back back to Books previous previous story  |  next story next

Defined by an open Bible?

This book on what itis to be Protestant isinterestingly wrong,declares Alec Ryrie

© not advert

Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant revolution, a history from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first
Alister McGrath

SPCK £14.99 (978-0-281-05968-3)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50

THIS IS a fat book (550 pages) with a thin book hidden in it. The thin book is worth while, lively, and (I think) interestingly and stimulatingly wrong. The book around it is simply fat. The thin book asks what Protestantism is, based on wide-ranging reflections on its history and including some intriguing speculation about its future. Unfortunately, McGrath wraps this in a generalised history of Protestantism.

The first section of the book runs through that history up to about 1900. The frequent small slips in such a sweeping account are to be expected; and the odd balancing of it (eight pages for the English Civil War and eight lines for the Thirty Years’ War?) is forgivable. But it is humdrum: a narrative plod without much explanation why we need to know this stuff. The final section of the book, on the 20th century, has some of the same flaws, although it is much livelier.

It is in the middle section — on the “manifestations” of Protestantism — that the book comes alive, and McGrath really starts to tell us what Protestantism is. It is entirely appropriate that his answer is shifting, fragmented, and paradoxical, because that, he argues, is the nature of Protestantism itself.

Even the question who is a Protestant is unclear. McGrath un-problematically (polemically?) claims that Anglicans are Protestants. That was once true, but is it still? “All Protestants”, he says, accept the ancient creeds as normative — but elsewhere he describes anti-Trinitarians as Protestants. Pentecostalism “is unquestionably a form of Protestantism” — but perhaps only genealogically, in the sense that birds are unquestionably a form of dinosaur.

His point is that, while Protestantism has many distinctive features, its nature is to be so diverse that almost no generalisation about it can be true. It is defined by opposition — to Roman Catholics, to non-Christians, to other Protestants — and so it evolves and mutates with its opponents, showing a “Darwinian restlessness”. It can do this, he argues, because it is not so much a creed as a method — a “way of doing theology”.

That method? To McGrath, it is the open Bible. Since no one is authorised to interpret scripture authoritatively, arguments can never be settled decisively — a phenomenon that McGrath sees as providing Protestantism’s weakness and its strength. He shows how readings of scripture have shifted on a range of subjects — slavery, usury, Charismatic gifts — while arguing that these changes are an “outcome” of the Protestant encounter with the Bible.

But surely this misplaces (and underplays) Protestantism’s corrosive genius. In those and many other cases — including Luther’s epiphanies — Protestants did not simply sit at scripture’s feet: they persuaded the Bible to tell them what they needed to hear. The value of Luther’s principle of sola scriptura was that it gave him a stick with which to beat Rome.

Indeed, part of the Bible’s theological power is that any theologian in dialogue with it can always (in this life) have the last word. The many “Protestants” (in McGrath’s wider definitions) who have downplayed, qualified, or even abandoned biblical authority have not ceased to be Protestant. (I should have liked to see more about the Quakers in this book.) There is more — or less? — in Protestantism than McGrath wants to let us think.

Still, this is a book well worth disagreeing with. If you are at all interested in what has made modern Christianity what it is, have a look. But skip the first third of it.

Dr Ryrie is Reader in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.

To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price")



back back to Books up back to top previous previous story  |  next story next


© Church Times 2006 - All rights reserved

Website by Baigent