THE Lutheran revolt against Rome was just one generation old when the 19th ecumenical Council of the Church opened at Trent in 1545. Already by that time the Christian heritage of medieval Europe with its lights and its darknesses, its successes and its failure, its glories and its miseries, was slowly ceasing to be seen as a common possession. This common patrimony of Reformation Protestant and Tridentine Catholic was reinterpreted more and more negatively by Protestant critics and more and more positively by Catholic apologists, until there emerged two standard and opposed evaluations of it which have lasted to our own day.
By Trent, differences were hardening and being accented by polemics, while continuities and things held in common were being passed over in silence and played down. In the foreground of the picture held by both sides of the events they were passing through stood division, while in the deep background, so far back as to be almost out of sight, stood continuity and beliefs shared for a millennium and a half.
One of the great merits of this book is its attempt, indeed its success, in persuading us to see the 16th-century Reform in a larger perspective. We are in a better position today than the early Reformers and their opponents were, to evaluate the discontinuities and continuities over which they fought. By emphasising what they had in common rather than, as they did, what they disagreed about, we can achieve a new understanding of Christian differences and, perhaps, new ways out of old dilemmas. After all, as the book points out in its first chapter, there was already, before the Reformation, a tradition of diversity in mainline Christianity from its beginnings, even if this tradition was not quite so diverse as the authors seem to suppose and as some modern scholars try to insist.
It is clear, however, that as the book suggests both sides in the Reformation controversy tended to exaggerate the monolithic character of pre-Reformation Christianity. Catholic controversialists did this the more to emphasise the scandal of the division of Christendom, Reformers to emphasise the evangelical power of their movement.
The book devotes chapters to scripture and tradition; to authority, internal or external; and to the conflict about the externals of religion which was one of the great conflicts of the Reformation. The Eucharist, priesthood and church, truths which their forefathers had held in common, now became disputed issues and Christians began to stigmatise each other as "limbs of Satan" and "followers of the Anti-Christ". Polemic built up inexorably a strong sense of division. This was a gradual disintegration of medieval Christendom rather than a sudden and total collapse. It took time for differences to become fixed and for eirenicism to die. But slowly and relentlessly controversy pushed the frontiers of division. Catholic preparedness to admit fault and failure, as exemplified by Pope Adrian VI, and moderate assertions and positive hopes for a new and reformed Church, as in Melanchthon's Confession of Augsburg, which had marked the first generation of the Reform, gave way to polemical evaluations of opponents which were biased and false.
The words of Cardinal Reginald Pole, member of the British Royal Family and Papal Legate to the Council of Trent, reveal the way things had fallen out even by the time of the Council. He advises the Fathers to be on their guard against the simplistic dismissal of their opponents and the personalisation of the dispute, pointing out that it is net enough for their decrees to carry the legend "Lutherus dixit, ergo falsum est", (Luther said it, so it must be wrong). In spite of Pole's wise words this was the mentality that prevailed, nor indeed in Trent's decrees, which are carefully impersonal and direct their anathemas not against people but against opinions. This sober conciliar approach is, however, not found in most theological controversy and in popular confrontation. Here the style is personal attack and abusive polemic which merely widened the rift, deferred true dialogue and prolonged the divisiveness of the Reform for centuries.
The book clarifies in many ways the damage this approach has done to Christian confessions. It further underlines the fact that we, Western Christians, have perhaps given too much significance to the 16th-century Reform, which did not touch at all the eastern half of Christendom and needs to be repositioned in the global Church of today. The passage of time has let some old animosities die, but more importantly it has given us a chance to relativise the divisions of the Reformation and to allow its continuities to move into the foreground of the picture.