Amy Nelson Burnett succeeds admirably in three arguments about the controversy among reformers in the 1520s over the sacraments. First, the conflict had its roots in the divide between Luther and Erasmus, a disagreement regarding biblical hermeneutics and metaphysical assumptions. Second, printing brought the debate to the wider public in ways often beyond the control of the protagonists. Moreover, when they could utilize it, the Wittenbergers were more successful in reaching a larger audience. And third, the controversy over the sacraments did not simply divide evangelicals in the 1520s, but rather provoked a breakdown in authority. Burnett suggests this provides a better lens for understanding the reformation more broadly than simply the adoption of Luther's doctrine of justification. This outstanding study is not only an encouraging and articulate example of the intersection of intellectual history and cultural history, but it is also one of the most incisive discussions of the reformation era and the sacraments in the forty years since B. A. Gerrish introduced his taxonomy of Reformed sacramental theology. Burnett is also to be congratulated for producing such a delightfully readable account considering the complexity of the primary sources.

Like Italian humanists before him, Desiderius Erasmus called for careful philology and the discernment of historical context when examining a document. Burnett explains how, in his 1518 Plan or Method of Studying Theology, Erasmus subordinated the external, material world to a higher, spiritual reality. Similar to advice he gives in his 1503 Enchiridion and displaying his Platonic metaphysical assumptions, Erasmus pushes his readers, especially when handling scripture, to seek out a higher spiritual and moral meaning beyond the base literal. In the Plan or Method, Erasmus offers up an array of examples where Christ and Paul use parables and imagery to teach higher spiritual truths. Erasmus also had a positive evaluation of human potential, contrasting sharply with Martin Luther's more thoroughly Augustinian sense of human fallenness. Although Luther was indebted to the humanists’ revival of ancient texts, his exegetical sensibilities were entirely different from those of Erasmus. While Erasmus sought out higher spiritual meaning, the Wittenberg reformer believed that both flesh and spirit were wounded in the primordial fall and both needed redemption. For Luther, God's self-revelation in scripture was direct, plain, and clear; it simply needed to be unleashed from papal captivity. According to Burnett, Luther and Erasmus (not Luther and Zwingli) were poles around which two different groups of evangelicals emerged. The division over the sacraments manifest through the 1520s—a heated and often public controversy over, among other items, the definition of “sacrament,” the nature of Christ's presence, the relationship between sacraments and the church—was the outworking of this more foundational difference in hermeneutics and metaphysics.

Burnett's repositioning of Erasmus accomplishes two important things (among others). First, we are liberated from the reductionist and mostly confessional narratives produced by later generations that looked back to the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 and raised up a brawl between Luther and Zwingli in whose wake two confessional traditions emerged. That is simply too neat a story. Of course, among the Lutherans, Luther was a seminal figure, but he was not the only one writing: we have to deal with Rhegius, Brenz, and certainly Melanchthon. Thus Burnett often refers to the “Wittenbergers,” a welcome shift in nomenclature. To the south, things were even more complex. Zwingli was only one of several sacramentarian theologians in south Germany and Switzerland—and he did not occupy the seat of deference as Luther did among the Wittenbergers. Historians have worked for some time now reclaiming, for example, the place of Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Capito. Burnett herself produced an important study of Karlstadt in 2011. It was, rather, around Erasmus that the proto-Reformed circled as satellites. They drew deeply from his hermeneutical agenda and his metaphysical vision. The second accomplishment of Burnett's repositioning of Erasmus is a wider vision of the sacramental divide, that the conflict was not simply over the Eucharist. This means, then, that the Anabaptists were in closer intellectual company to the Reformed—much more so than Bullinger, Zwingli's successor after his death in 1531, would have liked. Perhaps Luther was right all along.

Burnett also draws our attention to the strengths and weaknesses of print in the spread of evangelical ideas. Earlier historians have noted that the progress of reform was aided by the press, but this study allows for a far more nuanced portrait. As Burnett puts it, controversy generated sales and publishers were not immune from profit motivations. The genre of the pamphlet itself, short digestible tracts, was a creation of the reformation era. The Wittenbergers majored on publishing catechisms, sermons, pre-communion examination questions—the kind of literature that could penetrate, Brunett explains, to the lower strata of society. On the other hand, the sacramentarians wrote for an urban and more literate elite. Language itself was an issue: for those in the empire, Luther's German was becoming the standard while the Swiss German of the sacramentarians was unfamiliar. Printers knew this and did not wish to risk a down turn in sales. In terms of content, a reader might only encounter the ideas of a given reformer through the polemical refutation of yet another reformer. Then, likewise, there was the repeated phenomenon of documents which got to press without the final approval of their authors. Burnett offers several examples of the above phenomena; a standout is her chapter on Bucer's controversial translation of Bugenhagen's Psalms Commentary.

Burnett outlines the patterns and tactics in the debate (challenging opponents’ scholarship, accusing them of misrepresentation, declarations of heresy) and she is remarkably careful with her handling of theological terms, navigating subtleties often missed. For example, she notes that the debate concerned not simply Christ's presence, but the presence of Christ's body. This controversy, she argues, allows us to see the emergence of the Reformation through the lens of the breakdown of authority rather than a narrow focus on Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone. If, Burnett concludes, the theological core of the Reformation is not the adoption of a particular doctrine, but the rejection of the teaching authority of the pope, then the respective places of Erasmus's “Bible humanism” and Wittenberg theology come into relief. And the former did not, she insists, simply make way for the later. Only with the emergence of the debate over the sacraments did the differences between these schools become clear. The division included, then, not only a rupture between Wittenberg and the sacramentarians, but the splintering of the sacramentarians into the magisterial Reformed and the Anabaptists. This book will be a major resource for scholars researching not only the controversy itself but how the German Reformation took shape in the 1520s.