Reading Pelikan, Again

The fourth volume of Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine is Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700). It makes appropriate reading for the 500th anniversary year, by some counts, of the Reformation The book resembles its predecessors in the series in being clearly written, well organized for reading by the non-specialist, and having a scholarly apparatus that I imagine must serve the specialist well.

The book has seven chapters of three or four sections each. Each section runs to about a dozen pages. These pages are printed with the text occupying the the right two thirds of the page, the left being reserved for the references. A typical section, then, has the equivalent of eight full pages of text, meaning that the attentive reader can finish it in an evening. As for the references, the first paragraph of "The One True Faith", the last section of the first chapter, "Doctrinal Pluralism in the Late Middle Ages", has twenty-one of them, to the works of fifteen authors.

After two chapters taking the still mostly unified church through the end of the 14th Century, Pelikan gives the next four to the main streams of the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and Radical (Anabaptist, Socinian, other). The final chapter shows the three larger groups consolidating their doctrines: the Lutherans in their christological thought; Calvinists thinking through covenant theology; and Roman Catholics clarifying what their teaching on grace should be

It is a relatively drier read than Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, for it is doctrinal history, not cultural and political history. You will not read of Swiss printers announcing their adherence to the Reformation by consuming sausages in Lent, of Ulrich Zwingli falling in battle, or of the lively manner in which the early Jesuits held their missions. For that matter, you will not read how Archbishop Laud brought the Church of England some distance back from the Reformed tradition to something nearer Lutheranism and Catholicism. But you will, if attentive, come away with a sound understanding of what all the parties thought, and how they adjusted and clarified their thinking in opposition to one another.