These eight essays come from a 2017 conference at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They are divided into four sections relating to particular thematic dimensions of the Protestant Reformation: biblical interpretation, preaching and pastoral care, justification, and the Christian life. Each section features two essays. The contributors are fine Reformation scholars and the volume includes an introduction by Scott Manetsch and a superb afterword by Timothy George: “What Evangelicals Can Learn from the Reformation.” An excellent bibliography further enhances the book.

The four parts and their topics go to “the substance and essential core of the sixteenth-century Reformation” which, says Manetsch, was “a religious renewal movement that called the church back to the Scriptures and the centrality of the Christian gospel” (1, 2). The Reformation was “about recovering from Scripture the central message of Christianity—that God extends grace to sinners who trust in Jesus Christ alone—and applying that theological insight to the spiritual needs of men and women as well as the practical concerns of church and community” (2). Here, the “recovery, reading, and faithful application of the Bible” were central (2).

All essays point toward this central conviction, expressed in varying ways. To mention two: Michael Horton's “Novum or Rursus? Justification and the Bible in the Reformation” places Luther's “breakthrough” discovery in the context of patristic exegesis and indicates “the striking similarities in the exegesis of the Reformers’ opponents and the new perspective of Paul, particularly with respect to the meaning of ‘works of the law’” (107). Ronald K. Rittgers's stimulating essay, “Scripture as ‘Sacrament’ in Protestant Pastoral and Devotional Literature,” argues the magisterial reformers had a “sacramental” view of scripture—as a “means of grace.” Correlatively, Rittgers argues, in the proclaimed Word, there was a “Protestant conviction that the Word could also mediate grace in printed works of pastoral care and devotion, including those with very little human commentary” (72). These were “new portals through which God could bestow his grace” (102). Protestants thus contributed to “a new and important form of sacrality” (103).

This is a splendid collection with historic and contemporary dimensions which repays sustained reading and reflection.