Imagine a world without Protestantism.
I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”
Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.
Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.
The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.
Consider the findings in the Pew Research Center’s comprehensive report on global Christianity in 2011. At the time of the report, there were more than two billion Christians in the world. Slightly more than half were Roman Catholic; another 12 percent were Orthodox. The report counts Anglicans as Protestants, but according to my definition—episcopal, priestly, creedal, conciliar, liturgical, sacramental—they count as catholic. Roman, Eastern, and Anglican Christians together form two-thirds of global Christianity.
The next-largest group is Pentecostals, who form about 13 percent of all Christians. Add them, along with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to the catholic group, and we’re already up to 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent includes Lutherans (3.5 percent), Baptists (3.25 percent), Reformed (2.5 percent), Methodists (1.25 percent), and Adventists (1 percent). Membership in “nondenominational” churches is difficult to calculate, given their overlap with Pentecostals and ex-Baptist congregations. Let’s estimate that they constitute somewhere between one-quarter and two-fifths of all Protestants, and therefore at least 10 percent of all Christians.
What picture emerges from these numbers? The majority of Christians worldwide belong to catholic traditions. A sizable and growing minority of believers are evangelical: Pentecostals, low-church charismatics, and members of independent churches, Bible churches, nondenom churches, and other “primitivist,” “restorationist,” and biblicist movements that place a premium on personal conversion, mass evangelism, and spontaneous expressions of faith, devotion, and worship.
Where are the Protestants proper? I mean the middle-way communions that carry the banner of the Reformers, rejecting high catholic tradition by following Luther and Calvin in their liturgy, sacraments, and confessions. These groups appear to make up 10 percent of the global Church at most—perhaps less than five.
By and large, these Protestant traditions are not growing, and many of their churches are not recognizably Protestant at all. They increasingly resemble their evangelical neighbors. How many Baptist congregations recite the Creed? How often do Presbyterians celebrate the Lord’s Supper? And what percentage of these denominations belong to the “liberal mainline” of North America and Europe? Not a few of these rapidly declining churches deny doctrines that other believers—catholic, evangelical, and Protestant alike—consider definitive of basic orthodoxy.
In short, the original Protestant vision, articulated and enacted by the first generations of Reformers, is on life support. It barely registers in surveys. Perhaps ninety-five out of one hundred Christians in the world already inhabit a world without Protestantism. This may strike students of the sixteenth century or lovers of Reformed theology as bad news. As for catholic and evangelical believers, it isn’t clear that they much care, or whether they have noticed at all.
Protestantism without Reformation”: That is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous line about religion in America. A century later, we could apply a revised version globally: “evangelicalism without Protestantism.” The relevant features of this phenomenon are its biblicism, entrepreneurialism, and populism. Call it “mere evangelicalism.”
And there’s the rub. There is a world of difference between “mere” and “magisterial.” Yet today we see a resurgence of interest in magisterial Protestantism: its theology, history, and resources. In one sense, this interest is all to the good. Scholars and pastors in magisterial traditions sense the anemia in mere evangelicalism and aim to provide nourishment. There is good work being done here, some of it found in the pages of First Things. The labor of recovery and retrieval in service of renewal is vital for any tradition.
But whose tradition? The disconnect between mere evangelicalism and magisterial Protestantism is profound. I live in west Texas, in a blood-red county with a church on every corner. If you asked me to find a bona fide representative of magisterial Protestantism on a given Sunday morning, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. Mine is a landscape without Protestantism: You can go high and you can go low—most people in my town go low—but you will struggle to find a single congregation in line with the Reformation vision. The few that perhaps remain are either liberal or in hospice care. Otherwise, if you don’t want to go catholic, you have your pick of dozens of options, typically featuring a weekly concert and a preacher in jeans, with screens on every wall and sacraments nowhere to be found.
The problem for magisterial retrievers is fourfold.
First, they need to face up to reality. The national story told in Nathan Hatch’s 1989 book The Democratization of American Christianity is now a global one. The levelers won and the old mainline died (another story well told at this point, by Joseph Bottum and Ross Douthat, among others). There are now only two games in town.
Second, mere evangelical churches will not easily adopt magisterial identities. It is, for one thing, a matter of conviction: They believe in populist biblicism. They aren’t attracted by Bucer or Gerhard. The lack of tradition is a feature, not a bug. Moreover, even where desire is present, participation in a tradition cannot be reverse-engineered. The movements that emerged from the magisterial Reformation were and are living liturgical and doctrinal traditions, embodied in institutions, confessions, and practices. A start-up church founded seven years ago by a twentysomething fresh out of seminary cannot “become” a part of such a tradition, however much the head pastor may admire the writings and theology of, say, the Lutheran scholastics. Theoretically such a church might join the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, but at the price of losing all its members.
Third, there is a structural instability at the heart of the Reformation vision that undermines any attempt to strike a durable middle path between catholic and evangelical Christianities. My term for this problem is Goldilocks Protestantism. Heirs of Calvin and Luther don’t want to give up, for instance, Nicaea or infant baptism or the necessity of ordination for the administration of the Supper. Neither, though, do they want a magisterium or bishops, saints or icons. Not too high, not too low. Just right.
This approach is finally unsustainable. Mere evangelicals see nothing in Scripture that mandates or even authorizes baptizing babies; they see no detailed instructions for a centralized polity or the pastoral office; they certainly don’t see the Nicene Creed. To counter by saying that such a reductive hermeneutic (nuda rather than sola scriptura) is not the vision of the Reformers is to beg the question, since mere evangelicals have no stake in fidelity to anything anyone said in the sixteenth century.
I am not suggesting that, because Protestantism is structurally unstable and therefore liable perpetually to disburden itself of ecclesial tradition, the evangelical result is unfaithful. The point is not that populist biblicism is wrong, but rather that it is the sole statistically meaningful Christian option in the world today that is not catholic. Magisterial advocates should admit this fact and respond accordingly.
Fourth and finally, there is a question of coalitions and collaboration. In my experience, magisterial Protestants see themselves allied with mere evangelicals; together these groups form a single team, over against the high catholic traditions, even if the magisterial Protestants wished the evangelicals had a higher sacramentology or some such. I submit that this default setting is an error.
Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:
if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.
This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.
In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.
Image by Emma. Image Cropped.
