I was reading over a Pew survey from last year, and it is striking how much Catholics and Protestants have converged in their beliefs.
Is the Reformation effectively over? Is there even a reason for it to continue anymore?
My impressions from this Pew article is it shows a few different things:
* there has been a greater meeting of minds of Catholic and Protestant theology on some important issues since the Reformation
* people often don't understand or follow their own religious traditions
* the media/researchers often don't understand these religious traditions
1. Sola fide is pretty much the historic Protestant position here, though the phrasing of the question doesn't reflect the complexity of the issue: the general idea is that faith if true leads to good works, but it is faith itself that saves. The question of "Get into heaven" I suppose would mean different things to Protestants and Catholics since Protestants don't have Purgatory. But a lot of people who are Protestants and aren't connected in any real way to the theological tradition of their churches and may just think of going to heaven if you are good or to hell if you are bad.
There has been significant progress in Catholics and Protestants coming together to reevaluate the extent of differences on this issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Declaration_on_the_Doctrine_of_Justification2. There has been since Protestant's beginnings a division between those who see Scripture as sufficient in itself to guide individual Christians and congregations, and those who see a large role for the authority of the church as an institution and its historic creeds as important guides for interpreting and living out Scripture. So the split here is nothing new and does not signal Protestants are becoming more like Catholics.
