AP

What do you Mean You’re a Protestant?

Review of Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023). 981 pages.

On June 7 in 2020 a mob in Bristol tore down an eighteen-foot-tall bronze statue of Edward Colston, defaced it with crimson paint, rolled it down to the harbour, and heaved it into the murky green with a plop and a sigh. Colston was a benefactor of the city but a slave trader. They punished him in effigy.

Hundreds of statues and monuments were defaced and/or pulled down that year: Civil War notables, Washington, Columbus, Churchill, and James Cook in Australia, among others.

In the West many look to history not to learn and understand, but to critique and condemn. University history departments churn with grievance.

It is much easier to tear down than to invent and build, so we stroll through the past on a path of least-resistance mockery and maximum self-contentment. Are we happy for our descendants to assess our life and work in kind?

Christians are not immune from the easy and charming rewards that come with frowning at history. Most Western Christians seem to have very little knowledge of their Christian heritage and see little point in acquiring such knowledge.

We remain suspicious of our forebears in ways that reflect our own allegiances: Pentecostals suspect that their grandparents weren’t spiritual enough; high churchmen find too many enthusiasts; Catholics view Protestants as schismatic; and Protestants find the Middle Ages too Roman.

To the extent that we cut ourselves off from history – whether by angry arrogance, smug criticism, tribal suspicion, or plain blockish ignorance – we condemn ourselves to infantile thoughtlessness, and we open ourselves to whatever faddish winds may be gusting through. We make ourselves shallow and easy meat for false teachers.

That is what makes Matthew Barrett’s Reformation as Renewal so important.

They make things big in America and this is a great hairy nine-hundred-page beast of a book. But the beast wears glasses and is wise and kind. Reformation is a highly readable distillation of decades of patient and laborious study and thought.

The book’s thesis is in the title. Pick up any older church history and the Reformation is presented as appearing as suddenly as Athena stepping from Zeus’s slashed brow as a grown and armoured woman ready for war. Yes, we nod to John Wycliffe and Jan Hus and maybe Savonarola as “proto-Reformers”, but Luther arrives on the scene like a bolt of lightning, hammer and 95 Theses in hand, creating a glittering Protestant movement ex nihilo.

Such histories depict the Roman Catholic Church as gargantuan and solid as Europe itself, with a little boat of Protestants setting forth from this continent to settle in a new and different land. The Reformation appears as a fresh start, a new beginning. Barrett teaches how wrong this idea is.

Instead, he shows us the One, Holy, Catholic [universal], and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, unfolding through the ages according to the power and plan of Jesus, who promised, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” But Jesus also promised that his Church would be viciously persecuted from without, and relentlessly tested from within by temptations and false teachers, so that it would only be at the end of time that he would separate the wheat from the weeds.

Thus, through the ages the Church has appeared more-or-less unified and healthy and pure. Certainly, as the Middle Ages progressed the Church in the West did not appear to be in very good shape at all: the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory became mainstream, too many priests were ignorant of the Bible, or were absent, or had purchased their positions as a fat source of revenue. By the turn of the sixteenth century the sale of indulgences was rampant. Rome was the throbbing centre of this abscess.

From the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, like the orc from the sea in Daniel 7, a Roman church emerged – deformed, dominant, and seemingly all-powerful.

But by no means had Jesus paused in his promise to build his church. Barrett shows us how he blessed and built the church through certain great but more-or-less flawed medieval teachers. Anselm, for example, built up the church’s understanding of Christ’s atonement as a penal sacrifice. Aquinas taught us how to understand our fallenness and God’s work of election; and how – plundering the epistemology of Aristotle – to think more logically and systematically about natural theology and the doctrines of the Bible. Wycliffe taught us how important it was for all Christians to have access to the Bible.

False teachers arose – teachers so lamed by the devil’s lies that they did more harm than good – Duns Scotus, William Occam, and Gabriel Biel. Biel (c.1420–1495), in particular, taught straight-up Pelagianism, that we are saved by our works in cooperation with God.  

Yet through all the twists and turns the LORD preserved in his Church the doctrines of Nicaea and Athanasius and Chalcedon, as well as the precious truths about the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Sonship of Christ.

The upshot is that Luther and the Reformers never intended to start a new “Protestant Church” from out of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Instead, they fought to tear down the strongholds of the lies and heresies of the Roman church in order to restore the True Church to all its true glory.

Luther and Calvin were crystal clear about this; it was Rome that had broken away. Those who joined themselves to the Roman church were the inventors of novel doctrines, the heretics, the schismatics. Luther and Calvin knew that they had only ever taught what Scripture taught, and the Gospel Truth that had been faithfully passed down through the fifteen-hundred-year existence of the One True Church, and which had been passed down even through the Middle Ages.

Barrett lays out his argument in four parts.

In Part One, “The Reformation’s Catholic Context”, Barrett takes 370 pages to show what about the medieval church was good and consistent with Christ’s teaching, and what was false and schismatic. There is likely more material here than almost any Protestant Christian has read on the Medieval Church, and the book is worth buying just for this. It establishes a solid background so that we might better understand Luther and his fellow Reformers. It shows that Luther emerged rather as a product of the ancient and true Church at a critical time, when Romanism loomed large and the flame of truth was hard to see under the bushel of false doctrines. Barrett quotes the reformer himself: “Luther did not start a new church; the Pope forced a new church by removing one of its own members.”

In Part Two, having established this foundation and framework, Barrett gives us a fresh and masterful account, over 180 pages, of “The Genesis of the Reformation” in Germany and Switzerland; focussing almost entirely on Luther, who “may have been turning away from the papacy, but in doing so he was turning toward the church catholic and its Great Tradition” (emphasis original).

In Part Three, “The Renewal of the Catholic Heritage”, Barrett describes across 290 pages the development of the Reformation in Zurich, Strasbourg, Geneva, Berne, France, England, and Scotland. This section includes an extensive description of the anabaptist movement: “The Reformation’s suppression of the Anabaptists was severe, but in the estimation of the reformers such suppression was proof the reformers were faithful heirs of the church catholic.” Unlike Part One, which is full of fresh thought and insights, Section Three recaps existing scholarship on this era. But it is well told and demonstrates again the Reformation’s consistency with the One True Church of the ages, and its desperate fight against the Roman aberration from this.

Part Four, a forty-page postscript, describes “Counter-Renewal” and how the Roman church failed in the Counter Reformation to return from its waywardness to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Barrett’s quotation of Richard Muller pulls it all together: “The Reformation … was not an attack upon the whole of medieval theology or upon Christian tradition. The Reformation assaulted a limited spectrum of doctrinal and practical abuses with the intention of reaffirming the values of the historical church catholic…. The reform of individual doctrines, like justification and the sacraments, occurred within the bounds of a traditional, orthodox, and catholic system which, on a grand scale, remained substantially unaltered.”  

In August 2023 I tore a ligament off my right clavicle. Post-op the surgeon ordered six-weeks of no driving, exercise, or lifting. I spent a lot of that time in my armchair with Barrett’s 3-pound tome propped up on a cushion on my lap. I think I chose well; the time investment was well worth it. If you don’t have that kind of time I’d buy Barrett’s book anyway, carefully read Part 1, and use rest as an up-to-date reference work on the first century of the Reformation.

Let’s not join the join the ranks of the anti-historians, who leave their minds undefended from the smug and fatal rootlessness of the zeitgeist. It is vital, for the survival and health of the church, that we work to acquire a good grasp of church history. It is especially important for Evangelical Protestants to understand what it means to be a Protestant: we are not an appendix to Jesus’ One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, but the Body itself. “You are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Cor 12:27).   

Matthew Barrett’s opus magnum will bring you to right view of the medieval period and a good and clear understanding of the Reformation as Renewal.

– Campbell Markham