The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church seeks to retell the story of the Protestant Reformation by focusing on the connection between the Reformation and the theological heritage of the medieval West. Drawing on the historiographical interventions of a previous generation, Barrett sets out to reveal that the magisterial reformers— Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and their co-conspirators—were not trying to be original or innovative. They attempted to shape their various movements according to the trusted theological authorities of the Christian past. In Barrett’s words, “the Reformers did not think the Reformation was primarily a revolution for new, modern ideas, but a retrieval and renewal of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” (4). Barrett’s stated goal is historical in nature: “What follows is not an attempt to mine the church fathers or medieval theologians to determine if the Reformers were right, which is itself a different project. Rather, what follows is a fresh, intellectual and theological history of the Reformation that listens to discern if the Reformers themselves interpreted their reform as a renewal of catholicity” (32).
The Reformation as Renewal proceeds in four parts. The first section deals with the medieval Latin tradition, beginning with monasticism and mysticism and settling in for an extended discussion of scholasticism. In Barrett’s account, Thomas Aquinas represents the pinnacle of medieval scholastic theology, an ideal synthesis of Augustinian Platonism and medieval Aristotelianism. The abandonment of Aquinas’s theology in the late Middle Ages signals a decline, as “Augustinian realism” was countered with the nominalist philosophy of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The embrace of nominalism in the universities and its semi-Pelagian approach to salvation was, in Barrett’s story, what “became the soil for [Luther’s] early protest” (205).
The second section tells the story of Luther and the German Reformation. Barrett situates Luther as a “late medieval man,” influenced in his early years by the via moderna of the nominalists but eventually finding his path to reform through the eyes of Augustine. Armed with this Augustinian vision, Luther and the Wittenbergers fought for their idea of a unified and apostolic church against traditionalists, Catholic humanists and, occasionally, rival reformed approaches.
The third section takes the reader from the Swiss cantons to the British Isles, where Barrett tests his thesis in Zurich, Geneva, France, England, and Scotland. Here, the author compares the approaches of the magisterial reformers like Martin Bucer and John Calvin to those of the so-called Radical Reformation—Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and militant dissenters. Barrett focuses on how Reformers established communities of catholicity by appealing to secular authorities, instilling education reforms, developing Bible translations, and constructing theological texts.
The fourth section deals briefly with the Catholic Reformation, including the formation of the Jesuits by Ignatius of Loyola and the conclusions of the Council of Trent. Barrett reads Trent as a subtle triumph for nominalism and a rejection of Augustinian soteriology. Thus, in his section “Who Is Closer to Thomas Aquinas, Trent or the Reformation?,” he concludes that the reformers’ claims to catholicity were sustained against the declarations of Trent (863-864).
The subtext for Barrett’s analysis is a longstanding and contentious academic debate over the legacies of late medieval scholasticism and its unanticipated offspring, the Reformation. Seeking to dispel Brad Gregory’s notion that the Reformation gave birth to secularization, Barrett draws especially on the work of David Steinmetz and his protégé, Richard Müller, who both focus on contextualizing the Reformation as a continuation of medieval scholasticism. The Reformation as Renewal combines Steinmetz’s and Müller’s work on Reformation scholasticism with twentieth-century scholar of medieval philosophy Etienne Gilson’s impulse to name the rise of the via moderna as a declension. Gilson, as an eager Thomistic revivalist, made Aquinas the standard by which all medieval scholastic thought should be measured. Thus, for Barrett as for Gilson, Scotus, Ockham, and the late medieval nominalists muddled and fumbled the scholastic legacy epitomized in the Thomistic congruence between reason and revelation. (This notion has been skillfully challenged by Steinmetz’s own doctoral advisor, Heiko Oberman, although Barrett hesitates to engage Oberman’s reappraisal of late medieval scholasticism directly in his text.)
As a massive, sweeping tome, The Reformation as Renewal holds many bright spots. Barrett’s mission to link the Reformation with its foundations in the medieval West is a worthy one, and he rightly affirms the need to contextualize doctrinal debates within the big, rancorous world of medieval Christian scholasticism. His text provides helpful summaries of certain points of medieval theology, while his attention to political history amplifies the stakes for the actors involved in the program of church reform. Barrett recognizes the literary networks of church leaders across Europe, demonstrating that the Reformation was a vast, cosmopolitan intellectual movement. As an intellectual history, Barrett does his unacquainted readers a service by bringing them into conversation with some of the key historians and theologians in the ongoing debate over the legacy of the Reformation. As noted above, Barrett introduces a limited but essential collection of scholars who have taken up the question alongside and after Etienne Gilson and Heiko Oberman.
That being said, numerous issues plague Barrett’s attempt. For one thing, the content of the book pushes Barrett’s thesis in all kinds of directions. At times, the author offers a straightforward and compelling theological narrative, exploring the Reformation’s major actors in a historical fashion. But this encyclopedic thoroughness (e.g., ninety-one pages on Thomas Aquinas) comes at the expense of a tightly-argued analysis of the Reformers’ appeal to tradition, ostensibly the big idea of the book. Even when engaging his thesis, Barrett is often of two minds about what his project is actually doing. Sometimes he argues that the Reformers were self-consciously presenting themselves as the true custodians of an ancient catholicity. This is the stated thesis of the book and is accurate so far as it goes. But in other places, Barrett is in fact arguing the Reformers were more in line with an unbroken “Great Tradition” than even they could have known. Given Barrett’s introductory plea that we listen to the voices of the Reformers and their arguments for their own catholicity, one might expect the study to be framed around figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, Irenaeus, Cyprian of Carthage, Chrysostom, Tertullian, or any number of other voices cited by the Reformers. But instead, Barrett often chooses the authorities on behalf of his historical subjects. For instance, he concedes that both Luther and Calvin probably never read Thomas Aquinas firsthand. Nevertheless, it seems important to Barrett that he show how the pair may have unintentionally mirrored Aquinas’s theology in their respective movements. He even concludes that “As far as Calvin was indebted to Augustine—and his debt was deep—he was indebted to Thomas and any other Scholastics committed to Augustinian exegesis and theology” (181). Of course, since all medieval Latin theologians were committed to Augustine, himself the object of countless interpretations, the sentiment is basically meaningless. Barrett’s fixation on Aquinas is curious—not because Aquinas is unimportant in medieval theology, but because he is not authoritative for Protestant reformers. As Steven Tyra has shown, even those most familiar with the Angelic Doctor, like Martin Bucer, could gleefully jettison Aquinas’s Aristotelian metaphysic in favor of one that better suited the thrust of a given biblical text.
The author’s narrow gaze at medieval soteriology and philosophy becomes problematic at points. Religion was not merely (or even primarily) a matter of the intellect for medieval Christians. It was also worship, ritual, embodied practice, communal identity, habitus. To focus exclusively on doctrinal particulars obscures more consequential aspects of medieval religion that the Reformation challenged. For instance, consider Barrett’s treatment of Luther’s reforms of the parishes in Saxony. He argues early on that Luther was not pushing back against scholasticism writ large, but merely the decayed scholasticism of the via moderna, the nominalism of William of Ockham, Gabriel Biel, and others (283). Thus, when reforming the parishes, Luther sought to rid his churches of “remnants of late medieval beliefs and practices” (as opposed to the intellectual foundations of the high Middle Ages) (483). But what were these “late medieval beliefs and practices”? Purgatory, aural confession, transubstantiation, pilgrimages, indulgences, penance, the efficacy of relics, and clerical celibacy were not “new ideas.” All were thriving in the thirteenth century, many enforced by longstanding tradition and conciliar decree, and supported by Aquinas and virtually every other theologian long before the scholastic “decay.” In the matter of liturgy, Luther sided with the early church against the medieval one, a point Barrett notes earlier in the same chapter (466) but then he fudges the historical periodization later, suggesting by innuendo that such practices were late medieval “remnants” (483).
Finally, questions linger about Barrett’s use of catholicity as a dividing line. What is the catholicity to which all the magisterial reformers submitted? Is it a shared set of doctrinal assumptions? Is it adherence to the ecumenical creeds? A collective admiration for Augustine? A methodological commitment to scholasticism? A presumption that one’s theology wasn’t novel? The concept of catholicity is ill-defined in Barrett’s argument. As such, the goalposts for catholicity tend to move depending on the person or movement being examined. Take Barrett’s treatment of the Anabaptists and Spiritualists in the so-called Radical Reformation. In order to argue for the catholicity of Luther, Calvin, and others, Barrett uses the Reformation radicals as a foil. “While the Reformers sought to reform the one church, the radicals decided to abandon the one church and were not shy in their partial and sometimes total rejection of its catholic tradition” (654). But was not Luther’s approach also a bold, partial, and sometimes total rejection of tradition? The notion arises that if Martin Luther and John Calvin were “medieval men,” subject to their cultural and social circumstances and reliant upon medieval resources, approaches, and methods at their disposal, then the same is also true of Anabaptist leaders. If the magisterial reformers rejected or accepted elements of the past carefully, strategically bolstering their efforts by recourse to ancient authorities, so too did various radical factions.
As a historical survey of Reformation appeals to catholicity, Barrett might have laid out Balthasar Hubmaier’s use of the church fathers to argue for his position on believer’s baptism, the renewed martyrological tradition of antiquity found among the Hutterite Brethren, appeals to the Apostles’ Creed made by Pilgram Marpeck, or Caspar Schwenckfeld’s self-professed adherence to the twelve articles of the Creed and the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Recognizing Anabaptist and Spiritualist attempts to prove their own catholicity could have driven Barrett to the next logical step in such a historical study—to ask the critical question: Why did Anabaptists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics each present their idiosyncratic movements as a true appropriation of the ancient faith? Upon asking, Barrett would have found ample recent scholarship to help him frame his answer.
In the final assessment, it is difficult to recommend this book in part because I am left unsure of its intended audience. The Reformation as Renewal is often a wide-ranging survey of the Protestant Reformation, the kind of work typically useful in classes on the Reformation or early modern Europe. But Barrett’s subtext, the focus on uncovering Thomist/Aristotelian/Augustinian soteriology in the Reformers, hampers the book’s effectiveness as an overview. Conversely, historians of the Reformation and specialists will find that the book is far too vast in its scope, lacking in its engagement of relevant secondary literature, and biased in its execution to lend itself as an accurate historical study of Reformation appeals to catholicity. Readers interested in engaging Barrett’s thesis would be well served by reading in conversation with Irena Backus’s Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation,1 Esther Chung-Kim’s Inventing Authority,2 Quentin Stewart’s Lutheran Patristic Catholicity,3 or R. Ward Holder’s Calvin and the Christian Tradition.4 In a similar vein, readers may contrast Barrett’s summation of Augustinian theology and its appropriation in late medieval context by reading Eric Saak’s Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages.5
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Footnotes
- Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378-1615) (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2003).
- Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing Authority: The Use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011).
- Quentin D. Stewart, Lutheran Patristic Catholicity: The Vincentian Canon and the Consensus Patrum in Lutheran Orthodoxy (Münster, DE: LIT Verlag, 2015).
- R. Ward Holder, Calvin and the Christian Tradition: Scripture, Memory, and the Western Mind (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
- Eric Leland Saak, Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
