One Protestant church, united?

While it may appear that the only thing Protestants agree on is that they are not Catholics, there are some shared underlying principles within Protestantism.

One thing Roman Catholic apologists love to point out is that the Protestant schism is ongoing. Protestantism split from Rome and then continued to split from itself. We now have tens of thousands of Protestant denominations. I do not think that is as significant as the Catholics suppose. Counting an unaligned house church or two as a denomination is a stretch, and quite often the differences between even bona fide denominations are slight and the interchurch relationship friendly. When you group together like minded churches that are on good terms more or less, there are fewer Protestantisms than the raw number of denominations suggests.

Still, it would be a good thing for unity if there were only one Protestantism. It would make ecumenical dialog easier with the Orthodox and the Catholics. The difficulty is that freedom to argue about all points is Protestantism's core principle, as well as the source of the many denominations of Protestant. Traditionally a divergence in thinking about secondary doctrines has been the occasion to form a new denomination, which is an unfortunate habit. It is better to take a broad church approach that encompasses differences and allows debate to proceed without divisions resulting. Is such a thing possible?

I think it is. While it may appear that the only thing Protestants agree on is that they are not Catholics, there are some shared underlying principles within Protestantism. The first of these I have already mentioned, and that is the freedom to seek fresh answers, to debate, to create divergent theologies and practices and styles of worship.

Additional similarities are a high regard for scripture and a much lesser regard for Christian tradition. (No Protestant church is really and totally sola scriptura, a matter I will take up in a future post.)  Another is that Protestants have generally clarified, to varying degrees, the ancient confusion about justification and sanctification, by seeing them as distinct though intertwined. Faith fully justifies, yet faith without works is dead. As some put it, it is useless to think you can get by on talking the talk without walking the walk.

Protestants agree on the divinity of Christ and the triune nature of God.  Most use or credit the Nicene Creed. The others acknowledge the truth of what it says; they mistrust creeds on principle but acknowledge that what this one says is based on the Bible. There are a few churches that do not hold the trinitarian view of God, but are they properly called Protestant? They are not if you view Protestantism from the historic perspective. Protestantism began as a movement to recover and safeguard the essential truths of historical Christianity. It is reasonable to say that where churches have departed from that they have abandoned the Protestant idea. (Protestantism's interminable debates are attempts to achieve a right view of the historical essentials, not a license to innovate to the point of producing a new and deviant faith.)

Most Protestants do not hold with auricular confession, though it is retained in some denominations, generally as an optional rite. In those churches that reject it outright, it is still seen as a good thing if you talk things out with your pastor if you have some kind of ongoing sin problem. Protestants in general take their personal failings very seriously and seek effective measures to combat them, but going to confession is generally not one of them, unless you consider talking to your pastor about your failings to be the same thing done informally.

It is difficult to find a Protestant who puts any stock in the ideas of purgatory and indulgences, venerates relics or says the rosary. Those matters have become extrinsic to the whole Protestant movement, a kind of negative agreement across the spectrum of Protestantism. You would need to go back five centuries to find the reasons. As matters now stand, Protestantism as a whole is opposed to religious ideas not easily placed in context of scripture.

I think that is enough agreement to unite on. What is needed is some way to stop dividing over other issues. What is needed is some kind of organization that will keep alive the spirit of debate and inquiry, while shutting out the spirit of division.  If the first rule is that we pledge that we will love one another and stay together even when we just cannot see things the same, that would be a good beginning. You're not allowed to quit because of another person's strange ideas. People manage this all the time in Christian marriage; why not in the church?

Of course Christian fellowship requires Christian faith, and demands it of all concerned. There is no way to accommodate unbelief in the community of faith. There needs to be some standard of orthodoxy, but it needn't be very strict.  I think the Nicene Creed would do, as a statement of what, minimally, you need to believe to be a Protestant.

It might also be healthy to adopt a declaration that one believes the Bible to contain all things necessary to salvation, a phrase from the Anglican tradition* and a good one. It says by implication that the faith as it was understood in the apostolic age is still saving faith today, without poking too offensively into the question of whether later doctrines are true or not. It does not slam the door on discussions with Catholics, as some other statements might.

There needs to be some kind of agreement, whether tacit or written into the bylaws, that theological debates and doctrinal stance-takings on Christianity's secondary issues are matters taken up only after church. "In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity."  If Calvinists, Arminians and Molinists (and so on and so forth) can't hug each other and serve Christ in common cause, they have missed the point of the very thing they are debating.

I hope all that would be enough agreement on which to build a united Protestant front. The hope is that it would allow Protestants their cherished freedom to debate, without giving the debates a centrality they do not deserve. I would further hope that the United Protestants would give most of their time to the teaching of the apostles, to breaking of bread, and to prayers, not to arguing over minutiae. What is needed is a church where theological debate can be open and vigorous without becoming central.

-----------
* Article Six of the Thirty-nine Articles says, in part, "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or to be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."