The past several decades have seen significant changes in the relations between Catholics and Protestants. Theologians on both sides of the confessional divide have grown increasingly willing to engage in dialogue with one another. If even 50 years ago Catholics and Protestants defined themselves in mutually exclusive terms, today they are more inclined to regard each other as members of the same universal church.
Derek Wilson and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto applaud these recent ecumenical trends in their provocative and informative account of the past five centuries of Christian history, yet they also insist that false appraisals of the Reformation’s legacy continue to impair relations between Protestants and Catholics. Whereas Catholics have often blamed the Reformation for shattering a unified church and paving the way for secular individualism, Protestants have lauded the movement for liberating consciences and sowing the seeds of scientific, economic, and political progress. According to Reformations, as long as Catholics and Protestants continue to view the Reformation as a cataclysmic event that split the church and altered the course of Western history, they will be predisposed to emphasize what divides rather than what unites them.
Reformations seeks to correct such common misperceptions about the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. The idea for the book originated when the BBC enlisted Fernandez-Armesto, “a Roman Catholic of Tridentine temptations wistfully resisted,” and Wilson, “an evangelical Protestant of charismatic sympathies sparingly indulged,” to discuss the historical significance of the Reformation. After several years of research and debate, the two historians claim to have discovered not only that their own beliefs were much closer than they had supposed, but also that the gulf separating Protestants and Catholics for five centuries is more apparent than real.
At the root of exaggerated assessments of the Reformation’s revolutionary nature, contend the authors, is a myth of pre-Reformation church unity. According to Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto, “the ‘scandal of disunity,’ is a mantra often recited with little understanding.” Western Christians conveniently forget that the pre-Reformation church had already been rent by several schisms and was rife with disagreement, dissension, and diversity. Medieval Christianity church encompassed a bewildering array of doctrines, liturgical practices, local saints, religious groups, prophets, and lay devotions. Quests for grace outside official channels and critiques of the established church did not begin with the Reformation. “Diversity was not the privilege of radicals, but the pattern of Christianity.”
When viewed in this context, the Reformation appears as just one of many spiritual renewals within the long sweep of church history. Even if Protestants gave the church a particularly shocking jolt, the task of reforming the church neither began nor ended with the Reformation. In calling laypersons to a more genuine piety and in striving to restore the “primitive” purity of the church, the Protestant Reformers were simply participating in the “continual reformation” needed to keep the church from institutional stagnation, empty formalism, and cultural conformity.
To show that Protestants were not alone in their reforming efforts, Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto have organized their book thematically rather than chronologically. Instead of depicting Protestantism and Catholicism as two discrete traditions, the book highlights the concerns and struggles they had in common. Two chapters are devoted to questions of tradition and revelation, two to worship and priesthood, five to “human relationships” (both within and outside of the church), and one to doctrine. Seeking to downplay divisive doctrinal issues, the authors suggest that the Reformers grappled with problems typical to every church body. Although Protestants may have initiated some new solutions to these problems, their responses to the church’s perennial dilemmas were often quite similar to those of Catholics.
Where historians and theologians have traditionally seen a sharp contrast between Catholics and Protestants, Reformations strives to find common ground. Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto argue that although the Reformers championed sola scriptura, Protestant clergy were as wary as Catholic priests of the dangers of the “open book” and as doggedly attached to their own traditions. Indeed, the Protestant establishment proved itself highly susceptible to clerical elitism and formalism and often spawned its own “mini-reformations,” including Puritanism, Pietism, Methodism, and the Great Awakening. Catholic mystics such as Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross, on the other hand, cultivated a mystical lay devotion that was as potentially individualistic and subjective as anything the Protestants produced.
At times, such comparisons seem simply to confirm truisms—that every church needs its prophets and critics, that the church is a diverse body, that a perpetual tension exists within the church between structure and creative spontaneity. In other words, Reformations paints an anachronistic picture of church history. Although the book is packed with historical details, their arrangement is somewhat haphazard and forces the reader to shuttle back and forth between centuries and continents at dizzying speed. Ironically, the book’s celebration of Christian diversity often has the unintended effect of flattening out the differences between confessions and historical periods, making them seem diverse in exactly the same ways. To point out that the church has always had its rebels and reformers can create the impression that there was little distinctive about Luther’s message or the historical context of the Reformation.
Beneath Reformations‘ occasionally facile comparisons, however, lies a subtle historical argument. According to the book, the church has sought to reform itself during the past 500 years with greater vigor than before. Catholics and Protestants have repeatedly striven to purify their respective churches and foster a more active and informed lay involvement in the faith. By taking advantage of increased literacy and improved methods of communication, the church has shared the gospel with more people than ever before. The Reformation did not by itself launch this new era of reform. But in establishing “a new kind of creative tension” between the Word (Scripture), the church (tradition), and the Spirit (individual experience), the Reformation did provide the church with added incentives to reform, as well as new checks on corruption and complacency.
This reforming impulse has manifested itself most visibly in the struggle to spread the gospel and to forge a more Christian culture. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the increasingly better educated clergy of both churches launched an aggressive campaign against the animistic world-views, local saints, magical practices, ungodly behavior, and doctrinal ignorance of Europe’s overwhelmingly rural population. Because the gospel had yet to touch huge segments of Europe’s population in a meaningful way, distinctions between godliness and worldliness were “more conspicuous” at the time than differences between Protestants and Catholics. “The conflict of Protestants and Catholics has dominated the history of books, but the assault of the godly on the world was a much wider and deeper conflict.” Although sometimes heavy-handed, this “reformation of culture” was accompanied by the overseas missions that have become a hallmark of modern Christianity.
In the long run, argue Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto, this shared impulse for reform has done more to shape the modern church than have confessional divisions. Despite their differences, Catholics and Protestants have often worked together during the past five centuries to renew the church, spread the gospel, reform culture, and deepen personal piety:
In some ways, “Reformation”—defined as a search for a purer Christianity, more conformable to primitive models, or as a movement to communicate Christian verities more deeply and widely to Christian people—was less a source of division than a common theme spanning hostile groups. … Despite its reputation for having divided the church, we think it has been the great unifying theme of Christian history in modern times.
In this sense, nineteenth- and twentieth-century ecumenical movements were themselves offshoots of the “Reformation,” since the drive for ecumenical cooperation originated among mission-oriented evangelicals seeking to put aside confessional differences in order to fulfill the Great Commission.
To redefine the term Reformation so as to separate the real unity of the church’s past from an apparent disunity, however, requires some sleight of hand. Reformations is least compelling in explaining why many Western Christians have felt convinced that there is a big difference between being Protestant and being Catholic. Because the authors are intent on mending today’s confessional divisions, they often find more similarity between past Protestants and Catholics than historical partisans of both sides would have detected. Yet the fact remains that Protestants and Catholics believed what they were told about each other and acted upon their perceptions, however unfounded these beliefs and perceptions proved to be.
Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto largely blame rigid doctrinal formulations for the animosity between Catholics and Protestants. It was theologians, as well as political and ecclesiastical leaders, who perpetuated confessional differences. Only reluctantly do the authors devote a chapter “to the kind of Christianity that goes on in the mind and is expressed in doctrines and attitudes, because it has meant so much to the elites who have defined the difference between Protestants and Catholics.” According to the authors, doctrine is the least important aspect of the faith of most Christians. “The Christian’s is usually a life of sensation, not of thought,” and most believers feel the difference between churches chiefly in terms of the “aesthetic” and “social” experience of worship.
While doctrine may not be the first thing on most believers’ minds, Reformations establishes a false dichotomy between Christian thought and Christian experience. Theological concerns were inextricably interwoven with many of the reform movements that the authors discuss, if not immediately for the majority of adherents, then at least for those who helped to shape the movements. “Justification by faith” may not have been all that the Reformation was about, but it is difficult to disentangle the doctrine from Protestant complaints about indulgences, the Mass, and abuses of clerical authority. Given the authors’ otherwise keen interest in worship, the few pages they devote to sacraments and means of grace seem insufficient. No mention is given to the Protestant critique of clerical celibacy, a stance that had important theological implications and profound social consequences. Ironically, the authors themselves do not shirk from speculating about the nature of an ecumenical church, the boundaries of orthodox belief and worship, and the various means through which divine revelation is disclosed. If the authors’ own prescriptions are perhaps more flexible than those of past Christian thinkers, they are no less theological.
Reformations is an ambitious attempt to assess church history in light of today’s ecumenical concerns. When read as a call to further ecumenical cooperation and a celebration of how far the church has come over the centuries, the book is compelling. When read as a historical account of Catholic-Protestant relations, however, Reformations might leave one wondering what all the fuss was about in the first place.
Matthew Lundin is a doctoral student in history at Harvard University.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
