Protestantism is either directly or indirectly responsible for some of the world’s greatest philosophers, certainly most of the world’s greatest philosophers since the end of the Medieval Era. Protestantism has a spectacularly strong intellectual tradition, and strong scholarly rigour. Protestantism has produced most of the world’s most influential translations of Scripture.

This much is certainly good, but it means we face the specific trap of overly-academic church cultures at the expense of genuine piety. In the 17th century, a man like Johann Gerhard could write like a mystic or like a scholastic philosopher whenever he deemed either mode more fitting. Today, we mostly write like philosophers.

We are in dire need of rediscovering what it was exactly that meant theology could be both pious and intellectually rigorous, not either one or the other.