The Case for Protestant Christianity w/ Dr. Fred Sanders

Episode 291: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Fred Sanders, systematic theologian and professor at Biola University’s Torrey Honors College, joins the podcast to explore why young Christians are drawn to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—and whether Protestantism truly lacks the depth, history, and tradition they seek.

Drawing from his decades teaching in a great books program, Sanders argues that authentic Protestantism isn’t merely “protesting” Catholicism, but testifying forth the truths recovered during the Reformation. The conversation delves into the real meaning of sola scriptura, the crucial distinction between justification and sanctification, and why virtuous denominationalism might be preferable to top-down organizational unity.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Fred Sanders (00:00):
Think about the theology enshrined in the Reformation. Think about the truths held forth from the Bible in Reformation theology. That’s what we’re looking for.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:15):
What if you were part of a battle that’s been going on for more than 500 years? That’s the way it feels when Protestants and Catholics disagree over Christianity’s most important questions. And these questions are things like who has the final authority in matters of faith? What role should tradition play in interpreting scripture? How are we justified before God?

There are a lot of Christians today, especially young adults who are drawn to Catholicism and Eastern orthodoxy away from their Protestant heritage. They like the history, they like the tradition, they like the liturgy, but how should we engage? Did Protestant Christianity really begin only with Martin Luther or is it more deeply rooted in historic Christian faith? And what ultimately does it mean to be Protestant and why would we be Protestant?

(01:04):
Well, my guest today is Dr. Fred Sanders. He’s a systematic theologian and a professor at Viola University’s Tori Honors College. He’s the author of several books, including The Deep Things of God and the Triune God. We’re going to talk all about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism today. Let’s welcome Dr. Fred Sanders to the podcast. Dr. Fred Sanders, welcome to the Truth Change Everything podcast.

Dr. Fred Sanders (01:29):
Thanks. It’s good to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:31):
I’m really looking forward to talking to you as a theologian about something that it seems to be getting a lot of attention in our culture today. A lot of high profile people have converted from Protestantism to Catholicism or Eastern orthodoxy. A lot of it’s young adults and they get a lot of energy out of this. They talk a lot. They’re getting a lot of attention.

And it does seem that there are a lot of young people who are interested in the history and tradition and they’re looking for liturgy. They don’t want just rah-rah worship services anymore. And they feel like they want to be part of something that’s a tradition. But what do you think, and this is the deepest question right off the bat here, but what do you think Protestants can learn from that and what are we missing in our own churches at the present time?

Dr. Fred Sanders (02:29):
Yeah. I think that when someone encounters another kind of Christianity, another version of the church, Catholicism or Eastern orthodoxy or a certain kind of high church Anglicanism, especially when a young person sees that and says, “Well, there’s some real gravity there. There’s some earnestness and some depth and some richness and there’s some reverence there that I don’t register in my own home church or network of churches.” That’s always worth taking seriously. I mean, that’s the depth of Christianity sort of calling out to them in some way.

Now, the idea that that is located in a denomination that they can go and join is of course a problem and an error. But in terms of being self-critical, I think it’s worth stopping and saying, “Is the church I’m in currently communicating reverence and awe and depth? And do we talk like people who just made this up in the ’70s in Southern California? Or do we talk like people who don’t just have a Bible plus a revival in the ’70s, but actually have the entire Christian tradition as something we inhabit and that we’re on this end?”

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:40):
And you’re saying this as a guy who is in Southern California, and so you see all of that. But the word Protestant I think does throw a lot of people, and maybe we don’t think enough about this, but does it mean that we’re just protesting against Roman Catholicism? Or I think you’ve really argued that that’s not really a super helpful way to understand the term, that there’s something more to it, what it means to be Protestant.

Dr. Fred Sanders (04:09):
Yeah. So when we go to Protestantism as a category or reformation theology would be another kind of helpful way to put it. When I first started teaching at Viola University, the worry was, oh, probably these students think that the church started with Martin Luther. And after just a few months of teaching the kind of students who go to Viola, I realized, oh, I wish they thought the church started with Martin Luther because that would mean they have 500 years of active memory of Christian existence in their mind. And in fact, they have maybe seven years.

(04:45):
And so when they say Protestant, they usually mean my youth leader. And unless their youth leader happened to be awesome, then all those defects are something that they’re projecting onto Protestant history, which they believe they know because of the church they grew up in. But of course, I just wish that they had five centuries of the heritage of Protestant theology in their mind. So just to flag that really quick as kind of the shorthand we use for it, but it does kind of matter.

The Reformation theology began to be described as Protestant at a time when the word Protestant in Latin and then in English, protestare, and then it comes over directly into English, to make a protestation. It used to mean to testify forth. You can see it in the word roots there, protestare, to testify in a forward way or outwardly to the world.

(05:38):
To protest didn’t mean to get picket signs and yell unfair, unfair. To protest 500 years ago in English as in Latin meant to hold forth the truth. There’s even love poetry from the 16 or 1700s that says, “Bid me live,” someone says to his fair maiden, “Bid me live and I will live thy Protestant to be.” It doesn’t mean I’m going to protest you. It means I’m going to hold forth externally about your beauty. I am testifying forth about it.

Now there’s no use fighting to reclaim that word. So if someone has the folk etymology, Protestants only protest, there’s probably no talking to them about that. I tend to paraphrase in terms of… Well, first of all, I will point out that that’s a fake etymology. Secondly, I’ll point out, think about the theology enshrined in the reformation. Think about the truths held forth from the Bible in reformation theology. That’s what we’re after.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:34):
Okay. That’s a really helpful distinction. And I wasn’t even aware that that was really the way the word was used. So I get that. I understand that. But I do want to go back to the argument that you made. You’re teaching in the Tori Honors Institute. This is one of the great books programs, might have been one of the first at a Christian university.

And you’ve dedicated essentially your entire career to teaching in this program. So you are almost, I would say almost exclusively, you’re working with the best and brightest students that there are in the United States and they’re really oriented toward books, logic smart, book smart, that kind of thing.

But you mentioned that you wished that they had a 500-year tradition. A lot of people are now making the argument, well, okay, your tradition goes back 500 years. Mine goes back 2000 years. I hear a lot of people who are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox make that point. Talk about that.

Dr. Fred Sanders (07:38):
Yeah, that’s good. The great thing about getting back 500 years, you could really… 200 years. If you had 200 years of active memory in your, we used to call it RAM, right? People don’t talk that way anymore about computers. If your active memory that you were accessing held 200 years of stuff in it, you would find that those people are themselves quoting older people who are quoting older people who are quoting older people. You can’t get that just on your parents’ Christianity.

I’m not someone who slams the boomers or anything, but if you go with… Actually, the boomers are now getting old enough. They were getting enough decades there that if you could just get back to the Christianity of the 60s and 50s, you might be reaching. But if you reach all the way back to the 1500s, the 16th century, you’re going to find that the original Protestant theologians were viewing themselves not as starting a new church, not as beginning a brand new thing.

(08:31):
This was not some sort of Marxist year zero where all the history had to be scrubbed clean and we’re starting over with only the good people. This was a reform from within the one great Christian tradition. That is to say, if you could use the word Catholic properly here, meaning universal, so you might say not with a capital letter and not intending the Roman Catholic communion in particular, but the entire Christian church.

All the magisterial Protestants, all the great founders of Reformation theology were self-consciously reaching back to the entire history of the church and saying, “There have been things that have gone wrong here that we need to correct and reform and repair, and we will do that how? Not by coming up with new bright ideas, but by appealing back to the sources, ad fontes.” This goes back to look at what the actual Bible says about this and judge contemporary practice in light of what the Bible says.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:30):
Now, there was a counterreformation. Talk about that a little bit because a lot of my Catholic friends will say, “Well, I mean, yes, we needed the reformation to shake us up a little bit and make us realize that there were a lot of things that had strayed from the truth, but we fixed it. We fixed it.”

Dr. Fred Sanders (09:53):
Yeah. And so historians will talk about the reformations sometimes and talk about the Catholic reformation or what an older scholarship was called the counter reformation. And there were those moves around the Council of Trent and shortly after the Council of Trent, both in theology and broadly culturally to try to correct abuses and reorganize around the Protestant objection to those abuses. I would say that they did not…

That’s good. It’s good for all the things they did clean up, but they didn’t go far enough. And of course, to get there, Rome had to excommunicate and expel the Reformation bodies and churches and countries. So if I point out you’ve done something wrong, you fire me and then you fix it, that’s a mixed response, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:44):
I would say so, yeah. Yeah. Another thing that a lot of my Catholic friends will say is, “Well, look, Protestantism, you guys just keep dividing.” And there is the old joke of the guy who was stranded on a desert island, they discovered him and he had three huts. “What’s this hut?” “That’s my house.” “Well, what’s this one?” “That’s my church.” “Well, what’s this one? You’re only one guy, you got three huts.” “Well, that’s where I used to go to church.”

But you see that, you do see that a lot. Denominations keep dividing and dividing and dividing. It does appear to be that way often. I’d love to hear you talk about that. Is it a fair criticism?

Dr. Fred Sanders (11:29):
Well, I mean, yes and no. For one thing, this impulse to preserve Christian unity or to work for Christian unity, I think that’s a good impulse. There’s something deep and spiritual happening there to perceive that one God, one Christ, one church, one baptism, that we should remain tender about that. We should also not be naive about anyone’s particular scheme for how to enact and enforce that beautiful unity. So when someone complains about Christian disunity, I think, okay, that’s fair. Let’s not get hardhearted about that.

There are two different strategies for sort of valorizing Christian unity. There’s sort of like an internal strategy and an external strategy. Rome in particular, the Roman Catholic church has heavily invested in an external strategy, one organization, one council of bishops, one pope to rule them all, right? Anyone who’s under that umbrella counts as being Roman Catholic. Protestants have tended for various historical reasons having to do with trying to get this done in the 1500s as early modern Europe is taking its form, et cetera.

(12:34):
Protestants have invested in a more internal unity. So I’m in an evangelical free church in America down the streets of Baptist church. I’m not in competition with them. They’re a good gospel preaching, biblical Baptist church. I don’t think we’re alternatives in the food court and I’m not fighting them for market share. I think we have unity. We’re different denominations. We disagree on a couple of doctrinal details, but I don’t view them as a different sort of Christian in any profound way.

So we have a profound inner unity. I’ll go preach in their pulpit when invited. There’s a real unity there. Now, driving by on the street, you might say, “Why do those two churches not get along?” Well, we do get along. We get along just fine and there’s all sorts of diversity, like legitimate denominational differences between us, but we’re not fighting. Now that can look externally like disunity, but in fact, internally, there’s a ton of unity there.

(13:33):
In fact, it’s mainly a unity story. On the other hand, if you make this heavy investment in external unity, kind of a top-down oneness approach, the problem there is it masks internal disunity. So I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of different kinds of Catholics.

I studied in Berkeley at a graduate theological union with Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits and various other kinds of Catholics. Those are just the three institutional forms. Now, they’re not fighting each other, kind of. I mean, they’re within the same Catholic church, but they’re distinct things within it, and sometimes they do disagree pretty starkly.

And then if you just do sort of a liberal versus conservative kind of a split within the Roman Catholic church, you think, “Oh, these are totally different. There are obviously different church bodies within this church.” You get a diverse group of Catholics and ask them what they think about the current Pope or the last Pope or the Pope before that.

(14:32):
These have been extremely divisive times. Now, we can talk strategically and say, “If you invest all your energy in external unity, you have your reward. You get the fact that everyone who says they’re Catholic counts as Catholic.” I want to say as long as they’re in communion with their bishop, but out on the edges, there are splinter groups within the Roman Catholic fold that are in fact at war with their bishop and have not yet been interfered with. Can I as a Protestant take communion in a Roman Catholic church? Theoretically, no, but I can just…

I live in LA. I can drive to about six churches. I guarantee you I’ll find a priest who doesn’t give a rip about whether he gives me communion or not. So what’s the standard? What’s the unity? There’s just a ton of disunity. I could make the same kind of case about Eastern orthodoxy, which in some ways is even worse because their investment in external unity is not as total as the Roman Catholic investment.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:30):
No, I really appreciate this. I think I share the same concern. I drive down the street and I see all these different churches and I think, well, it’d be a whole lot more efficient if they all just gathered together, but maybe that isn’t really the point. I don’t think the same thing about coffee shops. I don’t drive down the street and say, “Oh man, there are 10 different kinds of coffee shops here. It’d just be a whole lot smarter if they all just formed one coffee shop, the one Starbucks to rule them all.”

But I don’t think that way because I recognize these people for different reasons, different approaches, different philosophies, different strategies. They all serve coffee and people develop preferences, but why do I think that with churches? I don’t think I’ve ever really asked myself that question before.

Dr. Fred Sanders (16:19):
Yeah. I mean, driving to coffee shops is a very American illustration, obviously, but we are dealing with, inside of an American cultural matrix, how should we think about denominationalism? And I don’t want to just sing the praises of it like, “Hey, let’s have more denominations.” Because obviously if you get down to details, there are some churches that ought to join up with each other and so on.

But there is such a thing as virtuous denominationalism, virtuous in the sense of, you don’t make too little of what being in a particular church and you don’t make too much of being in a particular church. And if I could say on the Protestant side, what that looks like is a lot of young people grow up in churches. I’m thinking about non-denominational or sort of low church settings where they actually have no idea what tradition they’re in.

(17:08):
I mean, they show up, they’re brilliant. My students come in with high SAT scores and demonstrated academic achievement at the high school level, and I ask them what church they go to and they say, “Church.” And I feel like I’m an anthropologist deep in the jungle saying, “Which tree is holy?” Or something like that. You ask them, “What church?” And they just say, “Church.” And I say, “Well, is it Baptist? Tell me how you take communion. What does membership look like?”

And it takes a number of questions to get them to surface what particular branch or tradition or history they’re in. I would say that’s not enough denominationalism. I would actually press those churches and say, “Your people need to know who they are. There’s actually something good about that, super healthy.” Now, on the other hand, there’s vicious denominationalism that makes too much of it, and this shows up, it’s easy to make fun of these people because they’re just constantly talking about being the right church.

(18:09):
And even among Presbyterians, they’ll fight about, like, “Oh yeah, you’re in the wrong kind of Presbyterian church.” And so it’s easy to hear that kind of stuff. That kind of infighting in public probably is more divisive for Christians than just the sheer existence of multiple kinds or outlets of Protestant theology.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:29):
Yes, right. Well, theoretically, sola scriptura should tie all of that together, but it is a very difficult thing to do. And earlier you referenced one Lord, one faith, one baptism from Ephesians chapter four, and that goes on to say that God gave some to be apostle, some pastor, some evangelists, some prophet, some pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry to build up the body of Christ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s son.

So that is really a goal, a scriptural goal, but I think a lot of people maybe misunderstand that. And I’d be curious, what does sola scriptura mean from a reformation standpoint and what should church tradition and reason and theologians who’ve interpreted scripture in the past, how do we factor all of that into our growing faith?

Dr. Fred Sanders (19:35):
Yeah. Sola scriptura is a reformation motto that it’s fine, I’m in favor of it, but like all mottos, it sort of floats free of its original context and can be applied to mean whatever the current user thinks it means. And so there’s some very small-minded ways of thinking about what the motto sola scriptura means, small-minded in a sense of all I read is the Bible. Sola means only read the Bible and never read anything else. Tradition is terrible. Oh, well, that’s not… Okay. If that’s how you interpret your own tattoo, great.

But what that motto is actually identifying in the reformation theology that was honed in the 16th century is that among all the different relative authorities, which we consider as we’re interpreting the word of God, like our ability to reason and the tradition that we’re in and the other sort of authorities that are out there, including creeds and the history of councils and the classic theologians who have written well on all these things and the best commentaries, but among all those relative authorities, there’s one absolute authority, and that is the word of God and scripture itself as scripture interprets scripture authoritatively.

(20:48):
So viewed that way, sola scripture is supposed to mean we’ve got a lot of things on the table, but we have one that rules over those things. The smaller-minded way of taking that motto has been, “I don’t read anything but the Bible.”

But in the 16th century, clearly it was a table loaded with lots of historical resources and naming a criterion that you would use that judges the others, but is not judged by the others. Sounds totally different though when you don’t have any others on the table. When you’ve swept the table clean, all you’ve got is a Bible, then you’re not saying sola, you’re saying some people say solo scriptura to name this false view, nothing but the Bible, solo scriptura.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:38):
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that makes sense. And I hear it all the time from churches. Well, do you have a doctrinal statement? Oh, scripture. The Bible is our doctrinal statement. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with that because I know that when I read scripture, I’ve got to interpret it. But when they’re saying that, is that really the sola scriptura tradition?

Dr. Fred Sanders (22:06):
No, it’s not. I mean, if you’re using the phrase sola scriptura as a motto to summarize what the Protestant reformers were teaching, then you need to look at what they did. They wrote catechisms, they wrote confessions. Those confessions all started by saying, “Okay, the Nicene Creed, right? Yep. Now we want to go on to add a few other things,” and then they develop it more.

So yeah, if you’re trying to use sola scriptura as a motto to align yourself with the Protestant reformation, you’ve got to have those other things there. I’m a big fan of the creeds of the ancient church. I love classic theology from the whole 20 centuries, but especially the first seven or eight centuries. But I’m also very comfortable in my home church in a low church setting where we don’t routinely liturgically recite the creed, but we do have a doctrinal statement and that doctrinal statement is at a very low level.

(23:00):
It’s just truth in advertising. It’s saying, “We believe whatever the Bible teaches. And by the way, here’s a list of 10 most important things we think the Bible teaches because it’s not a closed book. This isn’t our first rodeo. We read it. We have made some decisions about what it means, and here’s an honest account of what we think those are.”

No, a doctrinal statement like that is a form of commentary. There’s the Bible itself and then there’s the commentary. My commentary, that is my church’s doctrinal statement, says, “Here’s how we take that.” So if you take it the other way, you need to know that 50 or 100 or 200 years ago, we though hard about this and our commentary says what we believe it means. We’re just being honest about that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:48):
At Summit Ministries, the Apostles Creed historically for 62 years has been our doctrinal statement. So if you don’t agree with it, you’re not going to be an instructor or an employee at Summit Ministries, but we also felt like we needed to add a statement of convictions. How does the Apostles Creed apply to the big issues that we’re going to be addressing in our program?

So we address things like what it means to be made in the image of God, the value of life, man, woman, marriage, things like that to add to it. I mean, we couldn’t think of a better approach. I’m just curious what your thoughts are about that. I mean, you’re part of a university. I’m sure you guys wrestle through the same things.

Dr. Fred Sanders (24:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think the approach of starting with a historic creed and then adding further specification to it or… I mean, adding can sound like a bad word, right? What I mean is specifying sort of how…

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:53):
Explicating.

Dr. Fred Sanders (24:53):
Yeah, you in particular take this. Some people believe in the Apostles Creed, but they think this other thing in addition to it, and we don’t. We’ve taken this other position on that. Yeah. I think that’s a good approach. And the idea of actually having the Apostles Creed in place and then going on to add writers to it to say who you are in particular as an organization, that’s a great approach.

Biola University has a 1912 statement of faith that our founders put together, and it doesn’t name check the historic creeds, and we don’t sort of print the apostles of the Nicene Creed somewhere in our sort of articles of incorporation, legally speaking. But you can read the writings of the men and women who founded the university and what they thought about the historic creeds, and you’ll know that, oh yeah, we’re in that ballpark.

(25:48):
But yeah, no, I applaud the approach of explicitly name checking one of the ancient ecumenical creeds and then going on to say, “But we’re Protestant and we’re evangelical and we have the following ministry positions.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:01):
Yeah, that’s good. And I would encourage people to look at the history of Viola too. It’s so cool. Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Lyman Stewart, the oil man. It’s such a cool history. You could really understand evangelicalism and even before that fundamentalism by just looking at the history of Viola. It’s pretty cool. Let me ask you about this because we’re going to get into this. This is the really hard stuff maybe.

The differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic theology when it concerns salvation. So what does scripture teach about justification by grace through faith? How should we understand the relationship between grace, faith, and good works? Is there a difference that’s meaningful between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism?

Dr. Fred Sanders (26:52):
Yeah. And you could start by celebrating what Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have in common, right? So my main work is on the doctrine of the Trinity, and hey, it just happens that everyone’s got that in common. And so I get to spend most of my work day using Roman Catholic theology because it doesn’t differ at all from Protestant theology of the Trinity. So that’s great. And it’s worth tagging that base before getting into the important differences.

Even in the doctrine of salvation, there’s a bunch of stuff we have in common. We agree that, listen, in ourselves we’re lost, only in Christ are we saved. I’d have to state that vaguely but powerfully to sort of rejoice. And yes, if I were at an ecumenical fellowship gathering of some kind and I made that kind of statement about salvation, all heads would nod. And then where’s it going to differ?

(27:47):
Where’s this difference going to emerge? You have to quit using the word salvation actually and be a little more precise and say justification by faith. It really does come down to that. We use the word salvation so broadly to include everything from your first conviction of sin through sanctification and glorification and everything about the Christian life. But if you’re talking about the question, on what basis does God forgive me or on what basis do I stand before a holy God as someone who can stand in his presence?

The Protestant answer, and this is really the core of what was rediscovered in the reformation, the Protestant answer is that we’re justified not by works. Works have no place in our justification, but only on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ. So it’s that justification by grace through faith. So you can tell if you simplify that a little too much, you kind of lose some of the sharpness of it and you say, “Well, we’re saved by grace.” Okay.

(28:48):
I mean, Roman Catholics certainly gladly affirm that we are saved by grace. Their Bibles also have Ephesians two, Ephesians two, eight and nine. You have to be a little more precise about that and say, “We agree that we’re saved by grace.” Protestants think that Roman Catholics don’t carry that out well theologically because they end up defining grace in a way that they don’t make a distinction between justification and sanctification.

So this is not a perfectly fair account of Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation, but basically the cartoon version of it here is you enter into a state of grace and you become progressively sanctified through the work of Christ and the spirit in your life. And when you are sanctified enough, you stand before God and are justified. So if there’s a difference between justification and sanctification, it’s that sanctification is the name for the whole thing and the end of it results in justification.

(29:50):
The Protestants make a stronger distinction and say, “No, it starts with justification. Christ died to save sinners. He justifies the ungodly and then a process of sanction Certification flows from that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:03):
How do Roman Catholics understand Ephesians two: eight and nine? For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is God’s gift, not from works so that no one can boast. For you are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared ahead of time for you to do. Talk about that for a minute.

Dr. Fred Sanders (30:31):
Yeah. So just to take someone like Thomas Aquinas who died in 1274 and is kind of one of the great leading figures in all Christian history, he’s important for all Christian theology, but he’s especially distinctly Roman Catholic before the reformation. He would define grace very broadly to include the God-given power to do meritorious works. It’s kind of a mouthful, right?

So if you think about grace, the Thomist view or the Roman Catholic view broadly would be it includes the power given by God, it’s not your own, but it’s given by God and it’s the power to do works which merit salvation.

So once you define grace that way, then you go back to Ephesians two and read, “By grace you are saved through faith.” And you think, “Oh right, I’m saved by God supernaturally, sacramentally infusing into me the power to do works that are meritorious.” And that’s salvation by grace through faith.

(31:34):
Now the reformers look at that and say, “Okay, plenty of good things in what you just said, but that’s not salvation by grace.” We’re talking about justification, which is a word that’s not used there in Ephesians two. You got to kind of bring it in from Galatians and Romans and put the whole package together and say more precisely when we read this saying you’re saved by grace through faith, what we mean is justification is by faith and not at all by works.

(32:00):
Now I want to put in a word for the fact that the Protestants would then rapidly go on to say there is a place for works in the Christian life. It’s right there in Ephesians two: eight. It’s all over the Bible. Christians must do good works, but good works have no sort of weight in the question of justification. You have to radically exclude them from the question of why are you justified before God? You talk about them later.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:29):
Yeah, because he is our workmanship created…

Dr. Fred Sanders (32:34):
We are his workmanship.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:35):
I’m sorry. We are his workmanship. Yeah. Okay. So when you talk with students and they say, “I’m really attracted to the traditions of a Roman Catholic church. I really like the music. I like the liturgy. I think the mass is really important or I just feel like I’m tapped into something deeper and more historical.” I’m sure you have this kind of conversation with students all the time and they say, “I’m thinking about converting.” Walk us through that conversation the way you have it with them.

Dr. Fred Sanders (33:11):
Yeah. Well, I teach Socratically. That means I ask a lot of questions and that’s in the classroom. But then even in office hours, even one-on-one or getting coffee with somebody about a serious spiritual matter as a pastor, I do ask a lot of questions because it kind of matters if someone says, “I just feel like in my Protestant church, there’s no depth or reverence or beauty.” Well, I don’t know their church. They might in fact be going to a really substandard church, which needs to be improved.

So I don’t want to say just, “Oh, Catholics are bad. Roll over and go back to sleep.” That might not be the appropriate intervention in that person’s life. So I got to figure out what they mean, what they know, what they’ve learned to associate their Sunday experience with. Do they think what I’m experiencing is Protestant church life?

(34:06):
To some of them, I have to say, actually, you should probably, it sounds like, visit some other kinds of churches. But if someone, say, I don’t know, Calvary Chapel or low church, broad evangelical, and they’re saying, “I’m not feeling it here. I think I’m going to try Eastern orthodoxy.”

I would say, “Is there a reason you’re skipping the 97 options in between? That’s a huge leap. Have you heard of Lutheranism? I don’t personally recommend it, but it’s a real thing. Have you ever met Presbyterians? Because they’re kind of interesting.” There are even low church traditions that are doing different sorts of things on Sunday and are catechizing differently. They use the word catechize. So there is something weird there.

And I would say if you’re feeling the need to experience a greater depth and richness to Christianity, it’s worth considering some of these other options because it’s not just that you’re skipping 90 positions in between, it’s that you’re leaving things you don’t understand yet in most cases. I’m dealing with young people here. Maybe you haven’t actually heard, you’ve heard it a million times, but you’ve never yet listened properly to the message of the authority of scripture and justification by grace alone.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:28):
So you would send them to some sources, some different confessions and counsels and so forth to really try to grapple with that.

Dr. Fred Sanders (35:36):
Yeah. And again, with young people, I always tell them you only get one church of… If you grew up in a Christian setting, you only get one home church of that kind. Now you may have to leave it, but the thing is you’re going to be a little bit rootless from then on. So even if truth compels you to leave the church where you first heard about Jesus, first began your Christian life and lived with your family and with brothers and sisters in Christ, if you have to leave it for truth reasons, that’s sad and you should consider carefully how much you have to leave it.

So again, the reason to avoid something like orthodoxy is like you’re never going to celebrate Easter with your family again. You might be forced to take views about your family’s status as Christians. So then it becomes, now it’s not just about you and your experience, but you’re actually embodying a judgment on your home church.

(36:31):
Now, I grew up Pentecostal, a foursquare church here in Southern California. Love lots of things about it, very friendly and comfortable around Pentecostals of various kinds, but I am not myself Pentecostal. When I came of age, studied the Bible for myself, made some theological judgements. I don’t mean super deep ones, I was like 16, but I’m sticking to them.

I decided, well, I don’t think I can be Pentecostal, so I’m going to leave that church of my origin and that won’t be my church anymore. Well, you only get to do that once. I’ve kind of cut myself off from that place. Now I still have a positive view of what I learned there. And it’s not a very big move and there’s lots of other complicating factors.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:21):
Yeah. Well, this is really helpful, Fred, thank you. I’ve been wanting to have a conversation like this for a long time. There are areas where Protestants and Roman Catholics on public policy issues, such as the issue of abortion, need to be working together, but that does not mean that there aren’t differences or that those differences are not meaningful. And you’ve really helped us think through that in a really powerful way. So thanks Fred for coming on the show today.

Dr. Fred Sanders (37:54):
Yeah, thanks for having me on. It’s good to talk to you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:56):
Thank you to my guest, Dr. Fred Sanders, for coming on the show today. You can learn more about Fred and his work at fredfredfred.com. This podcast is a resource of Summit Ministries and we equip and support the rising generations to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

We need to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it. We need to know the biblical and historical foundations of our faith. We have a lot of resources to help you with that. Just go to summit.org to get started. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.