What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church, by Gavin Ortlund, Zondervan, 2024, xxiii + 262 pages, $22.99, paper.

Increasing numbers of Protestants are becoming disillusioned with their tradition, or perceived lack of tradition. In uncertain times, in which people recognize how powerfully cultural traditions influence beliefs, threatening the concept of truth itself, the apparently fractured landscape of Protestantism makes many nervous. Can Protestant principles counterbalance such pervasive instability? For many people, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are attractive alternatives, cutting the Gordian knot of uncertainty by offering some form of supposedly infallible tradition. Complicating matters—though apologists for Rome and the East abound, via YouTube and other online venues—Protestants have not kept pace, leaving church members and leaders without adequate resources to encourage them to stay the course (xi). Moreover, many people grow weary of Protestant caricatures of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, resulting in a magnetic pull toward what appears to be rich traditions over against apparently impoverished ones.

What it Means to Be Protestant reminds readers that, in many cases, what people are rejecting is not historic Protestantism, but a hollowed-out form of it detached from its historically core convictions. Ortlund’s book offers a winsome, non-combative apology for Protestantism that seeks simultaneously to listen to and learn from Western and Eastern traditions and to promote Protestant convictions. While losing some of its force by not viewing Protestantism within definable confessional boundaries, this book is a well-executed and much-needed resource for churches facing a growing exodus of members either to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

Sola scriptura and sola fidei are guiding principles in Ortlund’s defense of Protestantism (xviii, 3). While the other three solas are vital, these two illustrate best why Protestantism renews the gospel in the church, restores a biblical view of Scripture’s authority, and removes “historical accretions” to the biblical tradition (xx). Filtering his material through these lenses, he organizes his chapters under three headings: Protestantism and Catholicity, Authority, and History. Chapters one through four argue ultimately that Protestantism alone affirms a broad biblical catholicity, in which the church exists “within multiple institutions” (22), offering “the most promising pathways by which to cultivate and pursue catholicity” (37). Promoting a “mere Christianity” in the vein of C. S. Lewis (xx), he shows how Protestant principles (following Philip Schaff) allow believers to see the good in pre-Reformation and other traditions (5–7), to acknowledge its own eccentricities and errors (7–10), to promote continual reformation according to Scripture (10–11), and to treat sola fidei as the “what” of the reformation and sola scriptura as the “how” (11–14). Faith alone is thus the object of reform and Scripture alone the method, making the former like “a precious jewel” and the latter “the safe that protects it” (11). Though not yet moving directly towards sola scriptura, chapter three indicates that differing principles of authority undergirded widespread Roman Catholic persecution of Protestants, and that Protestants and other traditions mean different things by faith and repentance. Within chapter four, Ortlund defends what he means by justification through faith alone in Christ alone (60–64), illustrating well what is at stake in losing Protestant principles.

Chapters five through eight (part two) tackle sola scriptura more directly, showing what the doctrine means and does not mean, and giving two case studies via the papacy and apostolic succession. Treating the papacy illustrates that while Ortlund has both Roman Catholicism and Eastern orthodoxy in view as dialogue partners, the weight of his arguments often lean more heavily towards Roman Catholicism. Readers wanting a robust engagement with the Eastern church will find loads of good material here, but will likely need to supplement their studies elsewhere to some extent. However, his robust appeal both to Scripture and the church fathers in chapters five and six encompass problems both with East and West, which sets the stage well for his treatment of apostolic succession in chapter eight. Both Eastern Orthodox and Protestants agree that the Papacy rests on shaky biblical and historical foundations, and that demanding recognition of the papacy “hinders progress towards a true unity—which must be centered on Christ himself” (116).

Consisting of three final chapters, followed by a brief conclusion, part three offers Ortlund’s most forceful and persuasive critique of both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox views of a magisterial tradition. He opens this section with the famous statement of Roman Catholic John Henry Newman, who wrote, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” (135). However, by examining Protestant views of Christian tradition, Ortlund shows well why “retrieval” theology was embedded within historic Protestantism, creating twin concerns of being both biblically and historically grounded. Though he does not use the phrase, post-Reformation Protestants liked to assert that church tradition was ministerial and declarative rather than magisterial and legislative. What modern Protestants, let alone Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, often fail to recognize is that traditional Christian teaching, especially the creedal tradition, held authority in Protestant churches, though as a teacher rather than as a tyrant (101). To add my own illustration, one goes to math class, not because the teacher serves as an infallible answer key, but because, presumably, the teacher knows more than the student and can teach him or her how to do math. Denying the infallibility of the church does not mean that the Holy Spirit does not guide tradition through the Word; it means that even the best teachers can make mistakes in calculation and that Word and Spirit serve as the corrective.

Ortlund’s two case studies on the assumption of Mary and the veneration of icons (chapters ten and eleven) prove devastating, both to Rome and to the East. Ortlund shows clearly the ignorance of the early church about Mary’s alleged bodily assumption into heaven, and that venerating icons marked a complete one-eighty from the church fathers, rather than a doctrinal refinement. He thus justifies his revision of Newman’s assertion when he says, “Honestly, to be truly in history, is, before anything else, to cease making simplistic appeals to history” (158). By the close of the book, Ortlund makes a compelling case that it is actually Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy who stand on shaky ground in relation to faith, Scripture, and history.

Ortlund’s engagements with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are well-informed, fair, and charitable. To invert the order of Schaff’s four points, he argues well that Protestantism is viable (both biblically and historically), and that though Protestantism is flexible due to its built-in mechanisms of self-reform (sometimes resulting in eccentric diversity), Protestants can maintain the catholicity of the church (more broadly and effectively than the other two traditions can), locating it wherever the true Trinitarian and incarnational gospel is proclaimed. Though lacking a clear stance in any historical Protestant confessional tradition weakens his case a bit, this book is precisely the remedy that many modern Protestants need and are looking for, considering the growing attraction towards Roman Catholic and Eastern alternatives.

Ryan M. McGraw is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church serving as a professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina. Ordained Servant Online, August–September, 2025.