Luther’s End
Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman
Catholicism
by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom
Baker Academic, 2005
(272 pages, $24.99, hardcover)
reviewed by Carl E. Olson
Nearly half-way into Is the Reformation Over? the authors assert that the “most serious differences” between Catholics and Evangelicals today are not found in Marian beliefs, sacraments, the communion of saints, or views about justification, but are “rooted in ecclesiology, contrasting versions of what the church is and how it functions.”
This point is reiterated even more directly forty pages later: “If Christ and his church are one, then a great deal of Catholic doctrine simply follows naturally. In a word, ecclesiology represents the crucial difference between evangelicals and Catholics.”
This belief shapes Is The Reformation Over? and is, I think—I write as a Catholic—its most important contribution to Catholic-Evangelical relations.
The question posed by the title “appears straightforward,” write the authors, but “is not by any means a question to be answered simply.” They “do not propose a final, universal, dogmatic assessment of Roman Catholicism,” but an assessment made through “the classic ideals of the Protestant Reformation to measure contemporary Catholic Christianity,” including sola Scriptura, sola fide, and the priesthood of all believers.
This raises difficult questions: To what degree are American Evangelicals true heirs of the Protestant Reformation? How comfortable would Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli be in mostEvangelical churches today? And, given the diverse and fragmented nature of Evangelicalism (a term nearly as slippery as “liberal” and “conservative”), can an “Evangelical assessment” even be made of Catholicism?
These counter-questions are not so much critical as practical, highlighting the difficult task taken on by Noll and Nystrom. To their credit, they—Noll, who now teaches at Notre Dame after a long career at Wheaton College, and Nystrom, a prolific freelance writer—examine deep and difficult matters with care and moderation, only occasionally stumbling when attempting to summarize positions or arguments that defy short summary.
Is the Reformation Over? is most successful as a systematic, historical documentation of a complicated and often contentious relationship. This is to be expected of Noll, whose outstanding works of church history are marked by careful research and well-measured opinions. And it is not surprising that he would write such a book: Ten years ago he was a prominent Evangelical endorser of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT).
The End of the War
The book begins with the ecumenical efforts of Billy Graham and Pope John Paul II, the often unnoticed grassroots efforts of Catholic and Protestant lay people, and recent advances in Evangelical relations with the Vatican, before going into the history of the “Evangelical-Catholic polemic,” showing that well into the 1950s it appeared unshakeable, although “signs of peace” did exist during that lengthy “time of war.”
Carl E. Olson is the author of Will Catholics Be ?Left Behind?? (Ignatius), and co-author, with Sandra Miesel, of The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius).
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