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BOOK REVIEWS Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700). (The Christian Tradition , Vol. IV.) By JAROSLAV PELIKAN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. 424. $27.50. With this volume J aroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine continues its magisterial course "from the deaths of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in 1274 to the births of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel in 1685" (p. 1). Many questions commonly addressed in book reviews do not even arise in this case; anyone interested in the history of doctrine knows that Pelikan is writing the definitive work of its kind for our time. This volume has the virtues of its predecessorsand raises many of the same questions. Pelikan continues to write the history of what the church believed, taught, and confessed-not social or institutional history, not the lives or speculations of individual theologians . If the book contains no big surprises, however, it offers a wealth of new interpretations and insights. From a wealth of material, I can only single out some of the innovations , then note some of Pelikan's obvious virtues, and finally touch on some critical questions. The book has a straightforward organization. After discussing the doctrinal pluralism of the late Middle Ages and the crises in ecclesiology from the great schism to the Hussites and conciliarists, Pelikan focuses in turn on the Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, and Radical reformations. Yet he is explicitly not writing denominational history. Each chapter draws material from all four traditions as he attempts to trace the "development of doctrine within the Christian tradition as a whole" (p. 2). The book concludes with a chapter on confessional dogmatics in the seventeenth century. Accounts of late medieval theology have often been almost indistinguishable from histories of the period's philosophy. Pelikan usefully turns our attention from metaphysics and logic to issues of predestination , soteriology, Mariology, and the sacraments that more directly affected the faith and life of the church. Indeed, he arguably overreacts against philosophy: nominalism, for instance, may have had more impact on doctrine than this account suggests. Pelikan draws heavily on Hussite writers in discussing late medieval ecclesiology, and I suspect reviewers will be debating whether this adds 649 650 BOOK REVIEWS to the richness of a pluralistic account or represents an overemphasis. I'm not sure. I am sure that he shows that this period's conflicts were not simply a fight between the church's opponents and defenders but a genuine debate over the nature of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church-not least over which of those adjectives was most important. His chapter on Lutheran theology focuses on the publica doctrina of Luther's Reformation, " as expressed not only by Luther and Melanchthon but also by the confessional generation of Lutherans who followed them in the second half of the sixteenth century" (pp. 127-128). Thus the discussion of justification by faith leads to the debate between Flacius and Strigel on free will and Osiander's theory of infused righteousness, Luther's views on the atonement to those of Chemnitz, and Luther's appeal to the Gospel to the views of Scriptural authority in the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord. This is different from-and better than-the usual pattern of presenting Lutheran theology as the intellectual biography of Luther. Similarly, Pelikan's treatment of "Reformed theology" is not a summary of Calvin but draws on many voices. A single page on the Eucharist (p. 197) cites Oecolampadius, Zwingli, Calvin, Bullinger, Ursinus, Beza, and Edwin Sandys, the archbishop of York. For all its admirable richness, such an account of " Reformed " doctrine may occasionally blur important distinctions; one might infer, for instance, that Calvin did not significantly differ from Zwingli regarding the Eucharist. The chapter on the Catholic Reformation emphasizes i~.s creativity and innovation. This is not the story of a "counter-Reformation" but of a reformation of a different kind. Of course Trent provides the centerpiece of the story, but Pelikan describes the humanists and theologians who went before it and the debates which followed it. Even the account of Trent itself draws heavily on working drafts and the accounts of individual participants as well...

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