The Reformation as Renewal is an exemplar of special pleading

That the Reformation was a revolution is not a new idea. Centuries before contemporary scholars Brad S. Gregory or Patrick J. Deneen assessed the Reformation as an accelerant for modern secularism, individualism, and materialism, thinkers across a host of disciplines have characterized the birth of Protestantism as a paradigmatic shift of intellectual, political, social, and, of course, theological significance.

Whether that analysis is true, it’s also true that it does not necessarily reflect the opinions of many of the early Reformers, who understood themselves not as radicals, but, of course, as reformers, in the sense that they were seeking to return the Church to its biblical, and even patristic heritage.

That important point is the primary thesis of Matthew Barrett’s recently published book The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. “In the estimation of the Reformers,” writes Barrett, “a mixture of continuity and discontinuity with patristic and medieval predecessors did not mean a departure from the realist metaphysic of participation in toto but rather its refinement, bringing the concept to further maturity in light of Reformation soteriology and ecclesiology.” Yes, admits Barrett, scholarship has interpreted the Reformation as the overturning of an earlier epoch, but that’s not how the Reformers understood themselves. “The Reformers did not think the Reformation was primarily a revolution for new, modern ideas, but a retrieval and renewal of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

That analysis, as far as it goes, is more-or-less demonstrably accurate: any survey of early Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, or Bullinger will prove that they viewed themselves as recovering a biblical and patristic pedigree of Christianity, while their successors (e.g. Melanchthon, Vermigli, Turretin) drew upon and sought to improve medieval scholasticism. But was that self-understanding an accurate reflection of reality?

On that point, Barrett demurs. “Whether one thinks the Reformers were correct is a theological matter that is not the burden of this book. Whether the Reformers defined themselves by this theological conviction, however, is a historical matter, one that defined the Reformation as a whole.” To ensure the reader is not confused, he states again: “What follows is not an attempt to mine the church fathers or medieval theologians to determine if the Reformers were right, which itself is a different project. Rather, what follows is a fresh, intellectual and theological history of the Reformation that listens to discern if the Reformers themselves interpreted their reform as a renewal of catholicity.”

Nevertheless, elsewhere in his introduction, Barrett writes that the claim that Luther was more Catholic than many of his Roman Catholic opponents “is the heartbeat of this book.” Barrett then declares: “The Reformers did not take an axe to the tree, throw the tree in the fire, and plant a new tree. Rather, the tree remained the same; they simply pruned its savage branches.”

Color me confused. So Barrett will not be adjudicating the question of whether or not the Reformers were in continuity with biblical, patristic, and Scholastic sources—he will simply presume they were? He then states: “The Reformation should then be defined not according to its critics but on its own terms, as a movement of catholicity.” But on what grounds should it be defined thus—simply because the Reformers claimed as much? Why not, alternatively, presume that the Reformers’ Catholic interlocutors were the ones truly worshiping in continuity with the Bible, Church Fathers, and Scholastics, while the Protestants were fomenters of dissent, division, and innovation? Barrett’s project is an exemplar of special pleading.

Another problematic premise has to do with terms, in particular Barrett’s use of “Great Tradition,” and “church catholic.” It’s unclear what he means by these, but based on their context I’ll hazard a guess: they are both appeals to that same overarching theme of some pure, truly orthodox version of Christianity that the Reformation rediscovered and preserved from a corrupt, theologically wayward Rome. But such terms also presume that Protestants can—at least in some sense—determine what that is, beyond simply a concept over which self-professed Christians have been disagreeing since the early centuries. For, lest we forget, the great heresies of the early Church—Montanism, Sabellianism, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, Donatism, Iconoclasm—all believed they were the ones truly faithful to Christ and the apostles.

To wit, that attempt to rediscover true patristic teaching is complicated by Church Fathers teaching doctrines in conflict with Reformation teaching.

Consider St. Augustine, whose doctrine of salvation the Reformers believed they were retaining. That great bishop of Hippo taught apostolic succession: “The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after his Resurrection, gave it in charge to feed his sheep, down to the present episcopate.” He taught that Rome preserved Petrine primacy: “…what has the chair of the Roman Church done to you, in which Peter sat, and in which Anastasius sits today?” He believed in mortal sin, baptismal regeneration, the real presence of the Eucharist, penance, Mary’s sinlessness, the intercession and merits of the saints, and purgatory, among other doctrines.

Do any of those teachings, one might ask, constitute part of that “Great Tradition” and “church catholic” of which Barrett claims the Reformers so faithfully recovered?

Much the same problem is at work with Barrett’s take on the Scholastics. He writes: “The sixteenth-century Reformers, whether they always knew it or not, had far more in common with Scholastics like Thomas than they did with a medieval theologian like Scotus and theologians of the via moderna like Ockham and Biel…” Barrett uses math to make this claim: of 512 questions in the Summa Theologiae, he argues that only 16 treat faith and only 34 treat the saints and seven sacraments.

That means only approximately 10 percent of the entire Summa addressed those major doctrines considered most controversial during the sixteenth century, doctrines that Protestants could not affirm and remain Protestant. Even if one is generous and includes ancillary doctrines like original sin or mysticism, the percentage only rises by 1 percent…. When the scope of the Summa is taken into consideration, the continuity between the Scholastics and the Reformers dwarfs their discontinuity.

But this calculation tells us very little, for, even within the Protestant paradigm (see, for example, C. S. Lewis’ take in Mere Christianity) such divergences are typically how heresies work. A heresy is such not because it teaches so many doctrines incongruent with what preceded it as to make it unrecognizable, but that it errs by over-emphasizing some doctrines at the expense, if not elimination of others, and thus tends to extremes. Thus, for example, Arians prioritized Jesus’ human nature at the expense of his divinity, while Monophysites in turn exaggerated His divinity. That the Reformers agreed with Aquinas on many important doctrines is therefore irrelevant if they disagreed with him on others of equal importance, especially if those disagreements were over whatever constitutes Barrett’s “Great Tradition” and “church catholic.”

Barrett’s attempt to synthesize Thomistic and Reformation theories of the atonement also fails. “Punishment is key to a Thomistic interpretation of the cross” and “forensic elements are not absent from Thomas’s doctrine of justification,” he argues. This is demonstrably misleading: Aquinas, in his treatment of the atonement in Summa Theologiae III Q. 48, never suggests that Christ suffered the wrath of God or was punished as one deemed guilty on man’s behalf. Rather, “by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race,” (Article 2); and “Christ’s Passion was a sufficient and a superabundant atonement for the sin and the debt of the human race” (Article 4). Barrett seems to think that because, in the Thomist view, Christ liberated man from the debt of punishment, that Christ was punished, but there is nothing in Aquinas’ teaching to suggest that idea — rather, Christ offers Himself to the Father “out of love and obedience” (Article 2).

Contrast that Thomistic conception of the atonement with that of Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion Book II, Chapter XVI. We read there that Christ endured punishment for man’s sin: “And that at this point Christ interceded as his advocate, took upon himself and suffered the punishment that, from God’s righteous judgment, threatened all sinners.” We read that the atonement was a transfer of guilt from us to Christ: “To take away our condemnation, it was not enough for him to suffer any kind of death: to make satisfaction for our redemption a form of death had to be chosen in which he might free us both by transferring our condemnation to himself and by taking our guilt upon himself.” And we read that Christ endured the wrath of God: “No wonder, then, if he is said to have descended into hell, for he suffered the death that God in his wrath had inflicted upon the wicked!” This is far from Thomistic atonement theory.

One may even wonder: why must the Reformers be the true recoverers of the patristics and Scholastics? Perhaps both those sources are so deeply tainted by unbiblical ideas as to be unserviceable—that’s certainly what many “non-magisterial” Protestant groups believed. Yet Barrett makes such persons the antagonists of his story. The Anabaptists are “seditious”; the antinomians “just another one of the devil’s tactics.” He argues that “severing themselves from the catholic heritage sounded like a recovery of primitive Christianity until the radicals discovered that they no longer possessed the guardrails of historic orthodoxy.” Yet why can’t the “radical Reformers” be the heroes most emblematic of the Protestant ethos in their suspicions towards all “man made” traditions, rather than feeling a need to draw arbitrary lines of continuity from the end of the apostolic era to the sixteenth century? Moreover, within the Protestant paradigm—which possesses no authoritative arbiter over biblical disputes besides the very Bible itself—who’s to say the radicals weren’t being more faithful to Scripture?

Perhaps the most interesting argument in Barrett’s book is the provocative claim that, contra the popular narrative, Catholics—manifested in such teachings as those promulgated at the Council of Trent—were the real nominalists, while Protestants (including even Luther and Calvin, who were vocal anti-scholastics) were the true inheritors of the Thomistic tradition. It’s a difficult claim to evaluate, given that Barrett provides little evidence to substantiate it, besides citing the claims of scholars who assert much the same. And claims, we should remember, are not the same thing as arguments. One of the more curious parts of this “Protestants are the true Scholaists” narrative is Barrett’s assessment that Calvin oftentimes argued positions that aligned with the Scholastic tradition, even though, admittedly, Calvin himself thought his theology was at odds with the Scholastics.

But if Calvin was so confused about Scholasticism, why should we trust him as an authority, either on that subject or on scriptural exegesis or interpretation of the patristics for that matter?

Thus, despite the impressive scholarship and research that obviously went into The Reformation as Renewal, there is a certain lack of rigor regarding the entire text. This is perhaps most saliently visible in how little Barrett grapples with the Catholic response to the Reformation; I suppose if your story presumes the Reformers were right, why would you need to? Besides a closing chapter on St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Council of Trent—which is where Barrett claims that Catholics are the true nominalists—the author gives little attention to describing Catholic responses to the early Reformers’ arguments. One will search in vain across a thousand pages of Reformation history for any discussion of St. Francis de Sales or St. Robert Bellarmine, among other counter-Reformation Catholic thinkers.

Indeed, Barrett’s description of St. Thomas More is bizarrely biased, writing with rhetorical flourish: “…With ferocity More turned a blind eye to ecclesiastical affluence in the sixteenth century;” and, “Like an assassin, More made every effort to eliminate the Protestant program.” Perhaps most jarring was this description of More’s involvement in the execution of a Protestant: “More, however, did not flinch; the flames that licked Hitton’s skin were only a foretaste of the flames More was about to experience in hell itself.” Is Barrett actually claiming More is in hell?

Given those prominent Protestant thinkers who have endorsed this book—Carl Trueman, Bruce Gordon, Michael Horton, Gavin Ortlund, Joel Beeke, R. Scott Clarke—it’s apparent that many hope it will be an important, even classic work of Protestant historical scholarship. However, despite its impressive historical research—Barrett is obviously incredibly well-read and familiar with the subject matter—the book is deeply confused and uneven, marching forward, chapter after chapter upon unproven premises and thinly veiled anti-Catholic rhetoric.

It is an approach that empowers Barrett to focus on evidence that supports his predetermined conclusions, and ignore what doesn’t. Yet if that’s the case, The Reformation as Renewal is little more than polemic dressed up as history.

The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
By Matthew Barrett
Zondervan Academic, 2023
Hardcover, 1003 pages