Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment
edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark Paternoster Press, 1999 344 pp.; $35
The Identity of Geneva: The Christian Commonwealth, 1564-1864
edited by John B. Roney and Martin I. Klauber Greenwood Press, 1998 228 pp.; $59.95
Thomas Boston as Preacher of the Fourfold State
by Philip Graham Ryken Paternoster Press, 1998 357 pp.; $40, paper
If Protestants in general must sometimes plead guilty to forgetting the centuries of Christian history between the Apostle Paul and the start of the Reformation, evangelical Protestants must make the same plea for the period between Luther and Calvin and the outbreak of revival under Wesley, White field, and Edwards. Sheer ignorance is the most important reason for neglecting the nearly two hundred years of history between 1550 and 1730. But to ignorance is often added a negative stereotype. Wasn’t this the period of that notorious “Protestant scholasticism,” when churches and leaders turned their back on the vital faith, urgent exegesis, and courageous faithfulness of the first Protestants in order to fill up on arid philosophy, sterile disputes over theological arcana, and ego-driven quarrels about recondite church practices? The worst feature commonly thought to characterize the age of Protestant scholasticism was its propensity to substitute fascination about the secret will of God for Scripture’s clear teaching about the work of Christ.
As with most stereotypes, the commonly held views on Protestant scholasticism are not completely fallacious. Yet as these three books, and a modest tide of other similarly well-researched, volumes have recently shown, there is a whole lot more to the subject. Of these books, the symposium edited by Carl Trueman and Scott Clark is most ambitious in correcting misconceptions and arguing new theses. Among its most successful contributions are arguments by David Bagchi (for Luther) and David Steinmetz (for Calvin) pointing out how aspects of medieval scholastic theology survived in the first generation of the Reformation. Other important chapters include Richard Muller’s convincing argument that Calvin’s successor in Geneva, the oft-maligned Theodore Beza, taught a theology far closer to Calvin’s than prevailing views often admit, and Paul Shaefer’s depiction of the late-sixteenth-century English Puritan, William Perkins, as a preacher who featured Christ’s saving offer of mercy much more prominently than the Puritans are sometimes supposed to have done.
Similar illumination for a more limited topic is provided by the essays in John Roney’s and Martin Klauber’s book, which traces the progress of Geneva from its theological heyday under John Calvin to its much more modern (and modernist) theological existence in the nineteenth century. This book too overturns ill-grounded stereotypes, especially when it shows how much the quintessential scholastic Francis Turretin (1623-1687) relied on intuitive realities of faithful Christian practice in constructing an ideal picture of Christian truth. Yet the book’s prime contribution is to demonstrate that the theological transit from Calvin to nineteenth-century intellectual pluralism was a product of multiplied contingency: rather than responding to long-enduring tendencies built into this theology or that, Geneva’s religious history was shaped by a multitude of particular decisions related to a wide variety of political, economic, and social—as well as theological—developments.
Philip Ryken’s theological portrait of Thomas Boston, who ministered in Ettrick, Scotland, from 1707 to his death in 1732, also punctures stereotypes. Boston was known in his lifetime as defending views of salvation in which Christ’s grace was offered to all. His renown long survived his death through a book of sermons entitled Human Nature in its Four-fold State. By carefully reconstructing Boston’s theological sources (which included a lot of Luther as well as Calvinists from all over Europe) and by carefully exegeting Boston’s account of the Innocent State, the Natural State, the Gracious State, and the Eternal State (in heaven or hell), Ryken shows how pastorally sensitive, Christ-centered, and broadly evangelical one of the old preachers of the late-Scholastic period could be. Even as he remained in touch with the main emphases of what Ryken calls “international Calvinism,” Boston was a preacher whom all sorts of leading evangelicals recommended for a very long time. With his more particular subject, Ryken does what the other two books also accomplish for their broader topics—which is to unmask the deficiencies of stereotypes while opening up the era of Protestant scholasticism for its complex, and often edifying, realities.
Mark Noll
Atlas of the Year 1000
by John Man Harvard Univ. Press, 1999 144 pp.; $2
Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901-2000
by J. M. Roberts Viking/Penguin, 1999 906 pp.; $18, paper
Twentieth Century America: A Brief History
by Thomas C. Reeves Oxford Univ. Press, 2000 314 pp.; $21.95, paper
John Man’s Atlas of the Year 1000 is a richly illustrated, somewhat understated account of what the whole world, and not just the European part, looked like one thousand years ago. Along with solid treatment of Europe in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, Man presents accessible essays on the Americas, Africa, the world of Islam, Asia, and Oceania—all places where, since it was not by local reckoning the year 1000, there was not even an echo of Europe’s relatively mild concern for the flipping of the calendar. The most helpful contribution of the book, apart from the unusually clear maps, is the awareness communicated of how big the world, and how extensive the human family, were even one thousand years ago, when total world population was still less than 300 million (or close to the number of people living in the United States in the year 2000).
J. M. Roberts, who earlier had published a notable one-person history of Europe from prehistory to the present, is also successful in his single-volume twentieth-century world history. Religion does not feature large in these pages—only brief comments on Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, nothing on Billy Graham, John Stott, or other notable world Christians of the century. But on questions of economic development, world wars, colonial expansion and decline, world ideologies, and similar subjects the presentation is about as good as one can expect from a single volume.
Thomas Reeves’s Twentieth Century America is, if anything, even more successful than Roberts’s global history in providing learned, accessible, succinct accounts of important people, complex events, and momentous long-term changes. The book moves through its 15 compact chapters with a sure touch; it breaks up chronological surveys with focused discussions of, for example, “Postwar Challenges” and “Nixon’s America.” As befits a responsible history of twentieth-century America, Reeves integrates religious matters quite capably into his general account. Thus, William Jennings Bryan’s religious convictions, the visibility of Bishop Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham in the post–World War II golden era for institutional churches, the confusion among traditional churches brought on by the challenges of the 1960s and 1970s—these and other similar subjects receive fair, if brief, treatment. Reeves, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and who has made no secret in other books of his own sincere Christian convictions, is not writing a morality tale; nonetheless, a sharp moral vision is at work throughout these pages in a non-obtrusive fashion. With the volumes by Man and Roberts, Reeves’s book can be recommended wholeheartedly, not as another frivolous wave at a passing chronological moment, but as exactly the sort of serious popular history necessary for genuine perspective on the state of the moment and the future ahead.
Mark Noll teaches at Wheaton College. His new book, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction, will be published in December by Blackwell.
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