Prominent Protestant thinkers, such as Gavin Ortlund, Peter Leithart, Kenneth Collins, Jerry Walls, and Kevin Vanhoozer, said they are catholics. “Protestantism is the most catholic and the most biblical of all the major streams of Christianity,” asserts Ortlund in What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church.
More than a decade ago, Leithart, a former Presbyterian pastor, in a piece entitled “Too Catholic to Be Catholic,” argued much the same, claiming that to become Catholic would mean going to a “eucharistic table” where his Protestant friends are not “welcome” and to acknowledge that those Protestants are “living in a sub-Christian existence.” What, precisely, does this charge mean, where does it come from, and what is the (Roman) Catholic response?
As Catholic theologian Matthew Levering explains in his new book Engaging the Doctrine of the Church, “too Catholic to be Catholic” is not entirely new. Twentieth-century Lutheran scholars Friedrich Heiler and Wilhelm Stählin accused the Catholic Church of committing an anti-Catholic heresy by defining the particular as the universal.
Rome, these German Lutherans declared, seeks to rule in the spirit of the ancient caesars rather than serve the church in the humble spirit of the gospel. In Roman but Not Catholic, Collins’s and Wall’s expansive attack on the Church, Rome is not truly universal, because it excludes those Christians not in communion with the bishop of Rome. Such a position, they claim, is contradictory, self-serving, and divisive.
The real catholic church, say Collins and Walls, is visible wherever there are Christians. Vanhoozer similarly argues that Protestantism is more catholic than Rome, because it is centered not on an imperial structure (namely, the Roman See), but on an “imperial gospel,” the domain of God’s word. Doctrines taught only by a part of the Christian world, says Vanhoozer, are