The European Reformations.

Littell, Franklin H.

Two generations ago, the professorship on the Reformation was the key appointment in Protestant theological seminaries. With the rise of ecumenical and interfaith activities, in many centers for training the clergy the center of gravity has shifted in the curriculum. The specialists, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, still find the sixteenth century endlessly attractive. How much of this gets transmitted to the rising generations is open to question.

The volumes by Lindberg (Boston University School of Theology) and McGrath (Oxford University) are well written, equipped with bibliographies and other references, and can serve well to introduce students to the topics surveyed. in font, covers, binding, and illustrations both are beautiful presentations by the publisher (though the present McGrath volume is a Baker paper reprint).

Lindberg's The European Reformations is intended for use as a textbook, and it breaks little new ground in its treatment of the spread of the Reformation. His treatment of the "Radical Reformation" is conventional and brief, although he does see that the Anabaptist circle around Grebel marked the beginning of the Free Church movement (p. 212). There is no mention of the Polish Reformation, in which both Anabaptist and Unitarian influences were powerful, and the twelfth chapter, on the Reformation in the Netherlands, misses the critical point that the Reformation first came to the lowlands in its radical forms. Overall, the book's most creative insight is the author's exposition of the force of anticlericalism at critical junctures: at the height of the Renaissance (pp. 53-55), at the opening of the Lutheran Reformation (pp. 160-163), and in the English Reformation (pp. 309-310). This critical mindset grew broader and deeper and in some circles developed into a repudiation of the whole power structure and idea of corpus christianum.

McGrath's Intellectual Origin surveys, with extensive footnotes, the two great intellectual movements of the late Middle Ages: scholasticism and humanism. He shows how the two great Reformation movements, Lutheranism and Calvinism, were distinctly different in how they mined these lodes. Especially helpful for ecumenical purposes is the author's explanation of the way the motto ad fontes opened the way to study of rabbinical sources on the Hebrew Scriptures. "Commentaries and glosses were to be by-passed, in order to engage directly with the text itself. ..The slogan ad fontes was more than simply a call to return to ancient sources -- it was a call to return to the essential realities of human existence as reported in these literary sources' (p. 40).

From the Humanists, the restless theological spirits mastered Latin -- and poked fun at the miserable state of Latin in the church establishment. As they moved from critique to reformation, they added Hebrew and Greek to their intellectual artillery. Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo Valla used Hebrew sources to expose errors in the Vulgate, with the implication that errors in doctrine followed thereon (p. 131). At the onset of the Reformation, introductory volumes by Pellikan and Reuchlin facilitated the spread of Hebrew. The aim was to open up access to the Word of God without errors or glosses. Hebrew was introduced into the theological curriculum at Wittenberg in 1518.

Stressing the importance of the sources initially was accompanied by emphasis upon the historical and literal sense of the text. The three other traditional approaches to scripture -- allegorical, anagogical, and tropological -- were shoved aside. Soon, however, teachers were confronting the problem that close study of the message of the Hebrew Scriptures often brought spiritual openness to Judaism. This danger was warded off, in the main, by expanding the typological approach to the Tanakh: According to the dictation of the Spirit, the interpreter was able to read christological significance in passages of the "Old Testament" (p. 157). The McGrath study thus provides some insights of use in today's dialogue between Christians and Jews, referring to openings in the magisterial Reformation to Hebrew sources and commentaries that are missing in the textbook by Lindberg.

The authoritative volume by Williams (Harvard) relates an important part of the record of the Reformation era and provides in translation documents that arc virtually unknown even to most scholars of the period. (Neither Lindberg nor McGrath appears to be aware of this phase of the sixteenth-century Reformation.) In the end, the Counter-Reformation was successful in virtually wiping out in Poland both the Magisterial Reformation and the Radical Reformation. It comes as a shock to be reminded, therefore, that for more than a century Poland -- then the largest country in Europe -- was predominantly Protestant and that a large section of that Protestantism was Anabaptist and/or Unitarian.

Williams's The Radical Reformation (1962, greatly revised and expanded in 1992) introduced a typology that has come to be used by most serious scholars who pay attention to what McNeill and Bainton in the previous generation called "the Left Wing of the Rcformation." With vast learning and extensive use of primary sources in several languages, Williams demonstrated further how different were the state-church Reformers from the pioneers of religious liberty and the Free Churches. In 1980 he published a two-volume history of the Polish Brethren, and in translating and interpreting Lubieniecki's History he has supplied students with a massive fund of primary sources. Over sixty-five plates and maps are provided, with 132 closely reasoned pages of explanation of their importance.

I am enormously grateful to Fortress Press for its beautiful presentation of a volume of such size, requiring fonts in several languages. European publishers, in some countries assisted by tax laws that allow depreciation to be calculated over twenty years, will publish large and worthy volumes. It is rare for an American publisher, operating in an economy where the emphasis is on quick profit and avoidance of long-range planning and commitments, to take on and publish so beautifully such a volume as this.

For students of ecumenical history, the Williams volume is a vast field of buried treasures. Many of the topics and problems that arise in interchurch and interreligious dialogue today can be found in the controversies and numerous colloquys in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Poland. At high tide, the Polish Reformation gloried in a tolerant state, a pluralistic society, and different parties and sodalities whose members apparently believed that their differences could be resolved through writing and dialogue. Lubieniecki was acutely aware of his country's role in defending European Christendom against the incursions of the Muslim Turks and in protecting the True Church of the restored faith of the early church from the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic powers. He earnestly defended the pax dissidentium to which rulers had sometimes agreed and included the Mennonites under its protective cover. In his periodization of church history, he taught that Poland was called to be the center of the true Reformation, after its rise and fall in Saxony and in Switzerland (p. 26).

In the three books into which his History is divided, Book I relates the corruption and fall of the church after the first century; Book II tells how the gospel was brought to Poland; Book III narrates the rapid growth of Reformation Christianity in Poland, the increasingly bitter religious divisions blended with political interests, and the bitter end in exile. Religious radicalism flourished during the golden decades. Some envisioned a return to a primitive Jewish Christian church, quietly awaiting the Messiah. Others followed Jacob Palaeologus (d. 1585), an interfaith theorist who spoke of detente and understanding among "the three peoples" (Christian, Jewish, Muslim). Some were ardent discussants, maintaining that the mark of true Christians was obedience to the lex sedentium (1 Cor. 14): True Christians listen to each other and favor the language of edification above all other vernaculars and tongues.

In the end, the religious pattern was fixed by sheer power -- the clannish strife over conquests, successions, and prerogatives within Poland and the political and military constellations aligned and impinging from outside.