The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World (review)

A few weeks before Heiko Oberman died in 2001, he wrote a very moving farewell letter to other Reformation historians in which he proudly spoke of this book as one that had "exploded" from his pen after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As ever, the master had seized on a perfect verb. He might have also added that the exploding would continue in his reader's hands. This is a book unlike any written by Oberman or by any other historian in recent memory. Part testament, part confession, part polemic, part inventory of a lifetime of brilliant insights, The Two Reformations is an incandescent blast. At once intimate and magisterial, it has the feel of a very private conversation and the footnote-laden substance of a distinguished lecture. Its title is meant to reflect the book's main argument, that there were really two Reformations: the Lutheran one, inseparably tied to the medieval world, pessimistic and apocalyptic at heart; and that of the Reformed, and especially Calvin, more in tune with the Renaissance and what could be called the "modern" world, optimistic at its core and global in its reach.

Oberman takes on all of Reformation historiography in this book, and also takes off his gloves. Summing up an entire epoch in broad brushstrokes allows him to pass judgment on the ways in which Reformation history has been written up to now, most of which have been too flawed in his opinion, largely because they have not approached the Reformation on its own terms. Above all, Oberman reproves German historians of the Reformation. From the very start, among those Catholics who demonized Luther and the Protestants who turned him into a larger-than-life national hero, all the way to the nineteenth-century romantics, twentieth-century Nazis and fuzzy ecumenists, Oberman finds that German historians have had a pronounced tendency for inventing Luthers, Reformations, and Counter Reformations that fit their ideological and political needs. With blistering candor Oberman traces these shortcomings to German culture itself, and to German academics: "prophetic authority [in Germany] was subsumed by that too easily caricatured figure, the German university professor. Uncrowned king in his own domain, bulwark of hard and fast systems of philosophy, history, politics, and theology, he remains a major obstacle to that Erasmian critical vision that feeds on dissent" (xix).

Reviewing a lifetime's work and condensing all that remained undone was Oberman's aim. Ultimately, he was cheated by death, and so were all of those who admired his pioneering work and even those who were faulted by him. This is an unfinished book, the fragments assembled by Donald Weinstein, Oberman's colleague at the University of Arizona. Perhaps it is even two or three unfinished books, for there is so much packed in this ironically thin volume. His central thesis, explored from various angles, remains an embryonic proposal. Much is argued without sufficient elaboration, much is left out. Naturally, some pages are foggy: Oberman even speaks at times of several Reformations rather than the Two in the title. The sketchiness is as undeniable as the blurring of the lines between the personal and the professional. The brilliance is all too obvious, however, and so is the pain.

In sum, this is a very complex and fragmentary, totally arresting book. Novices will be totally lost, for this is no introduction, but rather a poignant and extremely controversial farewell speech — or series of speeches — aimed at those who are familiar with medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation history. Heiko Oberman is to be thanked for this parting gift, which will surely endure, and not just because of what it has to say about the Reformation. Few other great scholars have allowed such intimate access to their minds and souls, or such a provocative overview of an entire field. Even fewer have...