Gospel Prism

I have been reading Diarmaid MacCullough’s book The Reformation and I must say that though I have tried to stop reading it from the beginning, I can’t seem to let it go. Not because the writing style is so engaging, because it isn’t. Not because his positions align with mine, because they don’t. And not because it’s an easy read, because it certainly is not that as well. This is one of those occasions that the topic is so interesting to me, that I’m willing to whether many different obstacles that usually keep me from reading a book this size.

Mr. MacCullough writes regarding his own presuppositions:

My own viewpoint is neither confessional nor dogmatically Christian. My religious background is in the Anglican Communion, coming as I do from a line of Scottish Episcopalian clergy… (p. xxv)

But in reading this book, I would have thought that he was either a Roman Catholic or an agnostic by his viewpoints regarding Luther and Calvin and Protestants in general. It often seemed that MacCullough had a bias against the Reformed movements.

Generally MacCullough finds most Reformed movements that sprung up from John Calvin as “ultra-Calvinist.” He notes that that the Synod of Dordt, often found to be an appropriate biblical response by modern reformists, was “an extreme version of Calvinist predestination and set it as a standard for Reformed Protestant Churches generally” (p. 485). This presuppositional prejudice is found whenever he speaks of the Reformed. This bias then puts into doubt other things he writes. But all history in a sense is revisionist since the writer can never truly relive emotions and experiences and events. Therefore, I read this book with my filters on.

When reading about Roman Catholics, MacCullough records:

Pope Paul V was perfectly serious when in 1606 he furiously confronted the Venetian ambassador with the rhetorical question ‘Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?’ One of the tasks of the 1564 Tridentine Index had been to keep vernacular Bibles away from the faithful…Bibles were publically burned, like heretics. (p. 406)

I’m assuming that McCullough doesn’t find Scripture inerrant so his retelling of these events are probably more factual. I found it quite fascinating that the Catholic Church found the Bible so dangerous. Sad to say, there are many in the Evangelical world who find Scripture dangerous today as well.

In terms of sheer detail, there is so much in this boom to chew on. I haven’t read any other overviews on the reformation but this book has its plusses and minuses. It’s detailed, comprehensive, and tells the reformation story throughout all of Europe. But I would really read this book with a discerning eye.