Phillip Cary locates the heart of Protestantism in the gospel promise it reveals.
by Jason Micheli May 18, 2020
IN REVIEW
Jun 3, 2020 issue Christian Century
The Meaning of Protestant Theology
Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Phillip Cary
Baker Academic
Weeks before Christians ac\u00adclaimed their hosannas while hunkered down in their Zoom rooms, I paid a pastoral call to a 97-year-old shut-in from my congregation. Vince was worried that \u201cwhen the virus finally gets here, I\u2019m exactly the kind of geezer who will have a bad go of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI try to have faith,\u201d he told me, sipping his Folgers. \u201cSometimes it feels like I have Jesus in my heart, but other times I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ve tried to be good, and I\u2019ve always gone to church and done for others, but I\u2019ve not been perfect.\u201d He went on in that vein for a few minutes more, somewhere between anxious and genuinely terrified by the truth that none of us is getting out of life alive.
Finally, I interrupted him: \u201cChristian\u00adity isn\u2019t about trusting what\u2019s in your heart. That wouldn\u2019t be good news. Christianity\u2019s about trusting Christ, who promises that you\u2019re forgiven and loved. Hold fast to that promise; don\u2019t look into your heart.\u201d Vince looked skeptical. I stood up, made the sign of the cross over him, and said, \u201cVince, in the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I sat back down, Vince wept. \u201cHow is it that I\u2019ve gone to church my whole life and I\u2019ve never once heard something so good?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I couldn\u2019t help but wonder: Do Protestants have a reason for being if we can\u2019t comfort souls with the gospel\u2014or, for that matter, if we aren\u2019t producing believers who can recognize it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Meaning of Protestant Theology presses this same question. In our linked and ecumenical setting, Phillip Cary writes, Protestants are more acquainted than ever with the riches of the traditions represented by Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Do Protestants likewise have a distinctive gift to offer the body of Christ? Or are we simply un\u00adadorned alternatives, different for the sake of difference? Few people these days believe that you need to be Protestant to be saved, so why be Protestant?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Cary, there\u2019s an irony to the question because the ancient liturgies of the non-Protestant traditions reliably offer what contemporary Protestant preaching so rarely gives. \u201cThe great sacramental liturgies give us Christ, not advice about how to live the Christian life. In Luther\u2019s terms, they preach the gospel not the law. They focus not on telling us what to do but on telling us what Christ does, thus directing attention away from our own works to Christ himself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cary locates the distinctive contribution of Protestant theology to the body of Christ not in its divergence from the great sacramental traditions of Cath\u00adolicism or Orthodoxy but in its correspondence to them. The gift of Prot\u00adestantism to the whole church is not its ceaseless innovation. It\u2019s in Protes\u00adtantism\u2019s application of sacramental theology to the gospel itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The promise of the gospel is\u2014as much as water, wine, and bread\u2014a means through which God gives to us nothing less than God\u2019s beloved Son. Thus the gospel functions as an auditory sacrament, enacting the very reality of the thing signified, such that to believe the gospel is to receive Christ himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason to be Protestant in the 21st century is no different than it was in the 16th century. Protestantism, argues Cary, offers \u201ca piety of the word of God that clings to the gospel alone as the way God gives us his Son.\u201d The gospel promise, for Protestantism, conveys Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Protestantism emerged it represented \u201can intensification of faith in the sacrament.\u201d In the words \u201cthis is my body broken for you,\u201d God invades the present moment and calls into existence, as Paul says, the things that do not exist. Particular doctrines, such as justification by faith alone or sola scriptura, are not merely parts of the Protestant message. They\u2019re means of understanding the gospel as the promise that gives us Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What sets this book apart is the way Cary shows how Luther\u2019s grace-centered gospel produces the very thing many critics assume it fails to provide: changed and transformed Christians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Preachers and church leaders who turn to exhortation, moralism, and practical lessons do so for understandable reasons. Their desire to see transformed lives and communities is Christ\u2019s own desire. But what Robert Capon called the \u201cgrim pills of religion\u201d are not the medicine that can heal us, Cary contends. We\u2019re not transformed by being told we ought to straighten up and fly right. We\u2019re not even transformed by time-tested, doctor-approved wisdom about how we can transform our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The words of the gospel, the promise that gives us Christ, make us new from the inside out, Cary argues. Christ enters our hearts through our ears. To make his case, Cary explicates how Luther turned to Aristotle\u2019s theory of perception to show how the mind gradually takes on the form of the external thing it perceives. Faith makes us truly and inwardly righteous, Cary insists, \u201cbecause by faith our hearts take on the form of Christ himself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We become more compassionate not through the practice of serving the poor but by hearing again and again how Christ became poor and emptied himself for us, his enemy. Learning the message of done for you is what equips and emboldens us to go and do likewise with gladness. The gospel alone can produce what the law commands. It does so by working on us like a favorite song, Cary explains. \u201cWhen Christ the Beloved gives himself to us in the gospel, he gets into our hearts through our ears, like music, reshaping everything and remaking us from the bottom up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The words I spoke to Vince that day were nothing more than the gospel that had gotten into my heart and reshaped me from the bottom up. This is how the church works. In a world of suffering, God has created a community of care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the present moment, we cannot visit the sick or accompany the dead to their graves with songs of alleluia. We cannot gather to praise or receive Christ in bread and wine. In this time of fear, Cary does more than remind us of the God whose promise is so important to our identity as Protestants. The Meaning of Protestant Theology provides the balm that God is no farther from us than God\u2019s promise on our ear. And that is a form of care the church can offer even when it\u2019s hunkered down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jason Micheli
@jasonmicheli
Jason Micheli is a pastor at Annandale United Methodist Church in Annandale, Virginia, and the author of Cancer Is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo and Living in Sin: Making Marriage Work between I Do and Death (both from Fortress). He blogs at Tamed Cynic, part of the CCblogs network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ Kindle Edition<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Years ago, Phillip Cary began to suspect that Augustine’s inward turn was a false step, that what we sinners need is what Luther said we need–a grace that comes to us from outside of us. Here is the fruit of that suspicion, a fully realized account of the meaning of Protestant theology (and spirituality) centered on the Gospel as a sacramental word that gives us Christ. Cary’s account of Protestantism is theological rather than merely sociological; polemical yet ecumenical; and, again and again, surprising. I know of nothing quite like it.” He says something similar in the Great Courses course on Philosophy and Religion in the West and\/or his course on Augustine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Phillip Cary locates the heart of Protestantism in the gospel promise it reveals.by Jason Micheli May 18, 2020IN REVIEWJun 3, 2020 issue Christian CenturyThe Meaning of Protestant TheologyLuther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us<\/p>\n
—Matt Jenson<\/strong>, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University –This text refers to the\u00a0hardcover<\/a>\u00a0edition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n