Why I am a Protestant

a few notes on certainty

Here is another occasional piece, using Lindbeck to interpret some common strains in current religious culture. Do know that I wrote this with great care and intend it with kindness. Because this topic is so personal and affects so many of my readers, I am going to do something a little different. If you would like to write a response to this essay (300-400 words), please email it to me. I will be publishing the most thoughtful comments and responses in the weeks to come.
-KhS

So many factors in American life push against cohesion; we rush from home to work to school pick up to youth sports, the only constant being in a hurry. Or we hear of yet another friend’s divorce or “recoupling” and are told to track happiness as the constant and not the people or promises involved. We move from church to church seeking “better community” or more “vibrant” music, hoping for the same kind of dopamine we get from the devices we use to “check-in” when we arrive. There is no center so of course it cannot hold. It is no surprise that in such a world we seek something cohesive, a common story or structure to orient ourselves around. We are a chaotic people desperate for a center.

American Protestantism has long found its “center” in certainty. Though we are thin on order- if by order you mean a single, centralized authority- Protestants have long been told that the Truth can be found in the Word of God. There are multiple authorities alongside- tradition (lite), the local church, and teachers or authors among them. But if what you want in your search for certainty is- Tell me what is true, absolutely and finally, begging no questions- you may be disappointed by Protestantism.

Certainty asks how do we know what’s true? and who is telling us that it is true? It seeks not only the answers but the citation- tell me what is true, and tell me who says so.

Evangelical Protestants have long suffered from a crisis of authority- and so a crisis of certainty- and much of this is of our own making. By training our people to ask “who says so?” and “how can we know?” we have generated questions we cannot answer.

Certainty is not at all a bad thing to want; as is usually the case, it all comes down to what role it plays, and how desperate the wanting. But Protestant ecclesiology renders moot the instinct that it might be the church itself that provides it.

In Lindbeck’s definition of “cognitive propositional religion”, he speaks of a form of religious practice that assumes that theology functions similarly to philosophy, with a set of realities “out there” that can be grasped at through reasoned reflection. For a cognitive-propositionalist, “if a doctrine is once true, It is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false” (16). The truth of the doctrine is thought to rely in how reliable and certain it is. Doctrines must be known to the mind and known in the same way, by all people at all times.

One of the many places I see this cognitive-propositionalist view is in the consistent line of evangelicals who swim the Tiber (or the Bosphorus). Many make the swim hoping for a Tradition (capital “T”) that will deliver unassailable certainty, and with it, a nurturing faith. They long for this because without it their experience of God feels fragile, partial, and too touched by human hands. Put another way, they need the certainty in order to experience the nurture.

A recent online example is

Tsh Oxenreider

, who in a recent essay reflected on her personal journey to the Catholic Church. Tsh self-describes her spiritual journey as one of persistent seeking and dissatisfaction. She she was glad for a pandemic-era “break” from church. She had been jumping around from church to church looking for the One True Church, feeling frustrated with the way evangelicalism was so thin on tradition and certainty. She is somewhat self-aware about the ways her restless seeking are both a feature and a bug of evangelicalism. The idea that you might choose, for yourself, which religious tradition is true causes her no amount of anxiety- what if she has chosen wrong? What if there is a better choice to be made?

The great appeal of Catholicism, Tsh writes, is that she “doesn’t need to be her own pope”. Indeed, the Catholic church tells her exactly what to believe and how to behave- she now must go to church, even when she doesn’t want to! She has a catechism, which gives her the answers to all of her questions.

I think what Tsh means by “I don’t need to be my own pope” is that she does not need to ascertain for herself what is true about God and the church. But this, in fact, is exactly what she has done in deciding to be Catholic. Some converts deem the Protestant narrative weak at points and so seek out Protestantism’s more burly older cousin. Conversion to Rome by this account becomes a nearly natural outcome of the way many Protestants are spiritually formed. If you deeply desire certainty, you will not find it on this side of the Tiber.

To be clear, becoming Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox is a deeply personal journey. It is difficult to write about Tsh’s piece because her conversion is framed as such, as a personal journey that has led her to the One True Church. But framing her account this way leaves claims of objectivity veiled in her first person account. For this reason, any discussion of her journey will come off as “too personal” or “mean-spirited”, in a way they are certainly not intended. I am writing about Tsh’s account because it correlates so closely with my own inquiries about American religion. (Also because a reader sent it to me and asked for my thoughts!) But I do not intend to suggest that her conversion, or any such conversion, is invalid or suspect. I am simply hoping to peel back a layer on the intellectual questions that Protestantism generates and cannot, by nature of its ecclesiology, ever satisfactorily answer.

I hear many conversion accounts, both in person and online. In finding the One True Church, some have satisfied a lifelong dissatisfaction with the local church by replacing churches, like Russian nesting dolls, with succeeding versions that are increasingly doctrinaire. By this account, even as they seek to submit to Rome, individuals can desire a customized, personalized option that would recognize the special gifts that they brought to the Church in their conversion. In the opposite direction, some convert after experiencing churches that are increasingly fluid and bespoke- moving farther and farther from tradition- and only realize after a time that there is no center that can hold. But in both cases it is a desire for a Church that meets our perceived needs that orders our spiritual lives that is the impetus for conversion.

None of this is intended to be unkind, and conversions should be treated delicately. But-!!- conversions to Rome and Orthodoxy are continuing apace among evangelical Protestants. The desire for certainty, for a catechism, for guidance about how to live, and for the insistence that you must be in church- all of these things are offered by Protestant churches! They are just, for whatever reason, deemed too fundamentalist by some evangelicals. If you want this form of guardrails, you have to either be despicably rigid, as a Protestant, or become a Catholic.

And it is this that concerns me the most. Protestants have most of what Tsh desires- a catechism that “says a lot about the particulars about how I should live”, the Bible as a foundation, and “you and Jesus” at the end of your life. What we do not have is a teaching about historical succession from Peter on which to rest the certainty of our teachings. Protestants must instead rest with the untidiness of [gestures wildly] “all of this” while trusting that God can make a church out of our failures— just as He did with Peter.

For the convert’s dream of a Church that is universally valid, they’d have to lose the personal history of the churches that nurtured them up to this point. “One can simply migrate to a new denomination or local church if your beliefs (or your local church’s beliefs) ever change”, Tsh writes, as a criticism of Protestantism. But this is exactly what many do in their own conversions. Perhaps they have found the One True Church, but as a Protestant, and a committed-to-stay- one, I think the framing is misleading. The idea that there is a Church whose beliefs are unchanging (or claimed to be) is not a counter to Protestants who have a more fluid view of church forms. It is a theological reading of history, but remains at the end one version of events. Perhaps it was in fact the weak and measly Protestant church basements, the out of tune guitars, and the church cookbooks that set in your heart the knowledge that none of this is about you.¹

Indeed, with the search for One True Church, one of the itches that is scratched is a need for certainty- which may not be what religion is about anyway. One of the hardest and most fruitful wrestlings with Lindbeck is this question of certainty- for why wouldn’t we want to say that something is true?

The chief reason I stay a Protestant is not because I think Protestants are “better” and not because I think Protestantism is “truer”. It is, in part, because I think certainty is the wrong question.

I have been caught up in the wide moving river that we call grace. In it we see God’s acts with Israel, God’s guiding her through the wilderness and his presence in Christ, the ram in the thicket who provided for all Israel the burnt offering. Like Isaac, we do not know why God works in this way. Much of what I know of God’s acts may be silence. But what we do see is God making a people for himself.

He does this not by convincing us of what is true but by showing himself faithful. Indeed we will be known as Christ-followers only as we submit to this move of God, whether or not we understand how it holds together.

I do not think church is something we choose. It is, in our baptism, chosen for us. In grace God moves first, and the “yes” of our response is not to a pure doctrine or a truer history, but to a God who in his kindness continues to meets his people in communities that lack all of the certainty and historical claims that would make them valid. I find some comfort in the mess of it all, because this seems to me the kind of thing God does. I am a Protestant because this (gestures wildly) is my ugly mess, and I am bound by my own baptism to it.

My fear with the framing of some Protestant to Catholic conversion narratives is that they trade on a Protestant privileging of certainty that is itself thin. Certainty need not be the chief barometer of our religious lives. I deeply value and honor my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, but I do deem them as such- brothers and sisters who baptisms are valid and whose liturgy and history is instructive but not corrective to my own.

Indeed, I do think the church orders our spiritual lives by offering a deep center that makes universal claims about reality and about how we should live. I actually do have something of a Catholic ecclesiology, in that I do not think you can be a Christian without the Church. You might say I accept almost everything about Catholicism except Petrine succession.² The problem with that claim is that you cannot have Catholicism without it.

Religion is so shaky, so rocky, so uncertain- just like a church might be that was founded on the man who had just betrayed his Lord. This does not make it any less true- indeed that “certainty” and “truth” are not synonyms is one of the takeaways of The Nature of Doctrine. That Peter was the “rock” after his unsteady confession means that the strength of the church’s lineage is due to God alone, not to Peter’s own credibility. The source of certainty is, after all, in the God who grants us any grace we might have, to look upon him and live.

1. YES CATHOLICS ALSO HAVE CHURCH BASEMENTS AND OUT OF TUNE GUITARS. Also church cookbooks.

2. Also the Marian doctrines, which I disagree with quite strongly. But maybe more on this later.