Professor Gregory first gained the attention of the historians' guild in 1999 with his magisterial study Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). In that book he departed from the traditional approach to sixteenth-century martyrology by focusing not merely on martyrs of the Radical Reformation, but on Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Catholic martyrs as well. Against assorted modern social and psychological interpretations of martyrdom, he pointedly argued that martyrs, of whatever ecclesiastic stripe, shared the conviction that their lives were secondary to their commitment of fidelity to the God who had redeemed them to eternal life. Sixteenth-century martyrs were living embodiments of their faith.

Gregory's new book, equally magisterial, displays on over 500 pages, including almost 150 pages of notes and bibliographical references, very much of the characteristics of his first: impressive scholarship; commanding intellectual and bibliographic scope; wide learning; and a candid display of opinions. This latter characteristic, expressed in several extensive ruminations on the present state of cultural affairs in Europe and North America, makes The Unintended Reformation more than a work of scholarship, certainly more than a history of the Reformation or Early Modern European thought, no matter how brilliant (though the comment on the dust jacket that the book will take its place alongside Max Weber's Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism seems overly enthusiastic, schwärmerisch, as the Germans would say). The book is better read as a manifesto, as “a tract for the times,” as a historian's clarion call for understanding the historical causes of the postmodern predicament. Unfortunately, the book comes with baffling and precarious conclusions. Nonetheless, it is a deeply moral book that evokes glimpses of the finer spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages and the author's pain over their loss. While this reviewer sees notions of a traditional Roman Catholic institutionalized worldview informing the book, Gregory does not at all paint a romantic or glorious picture of the medieval church. In fact, he mourns over the failures of the Roman Catholic Church almost as much as he does over the story of the Protestant churches. Nonetheless, he posits an incisive difference: the medieval church existed in the setting of a community of shared values, which disintegrated with the Reformation and led to the malaise of contemporary Europe and North America.

The book begins with a conviction and a question. The former is a Jeremiad, barely subtle, against modernity, while the latter seeks to find the cause (or causes) of the modern malaise with its philosophical ambivalence, moral relativism, and theological confusion. By way of answer, Gregory offers a provocative reflection on European intellectual history from the sixteenth century to the present. Idiosyncratically he argues that a path leads from the religious exuberance of the Reformation to the cultural malaise of the twenty-first century. The Reformation goal of advancing the religious commitment of people and institutions led to the exact opposite, namely a secularized, even anti-religious post-modern society and mindset. As the subtitle of the book aptly puts it: a religious revolution secularized society.

Of course, Professor Gregory is not the first to pronounce on the topic of the historical and cultural significance of the Reformation. Not surprisingly Roman Catholic observers have tended to be deeply negative, finding fault not only with Protestant theologizing but also with its broader effects on European culture. From Bishop Bossuet to Joseph de Maistre to Christopher Dawson, Catholics insisted that Protestantism destroyed a rich and flamboyant late medieval culture without putting new meaning and vitality in its place. Protestantş on the other hand, have offered quite different conclusions, seeing in the Reformation the source of all the achievements of modernity, from indoor plumbing to democracy. A century ago Ernst Troeltsch's essay on Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World (Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt [Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1911]) argued that Protestantism had furthered the emergence of the modern world, but had not been its source: the Reformation gave European society freedom to develop in new ways by removing the restrictive obstacles to this development. It provided both a “good conscience” for the conduct of human affairs and also the idea of progress. In our own day, the question of the sources of the postmodern situation has led to the provocative probing of scholars such as David Martin, Michael Gillespie, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair McIntyre. With his Unintended Reformation Professor Brad Gregory joins this chorus of voices. He finds that certain notions of the Reformation had consequences that eventually proved to be the cause of everything bad in the contemporary West, from global warming and consumerism to moral individualism. His thesis is bold and clear (far more so than Max Weber's), though it is more subtle than first meets the eye: Professor Gregory is not arguing that (for example) the Reformation emphasis on sola scriptura triggered modern relativism; he is saying that this emphasis had consequences which, in turn, led to our modern malaise.

The book is structured neither chronologically nor thematically. Six chapters—titled provocatively if enigmatically “Relativizing Doctrines,” “Excluding God,” “Controlling the Churches,” “Subjectivizing Morality,” “Manufacturing the Good Life,” “Secularizing Knowledge”—define the thematic trajectories that collectively have contributed to the present dilemma of Western culture. Gregory calls them “genealogies” to denote their role in transmitting, with generational variations, notions of the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Each of these “genealogical” chapters begins with reflections on our current cultural state of affairs and then proceeds to track the historical antecedents. This historical backtracking—in itself, a creative methodology—takes the argument of the chapters to the Reformation (and, in a way, the time before).

The first chapter sets the stage for the six-fold argument of the book: “Excluding God” informs the reader of the contemporary scene, the modern intellectual's categorical unwillingness to have a place for God, then focuses on Scotus (d. 1308) and Scotus's argument that both God and humans exist in the same essence, so what applies to humans also applies to God. And vice versa. Scotus's rejection of the radical gap between creator and creation led to the disappearance of substantive religious claims from the exploration of the natural world, claims that had been at the core of the Christian worldview. Reason became dominant in philosophical and theological reflection—and religion, theology, scripture, and religious experience disappeared as sources of knowledge of God.

The second chapter, on “Relativizing Doctrines,” declares that the Protestant affirmation of sola scriptura as the formal authoritative principle was (as the cliché has it) “dead on arrival.” That is to say, rather than finding blissful agreement about the “plain” meaning of scripture, the reformers had to realize quickly that diversity rather than uniformity was the hallmark of Protestant exegetical forays. Most of these scriptural disagreements, such as that between Luther and Bucer, were theologically benign, though others, such as that between Luther and Müntzer, were deeply disturbing and lastingly significant.

Chapter 3 tackles church-state relations from the late Middle Ages to the present. The chapter covers familiar ground with the observation that until the sixteenth century the two realms lived in uneasy co-existence, but both always considered themselves part of the same fabric of an all but universally accepted world view. It was a clear consequence of the Reformation that the state was victorious in its effort to “control” religion, even when it claimed to be neutral by positing a policy of radical separation of church and state. In the sixteenth century the formal implementation of reform would have been impossible without the intervention of government in the religious controversy. Henry VIII and Gustavus Vasa are infamous cases in point.

Gregory describes here a process long antedating the Reformation (note the French Concordat of 1516 or the phrase “Dux Cliviae est papa in terries suis”); in fact, one may argue that the reform movement took advantage of the increasing role of secular authority so that the movement was ultimately successful only where rulers saw the need of greater control over the church. One may wonder though if governments really dictated theology. They interfered mainly when theological polemics broadly seemed to get out of hand, such as in German Lutheran territories in mid-sixteenth century or in Prussia at the height of the Pietist controversy.

The fourth chapter, titled “Subjectivizing Morality,” argues that “the bitter disagreements among early modern Christians about the objective morality of the good” led to secular, open-ended expansiveness. In other words, the new vision of the reformers destroyed the norm of an objective morality espoused by the medieval church, the bastion of universally acknowledged and accepted moral norms. Most of the chapter is commonplace or self-evident. More importantly, it overstates the disagreements among the reformers who all held to concrete notions of the “first use of the Law.” Reading an utterly subjective “religion of conscience” into Luther was an achievement of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 begins with a focus on the modern capitalist ideology of consumption and claims that this had its origins in the Reformation Era awareness that the religious-political conflicts of the time were “fruitless” and it was far better to go shopping than to fight about religion. Finally, chapter 6 relates how the “confessionalization” of the universities, the traditional seats of learning, made them parochial and insulated them from the new knowledge arising all over Europe.

There is much brilliance in these chapters, much impressive learning, and numerous instances of creative summaries of the scholarly consensus. It would be an epochal book were it not for two problems. One has to do with the little word “genealogy,” that is, the thesis of ultimate Reformation complicity for the ills of modernity. The second is the way the book understands the dynamic of historical development and change.

Take the claim that the religious revolution of the Reformation secularized society because of the nagging disparity among Protestants in interpreting the meaning of sacred scripture. This is not exactly a new insight (Johannes Cochlaeus called attention to the reformers' disagreements as early as 1523), except Gregory makes the novel case that modern moral relativism had its origin in Reformation (or Protestant) “hyperpluralism” of scriptural interpretation. Hopeless Protestant divergence about the meaning of scripture, expressed in fierce theological controversies, eventually called into question the truth claims of the Christian religion. The multiplicity of claimants of an authentic reading of scripture, Gregory argues, dramatically lessened the appeal of the Christian faith. Christians instead went shopping or (as did the plain-living Mennonites) built extravagant houses.

Consternation over the Protestant failure of to agree on a clear meaning of scriptural passages may have prevailed among the intellectual elites, but Professor Gregory overstates the relevance of these multiple strands of biblical interpretation for the ongoing story. The English Christian Deists' weariness of traditional understandings of Christianity did not lead them to disavow the Christian tradition but to reinterpret it. The likes of Collins, Chubb, or Whiston did not go shopping (Gregory's intriguing characterization of the Protestants who despaired over the weight of diverse interpretations) but became evangelists for their understanding of the Christian faith. In seventeenth-century Saxony scriptural claims aggressively advanced by Calvinists and Crypto-Calvinists were dismissed by Lutheran divines as “abomination” and heresy. The confrontation between Puritans and the Anglican establishment in England brought few if any Puritan to despair of the Christian truth because of the Church of England's unwillingness to modify the Book of Common Prayer. Gregory dismisses too blithely the importance of the ancient ecumenical creeds as consensus builder for all Protestant traditions. He also fails to appreciate that Luther's repudiation of papal and conciliar authority was first of all a historical rather than a theological judgment: history showed that popes and councils had contradicted each other, and thus were no reliable source of authority.

In focusing on what he considers the disastrous consequence of sola scriptura and the resulting cacophony of Protestant voices, Gregory touches on but largely ignores two developments that had little to do with the Reformation and yet impinged on the traditional role of the Christian faith more than anything else: the early modern European encounters with other religions and the scientific revolution. Here lies, in my judgment, the ultimate reason of the disappearance of a shared framework for the integration of knowledge, which Professor Gregory so deeply laments.

Of course, Christians had not been completely ignorant prior to the sixteenth century that there were other religious claims and religions; the “heathen” were an ever-present reality in theological reflection, though few Europeans had ever put their eyes on them. The military threat of the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century meant extensive reflections, generally hostile, on the religion of Islam. But the “heathen” was an abstraction rather than a reality, and it was not until the age of the so-called discoveries that Europeans began to be aware of the rich conglomeration of religions around the globe, raising the perturbing question on what grounds Christianity could be taken to be the only authentic religion. Philippe de Mornay's Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne contre les athées, épicuriens, payens, juifs, mahométans et autres infidèles (1581); Herbert of Cherbury's de Veritate (1624) and Hugo Grotius's de veritate religionis Christianae (1627) offered suggestions how to understand this religious diversity and yet find a pivotal place for the Christian religion. It took “my man Friday,” in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) to verbalize deep puzzlement about the religious diversity of humankind, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Parable of the three Rings in his play Nathan der Weise to conclude that all three religions “of the Book” were “deceived deceivers.”

At the same time, the scientific revolution forced an alteration of traditional affirmations about nature and the cosmos. Nicolaus Copernicus, Robert Boyle, and Galileo Galilei, names representative of many others, changed the understanding of the natural universe because the traditional understanding was found to be empirically incorrect. Newton's apple fell at the same speed for Protestants and Catholics alike. The nagging problem was the traditional connection between the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic worldview and that of the Bible. No matter what the philosophical constructs of Scotus, the sun did NOT move around the earth, and the need of European explorers to have ever more precise instruments to navigate vast and far-away oceans was a societal factor more crucial than Scotus's philosophizing.

The treatment of these topics in the book reveals Professor Gregory's somewhat idiosyncratic way of utilizing sources. In his discussion of Christian Deism in England, for example, he does offer comments about John Toland, but the more important Herbert of Cherbury, Louis Cappel, or Thomas Woolston receive no mention. And one can hardly talk about the English scene without noting that Bishop Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736) silenced the Deist impulse in England (and forced it onto the Continent) for more than a century while the Wesleyan Revival proved to be a significant religious and moral force in eighteenth-century England. In short, the fastidious focus on certain theological and philosophical developments in Early Modern Europe, with lip service to societal developments, caused Professor Gregory to pay scant attention to those forces and developments of the larger societal picture. The puzzle pieces that he offers leave quite a few blanks, and we wind up with a fallacious understanding of the European cultural dynamic during the past 500 years. It was not the Reformation but a congeries of intellectual, economic, and political forces unrelated to the Reformation that increasingly marginalized Christianity and brought about a painful process of secularization.

Gregory's way of looking at the time from Martin Luther and John Calvin to Richard Dawkins and Global Warming leads, perforce, to a rather gloomy view of the figures. Not surprisingly, toward the end of his book, Professor Gregory informs us that medieval Christendom failed; that the Reformation failed; that confessionalized Europe failed; and that Western modernity is in the process of failing. That is hardly a comfortable view to hold. “I wish this book could have had a happier ending” he opines (381). However, the book might have had such a happier ending had he removed his spectacles and also told us boldly that the subtitle of his book is a simplification terrible and that a more judicious approach to the contemporary world that he so ominously describes is in order. After all, infant mortality has been eradicated in the societies he desires; child labor prohibited; slavery abolished; illiteracy ended; education made a right not a privilege. The Inquisition is no more and women are no longer burned as witches. Of course, these instances are but part of the broader and more complicated characteristics of post-modern Capitalism, but an indispensable part nonetheless.

Is it not more accurate to observe that during the past three centuries all Christian traditions, the old as well as the new, struggled to relate to a brave new world, and did so with successes as well as failures? The good and the bad are always intermingled in human affairs; that surely was St. Augustine's message over a millennium ago. And if it were to turn out that consumerism and greed and ethnic rivalries will make our planet earth uninhabitable before too long, or that the efforts to give the Christian message meaning in a postmodern world remain unpersuasive, it will surely be a curious explanation that it all started 500 years ago with an Augustinian friar who quite simply yearned to be reconciled with his God. Of course, Professor Gregory would say, consistency has rarely been the hallmark of historic events.