This is a transcript of the video, Gavin Ortlund vs. Catholic Unity: Are Denominations Biblical? [Catholic Bible Highlights, 54 minutes, 10-23-25], minus the discussion portion.
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Dr. Gavin Ortlund, a Reformed Baptist apologist, runs the very popular YouTube channel Truth Unites (143,000 subscribers and 551 videos). Today we’re responding to the central claims made in his video, “Which Denomination Should You Choose?” (3-17-23). I will highlight a lot of related data from the New Testament and wonder out loud how Protestants interpret and apply them. What is the biblical doctrine of the Church? We need to have this important dialogue with our Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ, because the Bible views it as of the utmost importance.
Gavin’s opening statement is the following:
One of the questions I get very frequently is, “suppose I’m convinced of Protestantism; which particular denomination should I choose and how do I know in which particular local church?”
If we seek biblical truth, we want all of it that we can get, but since Protestant denominations contradict each other in literally hundreds of ways, it necessarily follows that someone is wrong in those instances and that these different groups of Protestants represent different degrees of biblical truth. Protestantism isn’t one unified whole, but rather, an amalgam of contradictory systems, that have no way of unifying, because of how they have defined authority and the seeking of biblical truth.
Of course, there is a great deal of common ground among Protestants, too, but what they have in common tends to be also what Protestants have in common with Catholics and Orthodox: things that all Christians agree with. The fact remains that they still massively contradict one another. I submit that this is not a desirable state of affairs; nor is it biblical.
Gavin continues, 24 seconds into his video:
[The] first [thing] is to realize that the stakes are not as high in choosing between two Protestant traditions, because the Protestant traditions recognize [that] the church does not begin and end with them. We’re not saying we’re the one true church, so if you make the wrong decision, . . . let’s say you become Anglican and you should have been Presbyterian, or you become Presbyterian and you should have been Methodist or something like this, the difference will not be that you’re not in the one true Church.
This brings us right to the heart of the matter. The problem with this is that the Bible doesn’t ever claim that all this error can be present among Christians, and that it’s fine and dandy and of no concern at all. The phrase, “the truth” appears in the New Testament 70 times. It’s presupposing that “the truth” is out there and can be identified. It never asserts that everyone must somehow grasp after the highest degree of truth they can find (in their subjective, fallible judgment) in one given Protestant assembly among several hundred.
St. Paul refers to “one faith” (Eph 4:5, RSV). Jesus prayed three times during the Last Supper that Christians “may be one” (Jn 17:11, 21-22). And what did He mean by that? Would it include massive doctrinal disagreements, as we find in Protestantism? It seems not, since Jesus defines this oneness as being “one, even as we are one” (Jn 17:11, 22) and “one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee” (Jn 17:21) and “perfectly one” (Jn 17:23). This is the oneness and unity between God the Father and God the Son. Do they ever disagree with each other? No; never.
It seems to me that Gavin and Protestantism as a whole deny that doctrinal and moral unity is supremely important. They have given up on seeking it. I vigorously submit that the New Testament assumes or presupposes “the one true Church” as a discernible, objective fact. Protestants today almost always assume that the search for the one Church is impossible; it can’t be found. This matter is so unimportant to them that Gavin flat-out states, “We’re not saying we’re the one true church”. This is what I have called in my writings, “The Protestant ‘Non-Quest’ for Certainty”.
This isn’t, by the way, how the first Protestants expressed things. Luther and Calvin and other early leaders in the Protestant Revolt believed in “the one Church.” But as they continued to endlessly split into endless competing groups as time went on, and moved further away from “classic Reformation Protestantism,” as it is called, most of them forgot about that and stopped taking about it.
Gavin’s statement is a classic example. According to him, in effect, whatever Protestant group you end up with ain’t the “one true church” anyway, so don’t sweat it! The stakes are low, rather than very high. Subjective opinion or even comfort seems to be more important than truth itself. They would never put it that way, but I think that’s what it inevitably comes down to, once one seriously reflects upon what a sort of “agnostic” claim like this implies.
The New Testament takes a very different view. If we look up the phrase “the church” we find that it occurs 91 times. Most of these refer to a local congregation; we also find the term, “churches” (e.g., Acts 15:41; Rom 16:4 and 33 other times). But in 21 passages, it refers to the one true Church (Mt 16:18; Acts 5:11; 20:28; 1 Cor 10:32; 11:22; 12:28; 15:9; Eph1:22-23; 3:10, 21; 5:23-25, 27, 29, 32; Phil 3:6; Col 1:18, 24; 1 Tim 3:15).
In other words, again, the “one faith” referred to in Ephesians 4:5 is assumed in the New Testament to be a unified body of doctrine or “apostolic deposit” that can be identified. The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, accordingly, made a decree, led by St. Peter and St. James, and by the Holy Spirit (hence, infallible), that applied to the entire Church (very much like later ecumenical councils). Hence, the Apostle Paul in Acts 16:4 proclaimed the decree as binding to local churches all through Asia Minor (present-day Turkey).
Why, then, would anyone want to join one mere denomination, which is not even claiming to be the one true Church that Jesus Himself set up (that’s in Matthew 16:18)? And how can this one true Church be described by Paul as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15) if all it is, is a self-contradictory confusing mess of hundreds of individual denominations? When two denominations contradict on some point of theology, both can’t be right. At least one is necessarily wrong, and both may be wrong. Error and falsehood is present, in any event, and that can’t possibly be good, according to the Bible. It’s the devil, after all, whom Jesus described as “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).
We Catholics contend, following the Bible’s clear and repeated teaching, that there is one Church only, with one truth and one unified apostolic tradition. We must then determine how to find it in today’s world, and that’s a separate argument from history, that I make in many articles and books. The Bible repeatedly forbids divisions of any kind among Christians.
Our Lord Jesus viewed His Church as being “one flock” (Jn. 10:16). St. Luke described the earliest Christians as being “of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32). Luke 2:42 casually refers to “the apostles’ teaching” without any hint that there were competing interpretations of it. St. Peter warned about “false teachers” among Christians, who would “secretly bring in destructive heresies,” which go against “the way of truth” (2 Pet. 2:1-2).
St. Paul, above all, repeatedly condemns “dissensions” (Rom 16:17), “quarreling” (1 Cor 1:11), “jealousy and strife” (1 Cor 3:3), “divisions” and “factions” (1 Cor 11:18-19), “discord” (1 Cor 12:25), “enmity” and “party spirit” (Gal 5:20), and calls for Christians to be “united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10; cf. Phil 2:2).
Paul condemns party affiliations associated with persons and asks, “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor 1:13; cf. 3:4-7) and regards Christian tradition as of one piece; not an amalgam of permissible competing theories: “the tradition that you received from us” (2 Thess 3:6); “the truth which has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit” (2 Tim 1:14); “the doctrine which you have been taught” (Rom 16:17); “being in full accord and of one mind” (Phil 2:2); “stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Phil 1:27).
He, like Jesus, ties doctrinal unity together with the one God: “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, . . .” (Eph 4:3-5). His strong and certain teaching on this topic is well summed up in the following two passages:
1 Timothy 6:3-5 If any one teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
Titus 3:9-11 But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels over the law, for they are unprofitable and futile. As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned.
What does a Protestant do with all of this biblical data? We’ll, they reply — I used to argue this myself in my Protestant days –, that they have a broad doctrinal unity on the most important doctrines (this is true, for the most part), but allow differences on what they call “secondary doctrines”. But that concept cannot be found in the New Testament.
In Matthew 28:19, Jesus urged us to “observe all” that He commanded us. He didn’t separate that into two groups, with one being open to all sorts of disagreements. I collected in one of my books, Bible Proofs for Catholic Truths, 295 Bible passages about the biblical categories of “the faith” and “the truth” and “the doctrine” and “teaching” and “the message”. These are all presented as synonymous.
Well-known Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) wrote:
Denominationalism thus represents the moral failure of Christianity. And unless the ethics of brotherhood can gain the victory over this divisiveness within the body of Christ it is useless to expect it to be victorious in the world. But before the church can hope to overcome its fatal division it must learn to recognize and to acknowledge the secular character of its denominationalism. (The Social Sources of Denominationalism, New York: The World Publishing Co. / Meridian Books, 1957; originally 1929, 25)
This is arguably far more critical than anything we have said above. Protestants have to grapple with this matter of sectarianism: a thing extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to defend from biblical teaching. I freely admitted this when I was a Protestant, too, by the way. I thought it was scandalous and that it made evangelism very difficult to undertake, seeing that Christians disagreed about so much.
I didn’t have a definitive “answer” to that (other than that sin brought about seemingly unsolvable division). How I resolved the difficulty in the long run was to accept that the Catholic point of view made a lot more biblical and historical sense: that it tied everything together in a way that no form of Protestantism could or ever would.
Related Books
Bible Proofs for Catholic Truths (Aug. 2009, 445 pages)
Protestantism: Critical Reflections of an Ecumenical Catholic (May 2003, 188 pages)
Related Web Page
Calvinism & General Protestantism: Catholic Critique
Sections:
Protestantism (General)
XIV. THE PROTESTANT “QUEST FOR UNCERTAINTY” / THE SO-CALLED CATHOLIC “PROBLEM” OF THE “INFALLIBILITY REGRESS”
XV. PROTESTANTISM: LOGICALLY SELF-DEFEATING / REDUCTION TO SELF-CONTRADICTION
XVI. DENOMINATIONALISM AND SECTARIANISM
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