This book is a lengthy overview of the Reformation period, starting with medieval monasticism in the fifth century and ending with the Council of Trent in 1563. The pre-Reformation material follows the trend in recent Reformation textbooks that provide the context of the Reformation—for example, Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (endnote 1). In Barrett’s case, the background material is intended to prove his thesis that the Reformation considered itself to be “a renewal of evangelical, reformed catholicity, a retrieval of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church” (32). Confessional Lutherans will agree with Barrett’s thesis, because the Augsburg Confession says almost the same thing: “There is nothing here that departs from Scripture or the catholic church, or from the Roman church, insofar as we can tell from its writers” (AC Conclusion of Part One 1; endnote 2).
The standard textbooks that have been used by Lutherans, at least since the 1950s, in my experience, have already made the case for the “catholicity” of the Lutheran Reformation. Jaroslav Pelikan is quoted to this purpose by the author (24–32). Is there then anything new in Barett’s book that makes it worth reading or purchasing by Lutherans? I think so.
First, and foremost, is the fact that the author gives insights from the recent scholarship on the Reformation throughout the book. Heiko Oberman, David Steinmetz, Steven Ozment, Richard Muller, Willem van Asselt, Denis Janz, John Farthing, Randall Zachman, Euan Cameron, and Scott Hendrix are mentioned by the author as examples of this recent scholarship in his first chapter (30–31 and 30n83). Barrett admits that his Luther chapters are indebted to books by Oberman, Hendrix, Cameron, Martin Brecht, E. Gordon Rupp, and Diarmaid MacCulloch (371n1). Where he refers to these recent authors, he interacts with their work and usually agrees with it. The fifty-seven-page bibliography is mostly drawn from recent works. This book is thus, in my reading, a product of fifty years of Reformation scholarship, though Barrett’s interaction with the scholarship does not interrupt the narrative flow.
Second, and most significantly, the author laments the fact that evangelical Protestants (e.g., Presbyterians and Baptists) have since the nineteenth century viewed the Reformation “as if the Reformers were radicals, throwing off the shackles of tradition, as if the church had been corrupted and lost since the apostles” (22). Then he declares that “the best evangelical academics avoid this oppositional narrative. . . . However, among the evangelical masses, the oppositional narrative is prevalent” (23). We Lutherans can hope that modern evangelicals will understand Barrett’s thesis and take it to heart. His intent is not to say that everything was fine in the medieval church or in modern Roman Catholicism but that the magisterial Reformers in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches were in harmony with the patristic churches and with many aspects of the medieval church and so on that basis could rightly claim “catholicity.”
Martin R. Noland
Pastor, Grace Lutheran Church
San Mateo, California
Endnotes
- Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1980).
- In The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000).