Why I Am Protestant

Why I Am Protestant (Ecumenical Dialogue Series), Beth Felker Jones. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514003008) 2025.

Summary: A Protestant theologian addresses the strengths, weaknesses, and contributions of Protestantism.

The Protestant tradition has fostered an emphasis on scripture that has but the Bible in the hands of every believer. Likewise, the focus on God’s grace in our salvation has brought great joy and freedom to many. But it seems that once Protestants broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, they have kept breaking into hundreds of different bodies. Likewise, putting the Bible into the hands of individual believers, while contributing to devotion, has also led to a welter of conflicting readings of scripture. The unity of the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrinal authority have been attractive to many frustrated with the divisions and interpretive chaos the perceive in Protestantism. Why, then, would anyone choose to be Protestant?

Beth Felker Jones was both raised in the Protestant tradition and teaches in a Protestant seminary. She makes a case that affirms Protestant strengths, acknowledges and addresses weaknesses, and does so in an irenic spirit that acknowledges solidarity with Christians in other traditions and the unity of the whole church under Christ.

Jones begins with by describing why she is a Christian. Surprisingly, she is unapologetic of growing up in a Christian home. She sees this as the grace of God (a theme that recurs throughout this book). She narrates the unfolding call of God, complemented by a growing appreciation of the beauty of our shared Christian faith, expressed in the creeds. Above all, she is a Christian because she has believed the good news of the gospel of Christ’s death for sin and resurrection to, and for, life everlasting.

Only then does she address why she is a Protestant Christian. Paradoxically, she claims she is Protestant as a way to embrace the true unity and catholicity of the church. She understands this catholicity as a gift from God through Word and sacrament. The focus on semper reformanda emphasizes the Protestant love for and humble approach toward orthodoxy. Emphasis on the solas emphasizes our salvation as sheer gift of God, not dependent on works, church, priests, or sacraments.

Jones goes on to describe how her Protestantism helps her in her Christian life. Belief in both God’s goodness and human sinfulness helps her understand brokenness both in the church and the world. The scriptures foster her intimacy and knowledge of God. Most of all, Protestant ecclesiology has been vital in her life. She writes:

“If God can and does work in corrupt places, who are we to limit the church to our own institutions and borders? If every historical church is riddled with sin, who are we to claim the rightness of our own churches? But if church is grace, then Protestant churches are church. More, they are church with the very important mission of promulgating the good news that church is powered by God and not by us. The church is the church by grace and not by institutional structures” (p. 51).

She believes this ecclesiology of grace is a crucial contribution that enables the church to face its own brokenness.

But grace doesn’t mean glossing over difficulties. Jones addresses individualism and fragmentation. While problematic, she observes that individualism and fragmentation are the fruits of modernity, and not confined to the Protestant tradition. However, this also allows for faith by consent rather than enforced by authority. She also proposes that interpretive complexity nevertheless acknowledges a center. Also, diversity of interpretation at the edges may offer a flexibility in mission. Indeed, the very fact of scripture in two languages assumes translatability, with the inherent differences that come with this. Jones believes all this calls us not into institutional order but deeper dependence on God.

I particularly appreciated her discussion of Protestantism’s strengths. She began with the idea of home–that our histories matter. Like Jones, I come from generations of Protestants–Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anabaptist. Then she focuses the remainder of this chapter on the riches of a theology of grace. This particularly evident in clarity in understanding of justification and its distinction from sanctification. She then turns to our hope for unity amid diversity–one font and one table. She carries this hope through in treating passages of scripture distinctively appealed to by Protestants.

My only critique in all this is I would have liked her to address what is particularly “broken” in our divisions and our interpretive pluralism and how we remediate these. That said, I thought her discussion of the greatest contribution of Protestants being our ecclesiology of grace a new idea. All told, Jones offers a strongly affirmative account of Protestants without arrogance or polemics. She models how one may be unapologetically Protestant while embracing believers of other traditions as part of one church. And it seems to me that this is how we might best approach the idea of ecumenicity that is the aim of this Ecumenical Dialogue Series.

You might also appreciate my review of the previously published Why I Am A Roman Catholic, by Matthew Levering.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.