Why Beth Felker Jones Is Protestant

This is a book review; it is a book review about how this is not the book for me, but it may be the book for you.

Dr. Beth Felker Jones, who is both a grad school colleague of mine (we both got our Ph.Ds at Duke) and one of my favorite living theologians, was asked by IVP to write this book along with Dr. Matthew Levering’s companion book called Why I Am a Catholic. (You can see, and obtain, both books here.) Beth invited me and my husband to be part of her launch team; my husband Edwin was also a grad school colleague of Beth’s and of Matthew’s, making Edwin at least twice as famous as me, I think. (Edwin even gets name-checked in Beth’s acknowledgements). Edwin was Protestant then, twenty years ago, but is Roman Catholic now.

On paper, Beth and I look like we would be in almost-exact agreement; United Methodist upbringing, similar doctoral education, similar experience with the feelings caused by losing family members to Catholicism (for her, it was her parents), similar commitment to the idea that any ecclesiology which does not consider Protestantism a fully legitimate branch of the church is a faulty ecclesiology. Plus, she’s an amazingly gifted writer given to memorable perorations about the beauties of the orthodox Christian faith (small o). And we are both very, very Protestant. (Trust me, there is nothing that will make clearer all the ways in which you are Protestant than being married to a Catholic.) Which is why I am wrestling with the fact that I am wrestling with the book.

Part of my differences with the book come, I think, from the fact that Beth and I have very different dialogue partners. I don’t talk to that many Roman Catholics – I didn’t even talk to that many Roman Catholics when I was at Duke, where it was apparently the Thing to Do to study theology and become Catholic – and most of the ones I do talk to, including my own husband, have a generous and open-minded Catholicism. I know there’s a whole sea of alt-right traditionalist Catholicism out there, and I also know that Beth lives and works among evangelicals whom she wants to save from that fate. So I think some of the language that strikes me as alarmist is, for her audience, warranted:

Roman Catholic theology does not take Augustine’s ecclesiology of grace as far as it needs to go. While acknowledging God’s work outside Roman Catholicism, said Catholicism also teaches that the Roman Catholic Church is without sin. I find Roman Catholic belief in the sinlessness of the church untenable in the face of reality. Roman Catholic ecclesiology stakes a great deal on institutional structures, including on the priority of the pope, the reliability of church tradition, and the church as a mediator of grace. Augustine’s theology of grace has taught me these things must be called ”works.” Such an institutional version of purity cannot account for the diversity of the work of God among the church bodies of the world (p. 39).

Beth and I are obviously talking to very different Catholics, because the ones I know would nuance this description in all kinds of ways, and they would also believe all the things which she calls out as particularly characteristic of Protestantism:

I’m a Protestant because the church is broken, and it should be inherent to Protestantism that we should not evade full acknowledgment of that brokenness. In the rest of this chapter, I explore the ways Protestant thought helps me be a Christian in a devastated church. First, Protestantism claims the promise of God that we may know God, despite the brokenness of the church. Second, Protestantism encourages an intimacy with and trust in Scripture as the revelation of God and insists that the church of Protestant faith lives by the God of the Word, not by the church’s institutions. Finally, Protestantism takes seriously the anti-Donatist theology of the church advanced by Augustine of Hippo, a theology that reminds us that church is church because of God and not because of us. These three things let me live in the mess and difficulty of a church that is not (yet) what God intends it to be (p. 51).

Much of the rest of the book consists of Beth working out these arguments – particularly through the use of arguments from Augustine and the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century. Here is where I also find myself parting company with her in places. I won’t directly address Augustine – Beth is one of the great twenty-first century interpreters of Augustine and has even been able to interpret him to teenagers – but we meet on more equal ground with the sixteenth-century Reformation; neither of us specialized in it and both of us have picked up a lot of what we know about it by osmosis.

My osmosis is being a scholar of the Methodist movement and living with a Roman Catholic scholar of the sixteenth century, and Beth’s osmosis is teaching at a generously Reformed evangelical college and an ecumenically Reformed evangelical seminary. I think she is answering a lot of questions I’m not asking, and asking a lot of questions I just never felt the need to answer. This is also why I didn’t some years ago, as referred to in the blog post above, sign the “Reforming Catholic Confession.” Beth did, as well as many other people I respect; but I want to rest my Protestant ground, not in the sixteenth century, but in the eighteenth. I am always going to read Luther and his solas through Wesley and his ecclesiolae in ecclesia.

Now, Wesley was not a mainline 20th-century Methodist, but a good Anglican in a time when this was much less about smells and bells and much more about claiming the centrality of God’s ultimately sovereign grace. (Yes, good Anglicans today can do both those things. That is a whole other post.) He believed in faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, Scripture alone, and all of this to the glory of God alone. But he rooted those beliefs in a communal, institutional, accountable authority structure.

Did that structure recognize human brokenness? Bumpily, but it got there. Did it encourage an intimacy with Scripture? In spades. Did it remind us that God is God and we are not? Absolutely. But, did it also look to tradition as a ground of faith and a guide to interpretation of the Scriptures? You betcha. Did it have a somewhat authoritarian ruling structure? Somewhat unfortunately, yes. (Wesley wasn’t kidding, although he was specifically referring to his ability to ordain, when he said he had become convinced he was “a scriptural episkopos as much as many men in England.” Man liked being in charge.) Did Methodism believe that we get real grace when we show up to the Communion table? Also yes – and from reading Scripture, fasting, meeting with other believers, prayer, and doing merciful acts. Augustine may have taught us to call those “works,” but Wesley taught me that faith without works is dead. I can’t drink my solas straight. I have to put them inside the institutional church to get them out at all.

In Beth’s defense, she recognizes that the desire to strike out on one’s own exegetically and ecclesiologically in self-destructive ways is a bug, not a feature, of Protestantism, writing “No Christian faith, Protestant or otherwise, can opt for the individual over the communal and continue to dwell within the story of Scripture. . .No Christian faith, Protestant or otherwise, can be complacent about fragmentation and continue to dwell within the story of Scripture, wherein the unity of the people of God is both an assumption and a plea” (p. 75, 77). Yet even the idea of a “Protestant faith” here is doing, I think, a bit more work than it should – because there isn’t a Protestant faith and there isn’t a Protestant church. There are thousands of Protestant churches, each with their own relationship to those Protestant Reformation distinctives at the heart of this book (witness my own experience with Methodism), and no real way to put the baby back into the sixteenth-century theological bath water.

With Beth, I affirm that the unity of the people of God cannot and should not be constrained to inside the visible boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church. Against (beyond? behind? around?) her, I affirm that the unity of the people of God must in some way subsist in institutions – whether cooperating, merged, or fractiously mudslinging at each other – if it is to subsist at all. There is no invisible church. There are visible churches. Jesus founded all of us. We – Catholics, Orthodox, and all the flavors of Protestants – need to figure out how to be the visible church, visibly. (I am reminded of a quote that I used to have on my office door years ago that was purportedly said after Vatican II, though I have never been able to track down the source: “We have to start from where we are, not where we were. We’re not there any more.”)

You might, after reading all this, charitably wonder why I am a Protestant. The answer is simple: I am called to the gospel ministry and I am of the female gender. The Reformers didn’t mean to create female pastors, they meant to create pastor’s wives. But they accidentally created a space where being a woman called to the ordained ministry is possible. Wesley didn’t really mean to create this space either, but as the consummate pragmatist he ended up helping the project along because he saw that souls were also saved when women preached.

Ultimately, I find Roman Catholic ecclesiology faulty not because it is institutional and not because it presents us with authority structures and not because it describes certain places where you are guaranteed to find grace (while of course leaving open, as Wesley did – and as a lot of Catholics really, truly also actually do – the possibility that grace will pop up all over the place where you weren’t looking), but because it ignores the fact that the Holy Spirit gifted the entire human race for ministry, not half of it. You can throw arguments about ten male disciples at me all day, and I’ll go all the way back to Genesis 1:26-31. (See blog post below.)

But anyway, you should read the book.