Thanks Edwin, I was counting on your recommendations. I have always wanted to pick up Alister McGrath’s *Reformation Thought *. A friend of mine had it in college and I skimmed through it but it is very expensive and I haven’t been able to pick up my own copy.
I guess it could really be expanded to Reformation in general. The few things I’ve read by Protestants seemed more like propaganda than history. To be fair though I don’t think any of the Protestants I’ve read would be considered historians even in Protestant circles… Not credible ones anyway.
God bless
Well, on the Reformation in general I can give lots of recommendations.
Some general surveys of the Reformation by Protestant historians are:
Euan Cameron,
The European Reformation. I’m indebted to that book for the insight that when Catholics and Protestants respectively approached death, their attitudes to faith/works flipped: Catholics were taught to throw themselves on Christ’s mercy, while Protestants tended to look at their righteous lives as evidence that they were among the elect. I don’t think this is true of Luther, but I think Cameron’s right that it became a fairly common approach among Protestants. This observation did a lot to eradicate my lingering fear that Catholics really believed in “works righteousness.” Maybe Cameron’s wrong, but this is the kind of interesting, even-handed observation you get from a serious historian. (Cameron has also done good work on the Waldenses, which is worth consulting if you run into the folks who think the Waldenses were basically Baptists.) Cameron is, I think, Anglican, but I’m not quite sure. I’m pretty sure he’s Protestant though.
Carter Lindberg, *The European Reformations. *I hear a lot about this one as maybe the standard survey at this point, though I’m afraid I’ve never actually read it. I’ve read some more specialized writing by Lindberg and can recommend him as an excellent historian–I believe he’s Lutheran. Note the plural in the title: this is fashionable these days and should be welcome to Catholics inasmuch as it recognizes the Catholic Reformation as one among many attempts to reform the Church rather than simply as a knee-jerk reaction to the “real Reformation,” which is how older Protestant scholarship often portrayed it.
A short recent book which I’m using for my upcoming class on the period is R. Ward Holder,
Crisis and Renewal: The Era of the Reformations. Ward teaches at a Catholic college–I think he’s a Presbyterian or something of that sort himself.
My own advisor, David Steinmetz, is in my opinion a model of fair-minded scholarship. When my wife took his Luther seminar (this was before she knew me), she first thought he was Catholic (when he was discussing Luther’s Catholic background), then Lutheran (when he was discussing Luther’s own ideas), and finally discovered to her amazement that he was a Methodist like herself, which she would never have figured out from the way he approached the material. Steinmetz is not inclined to become Catholic–in fact, he’s been one of the influences holding me back from doing so, and is also one of the reasons that I tend to see glib Catholic citation of Newman’s dictum about being deep in history as something like a personal insult. (Steinmetz’s own dictum on the subject, which I think is more accurate than Newman’s, is: “it’s hard for historians to convert to anything, because we know where the bodies are buried.”) Steinmetz has written the following books:
Reformers in the Wings (a sketch of 20 important but lesser-known figures from the Reformation era, including five Catholics);
Luther in Context and
Calvin in Context (collections of essays, mostly on the exegesis of these two figures)
Luther and Staupitz (this was one of his earliest books and a follow-up to his dissertation on Staupitz–it does a great job of distinguishing Staupitz’s late medieval Augustinianism from Luther’s own theology and showing just how Luther did in fact break with the medieval theological tradition).
Memory and Mission: also a collection of essays–these are on general theological subjects and may be of less interest.
I see from his Duke page that he seems to be back on the project of writing a general survey of Calvin’s thought, which I thought he’d given up. I hope he does finish this–he’s an excellent synthesizer but much of his published work so far has consisted of fairly specialized essays. He was at one point going to write an “intellectual history of the Reformation” called
Divided by a Common Past. I hope he does that some day, but he’s in his 70s now and the chances probably aren’t good that he’ll ever finish it.
Steinmetz’s own advisor, Heiko Oberman, has a stronger Protestant bias–he’s the source for the “Tradition I, II, III” paradigm which Keith Mathison has picked up and popularized. But he’s well worth reading, and at worst he’s a lot more sophisticated in his advocacy of Protestantism than many of the folks you seem to have been reading. His biography of Luther:
Man between God and the Devil, is the most interesting one out there for my money. (Bainton’s
Here I Stand is a better place to start, but has a more conventional Protestant bias. Oberman is always creative even in his biases.) Another scholar with whom I disagree (specifically for his Protestant biases) but respect immensely is Peter Matheson. He wrote one of the few books out there on my alias Cardinal Contarini, though I don’t think he gets Contarini quite right precisely because he (Matheson) is reading him through Protestant lenses.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, whom I mentioned above, is always worth reading. An excellent writer–not presently practicing any religion, I believe, but Anglican by heritage and bias. He has written a general book on the Reformation and a still more general survey of church history.
Edwin
