The Reformation: A Brief History (review)

Abstract

Early Modern European The Reformation: A Brief History. By Kenneth G. Appold. [Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion Series.] (Maiden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell. 2011. Pp. xi, 203. $84.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-1-4051-1749-4; $29.95 paperback, 9781-40511750-0.)Not long ago, a prominent German historian of the Reformation lamented that "we have lost the Reformation." In fact, a search for new books on the subject reveals that it is more than holding its own. At least nineteen general studies have appeared in English since the mid-1990s, plus another thirteen in German. Most eschew both the nineteenth-century elevation of Martin Luther as the godfather of Western civilization and the twentieth-century defense of Luther's theology as a metahistorical vision. In 1995 Bernd Moeller reminded theologians that "history makes no somersaults, and Luther was no miracle-worker who fell to earth."1Many of the new works share a view of Luther and his Reformation as not the dawn of modernity but the fruition of medieval Christendom. Just as prominent is the tendency to replace the classic (Protestant) singular- "The Reformation"- with a concept of plural reformations- Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic. These changes reveal a shift of focus from theological ideas to religious practice and a setting of the Reformation less in European history and more in the general history of Christianity.Each of these shifts is visible in The Reformation: A Brief History by Kenneth G. Appold of Princeton Theological Seminary. The Reformation occurred, he writes, "within a larger dynamic driven by the Christianization of Europe" (p. ix). Its agent was a church that was neither static nor backward, driven by the dialectical movements of its two heritages: the Roman legacy of hierarchical institutionalization and the Celtic "ethical" drive toward "the moral and spiritual transformation of individual lives and communities" (p. ix). Medieval Christendom experienced an immense evolutionary dialectic between an aim to manage the world and a desire to overcome it.The downshift from such great landscapes to the person and thought of Luther is a stock device of general works on the subject. Here Appold does not disappoint, as his second chapter bores into Luther as a "phenomenon" (p. 43) composed of heritages, actions, personality, and theological and other ideas. Although its rhetorical color and strong narrative make chapter 2 the book's liveliest chapter, there is no appeal to Luther's "genius" as the moving force. Rather, Luther's reformation comes as an acceleration, not a negation, of the medieval dialectic and brings both successes and failures. Appold explains the most fateful of the latter, the German Peasants' War, by Luther's formation in an urban world that was climbing for economic hegemony over the vast landscapes of traditional, rural Europe. …