Entanglement is the key and oft-repeated term in Christopher Ocker's important new interpretation of the Reformation. Ocker does not treat Martin Luther or any of the other historical actors in his story as free agents who shaped their worlds through premeditated ideas or actions. Rather, he presents them as the products of numerous long-term social, political, cultural, economic, and religious entanglements.

Luther is the central figure in Ocker's story—the Wittenberg reformer “was the hinge on which partisan identities were formed” (35)—but not because he was some kind of German Hercules. Ocker is interested in Luther as “a figure produced by changing social, cultural, and political ecologies, in the sixteenth century and over the next 400 years” (xi). Not Luther the human agent, but Luther the construct, especially the construct created by conflict about him in his own day and beyond—this is Ocker's focus. He argues that conflict over Luther's person and legacy drove change in the Reformation and beyond: “Martin Luther was a controversy. The Reformation was a controversy about him” (13). Thus, Ocker describes his book as an “anti-biography” (15) that “strives for an impersonal approach to the legacy of a person” (8).

This approach is shaped by some important convictions about the task and purview of the historian. Ocker avers, “We are all debtors to our environments” (xi), a statement with which every historian would agree. As Ocker puts it, “This conviction, that circumstances and effects, not individual people or events, are the proper object of historical investigation, has guided the writing of this book” (13), a statement that is more controversial. Ocker asserts that personal religious belief and experience also fall beyond the historian's purview because the historian has no reliable access to them in the past. Religious ideas also appear not to be a subject suitable for historical study. Here and there, Ocker concedes that ideas—including Luther's ideas—did have some causal force in the past, but his handling of religious ideas can be brusque and even at times incorrect. For example, he mistakenly attributes the “Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope” in The Book of Concord to Luther (201)—it was written by Philip Melanchthon. Instead, the proper focus of the historian is “the effect of an energy exuded by a conflict as such” (109).

According to Ocker, the historian must also attend closely to the random and ad hoc nature of the myriad entanglements that produced the Reformation and its legacies. In order to investigate these entanglements, Ocker invites the reader to crawl through what he calls the thicket or the underbrush of the past. As he leads the reader through finely grained analyses of the Peasants’ War, the Urban Reformation, and the Thirty Years War, to name but a few of the numerous topics examined, Ocker's wide-ranging interests and deep learning are evident and most impressive. He is very good at showing the complexity of religious change and the often ambiguous nature of religious commitment in the early modern period and beyond, especially among ruling elites. The book's great strength is how effectively it opposes a naïve and ahistorical view of Luther and the Reformation. The reader may be forgiven, however, for experiencing an ever-diminishing enthusiasm for the forays into the brambles of the past as the book progresses, for these forays are frequent, detailed, and often require the navigation of sentences and paragraphs of considerable length.

The seven chapters and epilogue include the following arguments and observations:

Luther's conflict with the papacy, largely accidental and unplanned, was never resolved, and thus contemporaries were plunged unwillingly into a “bipolar debate” (41): Luther as heroic anti-papal reformer versus Luther as arch heretic. Most people preferred to be somewhere in the “muddle” between these extremes (51), including those who stormed monasteries and revolted during the Peasants’ War. These people should not be seen as evangelical freedom fighters, for such anti-authoritarian unrest had a long prehistory. Most of the participants in Reformation uprisings had mixed motives, only one of which was sympathy for Luther's teaching, at least as they understood it. Luther's contribution to such rebellion was paradoxical: “he both provoked and opposed unrest” (72). In towns and cities, Luther became the “Wittenberg spokesman for obedient reform” (89) who supported the long-standing desire of local aristocratic oligarchs for greater control over their communities.

Two fantasies of unity—one imperial, the other ecclesial—directly shaped the Luther affair and unintentionally contributed to its growth, much more so than Luther or his ideas did. These fantasies become evident as such when the historian takes due account of the pope's inability to manage heresy, the conflict over conciliarism, the Holy Roman Emperor's failure to quash the Luther affair, and the ability of Protestant temporal rulers to claim church property for the Reformation cause. These factors comprised the “basic political anatomy” (100) of the Luther affair and ensured that the conflicts it created would remain unresolved for centuries.

Fantasies of unity continued as the Reformation progressed, for each religious group held to the “notional unity” (280) of the church, even though none ever realized it. Europe had, in fact, never been a unified Christendom, for the Middle Ages were marked by considerable diversity of belief and practice: “It's not that Europe moved from a unified church to religious diversity. Rather, its diversity changed and grew” (296). The controversy among the three competing early modern Christian confessions in the West—Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic—had the unexpected effect of underscoring the central importance that Europeans attached to viewing Europe as Christendom vis-à-vis the Other (Muslims and Jews). This controversy was part of a larger and longer global conflict about religion itself.

Ocker's larger purpose in this book is to argue for the presence of an essential malleability in Christianity, which he believes his study of Luther-as-conflict and the Reformation-as-conflict demonstrates. He writes: “This is the spirit conjured by history, a shifting figure, a series of masks applied to 500 years of cultural rivalries; and the specter of an unresolved sixteenth-century controversy drifts through its entanglements within and beyond Europe, as the world impinges on Christendom's sense of its own innate diversity” (385). It thus seems that Ocker ultimately wishes to disclose this diversity as the true spirit of Christianity, and thus to exorcise the false spirit of notional unity that obfuscates it.

How one responds to this larger argument, and to the various constitutive arguments along the way, will likely have something to do with how one assesses Ocker's methodology and its attendant assumptions—whether one finds anti-biography to be compelling history or not. There are other ways of accounting for Christianity's malleability or translatability, including those suggested by the missiologists Andrew Walls and the late Lamin Sanneh. They both place more emphasis on the essential teachings of the Christian faith—especially the Incarnation—than Ocker's historicizing approach allows.

An alternative approach is necessary in order to gain the nuanced understanding of the Reformation and its legacy in the West that Ocker seeks and partly provides. This approach requires one to be more willing than he is (at least in this book) to crawl into the thickets of religious ideas and personal religious belief and experience, and to attend to all of the myriad additional entanglements that such a foray entails. At the same time, one must be willing to venture into the bramble of larger, impersonal developments that Ocker so thoughtfully and painstakingly explores. As one embarks on both forays, one must give due weight to all causal factors, discounting none out of hand. Finally, one must be willing and able to make some sense of all of these entanglements in the telling of a coherent and elegant story. A tall order, to be sure, perhaps too tall. But it does have the merit of taking both the personal and the impersonal seriously in the study of the past.