Brad East’s First Things article “Goldilocks Protestantism,” which has generated a lot of conversation since its publication earlier this spring, begins with a shocking statement: “Imagine a world without Protestantism.”
East, an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University, quickly clarifies that he doesn’t mean a world without any sort of Protestantism – he just means a world in which the only Christians will be small-c “catholics” (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglican) or evangelicals, with “nothing in between.” That world, he says, is “a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media.” And, perhaps most shocking of all, he claims that we have already arrived as at a “world without Protestantism,” because in many places (including his own town), it’s nearly impossible to find a church that adheres to the “via media” of the sixteenth-century magisterial Reformers (Luther and Calvin, especially) while avoiding both evangelicalism and liberalism.
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