If there is hope for the church today, it lies in two things. First, there is a welcome recovery in certain areas of the Protestant world of the pre-Reformation Christian tradition: the creeds, the Fathers, and the medieval schoolmen. Second, and ironically, the chaos of the Francis papacy is driving many faithful Roman Catholics to rethink the ultramontanism that came so easily during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Perhaps this will gain orthodox, Reformation Protestantism an unexpected new audience.

Numerous times over the last few years I have heard both Roman Catholics and Protestants express a desire for a new Reformation. For traditional Catholics, Francis’s papacy has brought a chilly realism to bear upon the legacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Moreover, the ongoing and ever-intensifying abuse scandal has yet to have its full impact upon the Church of Rome—both in terms of institutional confidence and public image. Among orthodox Protestants, divisions on social justice issues and debates over the Trump presidency are driving erstwhile allies apart even as denominational numbers stagnate or decline.

As regards theological and ethical issues, the picture is no brighter. The pope sounds dangerously ambiguous on ethical issues such as homosexuality, while his role in the abuse scandal seems disturbingly murky. Despite an elaborate Catechism, Rome exhibits a dogmatic timidity—which some see as a studied pose that provides cover for more mischievous developments. Suddenly, with nobody noticing, liberal Protestantism has apparently found a comfortable home at the heart of the Vatican.

Orthodox Protestantism also faces conflicts of its own making. While the authority of Scripture has gripped the Evangelical imagination for much of the last century, mischief has been done to other Christian essentials. Recent years have revealed that some of the most influential Evangelical theologians of the last few decades were not even Trinitarian in the catholic, creedal sense. Vital classical doctrines such as divine simplicity, impassibility, and immutability are now at a premium, redefined beyond recognition or rejected out of hand. Errors that cost lives in the sixteenth century have been laughed off as minor blemishes on otherwise revered individuals and august institutions—a trivialization that reveals a terrible historical ignorance of both the creeds and the Reformation itself. The Socinian biblicism of Cracow, and not the magisterial Protestantism of Wittenberg or Geneva, seems to be the order of the day.

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