- The People's Book: The Reformation and the Bible ed. by Jennifer Powell McNutt and David Lauber
This book presents essays from a 2016 conference at Wheaton College on the Bible and the Reformation. The introduction made the fascinating observation that the Bible in the Reformation was at once "the people's book" and frequently a state-sponsored publishing venture. Although this provocative theme did not appear in many of the other essays, it provided an intriguing starting point.
Many of the essays also raised questions without quite answering them. In the first essay, for instance, Bruce Gordon noted that Protestants continued to publish a surprising number of Latin editions of the Bible. Gordon concluded that this was a sign of Protestants wanting to make a show of their historicity and catholicity. Yet it seems just as plausible that Latin remained a critical language for international scholarship and learned discourse, thereby preserving a market for Latin Bibles.
In the next essay, G. Sujin Pak made a detailed study of how Zwingli and Luther interpreted 1 Corinthians 14 as a text supporting lay readership of the Bible. She noted that the conflicts surrounding the Peasants' War and the rise of Anabaptists and Spiritualists in the 1520s dampened these magisterial reformers' initial enthusiasm for unfettered lay interpretation of the Bible. More fundamental questions about the benefits and challenges of lay people deciding how to read the Bible for themselves remain unaddressed in the essay. While it is clearly good for people to read and interpret the Bible for their edification, serious problems can also come through damaging interpretations of the Bible. In this and other essays, however, such critical questions often went unasked.
The final two chapters similarly discussed major concepts—sola scriptura and the perspicuity of scripture, respectively—without defining these terms. One subheading in the final essay, for instance, asked: "Perspicuity Today: Text or Church?" The author never considers that this might be a false dichotomy, which pits communities and individuals against each other. Oversights like these clouded much that was valuable in this book. [End Page 95]
Nowhere was this more evident than in Carl Trueman's insightful chapter "Reading the Reformers after [John Henry] Newman." This essay studied how Newman's journey to the Roman church set key patterns for how people continue to think about the relationship between scripture and authority today. At the end, however, Trueman observed that the conflict between church authority and sola scriptura was never as clear as it is usually made out to be, but then decided not to address it himself, writing, "Thankfully, this is not my task" (204).
Despite these critiques, this book points to an important future for ecumenical histories of the Reformation. This book was weakest where its American evangelical assumptions got in the way of more careful analysis. At the same time, it brought perspectives and questions to Reformation history that Lutheran or mainline Protestant studies often miss. On that score, this book continues to raise intriguing possibilities.
Dubuque, Iowa