The twenty-three essays included in Multiple Reformations? The Many Faces and Legacies of the Reformation include contributions from a host of well-known senior scholars who gathered for three colloquies sponsored by the University of Heidelberg and the University of Notre Dame in 2016 and 2017. The goal of the volume, according to the editors, is to “interpret and assess the Reformation as a historical and theological event, as a historiographical category, and as a cultural myth”—and to do this from a variety of disciplinary and confessional perspectives (xi). The book’s subtitle further underscores a commitment to engage the full diversity of the Reformation.
Thus, the first colloquy focused on the historiographical, cultural, and religious “construction” of the Reformation, including the question of whether the Reformation can be interpreted as a unified “event” or must be understood through a paradigm of “multiple Reformations.” The second conference raised questions related to the variety of confessional cultures that emerged from the Reformation and the “distinct forms of modernity which these cultures produced” (xii). The third colloquy addressed themes related to the authority of Scripture and the legacy of biblical interpretation in post-Reformation confessional cultures.
Although the ambition of the project is laudable, and the organizers clearly committed significant institutional resources to the effort, the result is something of a disappointment. Despite a number of insightful essays, the overall collection falls short of its avowed goals. The “reformations” considered here are limited to the Magisterial Reformation, with only a passing nod to Catholicism and no mention whatsoever of the Radical Reformation, and the essays themselves generally reflect the insights of an older generation of scholarship, with little sense of fresh or exciting directions that might inspire future scholarship. In general, the essays here are not poorly written or badly argued, but they are suffused with the evening glow of Reformed and Lutheran scholarship from the past thirty years.
The 500th anniversary commemorations of the Reformation touched off a small firestorm of debate in Germany, in which historians generally criticized the organizers of the 2017 Lutherjahr for a tendency to focus disproportionately on the heroic figure of Martin Luther and to regard the Reformation as an exclusively German event. Clearly, the organizers of the colloquia that gave rise to this volume have taken that critique to heart in their emphasis on “multiple Reformations” and their commitment to extending the time frame forward to explore the Reformation’s echo across the span of centuries and geography. Despite these good intentions, the essays themselves tend to follow well-worn paths. The historiographical essays, for example—written by such notable scholars as Euan Cameron, Randall Zachman, Emilio Campi, C. Scott Dixon, and Ute Lotz-Heumann—address the familiar themes of late medieval piety, debates over periodization, early Lutheran narratives of the Reformation, and, of course, confessionalization. These are all serviceable summaries, but they offer few sharp interpretative edges or memorable arguments.
The same can be said about an essay by Manfred Oeming on the importance of the Old Testament in Luther’s thought, John O’Malley’s summary of Catholic pastoral care, or Hartmut Lehman’s article on religious sources of nationalism in the West. Even when the essays extend beyond the familiar theological debates or the standard dramatis personae of the 16th century, they tend to reinforce arguments already well established in the literature.
The most original contributions, in my judgement, are those focusing on the cultural impact of the Reformation: Christoph Strohm on the development of Western legal theory; Ryan Hoselton and Douglas Sweeney on scripture and the evangelical-Pietist tradition; and essays by Friederike Nüssel, David Lincicum, and Matthaias Konradt on scriptural authority and biblical scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The second disappointment in a volume so explicitly committed to exploring “the many faces and legacies of the Reformation” is the paucity of attention given to the Catholic Reformation and the complete absence of any reference to the Radical Reformation—that is, the Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Antitrinitarians, or the sociocultural legacy that these religious movements unleashed in the history of early modern Europe. Although the editors express their hope that “by remembering the Reformation . . . in a truly comparative and ecumenical way, we will help to pave the way to an even more ecumenical future” (xv), it seems as if the standard categories of the Magisterial Reformation continue to prevail. Three generations of scholarship on the Radical Reformation—with the associated themes of religious voluntarism, separation of church and state, and conversations around Christianity and violence—are simply ignored.
Finally, at a time when the denominational heirs of the Magisterial Reformation are in rapid decline in Europe and North America, a more creative and self-critical assessment of the Reformation’s legacy might have given a nod to the renewal of the church currently underway among Christians in the global South. Whatever growth there is to be found within contemporary expressions of the Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed traditions today is happening in cultural contexts far removed from Europe—namely, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Moreover, the forms of Christianity that are currently experiencing the most dynamic growth today—that is, Orthodoxy, Pentecostalism, and African Initiated Churches—have little to no interest in the theological themes that preoccupied Magisterial reformers and their Catholic counterparts. To be sure, not every effort to take stock of the Reformation should be expected to give an account of Radical Reformation or the global church. But in light of the ambitious and far-reaching goals of the colloquia that inspired this volume, it seems that at least one essay might have given a nod to these themes.
The scholars who contributed to this volume are all worthy of respect. But as a whole, the collection represents the fading light of a passing generation of Reformation scholarship more than it does a volume destined to inspire a new generation of scholars to carry on their work.
John D. Roth is Professor of History at Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana.
John K. Roth
Date Of Review:
January 26, 2021
