Christopher Ocker's title scarcely prepares the reader for the sweeping reconsideration of Reformation historiography that he proposes. Focusing on the German-speaking regions of the Holy Roman Empire, with some attention to Geneva and France, he frames this volume of essays with a question: “How did hesitation, equivocation, compromise, and serendipity give shape to a Reformation driven by a handful of determined people?” (xi). His answer: three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life, the two polarizing forces of Protestant and Catholic reformers and counter-reformers, and a “third force” that consisted of those in the middle, “ordinary people, whose reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous” (xi). But “third forces” also include any intellectual equivocation or ambiguity and might be found inherent in a school of thought or method. This “binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definition,” on the one hand, “and the hesitations and compromises that accompanied religious controversy” (xii) on the other hand is Ocker's “hybrid Reformation.”
His investigation of “third forces” allows him to challenge what have become historiographical orthodoxies in Reformation studies. First, his focus on those in the middle (the majority of Europe [63]), “corrects and qualifies our picture of the past that has been dependent on the self-presentation of the loudest historical actors” (259). Second, he demonstrates that monikers used to describe individuals and groups (e.g., Anabaptists, Catholics) give a false impression of clearly defined categories populated by deeply convinced individuals. Third, intellectual and theological difference between adversaries was often not nearly so vast as has been claimed. The product of the same intellectual culture, most viewpoints were variants, not binaries. Fourth, even individuals on opposite ends of the doctrinal spectrum exhibit some ambiguity in their thought. Fifth, our periodization of the Reformation and understanding of it as a distinct watershed does not conform to reality. In short, current Reformation historiography accentuates difference and is the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns. Ocker proposes a fresh approach that is appropriate to the twenty-first century and focuses on similarity and compromise.
He divides his book into three parts. The first, “Indifference and Ambiguity,” takes a social historical approach offering case studies of lay individuals who, after initial attraction to Reformation ideas, settled into a middle ground or were motivated by non-ideological factors. For example, “A blacksmith named Hen, who had indeed been baptized as an adult in 1530 (he technically was an Anabaptist) and who had also participated in the Peasants’ War, considered himself in August 1533 neither Lutheran, nor Anabaptist, nor Catholic, but was merely someone who wanted to hear true sermons” (42). Not hardcore partisans, such individuals were bystanders interested in their own religious lives, whom historians have inaccurately placed firmly into various camps.
“Medieval Protestants” explores the relationship of the Reformation to the intellectual culture of late medieval schools and asks “is approaching the Reformation as a single phase in a linear chronology, a movement away from the Middle Ages, useful at all?” (69). Ocker's answer: the Reformation should be seen as a series of incremental intellectual changes, combined with much continuity. He notes, for example, that by the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the Gnesio-Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus had returned to a theological argumentation that was scholastic. Thus, the Reformation becomes more of a blip than a significant step on the road to modernity.
Among Ocker's more controversial arguments is his rejection of Ockham and nominalism (via moderna) as the sharp intellectual break with realism (via antiqua) that laid the groundwork for the Reformation's focus on individual linguistic phenomenon and the text of the Bible. Rather, he sees both vias as a subcategories of a larger academic style and method that “encouraged intellectual experimentation” (111) and the integration of insights from various schools. Luther's own Ockhamism was selective and adaptive. In the cultural ecology of this world, stringent adherence to closely delimited schools was the exception.
“Interpretation beyond Borders,” examines “scholars walking intellectual tightropes in biblical interpretation, without necessarily knowing it” (xii). Ocker reevaluates Erasmus's critique of scholasticism, noting that it was not that intellectual approach per se, but its exclusivity that he rejected. “True method in theology,” claimed Erasmus, “should remain uncommitted to any individual method” (168). Erasmus's own work of biblical translation was not meant to supplant, but to improve medieval exegesis. Other conflicts that have been framed as dichotomies are rather questions of degree, the role of allegory and analogical thinking in biblical hermeneutics, for example. Despite the Protestants’ reputation for rejecting medieval allegorical interpretations, all sides had to grapple with the fact that the Bible presented “temporal-local events of salvation,” and “the universal scope of salvation history” (205). Its multidimensional structure and discourse created a dynamic environment for intertextual play. Thus, Protestants “were fundamentally in the same position as their Catholic peers” (205), forced to reckon with figurative communication.
In recent years, the word “Reformation” has been used to encompass the broad range of fundamental changes that occurred in Western Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. From this perspective, the Reformation as a distinct event with religion at its center dissipates, almost to the point of incoherence. Ocker's collection challenges the idea of the Reformation in different ways. His assumption that it was driven by a few convinced partisans contradicts any notion of a broad-based movement. And his emphasis on commonality, ambiguity, and indifference diminishes its coherence so that again the Reformation almost loses its distinctiveness.
His is a demanding work, confronting the reader with its intellectual range, methodologies, and scope. Many of his points are not new; some will be challenged by specialists in the specific areas. But the comprehensive manner in which he assembles them, combined with his own discoveries, is the strength of his collection, allowing him to challenge received historiographies. On the one hand, the reader is left wondering whether Ocker's proposal for a new approach to the Reformation is as much driven by twenty-first-century concerns as the one he rejects was by the needs of former centuries. On the other hand, if the field of Reformation studies is to remain relevant, a willingness to rethink fundamentals is necessary. Ocker provides a good starting point for this exercise.
