Grace and peace to you today.

There are a few books discounted for Kindle today, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen any of these titles on sale before.
Pride (in the Name of Love)
Jared Wilson: “Jesus was perfect, and yet he did not look down on others. I am ridiculously imperfect, but I do look down on others. Jesus was perfectly holy, and yet was not arrogant. I am frustratingly unholy, but I am arrogant a lot. Like, a lot. I am not Jesus. But I do want to be like him.”
The Ends and the Means
Seth Lewis considers how small things can lead to big things. “A quiet phone call. That’s all it would take, and no one would know the difference. Except me. And my wife. And our friend. And God.”
There Is Power in Counting It All Joy
Paul Tautges: “To ‘count it all joy’ does not refer to being happy about the trial itself. Nor does it take away your permission to grieve. James is not saying, ‘No matter how painful your loss is, you need to just put on a happy face. Pretend, if you have to. Don’t let anyone see how much you hurt.’ No! True joy is not a spiritual façade.”
Trojan Horse Christians
“Satan will allow you to avoid all kinds of temptation if you continue to believe the lie that your moral life is the reason you have God’s acceptance. The enemy loves it when we build our monuments and look in amazement upon them. The problem with wooden horses is that they burn. They will not stand on the day of judgment.”
Say It, Even if It’s Been Said Before
This is true and worth considering: “The reality is, content you write today will be written again by someone tomorrow. It has probably already been written by someone before you. There is nothing new under the sun. Being faithful to God and encouraging others is more important than being on the cutting edge of a given topic.”
Why Waiting is Good News
Though we are impatient people, there is value in waiting. “Waiting reminds us that although we have agency, we are not ultimately in control. For those of us who find value in achieving, working hard, and crossing off tasks on our to-do lists, waiting can push us into a tailspin as it unhooks the lynchpin between who we are and what we do.”
Flashback: The Bit of Heaven the Heaven Tourism Books Never Touched
Heaven is the place where there is no trace of sin. In fact, the joys of heaven are dependent on sinlessness.

If we get a discouraged man to take heart again, and to set out bravely to fight his own battles and carry his own burdens we have done him a far greater kindness than if we had fought his battles and carried his burdens for him. —J.R. Miller

This week the blog is sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. This post is written by Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) who is president of Truth Unites and theologian-in-residence at Immanuel Nashville in Tennessee. He’s a highly sought-after speaker and apologist, and his new book What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church releases on August 20, 2024.
In my engagements with Christians from traditions outside of Protestantism, whatever issue is being addressed, the discussion almost always kicks back to questions of authority. By what standard do we evaluate our differences? What is the relationship between Scripture and tradition, and where does the ultimate authority of interpretation for both Scripture and tradition lie? It is hard to find any area of dispute that doesn’t terminate in these more basic, methodological questions.
For this reason, we must press into the question of ecclesial authority. Here I will consider two of the most typical objections to sola Scriptura, the Protestant position on where ultimate authority over the church is located.
Objection 1: What about the Canon?
The church’s role in canonization is often set against sola Scriptura. Such critiques, however, generally fail to touch the Protestant position. Protestants stand in broad agreement with other traditions that the church has been entrusted with the responsibility of discerning the canon. For example, Protestants find themselves in a broad agreement on this point with the Roman Catholic position, as articulated at Vatican I: “these books the church holds to be sacred and canonical not because she subsequently approved them by her authority . . . but because, being written under the inspiration of the holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and were as such committed to the church.”1
The necessity of the church’s witness unto the Word of God is a classical Protestant doctrine. (The seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologians were particularly adept at explicating this doctrine). For Protestants, the church’s charge extends not only to recognizing the canon but also to protecting the Scriptures during times of persecution and to translating, teaching, and proclaiming them. Thus, Protestants have spoken of the church as not only a necessary witness to the Word of God, but also the custodian and herald of the Word of God.2
The necessity of the church, however, does not entail her infallibility. Protestants have often compared the church’s role in the process of canonization to that of John the Baptist in pointing to Christ: It is a ministerial role of witness or testimony. That the church is entrusted with such a task in no way grants her infallible authority parallel to Scripture any more than John the Baptist possessed parallel authority to Christ. Rather, the one testifying is subordinate to that which receives the testimony. As Johannes Wollebius put it, “As it is foolish to tell us that the candle receives its light from the candlestick that supports it, so it is ridiculous to ascribe the Scripture’s authority to the church.”3
Infallibility is not necessary for canonization since the church’s responsibility is not constituting Scripture but simply recognizing it. Such recognition is not itself the action of an infallible agent. As J. I. Packer more recently stated, “The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. . . . Newton did not create gravity but recognized it.”4 Another metaphor for this action of the church used by the Anglican theologian William Whitaker is that of a goldsmith discerning true gold from other metals: “The goldsmith with his scales and touchstone can distinguish gold from copper and other metals; wherein he does not make gold . . . but only indicates what is gold. . . . In like manner the Church acknowledges the Scriptures and declares them to be divine.”5
For there is no higher authority the Word of God could rest upon than the Spirit speaking through it.Gavin OrtlundShare
Ultimately, the trustworthiness of the canon is rooted in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as well as the progressive nature of revelation itself. Thus, the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli pointed out that in the work of discerning the Word of God, the church does not start from scratch, but measures each book against the previous revelation she has already received from God. As Richard Muller expounds Vermigli’s view, the church “adjudges the canon only as she is taught so to do by the Spirit of Christ, her Teacher, and by the comparison of Scripture with Scripture— even as a counterfeit letter is proved by comparison with a genuine letter.”6 Muller points out that in explaining the church’s role in this way, Vermigli and other early Protestants like William Tyndale were not innovating—they were simply  repeating a view that had strong attestation in medieval scholastic debate, most recently by the fifteenth-century theologian Wessel Gansfort.7 The idea of a hierarchy of authorities, with the Scripture at the top over other subordinate (but necessary) authorities, was by no means a novel approach in the sixteenth century.
To state the point plainly, setting sola Scriptura at odds with the process of canonization confuses the recognition of infallibility with the possession of infallibility. The simple fact is that it is not necessary to be infallible to discern that which is infallible. When Moses heard God at the burning bush, he didn’t need a second voice whispering in his ear that this was indeed God. This is what Protestants intend when they speak of Scripture as self-authenticating. This simply means that the ultimate ground on which we receive the Scripture is inherent in it, rather than external to it. For there is no higher authority the Word of God could rest upon than the Spirit speaking through it. If you think you do have to possess infallibility to discern infallibility, you have a continual regress, because now you need infallibility to receive and interpret the infallible teachings of your church.
There is one way we can know with certainty that the church does not need infallibility to discern the canon: the facts of history. It just didn’t happen that way. With respect to the New Testament canon, scholars debate the exact date of its finalization, but it is generally seen to have become fully settled in the fourth century. The process of canonization leading to that point was bottom up, not top down. It was a gradual, cumulative, widespread, and organic process by which the church discerned the Word of God through the enabling direction of the Holy Spirit. It was not the result of an infallible statement from the Pope of Rome or an ecumenical council. As Collins and Walls note, “The canon emerged independently about the same time in the East, the West, and northern Africa.”8 In this process, Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter in 367 was particularly significant, confirmed at the Synod of Hippo in 393 and the Council of Carthage in 397. It is disputed whether the same canon list was adopted at the Council of Rome in 382, but either way, this council was not regarded as settling the issue.9 It was not an ecumenical council. It was not infallible.
The fourth-century New Testament canon was the result of a process that began within the New Testament itself, where various books are identified as Scripture (2 Pet. 3:16; 1 Tim. 5:18). Furthermore, as Michael Kruger points out, the New Testament authors frequently betray an awareness that they are writing with divine authority.10 Hence throughout the second and third centuries, books like Matthew, Acts, and Romans were not in dispute and were quoted with the same authority as the Old Testament Scriptures.11 The only dispute was around the fuzzy edges (for example, Revelation, 2 Peter, The Shepherd of Hermas). This does not render the final determination unimportant. It simply reinforces the central point here: Christians do not need an infallible act of the church to discern Scripture.
Similarly, the Old Testament canon was also not the result of an exercise of infallibility among the people of God. The Jewish people did not have an infallible teaching office, yet throughout their history, they were able to recognize and receive the Word of God given to them in what we call the Old Testament Scriptures. This is not to say, of course, that there were no disagreements about certain books (for example, Ecclesiastes and Esther) or alternative canons among various outlier groups (for example, the Samaritans, who were not considered Jews, held only to the Torah). Scholars debate when the canon of the Jewish people was closed, but it seems there was a “core” Old Testament canon in the mainstream Jewish tradition by the time of Jesus, sometimes referred to as the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (or simply as the Law and the Prophets).12 For example, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus referred to a Hebrew Bible of twenty-two books (corresponding to the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament), and appeared to conceive of the canon as closed.13
But what is significant for our purposes is simply to note that Jesus held the Jews of his day to the authority of Scripture despite the fact that there was not an infallible declaration of the canon among the Jewish people (Luke 16:16; 24:44; John 5:47, and more). This entails the possibility of receiving infallible revelation of God and recognizing it as such without an infallible decree from the church.
This argument from the canon against sola Scriptura is commonly made, but it falls apart under scrutiny. Even the Roman Catholic Church had a “fallible canon” for most of her history, since the canon was not infallibly defined until the Councils of Florence and Trent toward the end of the Middle Ages. Moreover, today the Roman Catholic Church also has a “fallible list of infallible teachings,” since the number of ex cathedra statements and other infallible forms of teaching has never been infallibly defined and is disputed. Similarly, other churches have a “fallible list of infallible councils.” This is not a problem for them; neither is canonization for sola Scriptura.
Objection 2: Doesn’t the New Testament Teach Us to Obey “Traditions”?
Criticism of sola Scriptura often points to the positive role of tradition in the New Testament:

“Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2).
“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thess. 2:15).

But these passages have nothing to do with sola Scriptura. Of course particular local churches would receive and obey apostolic traditions in the first century (as well as apostolic teaching in other forms). That would be true for every first-century apostolic church. This happened during the apostolic era, while Scripture was still being written. These traditions do not exist as an infallible rule for the church today— as I have noted, the transmission of oral teachings is fallible and led to immediate disputes in the early church.

Unfortunately, criticism of sola Scriptura sometimes completely overlooks the distinction between the apostolic age and the post-apostolic age. For example, Josiah Trenham, quoting 2 Thessalonians 2:15, asks, “Are we to suppose, as the sola Scriptura theory would have it, that you were only to obey the Apostolic teachings and injunctions that St. Paul wrote down and not those that you heard from his own mouth?”14 But the notion that sola Scriptura would give license to first-century Christians to disobey the apostles’ oral instruction is an extreme caricature. For starters, sola Scriptura in no way designates Scripture as the only authority to be obeyed (as opposed to only infallible rule). More basically, sola Scriptura is a framework for the church as such, not for Christians in the apostolic age sitting under the teaching of living apostles, during the era in which Scripture was still being written. When passages like 2 Thessalonians 2:15 are set at odds with sola Scriptura, this simply reflects that the doctrine has been misunderstood.
Setting sola Scriptura at odds with tradition typically involves an equivocation on the word tradition. Martin Chemnitz listed eight different definitions of the word tradition as it was used by the church fathers, the first seven of which are completely harmonious with sola Scriptura.15 It is only the eighth kind of tradition, that which was affirmed at the Council of Trent, that sola Scriptura opposes. This kind of tradition Chemnitz defines as “traditions which pertain both to faith and morals and which cannot be proved with any testimony of Scripture but which the Synod of Trent nevertheless commands to be received and venerated with the same reverence and devotion as the Scripture itself.”16
More simply, Heiko Oberman distinguished between two broad conceptions of tradition that developed throughout church history. “Tradition 1” sees tradition as indispensable but primarily in the role of supplementing Scripture, not as a separate source of divine revelation. In this view, Scripture must be interpreted in the context of the church and the rule of faith, but it is the sole source of divine revelation. “Tradition 2” sees tradition as a separate source of divine revelation, especially rooted in Christ’s forty days of teaching his disciples between his resurrection and his ascension (Acts 1:3), not written down but allegedly preserved by the magisterium of the church.17
It took considerable time in church history for this second conception of tradition to emerge and then later become accepted. Historians disagree on when precisely the transition from “Tradition 1” to “Tradition 2” happened, but it is a controversial debate throughout the medieval era.18 When early Christians like Irenaeus appealed to tradition, they were frequently referring to what was coincident with the content of Scripture, not a separate rule or source of revelation. It was not until the fourth century (in Basil’s writings, for example) that there emerged a clear conception of unwritten tradition as a separate norm from Holy Scripture. But even there, the traditions more commonly referred to are liturgical practices, not universal obligatory dogmas that lack scriptural warrant. As J. N. D. Kelly notes,
All the instances of unwritten tradition lacking Scriptural support which the early theologians mention will be found, on examination, to refer to matters of observance and practice (e.g. triple immersion in baptism; turning East for prayer) rather than doctrine as such, although sometimes they are matters (e.g. infant baptism; prayers for the dead) in which doctrine is involved.19
Furthermore, even Basil shows concern for the necessity and priority of Scripture. For example, when arguing for the legitimacy of the phrase “with him” in the doxology, Basil appeals to tradition but then immediately adds, “but we are not content simply because this is the tradition of the Fathers. What is important is that the Fathers followed the meaning of Scripture.”20
Despite the numerous different meanings of the word tradition, critics of sola Scriptura sometimes employ any positive instance of this term as though it were speaking of tradition in the sense defined at the council of Trent. But it is specifically that conception of tradition that sola Scriptura opposes— namely, that Scripture and tradition are to be received with equal reverence as they together constitute the deposit of the Word of God, and that the magisterium of the church can offer infallible interpretations of both.
Protestants reject this schema because tradition is not the inspired Word of God, and when it is made equal to Scripture and the magisterium is put in the role of interpretation, then it is really the magisterium that has ultimate authority. In this way, the church is ultimately untethered from accountability to the inspired Word of God, resulting in, as Keith Mathison puts it, “a Church which is a law unto itself.”21 Protestants have referred to this position with phrases like sola ecclesia and solum magisterium to reflect the concern that the practical effect of this position (if not the intention) is to place the church above Scripture (and tradition).22
Hence the scandal of obligatory dogmas that have no testimony in Scripture or early tradition (like the issues we will peruse next in this book, the bodily assumption of Mary and the veneration of icons). These are good examples of what is at stake with a Protestant conception of authority in the church. In sum, sola Scriptura is not a generic rejection of tradition; it’s a rejection of those kinds of tradition.
Notes

E.g., Decrees of the First Vatican Council, Session 3, Chapter 2, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20.htm, accessed May 31, 2023.
For helpful examples, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2: Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 358–88.
As cited in Horton, The Christian Faith, 193.
As cited in Kenneth J. Collins and Jerry L. Walls, Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years After the Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 21.
As cited in Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Theology of the English Reformers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 36.
Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2, 361.
Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2, 358–63.

McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 140–51, also draws attention to points of continuity between the Protestant position on this point and a tradition of thought throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Collins and Walls, Roman but Not Catholic, 21.
For an overview of the canonization of the New Testament, see John D. Meade and Peter J. Gurry, Scribes and Scriptures: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 147–65.
Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 119–54.
On this point, see Peter Balla, “Evidence for an Early Christian

Canon (Second and Third Century),” in The Canon Debate, eds.
Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 372–85.
E.g., see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, endorsement of Collins and Wallins, Roman but Not Catholic; for an explication of this concern, Horton, The Christian Faith, 187–98.
For helpful discussion, see Meade and Gurry, Scribes and Scriptures, 111–20.
For discussion, see Steve Mason, “Josephus and His Twenty-Two  Canon,” in The Canon Debate, 110–27. The question of which Old Testament canon is the correct one is out of the scope of this chapter (I have addressed that elsewhere); our concern is to show that the recognition of Old Testament Scripture as such did not depend on an exercise of infallibility by the people of God. For a classic defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, see William Whitaker, trans. William Fitzgerald, A Disputation on Holy Scripture Against the Papists, Especially Bellarmine and Stapleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 25–109.
For example, Josiah Trenham, Rock and Sand: An Orthodox Appraisal of the Protestant Reformers and Their Teachings, 3rd ed. (Columbia, MO: Newrome, 2018), 163.
Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, vol. 1, 219–307.
Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, vol. 1, 272.
Heiko A. Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought, trans. Paul L. Nyhus (London: Lutterworth, 1967), 55. See also Heiko A. Oberman Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000).
For an overview of the medieval development, see Alister McGrath, Intellectual Origins of European Reformation, 141–48, and Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, 19–81.
J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (New York: HarperOne, 1978), 47.
St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 7.16, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s, 1980), 34.
Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, 15.

We all love to be part of a movement, don’t we? There is a kind of exhilaration that comes with being part of something that has energy and excitement. There is a kind of spiritual thrill that comes with being part of something that is premised upon sound doctrine and fixated on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what compelled so many to associate themselves with what was varyingly labeled “New Calvinism,” “Young, Restless, Reformed,” or the “Gospel-Centered Movement.”

Lest We Drift

It is a bit strange, only twenty years after it all began, to read what is already a kind of post-mortem of the movement. Yet that is a part of what Jared Wilson offers in his new book Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel. In its pages he asks: What went wrong with this movement? How did it gain such momentum, then lose it again? What mistakes were made and how can we avoid them in the future?

Let me pause for a moment to address the matter of nomenclature. I have never been a fan of the term “gospel-centered.” I generally eschew it because I find it novel (new to the Christian lexicon) and abstract (difficult to understand and apply). Nevertheless, it is the term Wilson uses for the movement and he defines it this way: “Gospel-centrality as a concept is essentially a summation of historic Reformed theology and Protestant spirituality that adherents would argue are as old as the Bible. … in its paradigmatic sense, gospel-centrality is shorthand for a Reformed understanding of biblical spirituality, bringing with it distinct truth claims that give the ideology substantial implications for life and ministry.” At some point, a movement based on Reformed theology was challenged to become a movement based on gospel-centrality. In my estimation, it never quite took and never quite worked. But let’s press on.

Wilson begins with a short biography of himself that could easily be the biography of so many people who had come to faith in seeker-friendly churches but then began to long for something more—a faith that had more content and more substance. Through the new technology of the internet, they encountered John Piper, R.C. Sproul, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, or some of the other prominent preachers or teachers. Before long they had embraced Reformed theology and, in many cases, the idea of gospel-centeredness. But that was then and this is now.

More and more leaders my age who once seemed so committed to the ministry philosophy of gospel-centrality now seem to have moved on. And they haven’t all migrated to the same place. The balkanization of the young, restless, and Reformed tribe has resulted in silos and splinters, some more substantial than others. They run the gamut from social gospel–style progressivism and Christian “wokeness” to right-wing political syncretism and legalistic fundamentalism. Even among the numbers who still hold to the doctrinal claims of Reformed theology and its implications for gospel ministry, there are now a number of factions and divisions along political and cultural lines. I thought we were “together for the gospel.”

Didn’t we all, at least for a time? Wilson’s particular concern is the idea and doctrine he has championed and defended for all this time: gospel-centrality.

Gospel-centrality really is God’s way for the Christian life and church. Gospel-centrality really is biblical. But part of doggedly committing to the centrality of Christ’s finished work in all things is being sober-minded—aware of our own inclinations to add to, subtract from, or otherwise attempt to enhance or augment the powerful work of the Holy Spirit through the message of grace in Christ. It’s not enough to be aware of how Mark Driscoll and others drifted. It’s our own drift that calls for our attention.

This drift is the concern at the heart of his book. Understanding what happened is the theme of the first couple of chapters and understanding the consequences is the theme of the next five.

So what happened?

For this particular armchair coroner, the primary cause of death was that the influencers and authorities of gospel-centrality failed to rise to the occasion of quickly changing cultural challenges and threats to theological orthodoxy. The movement’s thought leaders were assimilated into the pacifying (and compromising) swamps of “Big Eva” and thus lost their reformational fire—and their reformational credibility.

If you were along for the ride, you’ll appreciate his history of the movement’s rise and fall, and perhaps sometimes cringe as you remember some of its defining moments.

But more important than this is his warning about five different kinds of drift, which are not drifts from a movement but drifts from the gospel. Hence, whether or not you are “gospel-centered,” you will benefit from reading and considering them.

He begins with a drift into victimhood and explains that if we root our identity in anything other than Christ, we effectively place ourselves at the center and can soon become convinced we are victims of society or circumstances. “The cross does not secure your body from victimization,” he says. “But it does secure your identity from victimhood.” He then discusses the all-too-common drift into dryness in which Christ no longer thrills our souls and we go casting about for different kinds of delight. This will always lead to spiritual dryness and drift. “Religiosity cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy. If anything, it might expedite it, as we find it harder and harder to keep up the religious efforts without a renewed heart. The machinery of ‘spirituality’ cannot move for long without the oil of spiritual vitality. And this spiritual vitality can come only from friendship with Jesus.”

Wilson warns as well about the kind of superficiality that weds Christianity to a consumerist culture and the kind of pragmatism that replaces trust in Scripture with confidence in whatever methods appear to be effective. A chapter that may take some by surprise in a movement characterized by its commitment to the gospel is one about the temptation of legalism, for “the leaven of legalism is subtler than we realize.” We may think our focus on the gospel inoculates us against legalism, but legalism can take on new and deceptive forms. “We see the new legalism at work in evangelicalism today when we conflate secondary and even tertiary doctrines with primary ones. We see it at work when we prioritize cultural conformity over gospel unity and insist on extrabiblical litmus tests for orthodoxy that are more in line with tribal affiliations than with Christian communion.” A concluding chapter pleads with Christians to be aware of the tendency and temptation to drift—to leave behind the gospel and center the Christian life and the Christian church on anything else, anything less.

I have read most of Wilson’s books over the years and appreciate this one as much as any of them. His telling of history is both interesting and illuminating (though I think there could have been more said about the role of women in popularizing the movement such as writers like Gloria Furman, Emily Jensen, and Laura Wifler who rose with the movement and carried it to their demographic of young moms). Of more importance is his focused and timely warnings about both the tendency to drift and the specific ways in which each of us is prone to drift. No matter what movement we are part of or what label we prefer to wear, as long as we are “Christian,” these chapters are pure gold.