Theology Today - Vol 40, No. 2 - July 1983 - BOOK REVIEW - The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage

244 - The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage

The Old Protestantism and the New:
Essays on the Reformation Heritage
By B. A. Gerrish
Chicago, University of Chicago, 1982. 422 pp. $35.00.

In this volume, Brian Gerrish, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Chicago, has revised and collected fifteen previously published essays dealing with the "Old Protestantism" of Luther and Calvin and the "liberal Protestantism [which] has been the main bearer of a consistently historical approach to Christian theology," the "New Protestantism" represented here by the work of Schleiermacher and Troeltsch (p. 267). The essays illustrate Gerrish's efforts over a period of some twenty years to come to terms with "those ideas that mark Protestantism a distinct variety of religious belief," with an eye to "a more comprehensive study of the course of modern religious ideas" (p. viii).

Like marriage, in this respect at least, Gerrish's work is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly. His 138 pages of notes on 267 pages of text provide an encyclopedic commentary not only on the documents and events he discusses, but also on their treatment in the recent and not-so-recent scholarly literature in four languages, including Dutch. And yet, Gerrish has succeeded admirably in allowing the text to stand on its own, so that non-specialists can enter into covenant with it.

Gerrish is candid in acknowledging his "affinity with opinions expressed by Calvin," particularly in the latter's "pluralistic and progressive appreciation of Luther" (p. 2). He paints a picture of the "Old Protestantism" in essays on the distinctive "Reformation Princi-

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pies" of scriptural authority, faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, a sacramental theology of "efficacious signs," and the hidden God, even as he is building a case for the historical thesis that Calvin carried forward the reformatio continua initiated by Luther, the pioneer. In a final section, "The Reformation Heritage," a somewhat more disparate selection of essays focuses on Schleiermacher's and Troeltsch's attempts to make good on the theological thesis that a reformatio perennis would be possible only by means of a "New Protestantism," in which the historically conditioned character of the Reformation and its antecedents was taken seriously.

This is a wonderful book. It performs effectively the one essential function of any work of historical theology, namely, that of permitting one so to attend to the theological past as to force the heart inwards upon one's own theology in the present.

Gerrish's work has profound implications for descriptive and constructive theology alike. Specifically, I find myself persuaded by Gerrish's own analysis that his identification of certain issues raised by the "New Protestantism" relativizes the explanatory value of some of the fundamental categories of interpretation he employs in his treatment of the "Old."

Take, for instance, the issue of the basic datum of Christian faith. In the context of a powerful argument for the experimental focus of Calvin's eucharistic theology in a present "secret communication" of Christ to the believer through the signs of the Lord's Supper, Gerrish observes that, "Christ is the center of the Gospel" (p. 108). But what, after all, is meant by "Christ" and, therefore, by such technical terms as "Christological" and "Christocentric" in theological discussion? Gerrish is surely correct in holding that, for Calvin, "Christ" usually refers to both a "person" and that person's "work." However, when one turns to Gerrish's treatment of Troeltsch's position in the "Christ-Myth" debate, one discovers an equally powerful argument to the effect that neither the "personality" nor even the bare "historicity" of Jesus is "necessarily entailed by [Troeltsch's] most basic historical principles," the very principles which distinguish the "New Protestantism" and of which Gerrish himself approves (p. 267). What these principles do entail is rather "the Christian symbol" or "the picture of [Jesus'] life … as it presents itself in actual historical experiences" (pp. 246-47). But once one realizes that the categories of "personality" and "historicity" function in modern "Christological" discussions exactly as did that of "person" in classical discussions, namely, to identify the intrinsic character of the datum of Christian faith, viewed in abstraction from its meaning for human existence, one is also put in the position to realize that, at least so far as both are consistent in this regard, the basic datum of Christian faith is conceived differently in the "Old Protestantism" and the "New." The qualifying phrase is important. For neither is consistent in this regard, and this is an important discovery of and for

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historical theology-as important, in fact, as is the identification of the material difference between two conceptions of the basic datum of Christian faith for systematic theology.

Gerrish has ventured "a hermeneutic which, in Luther's metaphor, is willing to crack the nut to get at the kernel" (p. 3), and he has succeeded in so doing.

Philip E. Devenish
Union Congregational Church
Hancock, Maine