The Protestant Revolution: from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King William G NaphyEbury, 304pp, £19.99
"Where was your Church before Luther?" This was the question that, in one form or another, many Roman Catholics gleefully launched at their Protestant adversaries during the 16th century. Had it really taken 1,500 years for a credible version of Christianity to arrive on the ecclesiological scene? Or was it not more sensible to regard Luther, Calvin et al as simply another batch of repugnant heresiarchs? Protestants had their answers, of course, and they set about tracing their spiritual lineage back to the very earliest days of the Church. An authentic Christian tradition had always existed, they insisted, often embodied by individuals whom the Church had squashed and dismissed as heretics. The Reformation, by such accounts, was not an innovation, still less a revolution: it was a homecoming, a setting-right.
This was a punchy riposte to a potentially devastating question. It was slightly trickier to sidestep another issue that permeated Catholic polemic. Unity of belief and of practice had long been regarded as the hallmarks of the true Church: God would hardly want his acolytes to be splintered into squabbling factions. And yet, as Catholics were eager to point out, the Protestant fraternity had been deeply divided almost from the outset of the Reformation. Luther had fallen out with Zwingli; Calvin had introduced a third, very different, model of Protestantism in Geneva; radical Anabaptists and anti-Trinitarians had entered the fray. Catholicism had the pope in Rome and its councils to hammer out orthodoxy. What, Catholics asked, did Protestants have? Every decade brought some new schism, some new theological twist, some new sect.
As William Naphy's entertaining book makes clear, this was a point that Protestantism would never truly be able to deny. There was huge compensation, however, in that what bred chaos also made the Protestant experiment so vibrant and dynamic. Certainly, the first generation of reformers (and many subsequent Protestant leaders) were as determined as any Catholic to cultivate obedient congregations, to establish robust ecclesiastical structures, and to diagnose and eradicate dissent. The notion of a theological free-for-all would have horrified Luther or Calvin just as much as the papal Curia. That said, some of the principal tenets of the Reformation - a priesthood of all believers, individual access to and contemplation of vernacular scripture - were precisely what opened the doors to so many different brands of Protestantism. The Catholic point about unity simply became irrelevant: perhaps the genius of Protestantism was its ability to fragment but still survive. "It is messy," Naphy concludes, "but also immensely inventive and exciting."
Naphy offers a tidy survey of this extraordinary historical process. He begins with the first stirrings of religious revolt in Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva, traces how idiosyncratic versions of Protestantism emerged in the nations of both western and eastern Europe, and shows how the Protestant vision was transplanted across the Atlantic to New England. Next we see the efforts to revitalise and reform Protestantism during the 18th century (Methodism, the Great Awakening in colonial America, pietism in Germany and so on), while the later chapters sketch the blossoming of a more socially engaged Protestant sensibility: engagement with the cause of abolitionism, the social gospel movement, and so forth. A final section offers an overview of the tensions that defined Protestantism during the 20th century: attitudes towards modern science, racial segregation and biblical interpretation.
As a survey of Protestant history, the book works well enough. Naphy is careful to stress both the differences and similarities between state-sponsored, magisterial Protestantism and the religion's more radical, quirky or individualistic incarnations. He sensibly avoids sitting in judgement, rejecting the simplistic conclusion that Protestantism was "some great driving force to modernity or progress". Poring over scripture could produce an advocate of racial segregation just as easily as it could inspire someone to take up the cause of civil rights.
Less satisfactory is Naphy's intimation that Protestantism never really managed to become a Church in the traditional sense of the word. He is perfectly correct to point out that, as a unified world religion, Protestantism, in contrast to Roman Catholicism, lacks overarching mechanisms to settle differences and define dogmas. But this means only that an indivisible, world-girdling Protestant Church is an impossibility. Most of the individual Protestant denominations have always deployed a wealth of tools to enforce orthodoxy and adjudicate disputes within their own ranks. The scale and reach of such tools have always been more modest than those available to Rome, but, as anyone who lived in Calvin's Geneva could have told you, that hardly made them less potent.
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