[Also on Substack]
Rod Dreher’s gratuitous dig at the formal principle of the Reformation made for a handy foil for a response. The dig could have come from any Catholic; I’m sorry it came from him.
I’ve enjoyed Rod’s writing, including his latest essay,[1] and am glad to get my fill of it on his Substack “Diary.” But I cannot respond, as I feel I must, to that portion of his essay (a tissue of emotive non sequiturs) without coming across as gracelessly unecumenical.
Let the chips fall where they may.
I won’t disturb the peace of Rod’s combox with my biblicist (i.e., Sola Scriptura-based) protest, which he must find intolerably tone deaf. I welcome such disturbance here if anyone thinks fomenting it is worth the bother.
First, we have the irenic autobiographical set-up:
Though I would learn in time that I was wrong to judge all of Protestantism by my own experiences, and by megachurchery — there really is intellectual depth there, is what I’m saying, and besides, you cannot deny many good fruits in the lives of individual Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ . . .
Well, thank you very much!
. . . — there is zero chance that I would become Protestant.
Why? Here comes a dash of what I must call Newmanesque snobbery.
I agree, with [19th-century Roman Catholic convert and “canonized saint” John Henry Cardinal] Newman, that to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant.
Its sheer assertion prompts my invocation of infidel Christopher Hitchens’s apt “razor”: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Rome’s (and Constantinople’s) ahistorical conceits having been exposed for the pious anachronisms they are, they rule themselves out as options, at least for me.
I say this in full awareness of the challenge of what Romanist apologist Christian Smith calls Protestantism’s “pervasive interpretive pluralism” when it comes to following Scripture as the sole infallible epistemic authority for Christians living in the present Dispensation of Grace.
The efforts of Smith (and Casey Chalk, Brad Gregory, et al.) to rule out that epistemic status for Scripture do nothing to locate the “solid interpretive authority” that Rod seeks.
I simply can’t see the Church of the first millennium in Protestantism.
Well, I can’t even find “the Church” in the first century if he means that organization formed no earlier than the second half of the first millennium, which is where those who go “deep into history” find the beginnings of “the Roman Catholic Church” with its “re-presented sacrifice” that perfects no one.
Nor [Rod continues] can I reconcile myself with the lack of solid interpretive authority in Protestantism.
Has he found that authority in the historical fictions on which the Vatican (or Constantinople) rests its imperious claims? To be sure, one cannot integrally burke that question, but why frame it in a way that a priori rules out Scripture as that authority?
Now comes the ineffable sensorial dimension, against which mere argument is impotent:
And once one becomes accustomed to worshiping liturgically, with the body, the essential cerebral nature of Protestantism seems like a thin thing, at least to me. (Emphasis added.)
One can justify just about any behavior if what one “gets accustomed to” is one’s criterion of truth.
I cannot imagine a more modernistic, and unscriptural, understanding of worship.
If God is spirit, that is, not a body (Luke 24:39), then He must be worshipped in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Is that too “cerebral”?
How about “Love the Lord your God . . . with all your mind (ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ σου, holē tē dianoia sou) as well as with your heart (καρδίᾳ, kardia) and soul (ψυχῇ, psychē)? Matthew 22:37
I elaborate upon all this in my Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, which is in the interior design phase.
Post-launch, my focus will shift to the Romanist disparagement of the Bible as allegedly “insufficient” in all the ways that the Apostle Paul said it is sufficient.
DM’ing me on his site, Rod asked why I characterized his anti-Protestantism as “Newmaneque snobbery”; why couldn’t I just say, “Rod’s wrong”?
My answer:
How boring, Rod. I’d rather hear “Flood thinks he’s his own pope” than “Flood’s wrong.” As I wrote, your dig was gratuitous, not what I come to your platform for, one I felt needed to be addressed. Newman’s “deep in history” aphorism/canard has always bothered me. Lord Acton, certainly not shallow in history, regarded Newman’s dabbling in his field as inadvertently encouraging “a School of Infidelity” (Letter to Gladstone, 1896). Again, I’m sorry your essay was the proverbial back-breaking straw that provoked my criticism. Sorry, I say, because you are an excellent and almost miraculously productive essayist with whom I find myself much more often in agreement than in disagreement. Best, Tony
Note
[1] “Why Do People Convert to Catholicism? What Does Conversion Do for Us, and to Us?,” Rod Dreher’s Diary, January 24, 2026.