Response to Brad Gregory

This powerfully written, persuasive book is at once a damning critique of modernity and a salutary admonition that narratives of progress, or "supersessionism," have failed to give an adequate account of the contemporary world. As the title suggests, the Reformation is central to the story, and Gregory unfolds his arguments for the ways in which it continues to shape our times. It is not an edifying tale—the Reformation was a disaster and the damage done to Western society is incalculable. With its rejection of the authority of the Roman church, "the Reformation eliminated any shared framework for the integration of knowledge" (327). Yet Gregory seeks to make clear that while the past has made us what we are, there is no teleological determinism; it need not have turned out this way.

Gregory opens with an examination of how contemporary assumptions about God, nature, and science that modern society regards as "obvious" are, in fact, based on contestable truth claims. To grasp this requires an investigation of medieval theology and philosophy, and central to Gregory's account is the work of Duns Scotus and his univocal conception of being, where can be found the first step toward the domestication of God's transcendence, in which the cultural revolution of the 17th century would partake. How this concept of univocity played out in the Reformation is not given sufficient explanation. Where, for example, does Calvin's doctrine of transcendence fit into the story? Part of the answer appears to reside in Gregory's argument concerning the contribution of the Reformation to the rise of science: the "intractable" theological arguments between Catholics and Protestants had the unintended effect of marginalizing Christian claims concerning God's relationship to the natural world. Students of Calvinism might be surprised by the claim that Protestantism rejected "a biblical view of reality in which the transcendent God manifests himself in and through the natural, material world"(41).

A crucial argument relates to the genealogy of reason and science. Gregory shifts the focus from the 19th-century Industrial Revolution and the atheistic writers of the last two centuries and persuasively maintains that the 17th century was decisive in the development of thought concerning science and religion. The medieval world of the univocal conception of being and Occam's razor provides for Gregory, in these twin phenomena, the foundations of the formation of modern secular thought. He seeks to quash the common belief that scientific knowledge impugns religious truth claims. The two have been so entirely separated that leading scientists know nothing of theology and scripture, while religious people are frequently ignorant of natural science. The Weberian disenchantment thesis cannot be sustained.

What about the claims to truth? Gregory shows that contemporary society, above all the academy, holds to a relativistic position in which there are competing truth claims concerning "Life Questions." The unintended roots lie in the Reformation. Gregory provides a picture of a variegated late medieval church for which neither unity nor difference should be overly emphasized. It was against this variety that the Protestant reformers, magisterial and radical, rebelled. Gregory argues that the reformers sought to address serious problems in the Roman church; to do so they turned to scripture, and herein lies the source of the problem. One could argue, however, that after all the failed reform efforts of the late Middle Ages, it was the Protestant Reformation that acted as an effective catalyst for Catholic reform in the 16th century, perhaps another "unintended reformation." Gregory makes the well-established, though effective, point that from the start the reformers were deeply divided by their central claim of sola scriptura, and he rightly includes the so-called radical reformers in this group. Nevertheless, while this central point is undoubtedly correct, he gives no account of why the movement, despite its damaged Achilles tendon, progressed in the face of the Roman church. What was its attraction? This division over scripture Gregory identifies as the "distant historical source" of Western hyperpluralism. Fundamental to the debate was disagreement over the respective roles of reason and the Holy Spirit, bringing to the fore divergent understandings of human capacities. The problem...