What’s the big deal about the Reformation? Did the Reformers do more more harm than good? Maybe they taught us how to be good at revolting when we don’t get what we want? In his new book The Reformation as Renewal, Matthew Barrett shows how the Reformers did not revolt against the Roman Catholic Church with new ideas. They were mining after the old, biblical ideas for the “retrieval and renewal of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” and they perceived themselves as doing so (3).
TRAR is divided into four sections. Barrett’s initial chapter looks at how the Reformation made a renewing move back to and in line with the biblical doctrines of the early church being even more catholic than Rome (2). Barrett writes, “It was not they who were the innovators; it was the Romanists” (3).
The term catholic here means universal, and the Reformers believed there were marks of the Christian church that were universal (or common) to all true churches. By retrieving these former doctrines, the Reformers were coming back in line with the universal (“catholic”) church and were back in agreement with the apostles and patristic and medieval believers.
Barrett’s goal is not to show whether the Reformers were theologically correct (he assumes they were), but to show that “the Reformers mustered their disciples to reform, retrieve, and renew the church’s catholicity” (4).
Barrett offers an intellectual and theological history of the Reformation “that listens to discern if the Reformers themselves interpreted their reform as a renewal of catholicity” (32). What did the Reformers themselves believe they were doing? Rather than planting a new tree, the Reformers pruned away “the savage branches” (32).
The next half of this first chapter gives space to other interpretations on the Reformation, such as how the Reformers have way to the secular, individualist, modernist way of life we see today. On the other hand, some read the Reformers as those who revolted against Rome in order to break off its chains and start a new and pure church. Barrett argues against these perspectives and elaborates more upon it throughout the book.
In offering an intellectual and theological history of the Reformation, Barrett places the Reformers in their panoramic context. This is wide-screen stuff. Part One (chs 1–7) looks at the history leading up to the Reformation beginning with the monastics in the fifth century. Part Two (chs 8–11) looks at the early days of the Reformation, with particular focus on Martin Luther while bringing in men like Bucer and Melanchthon as well.
Part Three (12–16) carries the reformational narrative further as it spans out into areas like Switzerland (Zwingli), France (Calvin), and England (Tyndale) and Scotland (Knox). The final section (ch 17) looks at the Roman Catholic counter-renewal, its hard stance against the Reformers, and ultimately how it was Rome which was the sect that departed from catholicity.
Barrett concludes with looking at the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church followed by an Afterword by Timothy George who reminds us that he “context of the Reformation, largely understood, is the entire history of the people of God through the ages” (886).
The Chocolate Milk
Flow of Ideas
This book is very helpful because Barrett not only gives a history of the Reformation but connects the flow of ideas from one generation to the next. He is not satisfied to state simply what they believed but why they did and how they could retrieve those ideas.
In one way, this is a historian’s parallel with the process of how the NT interprets the OT. That task requires not only understanding what the Old and New Testaments teach but also the apocryphal and pseudepigrapha’s books. What writings were influential and were part of the Jewish “cultural river”? As well you can bring in Greco-Roman writings and to shed light on the language Paul or Mark use when they write of “the gospel”/“good news,” or of Jesus as the “Son of God.” How would Romans have understood those terms? How did John use and critique Roman culture, inscriptions, and the temple cultus in Revelation to show how much grander Jesus is? All of this informs how we understand and live out the Bible.
What Barrett does is similar. He guides us along the monastic, Scholastic, and medieval cultural river that flowed into the time of the Reformation so that we can understand their placement in history, why they believed what they believed, and how they could think they were renewing the church back to its roots. They had a foundation many today are simply oblivious of. All too many people think the “dark ages” provided us with no theology, and that the Reformation was the spark that ignited good theology again. That simply isn’t true. What is written in this book helps us to understand the how’s and the why’s of the Reformation and its effects today.
Nuanced
Barrett never (at least almost never) generalizes and instead opts for nuance between, for instance, the Reformers. Barrett points out that the German Reformation started because Martin Luther revolted the Catholic church’s doctrine of justification that stemmed from Ockham and Biel’s voluntaristic, nominalism. So while Luther may have had traces of voluntarism and nominalism, they were not in his soteriology.
While some have critiqued the Reformers for carrying voluntarism and nominalism into modernity, Barrett shows that just because Luther had these traces does not mean the other Reformers scattered throughout Europe did as well. In writing all of this Barrett isn’t aiming to prove that the Reformers didn’t bring nominalism into modernity, as some have argued. TRAR is for the purpose of showing what the Reformers did do—renewed the church back to its catholic roots. The Reformers relied on the church fathers, the Great Tradition, and men like Thomas Aquinas for articulating the Bible’s soteriology and ecclesiology.
One charge against the Reformers is that they rejected Scholasticism (Anselm and Aquinas) as a whole. But that isn’t at all true. The Reformers considered themselves “catholic,” holding to the doctrines of the Bible and the early church. They were also “Scholastic” in that “they shared a common commitment to Christian orthodoxy and a basic Augustinian theology of grace like the best of the Scholastics” (283).
A more nuanced understanding, coming from a close reading of the primary sources, Luther reacted to late medieval Scholastics like Scotus, Ockham, and especially Biel. Having strayed from patristic beliefs (like Augustine’s doctrine of grace), these three men brought about a “decayed” Scholasticism that Luther wished to critique and cleanse the church of (283).
Recommended?
As Carl Trueman wrote in the Foreword, what is investigated in the academy often takes a long time to trickle down to the church. I hope that Barrett’s book, while long and detailed, will be read by many professors and teachers who will show the intellectual relationships leading up to the Reformation. Those who would most benefit from this would be professors and students and laypersons who are very interested in the history of the Reformation. That seems obvious due to the nature of the book, but this book is long and it is not the easiest read. Although this is likely be due to my own struggle to keep up with historical events, movements, philosophies, people, and their beliefs in any history book I read. Yet that said, Barrett writes well and with clarity, and if you read this book you will come away with a more mature understanding of the Reformation and its goal to renew the one true church.
Lagniappe
- Author: Matthew Barrett
- Hardcover: 1008 pages
- Publisher: Zondervan Academic (June 6, 2023)
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