Like many essays, this essay starts with a challenge. I have stated before publicly — much to the chagrin of Protestants and the delight of Apostolics — that Protestantism, when one removes Jesus and the Almighty, collapses into Postmodernism. I have stated this unqualified; as such, it behooves me to justify my claim.
We ought to first define the origin and the destination. Protestantism, as I am defining it, is the elevation of the personal revelation of the Holy Spirit over institutional authority. For example, in an Apostolic denomination, a parishioner explaining that the Holy Spirit informed him that the host was not literally transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Jesus would be refused communion. The Magisterium of the Church has decreed this doctrine, and it is binding because of this. No amount of argument that hic est corpus is actually metaphorical will sway the truth, because the truth is not established at the level of personal arguments guided by the revelation of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it is established by the council of bishops in the form of the Magisterium and church councils. It is the Church — large C — where the buck stops and where truth is established.
This is the very meaning of Sola Scriptura, for here Protestantism plays a trick. The assertion has been, since Luther, that no matter how large the C in Church, Scripture alone represents the totality of divine revelation. This means that only the text of Scripture possesses absolute divine authority. As stated above, this is a catastrophic disagreement — not only between Apostolic Christians and Protestants, but between Protestants and most of the rest of the Abrahamic faiths. Most Jews are Rabbinic Jews and thus accept the Talmud as being the binding expression of the Oral Torah. Likewise, Muslims have extra-Quranic sources in the form of the Hadiths, along with placing interpretive authority with the Tafsirs rather than the individual Muslim.
The issue with the Protestant position is that there is a gulf between what is said and what is practiced, for Scripture is not self-interpreting. When a Protestant declares that Scripture alone serves as his ultimate epistemological authority, he is in reality stating that his own interpretation serves as this authority. The key word here is own. We need look no further than the dispute between the Lutherans and the Reformed during the very lifetime of Martin Luther to see the consequences of Sola Scriptura. Scripture taken alone presents few heuristics concerning the metaphorical as opposed to the literal and the poetical. This leads to the dispute between the soul-sleep Christians and Jews concerning the interpretation of Ecclesiastes, where Solomon declares, "The dead know nothing." Taken literally, this is a strong proof for the doctrine of soul sleep. On the other hand, the Jews see this as an exposition of the doctrine that the righteous never die, but the wicked are dead even during their days. The reasons for each position are beyond the scope of this article, but the question remains: who is right?
Strict literalism of the text is clearly nonsensical, as otherwise one would wonder when the lions and leopards in Daniel will emerge. Yet strict metaphoricalism is equally absurd, as one would then have to be a Christian and yet declare that Jesus's resurrection is metaphorical. Likewise, one cannot be a Jew and hold that Moses was a metaphorical figure. Both modes of interpretation lead one to absurdities and heresies.
As such, it is clear that some verses are metaphorical and some are literal. While a few are clearly one or the other, there are many more that are completely unclear. One of these verses is hic est corpus, or "This is my body," which Jesus says concerning the bread and wine at the Last Supper. The position of the Apostolic faith has always been that this is literal. Indeed, I once had a Catholic inform me that I should cease to be Jewish and accept Jesus because of this casual miracle. On the other hand, most Protestants hold that it is figurative, such as the Reformed and Baptist churches. There is one exception among the Protestant faiths, however, and that is the Lutherans. From the beginning they have asserted that hic est corpus is meant literally. Indeed, when the Reformed and Martin Luther himself had a meeting concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation, Luther did not permit a discussion and merely pounded upon the table, saying hic est corpus repeatedly.
Given that Luther was restricted to the bare text, this was all that he could utilize to defend a claim that he considered absolutely essential and heresy to deny: the text says this is his body, therefore it is his body. Of course, the response is that Jesus also calls Peter a rock, and no one thinks that a church isn't a proper church unless it's built upon a shard of the rock that Jesus turned Peter into — as he protested that he did not wish to become a rock. This is an obvious absurdity. As such, it is clear that not every statement of Jesus is literal. Indeed, elsewhere he states that he speaks in parables because "To you it has been given to know the secrets of heaven, but to them it has not been given... This is why I speak in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." Just because Jesus states a proposition does not mean that said proposition was intended to be taken literally.
So what leg did Luther have to stand on? What heuristic can any Protestant apply to answer even the first question when interpreting the text — is this metaphorical or literal? The answer is clear in the very words of Luther, as he said, "For the Spirit is required to understand the whole of Scripture and every part of it" (The Bondage of the Will). However, Luther still grounded the Holy Spirit in the text, saying, "This Spirit can be found nowhere else... than in his own Holy Scripture."
Now that we have defined the origination of Protestantism, let us turn to Postmodernism. This is a twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movement defined by the rejection of objective truth and absolute certainty. Modernism is the belief that human reason would guide us toward universal truth. Postmodernism is the recognition that the Enlightenment project has utterly failed. While, due to its nature, extremely hard to pin down, Postmodernism revolves around a few core ideas.
Many previous philosophies — from when Judaism first gave humanity the idea of the meta-narrative (before us, the idea of an arc of history with a beginning, middle, and end was foreign; our Messiah comes and reigns, whereas Baal Hadad must renew his kingship in a cycle) — have espoused a grand narrative of history. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard defined Postmodernism as a skepticism of metanarratives. Examples would be the Christian narrative of salvation, the Enlightenment's promise of rational progress, and Marx's story of class revolution. Eschatological promises are utilized to assert power and control the populace.
Another core idea is that of deconstruction. Associated with Jacques Derrida, the deconstruction of a text, idea, or cultural norm reveals the inherent biases and power structures that lie underneath. It takes the sacred cows — the works of literature, the well-rounded philosophers of yesteryear — and reveals them to be both horribly contradictory and the products of their time. Meaning is never fixed or stable.
Finally — and the idea which I am intending to focus upon — is that truth itself is subjective and highly dependent upon the individual. Each and every person is the ultimate epistemological authority. As Richard Rorty stated, "Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with." All information is to be viewed through power structures and the cultural environment of the individual. Ultimately, the individual decides.
While some of the more astute readers will now understand exactly what I am driving at — and the Protestants in my readership will be feeling slightly uncomfortable — I am, at this point, pointing at B and asserting that it leads directly to Z. This step must be justified.
While Luther did indeed surrender the epistemological authority of the Magisterium, he still retained a close adherence to the text — well, the texts that he liked — and the interpretations of the Church. He accepted icons that were not worshipped, justifying crucifixes and holy images. He mocked the low-church iconoclasts directly. Likewise, he argued in favor of the traditional Mass, with vestments, public ceremonies, and lessons preserved. The traditions of the Church were important to him. He defended them against the Reformed and Anabaptist churches.
One wonders, however, where his heuristic came from. Luther advanced the principle of adiaphora, or things indifferent. He argued that practices fell into three categories. The first was practices commanded by Scripture — unless he decided that Jesus nailed them to the cross. These were non-negotiable. Next were practices contrary to the Gospel and explicitly forbidden by Scripture. These were to be abolished. The third category is matters of Christian freedom: areas of practice on which Scripture was silent, neither blessing nor condemning. This is where the high-church practice of Luther lives. The vestments, incense, order of the Mass, and the images all fall into the area which is neither blessed nor condemned by Scripture. Consider his own words concerning the liturgy: "It would be good to keep the whole liturgy with its music, omitting only the canon." The key word here is good. Rather than arguing from the text alone, Luther introduces the vague notion of good. Likewise, on images, he stated, "unnecessary, and we are free to have them or not, although it would be much better if we did not have them at all." Preference and prohibition are two distinct categories and not to be collapsed. Meanwhile, Karlstadt, his rival reformer, kept to Sola Scriptura much more strictly, collapsing anything not mentioned in Scripture into the forbidden.
While this is a somewhat coherent heuristic, it moves ultimate authority away from Scripture and instead to pastoral judgment concerning love, order, and edification. In the absence of the doctrine of Daas Torah, this is a purely individual judgment. In essence, Luther looked into the abyss and blinked. Further Protestants did not.
I have alluded to Andreas Karlstadt earlier, but he is the next step in the fall from Apostolic Church authority to the absolute individualism of Postmodernism. Karlstadt went further than Luther, not only in adopting strict iconoclasm, but also in fighting against institutionalism. Luther still required institutional ordination to hold Mass and give communion. Karlstadt, on the other hand, permitted unordained laypeople to preach, and pushed to replace the educated theologian with the unlearned, who would expound through divine illumination. He treated the very notion of institutional authority and ordained hierarchy as an extra-biblical invention. (The sources here are in German, so I am relying upon an LLM's summary of a German study of Karlstadt; if any Anabaptist wishes to correct me, please do.)
However, American Protestantism — with the exception of the Amish and Mennonites — does not descend from the Anabaptists, but rather from the British strains of Protestantism. The most famous of these are the Puritans and the Separatists of Pilgrim fame. These were co-founded by Robert Browne, who took Karlstadt's collapse of epistemological authority from the pastoral and the textual, to the purely textual, and finally to the conscience of the individual Christian. In his writings he stated, "For it is the conscience and not the power of man that will drive us to seek the Lord's kingdom." Likewise he states, "Indeed, can the Lord's spiritual government be no way executed but by the civil sword...?" This paints a clear picture: while Karlstadt rooted his authority in the text, Browne rooted his authority only in the conscience of the individual, further collapsing the status of institution, Church, and even Scripture itself. For he says, "They [the magistrates] have no ecclesiastical authority at all, but only as any other Christians." To wait for institutional agreement is an act of cowardice and a betrayal. To search Scripture when your conscience is clear is to go against G-d. Finally, to ascribe any authority to a magistrate above that of an average Christian — if he even be Christian — is forbidden.
The modern descendant of the Puritanical sect is the Baptists, and it is here that we see the complete collapse of the idea of external authority. Indeed, John Smyth, as the founder of the Baptist church, decided that no church had a proper baptism. For many this would be an insurmountable obstacle — indeed, we Jews have languished for 1,600 years lacking our true ordination from Moses. Undeterred by tradition, reason, or Scripture, John Smyth proceeded to baptize himself. As such, the chain of tradition restarted in the individual and likewise terminated in himself, as everyman could theoretically restart his own chain of baptisms. To justify this act, he stated, "There is good warrant for a man churching himself."
I am reminded of Rorty, for baptism is what your colleagues allow you to get away with. He reasoned this was not absurd, stating, "For two men singly are no church; so may two men put baptism upon themselves." There was no appeal to reason, Scripture, or tradition — only ad hoc justification for his own conscience. In addition, he frequently revised his own conclusions based upon the whispers of the Holy Spirit, until he finally rejected the doctrine of original sin and asserted that every Christian may hold his own religious views.
Here, in the seventeenth century, we have already collapsed the supreme epistemology totally. There is no truth besides that which the individual conscience of man leads him to hold. Only the Holy Spirit whispering into his heart can lead him anywhere. Is it any wonder that the Enlightenment, robbed of truth, cast about for what it could grab? Is it any mystery that, in a world of chaos where Christianity had surrendered truth, Voltaire and Kant rushed to seize upon it? As a religious man, I naturally regard the Enlightenment project as an abject failure — in this, myself and the Postmodernists agree. In the collapse of the supremacy of reason and empiricism as being able to determine truth, is it any wonder that Postmodernists have stated that any man may hold his own views? They have fought against the idea of a singular truth, deconstructing every truth to show that its origin is based upon nothing more than sociology and power structures. Is this any different than Browne seeing Anglican corruption behind any attempt to subvert the conscience as the supreme guide of his flock? While Luther still rooted truth in the institution, Karlstadt rooted it in Scripture alone, taking Luther at his own word. But Scripture, as demonstrated above, cannot be understood in isolation; thus the natural progression is that of Browne. And once the conscience rules, we find ourselves in Postmodernism, with the Holy Spirit as the only fragile fence between the Protestants and the total denial of truth.
The Protestant who remains reading will, of course, argue that there is in fact an enormous gulf between the position I have demonstrated Protestantism collapsing into and that of Postmodernism. For all their faults, both Browne and Smyth indeed held that there was a very real, objective Truth. However, as Sola Scriptura collapses with no heuristic, only the conscience remains as the heuristic. The whispers of the divine, direct to the individual, inform him of doctrine. The issue is that we have just addressed four men who led four churches, all in dispute — sometimes strongly. It is clear that if the Holy Spirit is speaking, it can be speaking to at most one of these men. And it is highly likely that if the Protestant who remained reading is not of the lineage I have traced, he holds that none of those men either had the Holy Spirit, or, if they did, did not have the Truth in its wholeness. Functionally, no man can convince another, for the grounding of truth is the individual himself. This is completely circular and means that one may believe whatever one desires, as long as one's fellow church members will tolerate these beliefs. I have always defined belief as a principle or idea that a man acts upon without consideration. Given that the actions of Protestantism, as seen in Smyth, betray a lack of Truth, then the true belief is that of a lack of Truth. The private, unadjudicable access to Truth is functionally indistinguishable from its absence.
Postmodernism tears away the gentle lie and exposes that, without the notion of a Holy Spirit, nothing is left. It is but a small leap from the position of Smyth to that of Rorty. Therefore, we can see that as soon as Luther penned the words Sola Scriptura, it was inevitable that Postmodernism would be born. As truth relocates from the Magistrate, to the pastor, to the text, and finally to the individual Christian, its domain continues to shrink until its absence is not felt at all.
Published 2026-07-12
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