In 2011, Stephen Greenblatt published The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton). In that book, Greenblatt argues that Poggio Bracciolini's 1417 rediscovery of an ancient Epicurean poem by Lucretius helped kindle the Renaissance and ignite the modern world. At nearly the same time that the Pulitzer committee was announcing that Greenblatt had won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Brad Gregory's book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society was itself hitting bookstore shelves. Each sees in a particular event the fulcrum upon which the medieval world pivots towards the modern. As their titles might display, they see this pivot in starkly different lights. Where Greenblatt sees (most especially in a deeply personal preface) this emergence in largely positive terms, Gregory is not nearly so optimistic. Gregory's book is deeply serious and rather dark in its tone. It seeks to understand the modern secular world by exploring how contemporary realities “have been and are still being shaped by the distant past” (15, emphasis original). For Gregory, the emergence of the secular world is largely negative. It has bequeathed to us polarized politics and culture wars, rampant and overly acquisitive consumerism, and the abandonment of the idea of objective truth. Contemporary culture wars threaten the heart of our democracy. Consumerism destroys the natural world and threatens our existence via global warming. The abandonment of Truth portends a future in which morality is cut loose from ethics and becomes a mere construction. These contemporary predicaments have a past, the “ideological and institutional shifts that occurred five or more centuries ago remain substantially necessary to an explanation of why the Western world today is as it is” (7), and prime movers: Martin Luther and John Calvin. Though they did not intend to bequeath us this world (thus “unintended” in the title), nevertheless the Reformation lies at the heart of modernity's ills.

In six tightly argued chapters, Gregory employs what he calls a genealogical methodology (3–4) to explore the modern world's connection to its Reformation past. Though it is not as simple a task as identifying a common pair of ancestors and tracing their lineage forward, Gregory does state that “the basic idea is that we will misgauge the character of the Western world today—in both its extraordinary pluralism and its hegemonic institutions—unless we see . . . how its differentiated branches are the progeny of the Reformation era” (4). It lies beyond the scope of this short review to examine all six chapters, they are simply too dense to do them each justice. Thus, I shall explore two in more depth.

The opening chapter, “Excluding God,” looks at the ways in which the Reformation came to marginalize—in what Gregory recognizes must be one of the great ironies of history—the place of God in people's lives. Gregory begins the genealogy of the secular world's displacement of religion with science by looking back centuries before the Reformation to the work of the Franciscan scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus (d.1308). According to Gregory's genealogy, the displacement of religion began when Scotus argued against the analogia entis of Henry of Ghent directly and Thomas Aquinas indirectly by positing a metaphysical univocity of being which tied God to creation in a way that an analogy of being did not. To Gregory this domesticated God's transcendence. When this domestication of God was combined with Reformation era doctrinal disputes about the nature of God's actions and the meaning of Christianity a path opened “that would lead through deism to Weberian disenchantment and modern atheism” (41). Gregory recognizes that this is a complex path but one he, nevertheless, sees quite clearly. Gregory sees evidence of the path towards modern atheism in Zwingli's attack on transubstantiation, “Protestant denials of the natural world as the theater of God's grace” (46), and the “post-Presbyterian” David Hume's argument for the autonomy of the natural world from God.

There are a number of significant problems with the genealogy of this pathway, however. First, is the implication that Scotus represents an aberrant rather than Catholic approach to theology. To do this, Gregory first quotes his Notre Dame colleague Stephen Dumont approvingly when Dumont states that Scotus “broke with the unanimous and traditional view” of God and then secondly via a rhetorical sleight of hand wherein Gregory questions Scotus's orthodoxy: “Although his idea was not condemned as doctrinally heterodox, it was a critical departure from the inherited Christian notion of the relationship between God and creation” (39). In this telling, Scotus breaks something fundamental to Christianity from its origins—the analogia entis—and these broken shards were further pulverized by the Reformers who followed Scotus. The historical record is not this clear however. Not only was Scotus never condemned for heterodoxy but the opposite is actually the case. As recently as a general audience in July 2010, Pope Benedict XVI lifted up the centrality and importance of “Blessed Duns Scotus” in Catholic theology—most especially relating to the doctrines of the immaculate conception of Mary and the incarnation of Christ (Benedict XVI, General Audience, July 7, 2010). The appellation, “Blessed” is not without importance as it speaks to one who has been beatified by the Church. Certainly, Scotus's ideas were debated, modified, and argued over. But this would make him no different than any other medieval theologian. As to the appropriation of Scotus by Protestants, the centuries that separate Scotus from Luther and Calvin make this a terribly complex problem. What is not complex is the idea that the Reformers rejected the world as the “theater of God's grace.” As Susan Schreiner has amply pointed out, this can be seen as a central tenet of Calvin's thought (see, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin, Studies in Historical Theology 3 (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1991). Likewise, Luther once remarked in a sermon that all of creation is “our house, home, field, garden, all these things are our Bible, such that God not only preaches through these wonderful works (Wunderwerck) but also taps upon our eyes, moves within our senses, and shines in our hearts at the same time” (WA 49:434). Thus, the path up to Scotus is not quite a clear-cut as Gregory would like us to believe. Nor is the path from Scotus to the Reformation to modernity.

In the third chapter, “Controlling the Churches,” Gregory examines the ways in which the Reformation led first to the control of the churches by the state and then much later to separation of religion from politics. There are aspects of this story that are indeed positive, the freedom of religion primary among them, but Gregory also sees a far darker side to this coin. A side in which politics is freed from the moral claims of Christianity and thus left unfettered to annihilate those it deems as an enemy—whether the Jews of Germany or those caught in Stalin's erratic and disturbed sight. As with the other chapters, Gregory seeks to trace the genealogical heritage of this state of affairs. He begins with a model of medieval life in which the church and the various civil states were involved in a complex dance over the power and the control of social life. At times, the church exerted itself at the expense of secular authorities. At other times, the reverse was true. But at no time “was the Latin church either coextensive with or absorbed by any secular political entity, both because of historical contingencies and out of fidelity to Jesus's own words: Render unto Caesar” (136f). This began to change, according to Gregory, with the Reformation and most especially following the 1525 Peasants' War which convinced secular leaders that “biblical ideas could be dangerously subversive” (149). The solution was to begin to exert tight control of religious expression while simultaneously using the externals of religion for social control. This, then, aligned the state with the church and vice-versa. The first consequence of this realignment was the fact that the continuation of the Reformation in any geographic location depended upon the goodwill of the state. Ironically, even the papacy fell to this power relationship since—as Henry VIII pointed out most clearly—if they did not toe the line, Catholicism could be dissolved and replaced. A second consequence of this realignment was the de facto blessing of the state's actions—most notably its power to make war. Beginning as early as the Schmalkaldic War in 1547, the state could bless its actions by appealing to the greater glory of God. Exhausted by more than a century of religious war, revolution, and destruction, new ideas regarding the role of the state began to emerge. Not surprisingly, religion was moved to the periphery. Christianity, which had been the center of moral and social life, was shunted aside and politics separated from religion.

As with chapter 1, the grand narrative of this chapter is compelling and yet breaks down when examined in its particulars. Part of this is definitional. Gregory asserts that Latin Christianity was never subsumed by the state. This is most certainly true. It is also true that German or Swiss or English authorities did take over control of churches within their realms following the Reformation. However, here we are comparing a universal with a particular. In the first case we speak of Latin Christianity in the second we speak of Saxon, or Swiss, or English churches. One can find repeatedly throughout the medieval era kings, princes, and lords of various stripes using and controlling the church in their lands in the very same manner that their descendants did following the Reformation. Neither did secular leaders need the Reformation to bless their ambitions or sanctify their bloodlust. Gregory alludes to this when he mentions the Crusades, the Albigensian Crusade, and the Reconquista of Iberia. What he does not do is acknowledge how this changes his narrative. Though he does not mention Milvian Bridge, Christianity has been used by secular authorities to bless their political and violent aims since at least the fourth century. On this count, the Reformation is no different from the eras that preceded it. Just as importantly, Gregory does not take into account in his survey of the Wars of Religion the means with which those wars were fought. Simply put, for nearly a thousand years (or more) before 1618, warfare looked very similar and had a similar scope. It was not religion that made the Thirty Years' War so deadly; it was the dramatic advancement in the technology of war. In the sixteenth century, the city of Magdeburg withstood every attack launched at her by the imperial army. The cannons used in that siege were insufficient to destroy her walls or in many cases even reach them. A little less than a century later, Magdeburg became emblematic of the force and fury of the Thirty Years' War. Much improved cannons destroyed the walls and the city. In autumn 1630, there were nearly 30,000 inhabitants in Magdeburg. By the end of the siege, less than 5,000 lived. The damage to the city was so severe that most of those who survived left for other places.

The failure to acknowledge the importance of technological advancements to the story of the Thirty Years' War is an example of perhaps the most important flaw in this otherwise substantial work: a failure to look at his narrative with a wider lens. In the opening chapter of the book, Gregory faults many in the history profession for a myopic worldview that has engendered a supersessionist view of the Reformation. However, by focusing so sharply on intellectual history, Gregory has missed the broader cultural world in which the Reformation's intellectual jousts took place. There is no mention, for example, of the importance of the printing press. For all the discussions of the ways in which the Reformation changed various aspects of the medieval worldview, there is almost no recognition that what separated Martin Luther from Jan Huss was not simply the protection of his secular lord. It was also his ability to tell his own story, to broadcast his theology, via the printing press.

In the end, both Greenblatt and Gregory offer a story to explain the modern world. They both wish to point to a single moment and declare that it was at this moment in time when things changed. Ironically, both stories begin in a German monastery separated by exactly a century. What I think both amply detail, however, is actually the exact opposite. In both, the grand narrative breaks apart when one looks at the specifics of the argument because both demonstrate how the ideas they examine had lives and influence long before the fulcrum moment they describe. In this, perhaps they are most correct. The interesting thing about genealogy is that regardless of the pair of ancestors that you pick it is always an arbitrary choice, for each of them had two parents, who also had parents, who also had parents.