Abstract
With the quincentennial commemoration of the Protestant Reformation approaching, an avalanche of books and studies has appeared investigating the origins, development, and consequences of Luther’s Thesenanschlag—the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony. The present book under review serves as a particularly noteworthy single-volume commemoration. Indeed, its editors, Thomas A. Howard and Mark A. Noll, have asked fifteen experts from various disciplines to address a question of great import: “What did the Reformation accomplish, and how ought we to evaluate its influence nearly 500 years after the fact?” (9) Their answers have been grouped into three parts. Part 1 explores origins, cause, and impact. Part 2 examines prominent and contemporary historiographical perspectives. And Part 3 offers some concluding theological reflections, particularly on ecumenical issues.
The book opens with an excellent introductory essay by its editors. They briefly survey the various past interpretations of the Reformation, summarizing scholarship that once traced the origins of commercial capitalism, modern science, and liberal democracy back to the Reformation. They also correctly recognize, however, that the Reformation had a “darker side,” and cite examples of extreme polemics and coercive violence, which ultimately “tore Western Christianity asunder.” They thus conclude, following church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, that the character and content of the Reformation are perhaps best described as a “tragic necessity,” reflecting both the necessity of reform and the tragedy of scandalous division (17).
Thomas A. Howard’s opening essay notes how past centennials of the Reformation were dramatically influenced by their respective historical milieu. Whereas the first two centennial commemorations of the Reformation in 1617 and 1717 were largely “confessional,” the 300th anniversary jubilee in 1817 was couched in ideologies of “liberalism” and “nationalism” (32). This ideological rendering of the Reformation continued into the next century, when, for instance, theologian Adolf von Harnack claimed that modernity was “initiated by the hammer blows to the doors of the castle church in Wittenberg.”
The following chapter, by John Witte Jr., argues that the Protestant Reformation transformed not only theology but also law and the state. “Radical theological reforms,” he writes, “had made possible fundamental legal reforms” (56). Carlos M. Eire also makes a contribution to the volume, reprising the central thesis of his own work—namely, that the Reformation ushered in a dramatic change in conceptual worldview, a drastic redefinition of the “metaphysical and epistemological” paradigms governing western thinking (78). Peter Harrison argues that the Protestant Reformation influenced the emergence of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He contends that Protestant notions of human sin and the literal sense of Scripture in particular paved the way toward “experimental natural philosophy” (112). Karin Maag argues that the transformation of Christendom as a result of the Reformation also transformed older centers of learning and established new ones. Protestant churchmen became some of the most highly educated members of society. The first part of the volume fittingly concludes with Brad S. Gregory offering an abbreviated discussion of themes he first laid out in his magisterial The Unintended Reformation (2012). The true legacy of the Reformation, he argues, was the “unintended” and “unwanted” consequence of reconceptualizing religion as a private affair, which ultimately gave individuals the right to believe “literally anything one wishes as a matter of individual preference” (157).
Part 2 of the volume begins with Matthew Lundin, who highlights important trends in Reformation historiography since the 1960s. He observes that recent “research has illuminated the diversity of the Protestant message and the social, cultural, technological, intellectual, and political contexts in which it spread” (168). Nevertheless, he contends that the Reformation must be seen in its “original context”—that is, as a revival of old “Augustinian questions about the relationship between the City of God and the City of Man” (183). Herman J. Selderhuis then turns to the importance of commemorating the Reformation in contemporary Europe, which, he interestingly maintains, “is not as secularized or post-Christian as it might seem” (197). Philip Jenkins notes some striking parallels between the sixteenth-century Reformation and the contemporary religious revival in the “Global South.” Pushing further this theme of global Protestantism, Sung-Deuk Oak investigates the recent surge in Protestantism in Korean Christianity. This section also aptly closes with an essay by Mark A. Noll, who addresses the Janus-faced legacy of Protestantism. He stresses how the fundamental Protestant principle of sola scriptura operates on multiple levels, acknowledging that while “Sola scriptura draws people to Christ,” it also “drives Christians apart” (272).
The central concerns of Part 3 are ecumenical ways forward. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, for instance, argues that we must tear down popular, mythological “Luthers” of the past (284). Whatever his imperfections, the real Luther, according to Wilson, was a man after the “gospel of Jesus Christ,” and in pursuing this gospel together we find the prospect of ecumenical dialogue. Matthew Levering shows how John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas shared similar conceptions of the “holiness” of the Christian church. Despite the “ongoing and painful evidence of Christian sinfulness,” Catholics and Protestants can work together in proclaiming the essential holiness of Christ’s church (316). In the final chapter, Timothy George surveys the progress of ecumenical dialogue in recent years, highlighting his own personal efforts at promoting the “New Ecumenism.”
In a volume such as this, competing with so many other recent publications commemorating the quincentenary of the Reformation, some topics have been inevitably omitted. For instance, I expected at least one contribution from a more exclusively Eastern Orthodox perspective. As Ronald K. Rittgers writes in the Afterword, the 2017 commemoration should not be about Protestants and Catholics only, but about “Christianity as a whole” (338).
While I admire and commend the general ecumenical spirit of this volume, I am more convinced by those contributors who emphasize that the most long-lasting legacy of the Protestant Reformation was the fragmentation of Christianity and the space this created for secularism, skepticism, and unbelief. My own work in tracing the origins, development, and popularization of the so-called “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion are in perennial conflict or warfare, has led me to the conclusion that this historical narrative was largely a construct of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant polemics. By the nineteenth century, it served as a central rhetorical strategy of Protestant historiography. Thus, I fully support Rittgers’ contention that a more appropriate title for this volume should have ended with a question mark—Protestantism after 500 Years?