasons why I'm not Roman Catholic is because I want to be truly Catholic. I want to be truly universal. I'm a Reformed Catholic. That's what an Anglican is, a Reformed Catholic. I believe in the universal church, and I believe in the universal capability of error of every kind of church. And if you enjoyed that I was able to go through those ten self-critiques about Protestantism, there is a very good reason to be a Protestant. That's a very good reason to be Protestant. Because we can self-critique. The Protestant account of the Reformation is not that in the 16th century all the good people came on one side of the line, and all the bad people remained on Rome's side of the line. We do not think that everybody that remains on Rome's side of the Tiber is a bad guy, and everybody who is on this side of the Tiber River is a good guy. We don't believe that. There are good Catholics and there are bad Protestants, right? So we don't divide things like that. The Protestant basically says there is a line here. Above that line, there is one tick, there is one good guy. There is Christ in his word, and he gets to judge, he gets to adjudicate. And there are some that identify as Roman Catholics under here, and some that identify not as Roman Catholics, but be they Orthodox or Protestant. And we reserve the right to say all of these people can err and have erred, and all of them need to continually be reformed under the word of God. That is what sola scriptura means, if you've heard the phrase sola scriptura. It means that in the highest place of authority sits scripture alone. There are other authorities in the life of the church, but if there is a supreme judge who breaks the tie, that tie is broken by scripture, by Christ addressing his church through his word, and no particular church or institution or magisterium or bishop belongs in that highest place. So I do not think that everybody who remained with Rome was bad and wrong, and everybody who jumped ship with the Protestants was good and right. But I absolutely insist on the authority by which we make such calls about good and right, and bad and wrong. So I can acknowledge errors wherever they are found. And this is a beautiful Protestant distinctive that I think needs to be foregrounded. It's also why on this channel you'll very rarely hear me say anything about Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. And we've had a number of different Eastern Orthodox thinkers and theologians on the channel, John Baer and Jonathan Peugeot and Martin Shaw. I don't talk about denominational differences very much. And whenever I talk about any one of the three major streams of Christianity, I talk about Protestantism and I talk about our sins. I talk about the stupid things that pop Protestantism does and continues to do because I want to see us always reforming under the Word of God. But that's why I'm a Protestant. I'm a Protestant so I can do that. And I want to invite my Eastern Orthodox and my Roman Catholic friends to have that same level of self-critique. And sometimes they do. I mean, Pope Benedict said this about the post-schism church in the West. Get this about the 15th century. For nearly half a century, the church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one Pope or another. And in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The church no longer offered certainty of salvation, she had become questionable in her whole objective form. The true church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. That's Pope Benedict talking about what was motivating the Luthers of this world. The institution hath erred. The institution had failed to be the arbiter of where true salvation can be found. The institution can be bad and wrong. Therefore, the only thing to do is to outside the institution put a judge, put somebody who can adjudicate on where true salvation is found. And it's not going to be in the institution. It's going to be God in his word doing it. Now, obviously, there's all sorts of interpretation problems about, well, whose interpretation of scripture is going to adjudicate in these matters? Yeah, that's a difficulty, just as it's a difficulty to say which of these popes is correct and to interpret the history of the magisterium. There's going to be problems on that side too. But in principle, the church must be defined not institutionally, but spiritually, and that is a Protestant instinct that we can foreground because we are Protestants. It means we can self-critique, it means we can invite others to critique their own institutions, and we can say the Church of Rome hath erred, which is a really basic thing to say. I think it's a true thing to say, and it's why I cannot be Roman Catholic. The second reason why I am gladly Protestant is that I can acknowledge the work of the Spirit wherever he is found. There are innumerable stories of Christians in prisons picking up a Gideon's Bible, getting saved, sometimes going months and years without having any connection whatsoever to the institution of the church, and yet I consider them to be brothers and sisters in Christ. There are stories of the mission of God bursting the banks of Christendom and flooding the new world in ways that ride roughshod over our institutional niceties. And whether you're talking about stories in South America or South Korea or Africa, you are talking about stories in which the spirit of God was moving far beyond the institutions and creating works and movements that had no connection to Rome, and yet I believe with all my heart there are connections to Christ there. And in one sense, the movement of Protestantism and the movement of Protestant missions is a movement of the spirit that has been for the utter blessing, embitterment, and salvation of multitudes. I was recently at a gathering of people who are trying to complete the work of translation for the Bible, to get the Bible into every language and dialect. And exciting things are happening in the work of Bible translation. The horizon for when we would get the Bible into all these different languages used to be in the 2050s and beyond, and actually through AI, some of that process has been radically sped up. And perhaps in the next 10 years or so, we will have the scriptures in every single language on earth. This is an incredibly exciting missionary movement funded very largely by Protestants. That's not often kind of said out loud, and I'd be happy to be uh contradicted on this. Certainly, non-denominational and Catholic and Orthodox uh institutions have been part of the uh the funding of this and the the billions of pounds that have been spent on Bible translations, but but it is, it seems to me, very largely uh a Protestant evangelical kind of sacrifice. And I want I want to just say, yay, Protestants. Like I I've given you ten reasons to say boo Protestants, but at some point I want to say, yay, Protestants. Actually, the the work of mission, and here's one example of the work of mission, the work of Bible translation, has been just astonishingly driven forward sacrificially by people who have given everything for the work of the Lord Jesus, and they've seen people saved and blessed and cultures and civilizations bettered, and their Protestantism was not incidental to that movement, but actually um driving at the heart of it. And if one of these new Bibles um is kind of on a boat to a far-flung land and they've never uh understood the gospel before, and the boat sinks, and a crate of Bibles washes up on a beach somewhere, and these peoples find a book written in their own language and they encounter Christ in those scriptures and they begin to worship him the way the Bible is talking about, and they begin to break bread in the way that the Bible is talking about. I think that is a true church, and I think I can I can acknowledge the work of the Spirit wherever he is found, and that is something that's good. Uh, as a Protestant, the third and final thing, why I am a Protestant, why I love being a Protestant, is that I can know that I am saved. Now that is the material cause of the Reformation. People talk about the Reformation, there's the material cause, what the matter was with the Reformation, and there's the formal cause of the Reformation, the form of it. And the form of the Reformation was sort of sold the scriptura. Scripture alone gets to decide these matters. We've already spoken about that a little bit. But the the real heart of the matter is I'm saved through the grace of God alone, in offering Christ alone to be received by faith alone. Which means that those peoples who read about Christ in Scripture and see him as Lord and they just say, Lord, simply that reception of Christ, simply faith alone, in the Christ alone that is offered by God's grace alone, apart from works, apart from sacraments, apart from anything else other than the divine offer of Christ to that person who is encountering Christ in those scriptures, that person is saved. They have eternal life because Jesus is eternal life. They are saved. And they will go on being saved, and on the final day, they will be saved. There are three tenses to salvation, all Protestants believe in that. But unless I can know my salvation from the outset, then I can't actually proceed by faith. Everybody agrees that we need to go on in the Christian life by faith, whether you're Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Protestant, we all believe that we we need to be sanctified by faith and we need to be conformed into the image of God by faith. We need to participate in the divine nature by faith. But how do you have faith unless something's been offered to you? Faith is not a thing that you push out of yourself. Faith is what's pulled out of you by the divine promises. So the divine promise of salvation has got to come. And Christ has to be offered to me as the one who is salvation. He is eternal life. He's the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit. That's what eternal life is. And as he's offered to me to be one with me, then simply to receive him is to have eternal life. And then I love because he first loved me. And then I can have the faith that enables me to be sanctified, that enables me to be conformed into the image of Christ and participate in the divine nature and all that kind of stuff. I need to know that I'm saved first. I do. I need to be saved. And with Protestantism, we are foregrounding the thing on which everything else depends. I have Christ. I have Christ. And Christ is all I need, right? Of course Christ is all I need. Now with Christ, I can go on being saved. I can work out my salvation with fear and trembling and all that good stuff. But I've got to be saved before I can go on being saved and have that future tense salvation. I need to be saved. I need that past tense salvation. I need that. Protestantism foregrounds that, and it is right to do so because the other things don't happen without that. I'll finish with just three points to to make about this. Like, we believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and our relationship with the three persons of the Trinity is a relationship in which we must have salvation at the outset, or we cannot attain it later. Okay? So with the Father, I am adopted before the Father as a child of God, a co-heir. I'm adopted. And so obviously, the person who is adopted needs to go on and bear the family name and be conformed into the family likeness. That is absolutely true. But you're adopted. On a certain day, you are adopted. The papers are signed, you're adopted. You're in. My relationship to the father needs to have that past tense salvation to it, or I don't have a relationship with the father. I'm not I unless I'm already adopted in, I'm on the outside of the family, and the best I could be is a servant. In order to be a child of God, I need to be saved. And Protestant is the Protestant gospel, which I think is the biblical gospel, is to say, yeah, you're adopted into the family of God at the outset by faith. Secondly, How do I relate to the son? Well, the Bible gives lots of different analogies, but one of them is in a marriage union, in this covenant union that is spousal. And there is a beginning point to my marriage, and then there is the ongoing conformity into the likeness of married Glenn. But I've got to be married first. I've got to be in. There was a day when I got married. There's got to be a past tense vision for salvation. There's got to be I am already in because I've received Christ by faith. Okay? I'm in Christ. I am in Christ right now. And yes, I need to be conformed more and more into the likeness of Christ. But I'm in. I'm in already. I don't get pronounced to be the bride of Christ once I've served him properly for 25 years. You start. You start in. That is the gospel. The gospel doesn't make sense unless you start in. And then thirdly, the spirit. I'm born again by the Spirit of God. Now, obviously, when you are born, you then grow up into the person that you were born as. But you gotta be born first. And again, my relationship to the Spirit is I'm in. Or rather, he's in me to begin with, and not as a gift at the end of the process. What the Protestant gospel of faith alone guarantees is that all that other great stuff that is so often foregrounded in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spiritualities, all that great stuff, there is great stuff there, really great stuff, and I can affirm the great stuff that is in there. And sometimes my Roman Catholic brother or sister says things about that journey of faith. They say them better than what I say them as, and they believe them better than what I say them as. And they can live them out as better than what I say in my own spiritual tradition. But you gotta be in before you can grow. And the gospel of faith alone is why I am a Protestant and I'm glad to be a Protestant. And it means being glad as a Protestant. I can critique myself and I can critique my tribe and I can hold us to higher standards. Because none of those pop Protestant things are necessary. They're not baked into Protestantism. They are dangers that every Christian faces, actually, in one way or another. But Protestants are liberated because we're already saved, and we're liberated by the Bible above us to be able to point the finger at ourselves and work on those things. So if you find difficulties with all those pop Protestant tendencies, join the club. Genuinely, genuinely join the club. Find issue with those things, but be conformed to the likeness of Christ, because he is given to you in the gospel of faith alone. That'll do us for now. What do you think about this? I'm not sure we're going to do many other videos about this. Who knows, though? Who knows? Uh it is a topic of conversation that people want to hear about. I'd love to know what you think in the comments. And if you want to hear a gospel that is proclaimed that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox ought to be able to resonate with because it talks about Trinity and the two atoms, but it also talks about union with Christ. It's called 321. And what we affirm at the end of the course is that you can be one with Christ today and then grow up into that salvation. You can have his father as your father, his spirit as your spirit, his future as your future. It's a beautiful truth that I hope every Christian can resonate with. But it's found at 321course.com. If you've got this far in the video, I'm sure this video deserves a like. And why don't you share it around the place? Subscribe to the channel, and we'll catch you on the next one. God bless.