Marking the quincentenary of the Protestant Reformation, C. Scott Dixon delivers a timely, engaging account of the individuals, energies, conflicts, and forces that brought about arguably the greatest upheaval in the Christian churches since the age of Constantine. His book is the fourth of seven in the I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church and covers the period commonly referred to as the early modern era or “the confessional age” (roughly 1500 to 1685), an epoch coinciding closely with the rise of the early modern state. Dixon describes it as “a history of the early modern Christian Church in some of its myriad earthly forms . . . it is really about Churches rather than Church” (xiv). He divides the work into six substantial chapters that explore the “Christian Church [when it] was experiencing radical new phases of self-examination, fragmentation and renewal, particularly in the West, where the divisions brought on by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation permanently reshaped the face of Christianity and created completely new genealogies of the faith” (xiii-xiv).

Using solid research and his strengths as a historian, Dixon argues that the Reformation did not come about inevitably but happened through myriad social, intellectual, and political movements, critical events and decisions that coalesced to trigger a crisis that not only divided the Latin Christian Church but resulted in dramatic changes in the eastern Orthodox churches. At the same time, he demonstrates how various changes in the new confessions of the west had significant social, political, and cultural consequences. Viewing the wider canvass, he sets in relief the controversies in the Christian churches of our own age (openly gay bishops, the ordination of women, and public dissent), which many might see as signaling irreparable schisms if not the end of Christianity, letting these serve as a reminder that “behind all these variations is a history of thought and effort and struggle. And within, at the heart of matters, is the Church” (viii).

Instrumental in the church's self-examination before and during the Reformation was the Renaissance humanist movement, personified by writers like Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, who, rejecting the logical method of scholastic Aristotelianism, called for a return to the sources of the faith in the scriptures and writings of the church fathers and who developed tools of textual criticism and interpretation for recovering ancient Christianity and offering a path of reform. Their energies helped to force the critical question: who in the end had the right to determine the content of the faith? Despite the strengths of late medieval Catholicism, its many deficiencies (clerical ignorance, ecclesiastical abuses, past missteps, and a weakened papacy) greatly undermined Rome's credibility and moral authority, all of which caused to shatter “the medieval Catholic synthesis and the authority and the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church in much of northern and central Europe” (33). With his foundational theory of justification through faith alone (sola fide), Luther became “prime mover” of this revolutionary religious movement that questioned the theological claims of Rome's teaching authority and, in time, turned “a series of localized, very personal encounters . . . into a historical movement” that evangelical preachers, pastors, and writers, aided by the printing press, spread throughout the German imperial cities and urban communities (36). Other reform movements arose in turn, similar in many respects but each with its own local inflections and often radical divisions: Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva, and Karlstadt in Wittenberg. “Europe became a patchwork of antagonistic faiths, each claiming to be true in all essentials to the religion preached through Christ in Scripture. The result was unremitting quarrels, conflicts, and the further fragmentation of Christianity,” reflected especially in the many disputes over the belief in the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the preeminent symbol of the unity of the church (67). Dixon clearly explains the differences in the reformers' theologies and the inflexible Catholic response at Trent, which categorically reaffirmed “Catholic doctrine as it had been conceived and ritually enacted for centuries” before the Reformation (76). He observes, too, how the Catholic state, moving in similar turbulent currents, to a large extent became a mirror image of the Protestant type. And he follows nicely the many challenges to both magisterial Protestantism and Catholicism, like those of Karlstadt, Zwilling, Müntzer, the Pietists, the English Puritans, the German Pietists, and the Jansenists, to name a few. Here, however, the author might have said more on the religious turmoil in France, England, the Low Countries, and elsewhere to fill out his otherwise first-rate account of the lands contested by the Reformers.

Dixon's subchapters on the eastern Orthodox churches provide a welcome appreciation of the wider world of Christianity. He sees the tragic schism with the Latin west, the long-standing antagonisms and suspicions between east and west, and the impact of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople as continuing long after Constantinople lost its privileged position as “the foremost city of Orthodox Christianity” (110)—a distinction that Moscow would later enjoy as the “‘Third Rome,’ the providential successor to Rome and Constantinople” (132). Adeptly, he sketches the broad panorama of the wider world of Christianities, where, for the most part, the orthodox churches became subject to Islamic rule, with only the Thomas Christians of India and the Ethiopians evading that misfortune. “Generally speaking,” he concludes, “the history of the Orthodox churches in the Near East in the early modern age was marked by the gradual slide into further isolation, persecution and retreat” (171). Dixon devotes his final chapter to the remarkable energies in western Christianity as Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism expanded into the New World and Asia while American Protestantism settled into the colonies of New England. He sees each church bringing with it the intractable confessional struggles that had rent the fabric of European society in the wake of the Reformation and Counter Reformation and, at the same time, the extraordinary energies, creativity, and organizational expertise that would mark the rise of American Christianity and the various forms of the Christian faith in the wider world for ages to come.