The shift towards medievalism?

Uh yeah, pope/trentless roman catholicism is called protestantism

— Gnoisome Gnoll 🦃⚓🦃 (@gnoisomegnoll) November 12, 2021

In response to critics of EFS/ ERAS, Own Strachan had released a podcast episode decrying the shift towards "popeless and Trentless Catholicism." This shift has come about as much of Evangelical academia has shifted towards Thomism in its metaphysics. Strachan's charge of popeless and Trentless Catholicism is a charge that Evangelical academia has become like Roman Catholicism with the exception of having no pope and having the Gospel. In response to Strachan, at least one person claims that Protestantism is indeed a popeless and Trentless Catholicism. But is Protestantism merely Roman Catholicism with the Gospel and without the Pope?

The 16th century Reformation did not happen in a vacuum. It was preceded by the Renaissance, where new forms of learning and innovation came onto the scene. Most of the Reformers came from the (Renaissance) humanist tradition, as opposed to the establishes scholars steeped in medieval scholasticism. Calvin for example wrote against the scholastics of the Sorbonne, and much of the Protestant Reformation began with a rejection of Medieval Scholasticism.

Now, it is correct to say the none of the Reformers thought to thoroughly reject scholasticism, and that later Reformed scholasticism did not see the Protestant faith and the methods of Scholasticism as being incompatible. This is not a rehash of the discredited "Calvin versus the Calvinist" historiography. It is also not to claim that the first two generations of Reformers would disagree with Medieval Scholasticism on the doctrine of God; they did not. The key point here is to note that the initial point was not that of scholasticism. When Reformed Scholasticism began to take shape, the Reformed theologians of that era thought that the tools of scholasticism could be used in service of explicating the truths of the Christian Reformed faith. Generally, none of them thought that scholasticism in itself would become THE method the way medieval scholastics did. Does the method change the message? That can be discussed but none of the Reformed theologians thought it did, or they would not embrace scholastic methods as tools in theology.

The key point to observe here is to assert that Protestantism is not a "popeless and Trentless Catholicism," at least consistent Protestantism (we can exclude the via media Anglicans from the discussion). Protestantism did not just reject the pope or get the Gospel right. Without rejecting tradition, they nonetheless were willing to question it and dissent from it if they believed it to be false. They held to what Jaroslav Pelikan called "Tradition 1," treasuring tradition while keeping it at arm's length. They did not see any tradition as necessarily sacrosanct, unlike the way today's "Evangelical academia" seem to treat the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, which is basically slipping into a form of Tradition 2.

Is there a movement in church history that corresponds to "popeless Trentless Catholicism"? Yes, there has been such movements. The 17th and 18th century Jansenists in France is one such movement. But even bigger than that is Eastern Orthodoxy, which has no pope neitther does it hold to Trent. The fact is that Protestantism is more than just "popeless" and "Trentless." A major issue of the Reformation was also on the nature of authority, and this unfortunately is the major issue of our time as well, as American Evangelical academia flirts with Tradition 2 in its embrace of Thomas Aquinas.