Reformation in the Western World is a learned and laudably ambitious attempt to weigh up the impact of the Reformation, for good and ill, on western culture and modernity. The breadth of reading on show in the endnotes (occupying nearly 60 pages, in tiny type) is genuinely awesome, encompassing a wealth of literature in both English and German. Paul Silas Peterson has himself reviewed Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (Belknap Press, 2012), and his own monograph seems to be framed as a reply to it, taking a more positive view of both the Reformation and modernity. Sadly, it shows some signs of hurried composition, perhaps to avoid missing the high tide of the Reformation year. The structure of the argument can be loose, and the prose, often inexact and rarely elegant, has a somewhat staccato character.

For all its aspirations to breadth and balance, this study remains locked into the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, a paradigm which is itself deeply indebted to cultural (rather than dogmatic) Protestantism. This shows in the way it tends to oscillate between two senses of ‘Reformation’: the narrower sense, that of the Protestant Reformation (henceforth in this review Reformation^p); and the broader sense, that of the Reformation era, the division of Latin Christendom into rival blocs (Reformation^e). Peterson aspires to carry out his interpretative task with reference to the Reformation^e, but in practice he is preoccupied with the Reformation^p. There is little if any sense that the Catholicism of the medieval or early modern era might have its own implications for the emergence of modernity, and while it is clearly acknowledged that much in modernity can be related to the Reformation^e, the analysis stays chiefly focused on the Reformation^p.

While Peterson has some sympathy with modern Catholicism, the principal material weakness of this work is its at best sketchy knowledge of the Catholicism of the late medieval and early modern periods. Medieval and sixteenth-century Catholicism is seen in only in the distorting mirror of Protestant polemic, or else through the haze of Catholic memory since Vatican II. Thus there is barely a mention of the Council of Trent, and the only Catholic thinker of the Reformation^e to get much space is John Eck (and that largely because of the Leipzig Disputation). This matters not only because it is impossible to present a reasonable view of Catholicism on such a sketchy basis, but also because it is impossible to attain an adequate understanding of the Reformation^p without a better appreciation of its Catholic background and context. The most we get here is a recitation of what the Reformation^p denounced as ‘popery’, as in the discussion of one of the book's two theological leitmotifs, indulgences. The ‘sale of grace’ is featured in the cover-blurb, and recurs throughout the text; but while it is entirely fair to criticise the abuse (and perhaps even the use) of indulgences, it is not at all fair is to claim that ‘the pope and the leaders of the church of the late Middle Ages officially endorsed the scandalous sale of grace for money’ (p. 94). For the pope, of course, did not ‘officially’ endorse the ‘sale of grace’, which was condemned and forbidden in both theology and canon law under the general heading of simony. Neither the pope nor the hierarchy would have recognised Peterson's account as an adequate description of their actions and motives. One might legitimately argue that his judgement is nonetheless true. But to do so is implicitly to join the Reformation argument on Luther's side rather than to present a historical account of the experience of that time.

The effective occlusion of Reformation^e Catholicism from the discussion helps explain why this book presents such a partial and debatable vision of the Reformation^p. Thus the key issue of the sense of the certainty of grace or the doctrine of justification by faith alone is at best touched upon in passing (p. 142), while Peterson's portrayal of Reformation^p soteriology as little more than a retrieval of an Augustinian account of grace rests on polemical Protestant accounts of Catholic doctrine rather than on direct engagement with the latter. Protestant biblicism is represented, at some length (pp. 78–94), as a general avowal of the ‘unique authority of scripture’, and is contrasted with the supposed elevation of papal authority ‘above’ scripture. Again, this is to confuse Reformation^p polemic with historical understanding.

This absence of perspective is strikingly evident in the conclusion of Peterson's discussion of the Bible, which sees the Protestant approach to scripture in terms of a shift from ‘human authority to textual authority’ (author's emphasis), a shift which he links in an unspecific way to the principle of the rule of law as understood in modern western politics (p. 94). But, of course, the rule of law does not mean the unmediated rule of a transparent and self-interpreting text, which is the claim embodied in the Reformation^p ‘scripture principle’. In the modern world, the rule of law is exemplified by the Supreme Court of the United States: that is, it comes down, in the end, to a group of human beings whose decisions may not be infallible, but are most definitely inappellable.

The second theological leitmotif of this study is the priesthood of all believers. Here, too, a somewhat one-sided conception of the Reformation^e leads the argument initially astray, while a Whiggish understanding of the relation between the Reformation^p and modernity then takes it still further off course. The problems here are legion. The Protestant conception of the priesthood of all believers is presented as a major source of modern western conceptions of social and political equality even though it applied only to Christians (and not, for example, to Jews), and even though its foundation is equality in baptism, a foundation shared with Catholicism but far from unequivocal in certain forms of highly predestinarian Protestantism. Given that most Protestant Reformers unequivocally denied any notion of social or political equality, and that the original conception of equality which predominated in the United States excluded, in differing degrees, both slaves and women, it is difficult to believe even in the ‘jagged line’ which Peterson traces from ‘Wittenberg to Washington’ (p. 139). In this context, it is regrettable that this study engages so little with the historiography of the English Reformation, not only because the English experience was of especial significance for the later history of the USA, but also because that historiography has gone further than those of the European Reformation in challenging the self-congratulatory teleologies of modernity.

If there was one thing Luther and all his opponents agreed about, it was that there was one faith, for one church. For that reason the fragmentation of Latin Christendom consequent upon the Reformation^p has been for most commentators an embarrassment or even a tragedy, however necessary it might be thought to have been. Yet in this study we meet not only the recent idea that late medieval Catholic Europe was already religiously divided (a curious notion, which certainly did not impose itself on the minds of those who inhabited that time), but the still more recent idea that pluralism and fragmentation are endemic and even essential to Christianity as such (p. 77), an idea alien to the entire Christian tradition until the present millennium. This promising line of apologetic sits rather badly with the subsequent reaffirmations of the value of unity made in the context of the exposition of twentieth-century ecumenism (pp. 203–4), though in fact Peterson's ecclesial model remains one of division, renamed diversity, albeit decently veiled with the appealing metaphor of the strawberry plant: ‘Each strawberry plant is going to grow differently’ (p. 202). But this does not persuade. ‘Yes’, one is inclined to answer, ‘but not that differently’. Modern ‘Christianity’ is certainly not a bed of strawberries.

Much more could be said. The Reformation in the Western World is, it must be emphasised, a brave and ambitious book, unfailingly interesting even when, as this reviewer thinks, it has the wrong end of the stick. Yet for the reader who wants some sophisticated reflection on the emergence of modernity, Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual does the job with more flair and coherence, while Brad Gregory – whether at full length in The Unintended Reformation, or more briefly in Rebel in the Ranks – not only shows how important it is to analyse Catholicism and Protestantism together in tracing the genealogy of modernity, but also offers rather less incense before the ‘self-images of the age’.