Divided into three sections, Craig Atwood's study of the Czech Reformation, the rise of the Brethren, and the relationship of the Unitas Fratrum to the Protestant Reformation will deservedly serve as the standard introduction for beginners into the roots and the enduring importance of the Moravian Church. Atwood correctly notes that “this is the first book to focus on the theology of the Unity of the Brethren ever written in English” (2). Atwood provides both readers within and beyond his tradition with the historical context from which a complex and initially divided theological movement sprang up in the fifteenth-century Western Christian church. Not intended as a scholarly treatise, Atwood's study does not exploit Czech language sources, nor does it attempt to resolve some of the thornier theological strains that flowed into the creation of the recognizable “Unity” that first emerged in 1457–1458 but would be destroyed during the Thirty Years' War.

If students today at least recognize who Jan Hus was, they will profit from Atwood's rescue from oblivion figures as diverse as the conservative Utraquist Jan Rokycana, the pacifist Peter Chelcicky, and Gregory (Rehor). His tour through the medieval roots of the central European struggle with both the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clears a well-marked path for the intended non-expert traveler. Atwood shows persuasively that the initial bitter struggle between the “Utraquists” (that is, those whose main objective was the extension of the Eucharist “in both kinds” to the laity) and the more radical, apocalyptically inclined who met a crushing military defeat at the Battle of Lipany in 1434 determined the later history of the Unity. So did the theological influence of the English John Wycliffe and the Waldensians. Atwood plausibly argues that the initially conservative objectives of the Czech Reformation might have been accommodated within the Orthodox tradition of the East with whom they attempted contact and affirmation shortly before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (77–78, 98). The intransigence of Rome and the attempted compromises sought by the Utraquists, however, drove the Unity into convictions that settled upon a profound revulsion for connections between church and state, and the use of political violence in the name of religion.

Nine years before Martin Luther's birth, Luke of Prague initiated the Unity's “transformation from a sect living apart from secular society to a voluntary church” (189), but in so doing provoked renewed internal dissent between the rigorists and those who sought some kind of compromise for living in the world. By the time Luke died in 1528, the Reformation was already more than a decade old, and Atwood is at some pains to correct older historians' exaggerated claims for connections of the Brethren to the magisterial Reformation, or for their influence upon it. If Luke of Prague died largely unknown outside the Unity, John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) achieved a genuine measure of international renown, though he was fated to see the almost total destruction of this voluntary church. Atwood first analyzes the Unity's relationship to the emerging Protestant confessional traditions during the seventy years before Comenius's birth. Despite affinities Luther himself found with many aspects of the Unity's teaching, Atwood concludes that with regard to the doctrine of the sacraments, the Unity “differed on . . . several key points from Luther's understanding” (251). Rejecting both Zwinglian and Anabaptist influences, the Unity may have remained closer to Lutheranism but Atwood concludes that it has been too “easy to overstate the Lutheran influence” (261). The Unity appears to have had more affinities with the sacramental theology of Calvin than Luther, and Comenius's later positive relations to the Church of England may well reflect that tendency. Thus, the Confession of 1535 may have been the flood crest of mutual agreement between the Unity and the Lutherans. In avoiding the traditional distinction in the Unity between “things essential, ministerial, and incidental” (276), the Unity managed to reaffirm the central importance of Trinitarian doctrine along with the centrality of scripture and a belief in justification by faith, but predictably departed from Lutheran insistence on the ubiquity of Christ and hence more than a spiritual presence in the Eucharist (286–90). Atwood's claim, therefore, that affinity with Calvinism represents less a later change than “continuity with its theological heritage” (295) seems eminently correct. The political alliance of the Brethren with the Reformed in Poland in the later sixteenth century set the stage for the Reformed influence upon the appearance of the Brethren's or Kralice Bible between 1579 and 1613. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of the Unity's theologians were educated “primarily at Herborn Academy, Geneva Academy and the University of Heidelberg” (324).

This was precisely Comenius's own promising educational beginning, but he eventually lost his wife, child, position, and hope of a stable life in the cauldron of the Thirty Years' War, finding refuge in exile in Poland's Leszno community until its destruction n 1656. Aptly described by Atwood as the Unity's last and most eminent theologian (398), Comenius may nevertheless have embodied the frustrations of a movement whose dedication to universal education and pan-sophism attempted reconciliation of too many divergent views of the world. Both Comenius's and the Unity's preference for simplicity and pragmatism and their distaste for theological precisionism that led to repeated outbreaks of political-religious violence still speak powerfully to a religiously fraught twenty-first century. The choice to become “a voluntary community of believers who tried to live according to the simple teachings of Christ” (409) left unsettled, however, the thornier questions of where tolerance ends and indifferentism and skepticism begin to undermine conviction. Likewise, although few today are enamored of close linkages between the powers of a state and any religious majority, the protection of the weak and powerless became a near obsession with the exiled Comenius, so much so that he destroyed his own reputation by engaging in prophecies that confidently predicted the end of Catholic Habsburg tyranny in central Europe (361). As Atwood shrewdly concludes, “the world's labyrinth is extremely complicated, even for the faithful” (363). Whether the Brethren truly “charted the course for modern Christianity” (409) readers will undoubtedly want to judge for themselves. But they could scarcely ask for a more trenchant, well-written, and steady explication of the Unity's theological and cultural foundations and its subsequent history.