Sharifa Stevens

Dr. Beth Felker Jones

Why are we Protestant? Have you ever wondered what the differences are? BOW’s guest for this episode is Dr. Beth Felker Jones, Professor of Theology at Northern Seminary, sits down with BOW Ministry Team Member Sharifa Stevens to talk about being a Protestant. They discuss how it intersects and differs from other Christian traditions. What are the major beliefs that differ?

We so appreciate that Dr. Jones approaches this topic with grace and humility, not with an adversarial attitude.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:21 Introductions

Sharifa >> Hello and welcome to Beyond Ordinary Women Ministry. I am Sharifa Stevens, one of the hosts of Beyond Ordinary Women. And today, I am very excited to talk to Dr. Beth Felker Jones. Dr. Jones. I love saying that, so I’ll say that every time. Dr. Jones with a Ph.D. from Duke University, is a midwestern writer and professor of Theology at Northern Seminary.

She writes theology and fiction, has published numerous books and writes regularly at her Sub Stack, which is entitled Church Blogmatics. I had to say that slowly. A lifelong book lover, as she writes about relationships, identity and redemption. Dr. Jones’ latest book is entitled Why I Am Protestant. And we’ll be talking about that book today. You can discover more about Dr. Jones on our website BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org.

Welcome, Dr. Jones.

Dr. Jones >> Thank you. Delighted to be here with you.

Sharifa >> Thank you so much for being here. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Dr. Jones >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> Okay, so in your book, as you were writing your book, Why I Am Protestant, who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it? Who are your ideal readers?

Dr. Jones >> This is really bad writing advice, but I have trouble imagining my reader and I tend to just write. Really, it’s awful. It’s awful writing advice. But I suppose I hoped I was writing for other Protestants who might be thinking through both the joys and challenges of being Protestant, as well as for Christians in other traditions who might want to understand something more about the Protestant tradition. So that dual audience to mix it makes it a little bit trickier.

Yeah, I just wrote what I was feeling, and that’s really what I did. So, yeah.

Sharifa >> What prompted you to this feeling? What prompted you to write the book in the first place?

Dr. Jones >> Yeah. Well, the book was written by invitation of Intervarsity Press. So really grateful for that invitation. And it’s in a little series. There’s also a book called Why I’m Roman Catholic, perhaps, by Matthew Levering, and in future, there’ll be a Why I Am Orthodox volume. And Intervarsity Press’ desire was to have a series here that is clear about conviction from theologians in these different traditions, but is also peaceful and kind and ecumenical.

There are some kinds of books like this out there that are more fighting words. Right? And this is intended more as a heartfelt testimony to my own tradition than as a why I’m not these things and those things. So I was grateful to be tapped by IVP to write the book. But I had wanted to write a book like this for a long time because it’s the case that I understand why a lot of Protestants consider not being Protestant. Nonetheless, I’m persuaded that that’s where I want to be. So. Yeah.

Sharifa >> This is a loving treatise. I mean, it’s so bathed in graciousness and care and love and protection for the Protestant tradition. And so, as opposed to being a polemic against other traditions.

Dr. Jones >> Yeah, that’s the goal.

Sharifa >> So you met the goal, you exceeded it.

Dr. Jones >> You’re very kind. So.

Sharifa >> I have so many quotes that I like from your book. So I’ll just be quoting and then asking you about them.

So one of the first things of many that struck me was a sentence you wrote that said Orthodoxy is not primarily about getting our thinking right. Orthodoxy is built on and lives through right relationship with God. How?

So how do we have a right relationship? So, I mean, you explain this further in your book, and I guess I just want to give our audience an opportunity to hear your beautiful breakdown of orthodoxy as a concept. But how does one have a right relationship with God without thinking right? Can one or how do those work together?

Dr. Jones >> It’s not that there’s no thinking right involved, right?

Sharifa >> You’re a professor!

Dr. Jones >> The point of primarily like listing the right things, right? Checking off the right boxes. The 20th century theologian George Lindbeck says that (I’m kind of paraphrasing him here), but I’ll give his exact example. He says this if you shout Jesus as Lord while cutting off your enemy’s head, you are not living the truth, right, of Jesus is Lord.

And you can believe that all you want. Check the right box, right? But you are actually denying the truth that Jesus is Lord if you shout it while cutting off your enemy’s head. I think most of our examples are a little less serious than that one, but it really is about being who we are as people who belong to God.

You know, I think of parents who say to a child something like, “Remember, you’re a Jones.” Right? By which they mean not just or not even primarily, our family believes certain things. Right? But that we expect you to act in a certain way in this world on behalf of our family. And that’s what we’re called to do as image bearers.

Sharifa >> That’s so lovely to me, especially because I think we can hear a word like orthodoxy and it can sound dusty or—

Dr. Jones >> Old, hard. Yeah.

Sharifa >> Yeah. And what you are saying in your book is that orthodoxy is action. It is not mere intellectual ascent. It is the intellectual assent that guides your life, your life choices, your ethics, your relationships, with other people with the earth around us. It is not stodgy.

Dr. Jones >> When done right. Yeah. It shouldn’t be. Yeah.

Sharifa >> Or right praise involves relationship inherently.

Dr. Jones >> Mm hmm.

Sharifa >> It involves knowing whom you praise and how and where. So I just I really appreciated that. So thank you.

Dr. Jones >> You’re saying it very beautifully. I could listen to you talk for a while, so.

Sharifa >> Thank you. Okay, so another this is a pithier quote. But you said, “God cannot be caged.”

You said that God cannot be caged in the context of how we as a broken and fallible church can hope to understand God and in our reach for understanding God and ourselves can limit God. Right? So can you set up the context for this assurance that God cannot be caged when it comes to our faith?

Dr. Jones >> You know, a lot of this book ended up being about the brokenness of the church which wasn’t necessarily what I thought it was going to be about when I started writing. But it’s easy for us to believe, I think, when we see that brokenness, to suppose that God is somehow bound to that. Right? As though the truth about God were identical with the errors and the horrors, right, of some parts of the church.

And so I want us to put our confidence, right, in God and not the church. The church absolutely matters. We can’t get away from it. God loves it. God wants to work in it in the world. But it’s God who is God, right? It’s God in whom we have our faith. And if I were called to a place by faith in what we might be called, the God of the church, right?, I would despair pretty quickly. Nonetheless, God reveals himself to us in the Scriptures and in the person of Jesus Christ as good. Right? And so when faced with the not goodness of certain actions of the church, certain experiences in church, I don’t despair or I pray against despair, knowing that God is God.

Sharifa >> That’s good. Because a God that is good cannot be caged even in our brokenness, representing him.

Dr. Jones >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> Okay. So I’m going to go to this next favorite quote of mine. Appreciate your writing, “Scripture is not God, nor does it have the same status Jesus does. But between the first and second comings of Christ knowing Scripture in the power of the Spirit is our primary mode of revelation to Him, and it is to Him together with the Father and the Spirit (I love your Trinitarian emphasis) that Scripture testifies. God also speaks through nature through reason and in the community wisdom of the Body of Christ. But Protestant theology recognizes Scripture as different in kind from these other sources of revelation.”

So I have a vast question for you. Why is the emphasis on Scripture or Sola Scriptura such an important Protestant distinction?

Dr. Jones >> It really is for the reason we were just talking about. Right? Scripture reveals to us the truth about the God who cannot be caged, the God who is good, the God who is unfailing love, and the God who calls the church to better than the church has often been.

And so in the quote you just read, a scripture doesn’t stand alone. There are other ways that we know God but Protestant theology is kind of most basic claim is that we have to refer all of that back to Scripture or Scripture first and we don’t make any claims about faith or practice that don’t fit right with the people Scriptures.

So there really is the character of God as revealed in Scripture, right? The God of the Scriptures in whom I place confident faith. And again, for me, then it’s a reminder in the face of other claims about God, non-biblical claims about God, other uses of God’s name. In the face of those we can rely on Scripture for the truth about who that is.

And of course, that’s complicated because Scripture’s complicated, right? It’s a deep rich thick document, but I find it an enormous source of, again, I’ll use the word confidence in being able to place faith in the God revealed therein about.

Sharifa >> How would you contrast that confidence and that you Sola Scriptura anchor, I’ll call it. How would you contrast that with other traditions? What’s different?

Dr. Jones >> Yeah, that’s a great question. So of course other Christian traditions also place Scripture at a central place, right? Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox Christians and other traditions. We share this. Protestants share the Scriptures with those traditions and we share a biblical faith.

But there is a clear difference in terms of thinking about authority for theology. So while Protestants, starting with the Reformers in the 16th century through today, say Scripture alone, right, meaning we don’t make claims that aren’t based in Scripture. Everything else has to be read through Scripture as we can get through. The Roman Catholic church is clear that authority for Roman Catholic theology comes from Scripture and tradition or Scripture and the church together. Right?

Sharifa >> Right.

Dr. Jones >> So it’s just a clear difference in thinking about the way God chooses to work in the world and reveal himself in the world.

There is, in Roman Catholic theology, a greater confidence in the church than I have just expressed. Right? I’ve said I want to put my confidence in God where the church gets me down and Roman Catholic theology will insist in our confidence in God’s work in the church, which I just can’t find historically persuasive. So certainly we share the Scriptures and we share biblical reasoning, had really important biblical ways of thinking. But there’s a basic distinction about where theology starts. Does it start in Scripture alone or does it start in Scripture and church together? With confidence in the church as the right interpreter of Scripture?

Sharifa >> Now, that makes so much sense. Thank you so much for elucidating on that.

Speaking of church, this is the passage where you write, Biblically speaking, ecclesiology is (and ecclesiology is in the study of the church). “Ecclesiology is not the clearest of doctrines. It’s not that Scripture fails to equip the church, but the biblical witness does resist systematization around many ecclesial, logical questions that now occupy contemporary theologians.”

Tell us what is the good news about the Bible’s resisting of systematization concerning churches ?

Dr. Jones >> I think the good news here is about central helping us to sort out central matters versus peripheral matters. Right? The central matters about the church and Scripture are that we need each other. The church is the body of Christ, and we’re called to share the good news with the world.

Peripheral matters, and in my judgment, include things like how should we structure the thing?

But that means then that there’s freedom for contextualization and for diversity based on context as we think about things like structure and officers and ministers and a whole lot of other things that are interesting and important, but less central than the church is the body of Christ called to share the good news with the world. Yes.

Sharifa >> Okay. Man, that was so succinct.

Dr. Jones >> Well, thank you.

Sharifa >> How do you do that? Okay, that’s great.

Dr. Jones >> I’ve answered some of these questions before, but I’m not always so succinct. So you know, we’ll see how it goes, I guess.

Sharifa >> I just loved reading that passage, though. When you said resist some systematization. I was like cheering because the Spirit of God grants us so much freedom.

Dr. Jones >> So much freedom. Yeah.

Sharifa >> Right? But I think that’s intimidating to some of our brothers and sisters. That kind of freedom can be intimidating, but it’s so loving and trusting of the Spirit of God to say—

Dr. Jones >> And it reflects God’s love for the world and for I think, context and diversity that doesn’t want every church to look the same because God loves cultures and places and traditions and languages and all kinds of local flavor right which are beloved to God. And then when we try to take our local flavor and make it required for everyone, we violate God’s love for all of that difference.

Oh, yeah.

Sharifa >> Exactly. I like to think of the Spirit of God on the day of Pentecost, where everyone and the Spirit could have operated in such a way that everyone spoke the same language after the Spirit’s coming. And the Spirit part of the grace of the Spirit is that people could hear what the disciples were saying in their own language. It’s dignity bestowing.

Dr. Jones >> So beautiful. And you know, a lot of Bible scholars will point to Pentecost as a kind of healing of the fragmentation of the Tower of Babel. And it seems like the obvious way to heal that would be to put everyone back in one language.

Sharifa >> Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Jones >> But God doesn’t tell us the obvious way. Instead, it’s to draw all the nations in.

Sharifa >> Yes. And the nations continue to be the nations in Revelation. And they are speaking. They are in every tribe and tongue. They are worshiping in their language. So even when everything is consummated, we don’t lose these aspects of ourselves. There’s so much freedom. And so anyway, that quote made me cheer because of course, there’s going to be diversity. And of course, I’m an advocate for the diversity of the body of Christ. So.

Oh, speaking of what makes Protestantism specifically good for women.

Dr. Jones >> Great question. Scholars actually love to argue about which is better and or worse for women, Protestantism and or Catholicism. And I think certainly there are aspects of both traditions which can be good for women. And certainly we’ve seen in both traditions harm to women, right? So I don’t want to deny that or claim that, you know, no other tradition can be good for women.

But the Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers is claimed very early on during the Reformation by Protestant women. As a kind of authorization of their voices as theologians, as teachers, as contributors to the Reformation. And I think ultimately we see that.

Sharifa >> Well, I need to stop you because I don’t think a lot of people know this, that in the 16th century there were women’s voices who were saying, we believe Scripture when it says we are priesthood of all believers.

Dr. Jones >> Yes. And then they say so that’s why I’m talking.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Jones >> I mean, it’s not a huge number of women that it’s you know, it’s not unmixed. But certainly we have these voices, particularly from some powerful women. Right? Are getting on to the Protestant bandwagon and claiming exactly that.

And so I think it makes perfect sense then that we will see in Protestant churches later what I think is a reclaiming of the early churches extended to women, all offices and ministries. As Protestant churches start to ordain women in even the 19th and also the 20th centuries right that the logic of the priesthood of all believers is at play.

And even in something like the Azusa street revivals. Right? That radical kind of democratization or equalizing power of the Spirit is really claimed as the reason that leadership is not going to be restricted to just one class of people.

Sharifa >> So what you would what you would say is that Protestantism, even though there are pros and cons in every tradition when it comes to how women are spiritually formed and supported and also represented in the traditions of various church traditions.

And in Protestantism, because there is an emphasis on a lack of hierarchy, even within the offices of church governance that gives rise to a more egalitarian view of women.

Dr. Jones >> I think it should give rise to such.

Sharifa >> Yeah, let’s put it that way.

Dr. Jones >> More than it has always. Right. But I certainly would—

Sharifa >> It leaves room for that.

Dr. Jones >> Yeah. I would want to press my fellow Protestants to consider what the priesthood of all believers means for gender. As for other things. Yeah. And at least we can say, here’s this thing in our DNA as Protestants, which we’ve seen claimed in certain ways and which we should grapple with in an important way. So.

Sharifa >> Yes, thank you. That’s an important clarification.

Okay, we’re going to wrap up, but oh, I don’t know which question I should why don’t I let you choose. I have two more questions. I will let you choose which one you answer.

Dr. Jones >> Exciting. Okay.

Sharifa >> Yeah. So question number one is what do you think is the biggest challenge of the Protestant church in the United States currently? Question number two is what would you say to a fellow Protestant who claims that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox churches are not Christian.

Dr. Jones >> Can I answer both really fast?

Sharifa >> You can answer both. Yes.

Dr. Jones >> I’ll try. So first, I think the biggest challenge for Protestantism in the United States currently is Orthodoxy, and by that I mean right praise of the true and living God, who is not a nationalist or a partisan God, whether you’re partisan, whether your partisan politics are Democratic or Republican, and who is the God of all the nations. And to recover a Christian orthodoxy, that’s about who God is and not about whatever our politics are that we want. It’s pressing on us hard. Yeah.

For those Protestants who have been taught that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians are not Christians, I would just say you might be surprised if you take a closer look at shared belief across those traditions. And certainly all three of those traditions believe in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the efficacy of what he has done on the cross and in the power of his resurrection.

And all three traditions have beautiful things to offer to the body of Christ as a whole. But I’m a convicted Protestant. How’s that for short?

Sharifa >> So that’s really good. You did so well, Dr. Jones.

Thank you for taking so much time to talk to us about your book, Why I Am Protestant. I would like to give you the opportunity to tell our audience where they can find you. Where can they find your work?

Dr. Jones >> Sure. So the easiest thing might be to Google me, Beth Felker Jones, or all my links are on my sub stack at BethFelkerJones.substack.com which is also titled Church Blogmatics. There are links to my books writing about all kinds of things and other things that I care about there. So thanks so much for having me.

Delighted to be in conversation.

Sharifa >> I am so glad I got to talk to you, Dr. Jones. I’ve been an admirer of your work for many years.

Dr. Jones >> I’m deeply honored.

Sharifa >> For our audience, you can find other podcasts and videos pertaining to church theology and practice and church issues by logging on to our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, then clicking resources, then scrolling down to church issues.

Thank you all for listening. Thank you for watching and have a blessed day.