What Makes a Christian Distinctly Protestant?

 

Another short clip from Ligonier, in which Robert Godfrey answers the question: “What makes a Christian distinctly Protestant?” Here is the transcript:

“I would say what most makes a Christian a Protestant is the issue in the first place of authority. Where do we look for authoritative truth to guide us as Christians? And Protestants believe it is in the Bible. It is the Bible alone, sola scriptura, as the formal principle of the Reformation; and I think that is crucial, especially in our day where there are so many doubts about the Bible. But when one accepts the authority of the Bible, one will then find the doctrines of grace alone and faith alone clearly taught there.”

The problem with that argument is that the Bible can be misread, misunderstood, or misinterpreted. That is why there are so many different churches and denominations—even within Protestantism—all of them based on some doctrinal disagreement. So when there is a disagreement on how the Bible should be interpreted, is there an independent judge who can be trusted by all sides to arbitrate, and determine whose interpretation is right, and whose is wrong? What makes the Protestants the soul, legitimate, exclusive, interpreters of the Bible—especially when they have disagreements even among themselves?

Peter says of the writings of Paul, “… in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). So Paul can easily be misread and misunderstood (on which Protestant theology is almost entirely based). And he is not the only biblical author who can be misread and misunderstood; all scripture to some degree can be, as Peter says. Isaiah is not an easy book to read and understand correctly either. So what makes the Protestants so sure they have understood the teachings of Paul right?

In another place in the same epistle Peter again says, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). So according to Peter, the Bible can be misread or misinterpreted. It is easy to fall into the error of a “private interpretation” of the Bible. So who made the Protestants the soul arbiters and interpreters of the Bible? That is make-belief and self-deception. They are no such thing. I have made clear beyond dispute, in numerous posts in this blog, that the Protestant “doctrines of grace alone and faith alone” is not biblical. It is a heresy. It is not what the Bible teaches. The Protestant doctrine is based on a few misconstrued passages of Paul, to the exclusion of 99% of the rest of the Bible which teaches something different. It is a heresy, plain and simple. There is no other way to describe it.