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The past several decades have seen significant changes in the relations between Catholics and Protestants. Theologians on both sides of the confessional divide have grown increasingly willing to engage in dialogue with one another. If even 50 years ago Catholics and Protestants defined themselves in mutually exclusive terms, today they are more inclined to regard each other as members of the same universal church.
Derek Wilson and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto applaud these recent ecumenical trends in their provocative and informative account of the past five centuries of Christian history, yet they also insist that false appraisals of the Reformation's legacy continue to impair relations between Protestants and Catholics. Whereas Catholics have often blamed the Reformation for shattering a unified church and paving the way for secular individualism, Protestants have lauded the movement for liberating consciences and sowing the seeds of scientific, economic, and political progress. According to Reformations, as long as Catholics and Protestants continue to view the Reformation as a cataclysmic event that split the church and altered the course of Western history, they will be predisposed to emphasize what divides rather than what unites them.
Reformations seeks to correct such common misperceptions about the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. The idea for the book originated when the BBC enlisted Fernandez-Armesto, "a Roman Catholic of Tridentine temptations wistfully resisted," and Wilson, "an evangelical Protestant of charismatic sympathies sparingly indulged," to discuss the historical significance of the Reformation. After several years of research and debate, the two historians claim to have discovered not only that their own beliefs were much closer than they had supposed, but also that the gulf separating Protestants and Catholics for five centuries is more apparent than real.
At the root of exaggerated assessments of the Reformation's revolutionary nature, contend the authors, is a myth of pre-Reformation church unity. According to Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto, "the 'scandal of disunity,' is a mantra often recited with little understanding." Western Christians conveniently forget that the pre-Reformation church had already been rent by several schisms and was rife with disagreement, dissension, and diversity. Medieval Christianity church encompassed a bewildering array of doctrines, liturgical practices, local saints, religious groups, prophets, and lay devotions. Quests for grace outside official channels and critiques of the established church did not begin with the Reformation. "Diversity was not the privilege of radicals, but the pattern of Christianity."
When viewed in this context, the Reformation appears as just one of many spiritual renewals within the long sweep of church history. Even if Protestants gave the church a particularly shocking jolt, the task of reforming the church neither began nor ended with the Reformation. In calling laypersons to a more genuine piety and in striving to restore the "primitive" purity of the church, the Protestant Reformers were simply participating in the "continual reformation" needed to keep the church from institutional stagnation, empty formalism, and cultural conformity.
To show that Protestants were not alone in their reforming efforts, Wilson and Fernandez-Armesto have organized their book thematically rather than chronologically. Instead of depicting Protestantism and Catholicism as two discrete traditions, the book highlights the concerns and struggles they had in common. Two chapters are devoted to questions of tradition and revelation, two to worship and priesthood, five to "human relationships" (both within and outside of the church), and one to doctrine. Seeking to downplay divisive doctrinal issues, the authors suggest that the Reformers grappled with problems typical to every church body. Although Protestants may have initiated some new solutions to these problems, their responses to the church's perennial dilemmas were often quite similar to those of Catholics.
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