Grace — thank you for being brave and bar­ing your soul on your Protes­tant expe­ri­ences. I think one thing that stands out as a com­mon denom­i­na­tor in your com­ments and through my expe­ri­ences as well is there is a lack of dis­ci­ple­ship amongst many Protes­tant groups. It varies widely the amount of time devoted to dis­ci­pling new believ­ers, because one of the widely held beliefs in many non-denominational churches is that once you are born again, God speaks to you directly through the Bible, there­fore much empha­sis is placed on read­ing and study­ing the Bible. But, you are also trained in the faith by lis­ten­ing to the ser­mons and fel­low­ship­ping with other believ­ers — in this way, you are gain­ing knowl­edge of the faith.

I per­son­ally found that frus­trat­ing and sought out more for­mal­ized train­ing by attend­ing a Bible col­lege and sat­u­rat­ing myself with teach­ings from reli­able Chris­t­ian teach­ers — even then, I felt like I was not get­ting the whole thing and sensed I needed to go back to square one to get the whole thing, from the OT to the NT — I WANTED to be dis­ci­pled, but a for­mal pro­gram for this was hard to find.

So, I said all that to say I can under­stand your per­cep­tions of the Protes­tant beliefs, because, depend­ing on which group you were in, there are lots of vari­ables, espe­cially in regards to how our sal­va­tion is realized.

its hard to gen­er­al­ize the Protes­tant the­ol­ogy. I would think that most evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants would agree with #1.

#5 is a bit dif­fi­cult. I don’t think I ever heard a Protes­tant tell me I’m not a sin­ner. But, most of my Evan­gel­i­cal friends also have a hard time with all the “Lord have mer­cies” we say in litur­gi­cal ser­vices. They’ll say some­thing to the effect “Don’t you believe He already had mercy on you?” As if they’re think­ing Jesus took care of our sins once for all and that’s enough. But, I don’t know of any­one who would be com­fort­able say­ing “I’m not a sin­ner.” I think that Calvin­ists would not agree with #5 (Reformed The­ol­ogy has become very pop­u­lar amongst Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians since you were involved). How­ever, my kids and I were dis­cussing “Total Deprav­ity” (T-in TULIP) ear­lier today as one child goes to a Protes­tant school that is Calvin­is­tic. She said she never hears any teacher or stu­dent talk­ing about this or agree­ing with this. So maybe some Calvin­ists do and some don’t believe in Total Deprav­ity. And there’s part of the prob­lem… every­one believes so dif­fer­ently — even within their own tradition.

About the only thing I can say is that I increas­ingly come to the view that I do not know how to dis­cuss these mat­ters con­struc­tively. Per­haps a bet­ter way rather than describ­ing folks as “Prots” might be to use the Scot­tish term, “Free churches” — using it both in terms of its orig­i­nal mean­ing and in terms of its rela­tion­ship to doc­trine, tra­di­tion, etc. Essen­tially, though claim­ing to be bib­li­cal, they’ve freed them­selves from the spirit and full­ness of the text as well as a rela­tion­ship to the Body of Christ, too. I think this unfor­tu­nately frees them from the pro­tec­tions all these were intended to pro­vide from being “sifted like wheat”. But I do not know how to gen­tly put this for­ward with folks who while free­ing them­selves in this way, some­how see them­selves as the quin­tes­sen­tial embod­i­ment of the real thing… with­out try­ing (as you put it)… as if God’s new cre­ation involved no labors. I think every­one refers to the “work of the cross”, but has that really been “done” for us… and we don’t have our own to do? How can any­one claim to iden­tify with Christ and not see the call to live as He did… or at least “try” ? No, to me, free­dom of this sort is slav­ery to the self.

Thanks for prompt­ing a sleepy Mon­day brain.… bet­ter than coffee!!

You can’t be found guilty of mis­rep­re­sent­ing Protes­tantism, because that’s the point of it, a protest against some­thing, and every group has its own unique dif­fer­ences with the other groups. As some have pointed out, in Protes­tantism every man is ulti­mately his own pope, and when you were in that “tra­di­tion” you were fig­ur­ing out what it was for you.

I remem­ber when I was a young Protes­tant, tak­ing issue with a hymn, “For All the Saints” because, as I see it now, I didn’t like to com­pare myself unfa­vor­ably with those ancient Chris­tians whom peo­ple called saints. That was maybe a com­bi­na­tion of your #1 and #5.

I think that’s it — the only pre­cise direc­tion I got as a new­bie was “Read your Bible” and pray. Which isn’t bad advice, but it left it for the preach­ers to fill in a lot of specifics, and it left if for all my good broth­ers and sis­ters in the church to show me what it looked like in prac­tice. So there was noth­ing in writ­ing to tell me if I veered in my pri­vate con­tem­pla­tions into trou­bled or hereti­cal spir­i­tual waters.

I think the rea­son I some­times get a lit­tle appre­hen­sive about the Protes­tants is that they are still one of the loud­est con­trib­u­tors to what most Amer­i­cans would call Chris­tian­ity. And they carry a lot of the bur­den of keep­ing Chris­tian­ity from being mar­gin­al­ized out of our cul­ture alto­gether. They do it much bet­ter than Catholics or Ortho­dox do. But I won­der how much longer they can hold on — they’re armed with about 1/10th the Chris­t­ian armor that a mature Chris­t­ian really needs. <– more hyper­bole, I know. I always tend that way.

You’re right — I think I hadn’t really noticed, which is appallingly dense of me. One of the things I know I *didn’t* believe when I was a Protes­tant was that … I was a Protes­tant. I’m not try­ing to slap a derog­a­tive label on all my good broth­ers and sis­ters, but it would be impos­si­ble to try to refer to all the creedal Chris­tians who aren’t Catholic or Ortho­dox by all their indi­vid­ual denom­i­na­tions. Let alone the mad­ness of try­ing to say what they have in com­mon, since there’s almost as much dif­fer­ence between them some­times as there is between Protes­tant and Orthodox.

Which leads me to another ques­tion, but I might have to break that out into a new post.

One addi­tional thing: It seems impor­tant to men­tion that with all of this talk of mine, I’m not try­ing to say that Protes­tants are (cap­i­tal w) Wrong and Ortho­dox are (cap­i­tal r) Right. I leave it to peo­ple fur­ther up the food chain to hash all that stuff out. I am try­ing to spell out why I could never have stayed a Protes­tant with­out prob­a­bly leav­ing Chris­tian­ity alto­gether. Like I said, I might have just been being a total sim­ple­ton, but what I was get­ting by way of teach­ing was so unre­al­is­tic and flawed that it never would’ve been sustainable.

I’m just ego­tis­ti­cal enough, obvi­ously, to extrap­o­late out from that and say that there’s cause for worry out there. But I really should try and avoid that kind of hilar­i­ous pro­jec­tion — it says more about my prob­lems than any­one else’s, most likely.

It’s not impos­si­ble to call all creedal Chris­tians by their indi­vid­ual denom­i­na­tions. It is all in a book called “Hand­book on Denom­i­na­tions” by Mead and Hill. This book is revised every few years to keep up with all the changes. The cur­rent edi­tion is 400 pages long! You can find it on ama­zon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1426700482/ref=s…