This interpretive survey of the Protestant movement within western Christianity proceeds from the assumption that the Reformation and Protestants as a group can best be understood “by concentrating on the dilemma captured by [the] two symbols, tablet and text” (p. 3). For Dixon, the importance of the preached Word and the role played by the tablets of the law sum up the tension between the classic terms “law” and “gospel.” Dixon argues that this dialectic encapsulates the struggle of Protestants to grapple with the issue of authority in church and polity though few were prepared for the welter of disagreements that would surround the definition of what “church,” “state,” or “community” ought to mean once the bonds with Rome had been severed.

A teleology of Christian freedom moves Dixon's narrative along, with the classic distinctions developed by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch (“church” and “sect”) providing a setting in which the free church version of Protestantism won in the long run despite the fact that the “church” Reformation had been at some pains to put into place definitions and mechanisms aimed at “the forms of the faith it was trying to forestall” (p. 5). Dixon's argument that the debates over authority continued “well into the eighteenth century” (p. 5) will not surprise anyone familiar with the scholarship on the trials and tribulations of the confessional state and the doubts that have been raised about just how successful the imposition of order by princes or pastors was. The book's attractiveness lies in its determination to include both English and Scots’ dimensions of the Reformed and free church traditions. Additionally, it commendably insists upon the transatlantic spread of Protestants to North America as an integral part of the task facing the student seeking to understand not only origins, but the later forms of a fissiparous movement. Dixon believes in the end “Protestants” exhibit a “defining trait” of synthesizing the magisterial confessionalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the emphasis upon interiority, conversion, and individual judgment. The latter characteristics manifested themselves especially in the rise of the pietists and Methodists, and had long been characteristic of more radical separatists (p. 228).

The bookend geographical loci of a central European town (Wittenberg) and a proprietary British colony (Pennsylvania) serve aptly enough as symbols of the uncontrollable and unpredictable quality of the Reformation's early modern destination. Oddly enough, however, Dixon, whose prior publications have focused on the German-speaking Reformation, tends here to privilege the “second Reformation” symbolized by the rise of the Reformed confessions and the free church radicals who had so alarmed both Luther and Calvin. If the later incarnation of what it mean to be a Protestant succeeded where the Lutheran confessionalists failed, however, one might expect a more searching analysis that clarifies what went wrong, or where the weakness of the Lutheran vision can be identified. Dixon too easily slides over the Lutheran theological commitment to the ubiquity of Christ, its dogged commitment to sacramental realism, and its early success in proclaiming this dimension of the Word in its tradition of hymnody (pp. 32–33, 149–53).

Even his frontispiece illustration (p. 1) of “tablet and text” misleads since “Evangelical” in the descriptive title of the “true church” here meant strictly “Lutheran” as did the use of the traditional mass vestments and the fact that those approaching the altar are expected to approach and kneel—not to have mere bread and wine passed out to them as they remained seated as was common in Reformed circles. If the continuing debate over authority continued into the eighteenth century as Dixon correctly concludes, more attention might have been given to the robust liturgical life of Hamburg and Leipzig, and the popularity of the combined altar-pulpit that architecturally proclaimed the Lutherans’ conviction that Word and Sacrament could not effectively be separated. The more radical pietist-Lutherans attacked this conviction, sneering at the “dumb idols” of font, pulpit, altar, and confessional stool and reflecting the need to target a more vibrant version of “Protestants” than Dixon seems willing to concede in his exploration of liturgy and architecture (pp. 158–167).

More oddly, in the analysis of “Kingdoms” and “Communities” (pp. 60–121) in Europe and North America, Dixon remains fixated on the “Two Kingdoms” approach to the problem of authority without being willing to tackle the equally important problem of the “three estates” that occupied theologians as well. This omission is particularly striking since for Luther, the first estate (the Church) and the second (marriage) continued to reflect prelapsarian blessings Luther could not discern in princes and their polities. At the least, one might have expected more of an examination of Protestant marriage and household since Luther himself devoted so much time to the singular importance of both.

The privilege Dixon awards to the Reformed and free church groups also manages to distort the picture of the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although no one doubts the importance of the vast written records left by New England's Brownists and “puritans,” the Church of England's vitality in Virginia, other royal colonies, and unlikely places such as rural Connecticut by the 1760s, for example, is passed over in silence or dismissed as evidence of misguided efforts to “turn back the clock” (p. 213). Nor does Dixon quite appreciate the profound significance of the Moravians, who are not acknowledged as the most successful of Protestant missionary groups despite their small numbers (pp. 68–73). They played a disproportionate role in stimulating debate about what it meant to be Protestant not only in pluralist Pennsylvania (pp. 220–22) but also everywhere for their own peculiar vision of the church, most especially on their theology of marriage and human sexuality. Somewhat oddly, Dixon opts (despite his title) to end his assessment of Protestants not among Quakers or Moravians in Pennsylvania but with the rise of British-American Methodism as the symbol for the general revivalist impulse of the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 223–28). Since the “awakening” pattern became part of the history of Protestant renewal beyond Europe in subsequent centuries, one can appreciate the significance of the Methodists (and equally, the Baptists) to that story. Presumably, the comparably modest impact both groups had upon Christianity in continental Europe itself can be explained by the baneful continued influence of confessional, state-sponsored, or approved versions of Protestantism—though Dixon does not offer that conclusion.

As a survey of the sprawling literature the Reformation and subsequent Protestant groups have spawned, Dixon's analysis of “text and tablet” and the ongoing debates over authority offers a clearly articulated introduction to the non-Catholic forms of western Christianity. With the caveat that his account does not account for the inadequacy of Protestant attempts to provide a confessionally stable and liturgically potent manner of public worship that tied family, society, and state to their vision of “church,” his synthesis provides a good launching point from which to begin asking such questions.