Politically, socially, culturally and theologically Protestantism remains a highly contested phenomenon. Reflecting its origin in a conference in Gordon College, Massachusetts, this collection of essays offers a largely American perspective on the Reformation and contemporary Protestantism. The world, we are told, stands before a ‘landmark date’ as the quincentenary of the Ninety-Five Theses approaches (p. 1). The first, most substantial section, deals with the Reformation, the second with aspects of contemporary Protestantism, while the brief third section contains theological reflections.

Howard's essay, ‘Remembering the Reformation, 1617, 1817 and 1883: commemoration as an agent of continuity and change’, notes that reinterpretation rather than commemoration marked these German celebrations. Confessionalist, Enlightenment, nationalist and historicist values dominated in turn. It is salutary to be reminded of Treitschke's dictum: Luther allowed ‘that God might speak German to the German nation’ (p. 44). John Witte's ‘From Gospel to law: the Lutheran Reformation and its impact on legal culture’ is short on specifics and improbably hails the modern welfare state as a new expression of the Lutheran ideal. In ‘Redefining the sacred and the supernatural: how the Protestant Reformation really did disenchant the world’; Carlos Eire argues that the guiding principle of Reformed Protestanism was the incompatibility of spirit and matter. Peter Harrison, by contrast, offers a fascinating, well-documented and differentiated reflection on ‘Protestantism and the making of modern science’. Although science as we know it stems from the nineteenth century, the shift from a symbolic reading of the cosmos and an allegorical interpretation of Scripture in the early modern period legitimated and motivated a more empirical and cautiously experimental approach to reality, as seen, for example, in Johann Kepler, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and John Locke. There was, Harrison reminds us, nothing inevitable about the emergence of science in the West. Karin Maag's article on ‘The Reformation and higher education’ looks at the Protestant academies in Switzerland, France and South-West Germany, ‘new and more nimble institutions of higher study’ (p. 125), as well as the emerging Protestant universities. Both incorporated an element of practical training and discipline for future pastors, and a network of correspondence ensured the equivalence of standards and expectations across linguistic and cultural frontiers. By 1619 94 per cent of pastors in the Rhineland had spent time in higher education. One disadvantage was that pastors now tended to be drawn from more prosperous backgrounds and could appear rather remote to their congregations. Confessional and inter-confessional rivalries could negatively influence scholarship but they also stimulated it, and financial pressures nudged academies into accepting diversity among students and professors who not infrequently challenged confessional verities. Brad S. Gregory's ‘The Reformation and modernity: explaining the causal nexus’ recapitulates in readable form his book: The unintended Reformation. Neither the ‘liberal-progressive narrative’ nor its ‘revisionist-confessionalist’ counterpart adequately represent the complex relationship between modernity and the Reformation. The inability of the sola scriptura principle to settle the increasingly violent controversies between the confessions led to the state becoming in effect the arbiter of orthodoxy. Eventually the price paid for tolerance in the modern state was the privatisation of religion. Gregory appears deeply concerned about the emergence of ‘an increasingly legislative, surveillant, and interventionist state’ (p. 159). His view that Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism were ‘the great exceptions’ of the Reformation and the Radicals the mainstream is odd.

Beginning part ii, Matthew Lundin's ‘Myth and history in interpreting Protestantism’ is a reliable survey of recent historiographical trends. He makes good use of the writings of the Cologne lawyer Hermann Weinsberg (1518–97) to indicate the dilemmas faced by moderates in a polemical age. Herman Selderhuis argues that to commemorate the Reformation properly in ‘post-Christian’ Europe we need to understand correctly the theological emphases of the sixteenth century. Two thoughtful and informative articles follow on Protestantism in Nigeria and Korea. In ‘What hath Wittenberg to do with Lagos’ Philip Jenkins argues that ‘In both worlds – Germany in 1520, Nigeria or Uganda today – the Bible reached mass popular consciousness as part of a wider transformation of attitudes towards the word, to writing and to literacy’. In its vernacular translations the Bible links specific communities, so to speak, with the kingdom of heaven, being complemented by hugely popular films and videos and an epidemic of hymn-singing. Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress enjoys phenomenal success. In the swollen cities the independent Churches burgeon. Brazil presents a similar picture. Such Churches may appear authoritarian but the dominant ethos is democratic and participatory and offers women in particular the chance of a secure domestic life. Sung-Deuk Oak paints in ‘Protestantism comes East’ a convincing picture of the whirlwind success of Protestantism in Korea. It was associated with the social transformation brought by Christian civilisation, with nationalist resistance to the Japanese, and ‘missionaries and early Korean Christians worked hard not to impose Western ideas if they could find parallels within the traditional Korean culture’ (p. 244). In 1962 3 per cent of Koreans were Protestants; by 1997 this number had grown to a phenomenal 19 per cent, about 10 million members. Their influence on the wider society was considerable. In most recent times, however, corrupt practices and sex scandals in its mega churches in particular, combined with rigidity in theology and liturgy and the prosperity gospel have led to a loss of credibility. Mark Noll concludes part ii with a review of ‘Sola scriptura and the twentieth-century spread of Christianity’. He notes the chaos caused in Mongolia, for example, by competing Bible translations, but concludes that the positive results of the Protestant principle outweigh the negative.

Part iii, on theological considerations, contains an interesting reflection by Timothy George on ‘The new ecumenism’, especially between Protestant and Roman Catholic. An ‘Afterword’ by Ronald K. Rittgers asks whether, after 500 years, Protestantism is still needed.