Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (review)

No longer seen as the heroic force that saved the world from oppressive medieval Catholicism, Protestantism has taken some punches of late. Alister McGrath calls Protestantism’s “priesthood of all believers” Christianity’s “dangerous idea” (8), resulting in schism between the churches, skepticism of any truth claims, and secularism as the non-religious path by which to tolerate our differences. Kevin Vanhoozer offers a learned and winsome defense of the Protestant agenda by appropriating the tradition of the five solas (grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, scripture alone, and glory to God alone) as a basis for Protestant unity and an agenda for the future.

Vanhoozer reminds us that to protest is not merely to stand against something. It is also to testify for something, specifically, the integrity of the gospel. Luther was no anti-Catholic, but instead saw that contemporary Catholicism was not catholic enough, but instead too Roman (15). He looks to the nineteenth-century Reformed “Mercersburg Theology” which claimed that the Reformation can be retrieved as the “greatest act of the Catholic church” (30). Even so, Protestantism did unintentionally provoke a crisis of legitimation by raising the question of authority. But for Vanhoozer, as we shall see, it is a misreading of Protestantism to assume that each individual is the final authority in truth (19).

Vanhoozer claims that “to retrieve is to look back creatively in order to move forward faithfully” (24). Playing off C. S. Lewis’s “mere” Christianity, Protestantism can be conceived as catholic Christianity “inflected” by the Reformation (31). He advances the five solas as the first theology of “mere Protestant Christianity” (27).

Vanhoozer exegetes the five solas with a view to how they must address current concerns. With respect to the relation between nature and grace, several Catholic theologians, following Henri de Lubac, see the post-Reformation Thomistic tendency to interpret nature as pure, or self-enclosed, apart from its ultimate good in God, as a source of modern secularism. Vanhoozer responds that the problem is not that God is external to creation, but instead that creation is alienated from God because of sin (49). With respect to faith alone, he affirms that biblical authority orients freedom to the new reality which is Jesus Christ and not some neutral individualism (86). Counter to critiques of faith as fideism, he explains that it is quite rational to believe in testimony (98). Faith alone is not tantamount to “epistemic egoism,” not subjective, arbitrary private judgments, but instead trust in apostolic testimony (105). Scripture must be seen through the lens of tradition. The two are not to be pitted against each other. After all, tradition is nothing other than the effective history of the biblical word across the ages (143). To affirm Christ alone, contemporary Christians should re-appropriate the office of the keys whose authority accompanies apostolicity (172). Finally, God’s glory is reflected in Christian unity. Christians should endeavor to achieve full communion with regard to the Lord’s Supper.

Protestantism is not a virus that attacks the body but instead the antibody that attacks the infection of medieval Catholicism (metaphorically seen as a unified “Babel”). Of course, Protestantism can appropriate good things from its catholic heritage. But it should also repossess its historic home on “Evangel Way” (220). Fidelity to the church is measured by fidelity to the gospel (233).

Brilliant as this book is, the question today is not just the intellectual integrity of the Protestant tradition with respect to a secular audience, or how it has an edge over Roman Catholicism, but whether or not it proclaims a gospel that embraces and transforms sinners: are there still prodigals and elder brothers in the postmodern world for whom the gospel is indispensable? Otherwise, this book is a must-read.