The way [Peter Leithart's] essay ["The End of Protestantism"] is set up reminds me of an awkward stage some of my undergraduates go through. They come to Biola from good families and good churches, and we give them, along with all the Bible instruction, a truckload of Irenaeus, Athanasius, Nazianzus, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Dante. They read it, wrestle with it, come to love much of it, and then at some point in the sophomore year they look up and ask, “Why don’t Protestants read any of this great stuff?”

They ask this at a Protestant establishment. And not just Protestant, but the evangelical kind, a Bible Institute that turned into a university. They ask it of an evangelical faculty that has carefully led them through the whole heritage of patristic and medieval riches. They are sent here by their Protestant parents from evangelical churches to do this reading at a former Bible Institute with an evangelical faculty, and they want to know, “where are all the Protestants?”

Trying to avoid that gobsmacked look, I sometimes ask, “By ‘Protestant,’ do you mean your high school youth group?” Sometimes they admit that’s what they mean.

Sometimes a student will ask, “why don’t any Protestants recite the creeds?”

I don’t get exasperated. I get pretty excited that I get to be the person who throws open the doors to the vast resources of historic Protestant theology. Come on in, kids, and explore a lost culture: your own! Start with Billy Graham and R. A. Torrey and read your way backwards into the Victorians and the Puritans. Check out the Protestant Scholastics who knew Aristotle by heart. Meet the Methodist revival, run almost exclusively by Anglicans at first. Try to follow Martin Chemnitz as he engages Cyril of Alexandria on the hypostatic union. Watch Calvin’s mastery of the church fathers, and see him refuse to yield the patristic case to Sadoleto. See if you can figure out what strange mystical spot Luther is reading the Bible from. Explore the hinterland of the soul. All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.

Fred Sanders, "Glad Protestantism"