Eucharistic theology and practice are increasingly recognized as flashpoints in the religious divisions of the sixteenth century—nearly as much between Lutherans and Reformed Protestants as between Protestants and Catholics. Esther Chung-Kim, in her aptly titled book, Inventing Authority, has taken on a daunting challenge: to show that, despite their insistence on the primacy of scripture, they came to use the authority of the fathers to support their eucharistic teachings. She has waded through many large, highly technical and often polemical tracts and treatises, to show in detail how leading Lutheran and Protestant reformers used patristic sources to support their conflicting interpretations of the eucharist and of the scriptural passages they cited to support their views. Her task was further complicated by the fact that leading reformers on both sides did not have consistent principles of interpretation, often saying one thing and doing the opposite.

Chung-Kim begins with the Marburg Colloquy between Luther, Zwingli, and their respective followers, then studies Calvin's use of the fathers in his commentaries and early editions of the Institutes. She devotes two chapters to the eucharistic debates between Calvin and Joachim Westphal, considers that debate's impact in Calvin's last, 1559 edition of his Institutes, turns to debates between Calvin and Tilemann Hesshusen, and concludes with the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586 that pitted Theodore de Beza against Jacob Andreae. Throughout, she shows a mastery of the key points in debate.

Early on, the views of the fathers played a secondary role. At Marburg, Luther even admitted that Augustine and others may simply be wrong on this issue, and further suggested that they often debated issues that differed from those of his own day. In his commentaries and early editions of his Institutes, Calvin made relatively little use of the fathers. But as positions hardened, the fathers' role increased. In the Westphal-Calvin controversy, beginning in 1552, Westphal devoted a major tract to Augustine's eucharistic views alone. In the second round, both sides drew on a greater number of fathers. In the last, 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin deployed numerous fathers to defend his eucharistic theology. In the Calvin-Hesshusen debate, both drew upon a great number of fathers. Yet Hesshusen, though treating the fathers with more overt respect than Westphal, nevertheless still imitated Luther in ranking some as inferior to others—but downgrading Origen and Clement, rather than the towering figure of Augustine. By Montbéliard, the positions had hardened further, mutual recriminations became more intense (including identification of one's opponent with one or another early Christian heretic), and use of the fathers had become common. By the end of the period, “as the reformers sought the sayings of the fathers that supported Lutheran or Reformed doctrine, the actual voices of the fathers were limited to speaking only those words that the reformers gave them” (140).

Protestants' increasing use of the fathers responded to several concerns. Appeals to “scripture alone” simply were not resolving this and other important issues. So Protestants on both sides sought to show that the fathers—whom they continued to hold did not have equal authority with that of the bible—nevertheless agreed with their views and so affirmed their scriptural interpretations. As she notes in the Calvin-Westphal debate,

They also desired to refute charges of innovation, at first against the Catholic Church, but more and more, against each other. By the later sixteenth century, the fathers became “the primary way of authorizing new views, through claims that these views were not new at all, but in fact had an ancient historical heritage” (140).

She also reminds us that these eucharistic debates—and the increasing use of the fathers—were sometimes closely enmeshed in immediate political conflicts, as in the plight of the Reformed Marian exiles in Denmark and Germany. More broadly, she notes that the later sixteenth century debates contributed to confessionalization.

Chung-Kim's great strength is her skill in examining many important, albeit highly technical, examples of interpretations in contention. But sometimes the reader is overwhelmed with examples and observations. She might have offered a few instances where the reader can see clearly and fully the patristic passages in debate, and how she understands the reformers' readings and misreadings.

Chung-Kim suggests that the reformers were influenced by both scholasticism and humanism, but she might have been more precise as to just how this influence was manifested. She rightly describes a tendency in Westphal and Calvin to apply the “scholastic model of explaining away apparent contradictions with the fathers,” but more questionably attributes to “Protestant scholasticism” an acknowledgment of “fallibility in the church fathers” (60). At one point she accuses Calvin of deliberate misrepresentation (76). But seeming misrepresentations are better attributed to scholastic practices, or presentist readings of the sources coupled with rhetorical excess.

Her book is also marred by poor proofreading. In discussing a passage from Calvin's 1559 Institutes (93–94), she quotes him as saying that Augustine “felt and spoke the same way” as Calvin himself concerning figurative interpretation of “this is my body.” She continues, “Calvin can say that if sacraments did not have a certain likeness to the things of which they are sacraments, they would not be sacraments at all. Thus the sacrament of Christ's body and blood is in a certain manner [Chung-Kim's emphasis] Christ's body and blood.” Thus she leaves the impression that she is paraphrasing Calvin's interpretation of Augustine whom he may be misrepresenting. However, she is directly quoting Calvin who in turn is directly quoting Augustine from “if sacraments” through “Christ's body and blood” (Chung-Kim omits part of the quoted passage), which shows that Calvin was more faithful here to Augustine than she implies. (Her own note for this passage gives the correct citation to Augustine, Epistle 98 to Boniface!) Elsewhere (82), she includes part of Calvin's quotation of a passage from Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John, Tract 26, but again, quotation marks are lacking. (Once one deciphers the quote, it supports her point very well.) In her introduction, a passage (9) directly employs phrases (with one word change) from two adjacent pages in R. Po-Chia Hsia's Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 ([London: Routledge, 1989], 74, 175). The book is cited but the quotation marks are missing.

Despite these shortcomings this book will be of considerable value for scholars of Protestant historical theology, of Protestant patristic and biblical scholarship, and indeed of the wider practice of the construction of traditions. It is an important attempt to elucidate the ways in which major Protestant theologians read, misread, and appropriated the fathers to support their understanding of the Eucharist and their interpretations of the scriptural passages upon which their views were founded.