Protestant Roundtable Discussion

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I have a very special episode. If you guys do remember just, I think, the last episode that I did, I had the privilege of having Paul Facey, otherwise known as the Other Paul, on to talk about the Reformed principle of Sola Scriptura, and that was an excellent discussion, and I highly recommend folks check that out.

Protestantism, the Conference Announcement, and the Guests

But today we're going to be talking about Protestantism. What is it? What are some helpful ways, useful ways, to defend it? How do Protestants, or how should Protestants, interact with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and things like that?

So we're going to talk about a wide variety of issues from my guests that I'm very excited to have on, and I'll be introducing in just a moment. But before we do that, I want to kind of throw out another reminder of the upcoming, there we go, the upcoming Epic Online Calvinism Conference, which will be featuring Dr. James White, myself, Dr. Guillaume Bignon, Scott Christensen, Saiten Bruggenkate.

We're going to be covering different aspects of Calvinism, Reformed theology, and not your normal tulip sort of conference, but we're going to be talking about some topics that I think will be very useful for folks.

I have shared on social media the specific topics that we are going to cover, and I won't review that today because I want to kind of be able to jump into our discussion for today. But if you want to sign up for that and participate, there will be a panel discussion towards the end where you can interact with each of the speakers.

You can go to RevealedApologetics .com, click on the Precept You drop-down menu, and you could RSVP that. This is also a very helpful way to support Revealed Apologetics. The money that you use to pay for the conference actually helps support what I do.

So if you're looking to support Revealed Apologetics, that's one way you can do it. Otherwise, you show me great support just by being here during the live streams, and I really do appreciate the respectful interaction in the comment section.

I have to say that I'm very proud of my comment section. We do have some interesting folks sometimes, but for the most part, people really interact respectfully, and I really do appreciate that. So I just wanted to throw that out there.

That is January 21st, the Epic Online Calvinism conference. All right. Well, without further ado, I have to introduce this show as a bad joke. You know, a Calvinist, an Anglican, a Lutheran, and a Baptist walk into a bar.

What does the conversation look like? I'm just kidding around. I'm really happy to have such diversity here amongst brothers, and so looking forward to this discussion. First, I'd like to introduce a gentleman by the name of Jeremiah.

Is it Jeremiah Short? Yes. Jeremiah Short, otherwise known as The Black Doctor. I had just recently heard about him. He came in clutch as Anthony Rogers was unable to make it, and he was able to make himself available, so I'm greatly appreciative.

Why don't you take just a few seconds to tell folks a little bit about who you are, and then we'll move on to our other guests.

Sure. For guys who know me and those who don't, I am Jeremiah Short, also known as The Black Doctor. I do apologetics not only on TikTok, but also on Instagram and on YouTube. I am a seminarian. I am in school not only from Westminster Theological Seminary, but also Beeson Divinity School.

I'm also a Presbyterian, a pastoral intern at a Presbyterian church, as well as the interim youth director there, and so I do apologetics, not only apologetics towards Muslims, but also in dialogue with Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

I also do teachings on church history and audiobooks from the early church fathers found on my Patreon.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say in our discussion today, so welcome, and my next guest is revisiting the other Paul. Happy to have you back on, brother.

Why don't you just take a few moments to share a little bit about yourself and.

Your channel? Yeah, mate. Eli, thanks for having me again. I am super happy to be back on. So, I am Paul Facey, or the other Paul online, the head of the other Apostles College, the other apostolic college.

Some of the boys should be rocking up in the chat right now. I am a good, old-fashioned, Sydney-based Anglican in that, yes, very notorious diocese of the Sydney Anglicans, kind of a bastion of tradition amidst a sea of no comment, but either way, faithful Anglican, only very recently more or less became Anglican, and not really because I've searched the traditions and wanted to find one I liked the most, but I just wanted to find a decent faithful church near me after having left Hillsong and not having had a decent faithful church for a while, especially during the lockdown season here.

And so, I found someone, funnily enough, at a mutual Roman Catholic friends party, and then this person told me that goes to an Anglican church and started going there. Now I'm there, and I decided to say, what did I get myself into?

And having read into at least a little bit of the Anglican sources, Anglican theology, I'm like, you know what? I actually kind of like this. So, that's me right now. And with my channel, I basically do any topics of, regarding Holy Scripture, theology, and history that I see value in producing at the time, something that I see there's a need for, and particular right now, and really for a long time in my channel, and it's never really not going to be this way.

That particularly will include issues of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, interacting with them, their major claims, and getting really into the deepest depths of theological presuppositions, church history.

But otherwise, I'll deal with any number of other topics. So, I do, for example, intend to angle again back to soteriology a bit more, interact with non-monogists more generally, among other topics. And so, that's more or less me in a nutshell, and I hope to bring all these things from the highest tiers of academic literature on these topics down to the understanding of the.

Layman. And so, that's me. Well, thank you very much. I think you're doing an excellent job, and I told folks before that they should definitely check out your channel. You've got some great content there.

So, thank you for that, Paul. I'd like to introduce first time.

Guest, Jordan Cooper. How are you doing? Hey, good. How are you doing? I'm doing wonderful.

Happy that you're here. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Yeah. So,.

I'm Jordan Cooper. I am not a Calvinist, and I'm not a presuppositionalist, but thanks for having me on anyway. There's more to me than that. I actually have a filter. It's.

Overlaying your face. You actually look like Greg Bonson as you're talking. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I.

Figured you'd do something like that. I do think that the Bonson-Stein debate is a classic, even though I'm not a presuppositionalist. I still appreciate it. So, I'm the executive director of Justin Center, which is a Lutheran theological education organization.

So, we publish books. I host a weekly podcast. We do some seminars, and I have a YouTube channel. The YouTube channel's under my name, Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, not Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, though I get emails nearly every day with somebody calling me that.

Name is just a coincidence. Somebody told me I had a clickbait name the other day. I was like, I didn't name myself, but I'm also the president of a theological seminary, the American Lutheran Theological Seminary, and we have a completely online distance MDiv program.

So, and I teach doctrine courses. I've written a bunch of books. I don't know. Whatever else you want to know. Sure. Well, that's excellent. That's perfect.

Thank you so much for that. And a returning guest, I had Dr. Ortlin, and I apologize if anyone else is a doctor, and I didn't call you doctor. There's just certain names the doctor just rolls off the tongue.

I think of Gavin Ortlin. I think of Dr. Ortlin. So, I apologize if anyone else has a PhD. I didn't give you your props there. But Gavin Ortlin, Dr. Ortlin, is a second time guest, and I'm happy that you're here.

Why don't you share with folks a little bit about who you are, where they can find your stuff, and then we'll just jump right into our conversation.

Defining Historic Protestantism

Yeah, happy to be back. I'm happy to be with everybody. I'm a lowly Baptist.

One second, Gavin. I do apologize. Your voice sounds really staticky. I don't know if that's

Was it Gavin Ortlin or GavBot3000? What was that?

It doesn't still sound bad now.

Yeah, and I'm not sure. I'm not a tech guy, so I'm not sure what you can do.

Is it getting any better now?

Yes.

Yeah, that's better.

Okay. I did an interview the other day, and this happened, and I changed the settings and it helped, but then it started creeping back in. So if it happens again, let me know. Sorry about.

That, everybody.

Well, no worries, because when that happens, people in the chat come up with cool nicknames. Someone just called you RoboGavin because you sounded like a robot.

I'm so curious what it sounded like now. Well, anything I can do to keep people's attention. Yeah, I'll just be real quick. Yeah, I'm happy to be back. I'm happy to be talking with everybody else here.

I'm a pastor, I'm a Baptist, so it's cool. We got major different Protestant traditions represented here, which will be fun. I run a YouTube channel called Truth Unites. My academic work is in historical theology, and I'm interested in both ecumenical work, apologetics, and historical theology in general.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Excellent, and if anyone's wondering, I go to a non-denominational church, but personally, I hold to a more Reformed Baptist perspective. So that's where I'm coming from, just in case anybody wonders or cares.

But at any rate, we're talking about Protestantism today, and so my first question for you guys, if you guys can maybe give your own rendition of how you would define core historic Protestantism and why you define it the way that you do.

Something that I often hear from Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox folks is that Protestantism is almost impossible to define because, of course, you know, look at us, we have all these different denominations and things like that.

How would you guys define kind of a basic historic Protestantism, and feel free to kind of make various qualifications and maybe add a little bit if the previous person doesn't capture it the way that you might define it.

Jeremiah, why don't you go first and share that with us?

Sure. I would define Protestantism mainly in relation to the historic magisterial reformers, in my belief, primarily looking at the top three traditions, the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Anglican, even though each of them tend to mingle, sort of.

But when you get to the original core of the Reformation, you find a union within the core doctrines of Protestantism, such as the five solas, monergism, high view of the sacraments, and things of that nature.

And if we stick to that definition, we find not only just a core union of Protestantism, but also a recognition to call others who call themselves Protestant, but don't lean into that particular definition, to be called into that higher historical emphasis on what the Reformation originally was and what it claimed to be.

All right. Thank you for that. Paul, why don't you share your thoughts?

Yeah, sure. I'd largely go along that same definition, and I'd also qualify with also adding that the whole problem of, like, oh, you can't—the definition of Protestantism is so airy-fairy, it's all over the place.

You guys don't have a coherent definition. To that, I just say, well, whoop-dee-doo, so what? Because Protestantism, in the end, is not a term for a consciously united single ecclesial movement and tradition.

It's a historical umbrella term from after the fact that denotes certain common core presuppositions—common core, oh dear—under certain traditions from a certain period of time. And so that's something I find really the most essential bit to make clear before even defining it, that we're not pretending to be a single ecclesial body, per se, with unity on everything.

We are self-consciously—these Protestant traditions are self-consciously independent bodies with distinct flavors.

Within their tradition, almost like—. I apologize. I just have to interject. I do apologize. I am getting some comments from the audience if perhaps when a speaker is speaking that the rest of us can mute our mics because there is getting some kind of feedback there.

So I'm making sure I'm going to mute my mic as well. So I do apologize for interrupting there. So thanks. If you're not on, you could mute your mic. And then when I kind of indicate that, you know, okay, it's your turn to go, then you can turn your mic back on.

Thank you guys. Sorry.

About that, Paul. Go ahead. Yeah, no problem. That's a good idea. And so, yeah, that's the first clear thing I like to get out of the way, that Protestantism is first a historical category, not a theological or united ecclesial category.

And then once that is out of the way and dispels of any arguments of disunity, because it's not even meant to be that, I would more or less go along the same definition as Jeremiah, that the best definition refers to those magisterial traditions that came up in the milieu of the Reformation and particularly in the medieval West.

And I would actually, I used to not do this, but more recently I've grown on the idea of distinguishing that pretty strongly from evangelicalism. So kind of like the holiest movements and post holiness movements, pietism, Puritans, and all that stuff.

I think there is a very strong and very reasonable distinction to make between Protestantism, the classical movements versus evangelicalism, these distinct later movements, even though they do share some presuppositions.

So that's what I'd say. We've just been listening to Father James too.

Much. True. Not going to lie. Well, just to give you guys a heads up, I'm hearing from the audience that it sounds much better when we do that. So thank you very much. Jordan, why don't you share your thoughts there?

What is historic Protestantism from your perspective? Maybe you can agree with what's been said and maybe piggyback on that and make some more distinctions or how.

Would you engage that question? Yeah, sure. Gavin and I just had a long conversation about this. If you want to check that out on YouTube, give you a much longer answer there. But yeah, Protestantism, it is something that's kind of hard to define in a lot of ways.

And when I think of myself, like where I fit theologically, I do think of myself as a Lutheran first. But that is, I think, within a broader umbrella of movements that have some similar concerns that come out of the same kind of historical movement, though they do come out of that movement in different ways.

I do think it's important as we're thinking about Protestantism to distinguish what I refer to usually as more of a classical Protestantism, which are really what are the roots of those really three traditions, the Reformed, really in some ways the Reformed and the Lutherans, and then the Anglicans kind of borrow from both of those traditions in some ways.

So really those three traditions and then those who have historical roots there within those traditions, I would consider to be more classical Protestant. So when I think of more of a Reformed Baptist, that's somebody who really comes out of the Reformed movement in some way.

And I know people debate whether you should use the term Reformed or refer to a Baptist. But I think you can trace a lineage and theological ideas and conclusions that do go back to the Reformation. So I think it's important to distinguish that from what you find in what you may consider kind of megachurch, pop evangelical Christianity, which doesn't really have those historical roots or ties.

I mean, maybe somewhere Protestantism led to this or that. I certainly would reject the very common Roman Catholic characterization of Protestantism that I often hear that includes like, you know, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and other like Sedevacantists, Roman Catholic sects, and everyone that's not under the papacy as a Protestant.

So we've got to have some kind of definition that actually has some boundaries or you just end up calling literally everybody a Protestant. So I don't think we want to do that. So generally I'll say I'm defining Protestant pretty much as those three historic traditions and then those traditions that.

Develop out of that. So you're saying that in church history, we don't see in church history the practice of what we often see in many evangelical churches today of the great pantomime tradition, where they get in front of the stage and do the pantomime.

That's not part.

Of the liturgical process at all, no? Yeah, yeah. I don't remember reading about that in any of those.

Fathers. No, no St. Pantomimus? No, nowhere? Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that, Jordan. Gavin, why don't you share our thoughts? What is historic Protestantism from your understanding? Oh, your voice sounds robotic again.

I do apologize. You're muted, so once you unmute yourself. How is it now? Is that better? That does sound better, yes.

Okay, sorry guys. I think I'm the guilty culprit in giving the feedback earlier too, but I've just done away with my USB mic, so hopefully it won't be quite as crisp, but it won't be distracting either.

Yeah, I think one thing I could just add on is just to list a series of the doctrines that all the Protestant traditions have in common, because people often say, oh, you guys don't have anything that unites Protestantism as a positive affirmation.

It's just negative energy. You're just tearing things down, and you don't have anything that's common at the core. That's not true. I would say at the heart of Protestantism are sola fide, sola scriptura, those two of the five solas.

There's sola fide, the thing being recovered in the 16th century, and then there's sola scriptura, the way, the method, there's the what and the how there. That's at the heart. Going out from there, we've got belief in two sacraments, priesthood of all believers, church discipline as a mark of the church, an emphasis upon preaching and worship, an affirmation of the rights of clergy to marry, the reception of the Eucharist in both kinds.

Those would be all doctrines that are just common to all the Protestant traditions. They were all saying the same thing over and against many of the non-Protestants. And then one last thing I'll say is one thing that's common to Protestant traditions in the main is we don't anathematize those of a different institution.

So the lack of institutional exclusivism is common to the Protestant traditions. To my way of thinking, that's one of the best things about Protestantism because I think we look around today and we see there's true Christians and Jesus is building his church in multiple institutions.

It doesn't mean there are multiple churches. It means that one institutional hierarchy is not where the boundaries are for the one true church. But most of the other systems have dogmatic claims that are generally held to be infallible and therefore irreformable that deny that.

And so I think this is one of the strengths of Protestantism too. Construed rightly, it's actually the best pathway to Catholicity if you understand that. So anyway, those are a few thoughts just adding on to the great things that were already said.

I'm glad you brought that up.

Because I do think I hear an echo. If you guys can turn the mic down. I don't know maybe. Okay. All right. Much better. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think when we mention, for example, that Protestants do not hold to the idea that there is no salvation outside my denomination in this kind of really interesting climate today, some people more on the extreme side tend to interpret that as going soft, right?

Oh, well, you're too ecumenical. I believe that we should be ecumenical, of course, with boundaries. And I know even within the Protestant denominations, there may be a difference as to how far one goes in that respect as well.

But I do think that that is definitely a positive that we can see our Presbyterian brothers, our Anglican brothers, and so on and so forth as, quote unquote, brothers, part of the Church of Christ. And we're able to do that without compromising our convictions and standing firm on really important differences.

And I don't mean that in kind of a generic sense. The differences are important, but we can still come together and debate them and talk about them and hopefully build one another up and move closer to the truth with respect to those sorts of questions that divide us.

All right. Well, I guess my next question, I want to turn it back to Jeremiah. So you said you're a Presbyterian, right? Yes, I am a Presbyterian with some.

Anglican appreciations and Anglican tendencies. Okay. I'm sorry to hear that. No, I'm just kidding.

I love it. I have a Presbyterian on my mug, so it's all good. But I wanted to ask you, as a Protestant Christian, you often interact with Roman Catholics. Do you see any validity whatsoever when Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodoxy try to critique a Protestant perspective in terms of all of the denominations?

Look at how divided you guys are. Is there any validity to that kind of thing, or do you kind of just toss that over your shoulder and be like, you guys just don't understand the issue? We're divided on many things, but we're united where it counts.

I mean, how do you interact with that kind of issue when it's brought up when speaking with Catholics or.

Eastern Orthodox people? Yeah. My type of response really does depend on how the argument is presented. So if it's represented in a way that says, I get that you understand that these things can be united on the essentials, but in some things there are differences.

Why is that? Sure, we can explain that. But if they use the old 3 ,000 denominations argument, the thing that I immediately do is roll my eyes and turn them off because they aren't really being honest with their own sources.

Even Roman Catholic sources say there aren't 33 ,000 denominations, no matter how many you want to name. But the question is, where does our sense of unity come from? Is it unity or is it uniformity? Where even in the Roman Catholic sense, there are different flavors of Roman Catholicism, but there is uniformity in the core values of what they believe.

And we confess the exact same thing in relation to Protestantism. Our flavors might look different, but our core doctrines should be, if they are actually Protestant, should be the same.

So you're saying we have vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, and strawberry ice cream,.

But they're all ice cream with respect to Protestantism? To the sense, yes. And they have the core emphasis in what they proclaim, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ and justification by.

Faith apart from works. Okay, thank you for that. Paul, how do you interact with that one? You kind of just say similar things as to as the way Jeremiah kind of expressed it there, or how do you engage someone who says, oh, you know, look at Protestants are so divided.

You need to come over to the Roman Catholic communion. We're unified and it's been this way from the very beginning. How would you interact with something like that? You're muted, Paul. Sorry about that.

Thank you very much. I can read lip, but I'm not that good. Well, fair point. I'd start with a general.

Agreement with what Jeremiah said. Yes, that self-consciously, at least between most of us, Anglicans, Reformed, classical otherwise, and Lutherans, that we'll often say that, yes, we can consider each other brothers in Christ.

We have that level of core agreement on such things where we can legitimately consider us each other brothers in Christ and be in communion in a sense, notwithstanding issues of closed communion and whatnot.

And that's very important because very often the objection lobbed towards us is actually, it's attempting an internal critique, but it actually begs the question very hard by assuming that, like looking at a certain issue where Protestants don't have an exact unity.

Let's say, for example, our metaphysical theory of the Eucharist, for example, and they say, oh, if you guys don't have unity on that issue, or where's your unity? You have no true unity. It's really bad.

There's chaos, absolutely debunked and destroyed. But at least from my angle, I don't know how seriously the other guests here take it, but I'd say that that actually begs the question on whether a unity on precise metaphysical theory of the Eucharist is actually necessary for good Christian unity.

And I'd deny that premise entirely. I'd ask them to demonstrate that, which would then actually go all the way back into the whole issue of, well, what was delivered by the apostles? What did they consider essential and such?

So that's what I first say in response, that the objection very often involves a lot of question begging. Second of all, I would say that taking a step back from the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox issues, I would say that doctrinal diversity in many areas, whether it's on tier one essentials, or even on things that are kind of important, but not per se, it's going to damn you to hell if you get it wrong.

I think that is, look, that's an unfortunate reality of our world. It's an unfortunate thing of the fall of the noetic effects of sin, people's ignorance of various pieces of information. And it's a perennial problem across all denominations.

And this is all movements, all Christian movements. And this is where I would say that it's a valid concern. And yet it's one that applies to everybody because one can look, one need only look at mainstream Roman Catholicism in any country, particularly the USA, look at the state of their lady, look at the state of their clergy, and you can find heresy left, right, and center, whether with belief or with the actual practice with respect to the mass, for example, like a picture of a priest with a little blob altar in the middle of the beach and doing the Eucharist there.

And the tribes gone absolutely berserk, rightly so from that perspective. And then they'll respond to that by saying, Oh no, no, no, but we, it doesn't, it doesn't matter if there's people that heretics within our ranks, because we actually do have official agreement via the, via our sources.

So like scripture and the statements of the magisterium, no matter what people say, we actually have official agreement, but here's the issue. We Protestants can then say the exact same thing because all three of us here, whether Dr. Orland, Dr. Cooper, Jeremiah, Eli, we all actually affirm the same set of scriptures as our authority.

And so in that same sense, where a Romanist or an Easterner can say that no matter the heretics within our ranks, we have at least official on paper unity, even if there's disagreement among us, we can say the exact same thing we have on paper unity by submitting to that same authority.

And so if they want to if they want to play that game of there's official agreements, so the on the ground situation doesn't matter, then we can do exactly the same thing. And they, they can't say otherwise without just doing a, a blatant rules to the, but not for me.

So that's how I'd respond to that objection. Oh, excellent. Thank you for that. Gavin,.

What about you? You guys are divided. This is, this is a, this is a problem. We hear it all the time. How would you interact with that? And does it matter? I can ask, add a little spiciness here. And does it matter how the person asks the question?

I mean, do you, how do you navigate a genuine question versus kind of a, like a, an attempt to kind of get you a gotcha type of question, but this is often, you know, people use this kind of thing when they're,.

You know, in these kinds of discussions. Yeah, I do think it matters how people ask the question. And I think Jeremiah had good points about that, of, you know, when someone, if they're doing the gotcha thing because of 30 ,000 or 33 or 40, or whatever the number is, that does make you treat it differently because you're realizing, okay, this person either has not been informed yet, and then we can just inform them, or they're continuing to persist in a misrepresentative statistic.

And then you have to engage that differently. But if someone's giving a sincere and, and on target criticism, I do think we can acknowledge, you know, most of the thoughtful Protestant theologians have acknowledged there is a tendency to fractionate that comes in, in various Protestant contexts.

We need to repent for that. You know, Herman Bobbink has a passage where he talks about this dark phenomenon of fractionating, and we need to repent for that. That, that sin of division is against John 17, and it occurs in all churches.

It occurs in the non-Protestant world. So we can just acknowledge that. I don't think the solution to that is to leave Protestantism. I think Protestantism offers us the best pathway to Catholicity. One distinction that's sometimes helpful to throw out is institutional unity versus organic unity.

I am not of the same communion with the other seven small evangelical churches here in Ojai, but we cooperate for the gospel, and it's an organic unity. That's not nothing. That is seen by the people in our community.

They're like, wow, they speak respectfully about each other. They partner together. They, they believe in something that's bigger than themselves. So that's good. So it's not to say we pursue that instead of institutional unity, but it's small steps we can take in the meantime.

That's good. You know, and the last thing I'll say is Paul mentioned this, but the idea of theological triage, being able to distinguish different ranks of doctrine. I wrote a book called Finding the Right Hills to Die on that argues for four different rankings.

Oh, he's kind of right there. That's cool. Yeah. This is such an important. It's so.

Meta. He's got the book and the authors on the other side of the screen. This is pretty cool.

All my different books and Paul better be ready to hold them all up as I go. No, I'm just kidding. Triage is so important in this, right? Because what we value as Protestants is liberty of conscience.

You know, I understand that, that private judgment can be abused and taken too far, but there's an error in the other direction of tyranny, doctrinal tyranny that we are concerned about. And historically Protestants have valued the ability to follow your conscience.

And so when it comes to second rank or third rank doctrines, it's a wonderful thing to give people a mechanism to follow their conscience, even while they recognize that other person over there is following their conscience and they're still a Christian.

The differences are so important, but there's still a Christian and there's still a church. And so what, that's what having second and third rank categories enables us to do. I think that's incredibly helpful at a practical level.

Thank you for that. Jordan, so how would you interact with that? I mean, I'm a reformed Baptist of sorts. I don't hold to the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and someone could bring that to me. It's like, well, look at you Protestants.

Some of you guys hold to baptismal regeneration. Some of you guys hold to infant baptism. Some of you guys hold to believer's baptism. Look at all the division. How would you interact with that in terms of kind of highlighting the core, even while.

Not compromising on some of your particular convictions? Yeah, yeah, sure. A couple of things to say that, and I have a number of thoughts, you know, with everybody else's answers here, and everybody, you know, brings up some important points.

One thing I want to say that when Roman Catholics use this, you know, 33 ,000 number and, you know, I've heard it, the number increased at different points. I don't know. It seems like it's always getting higher every time I hear it, but whatever the current number is of the amount of denominations, you know, one of the things that I often hear is, well, it's proof that, you know, sola scriptura doesn't work because Protestants disagree with each other on all of these issues, and then often those individuals are going to point to say, well, my Episcopal church down the street has a rainbow flag outside, and this is proof that, you know, in Rome, we can hold our own against these things, and you guys who believe in sola scriptura clearly just fall off the bandwagon, and to those kind of points, I say, well, the churches that are, that have gone so off the rails are not churches that are still holding to the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, which is the primary Protestant principle, right?

So, if we're actually talking about the issues of what is our authority, I really think we have to narrow down those churches that actually believe in sola scriptura, like the churches that believe that scripture is actually inerrant, infallible, it is the word of God, doesn't just contain the word of God, we can all come to agreement on the authority of what scripture actually is and teaches.

So, first of all, I think we really have to narrow it down to that, because it's not fair to deal with issues of authority when we're looking at church bodies who use the name Protestant but have rejected any view of an infallible scripture.

They've abandoned the fundamental principle of Protestantism. So, I think that's just important to bring up as we begin these discussions. But I always try to say, well, what kind of unity are we talking about?

Because, and this is, you've all kind of already brought this up, but Rome has institutional unity, and Rome likes to pull out the fact that it has institutional unity to say, well, we have this kind of unity that you don't have.

Now, you only had to read some of the discussions on social media from Roman Catholics after the death of Pope Benedict to see the complete doctrinal division that Rome has on nearly every single issue.

So, I think that there's such a divergence within Rome, but they happen to be in the same structure. So, the question that I have is, is it really that much more important to have a structural or institutional unity rather than doctrinal unity, or are there other kinds of unity that we should seek?

I think everyone agrees that John 17, in the high priestly prayer of Jesus, tells us that we are to have unity. And yes, there are sectarians there, and I say this in Rome too. You got your Taylor Marshall types that are ready to anathematize everybody too.

So, it's not just Protestants that do this. You've got your sectarians all over the place. You get those types, but the majority of us recognize that unity is good. It's just a matter of how do you seek for unity?