Are Protestants Going to Heaven? | 2 Protestants Debate a Catholic (ATB #32)

WEEK 32: Are Protestants Going to Heaven?Welcome to Harvard Divinity School. This week, we sit down with Edward Doan to take on one of the oldest and most consequential questions in Western Christianity: can Protestants be saved?We start by refusing to treat this as one question when it's really three. Soteriology — can non-Catholics be saved? Ecclesiology — what actually constitutes the Church? And eschatological judgment — can any human being even know who's saved? Keeping those distinct turns out to matter a lot.From there, we walk through the Catholic position in full. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — "outside the Church, no salvation" — is 1,800 years old and has never been formally repealed. The Council of Trent explicitly condemned sola fide and sola scriptura. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium opened the door to Protestant salvation without walking any of that back. We press into that internal tension directly.Then we take up the Protestant case: Romans 3, Ephesians 2, Galatians 2, Abraham justified before circumcision. We work through the sola scriptura debate — including the Catholic counter that the Church gave you the canon in the first place — and we spend real time on justification, the theological heart of the whole dispute. Infused vs. imputed righteousness. Whether the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification actually resolved anything. And the doctrine of invincible ignorance — Catholicism's escape hatch, and why it creates some uncomfortable implications for evangelism.We also get into purgatory, indulgences, the Eucharist, and Mary — covering what actually started the Reformation and where the live disagreements still sit today.We're in Boston for this one, which feels appropriate.The interludes: a Catholic-or-Protestant trivia game, and a deep dive into the Penitential of Finnian — 6th-century Irish Christianity's answer to the question of how much bread and water a sinning cleric deserves.We close with Girl Problems: how do you know what flowers to get her, and how do you actually decide how many kids to have?Email [email protected] or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench to be featured on the show. Anonymous submissions: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z800:00 Introduction2:02 Getting to Know Ed04:50 Are Protestants Going to Heaven?34:49 Catholic or Protestant?37:59 The Penance Game41:08 Girl Problems