Theology of the Reformers, by Timothy George

A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Christopher A. Hall Christopher A. Hall received his Th.M. from Regent College and is currently completing a Ph.D. in historical and systematic theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Printed by permission of the editors of CRUX, September, 1990.

Theology of the Reformers by Timothy George. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1988, 337pp., pb., $21.95.

A Ph.D. candidate studying for a comprehensive exam on the Reformation recently asked me for a list of reliable guides to the period. Timothy George’s Theology of the Reformers immediately came to mind. Other reviewers also seem to agree with this assessment. Christianity Today, for example, recently honoured Theology of the Reformers as a runner-up in the Critics’ Choice Award category in its annual book awards (Christianity Today, April 9, 1990). What aspects of the book warrant such respect?

First, George, associate professor of church history and historical theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has managed to introduce and interact maturely with a tremendous amount of primary source material. His treatment of Luther is a case in point. The vast majority of footnotes in his Luther section refer directly to Luther’s Works. George’s aim is to allow Luther to speak for himself over a broad range of key topics that Luther himself felt were central to a clear understanding of Christian faith. George performs this task well by being both thorough and readable. Key concepts such as Luther’s understanding of human life as lived out in coram Deo. “before God,” the theological centre of his theology as Christus pro Me. “Christ for me,” and the role of Anfectung or “foreboding doom” or “anxiety” as a fundamental principle of Luther’s approach to theology are explained clearly and cogently. The centrality of justification by faith and Luther’s nuanced understanding of sola scriptura are thoroughly covered in George’s presentation, but so also are Luther’s love and understanding of “Worthy Maid,” the church. The reader who seeks a well-organized introduction to Luther will walk away satisfied, and the more advanced student who desires a fundamental review of Luther will not be disappointed. The same could be said of George’s treatment of John Calvin.

A second strength of the book is that George covers not only Luther and Calvin, but also Huldrych Zwingli and Menno Simons. In fact, all four reformers are given close to equal billing. Luther receives 56 pages, Zwingli 54 pages, Calvin 88 pages, and Simons 55 pages. Close to half of the main body of the book, then, is devoted to figures too often left on the periphery of Reformation studies. The road to the Reformation in Zurich under Zwingli’s leadership is discussed, main foci of his work as a theologian are analyzed, and special attention is given to the tragic disagreement and division between Luther and Zwingli over the nature of the Lord’s Supper. George provides important background material to this debate in his treatment of medieval eucharistic theology, practice, and abuse. He also analyzes the wider political context to the Luther-Zwingli deliberations, the exegetical issues at the heart of the debate, the Christological issues in the Luther-Zwingli meeting at Marburg, and the theological consequences of their final disagreement. Zwingli emerges as a significant theologian in his own right, one who “took more literally than Luther the sola in sola scriptura, even if the Anabaptists did him one still better in this regard” (p. 160).

George’s presentation and understanding of Menno Simons and his leadership role in the Radical Reformation also deserve commendation. George contends that Simons and the movement he represents have frequently been misinterpreted as merely a “wing” to the Reformation. Reformers such as Bullinger, Calvin, and Luther had little good to say about the radical reformers, and one sometimes wonders whether this is why treatments dealing with them have often taken a back seat in discussions of the period. George, however, points out that the Radical Reformation was more than a “side effect that merely revealed a more extreme form of the Reformation; it was instead a movement which gave birth to a new form of Christian faith and life” (p.255). In the life and thought of Menno Simons and in Anabaptism in general we encounter “decided emphasis on the interiorized process of salvation. For all of the radicals, true Christianity was ipso facto personal, experiential, and individual” (p.265). Simons and other Anabaptist leaders issued a fervent call for a personal response of faith, a response that in the atmosphere of the sixteenth century almost always entailed significant suffering, frequently at the hands of other Protestant reformers. George covers this aspect of the Anabaptist experience in his section entitled “The Bloody Theater,” and complements this discussion with other analyses of Simon’s understanding of new life in Christ, the Scripture as God’s infallible Word, Christ as incarnate Lord, and the nature of the true church. His discussion is informed by an immersion in primary sources and a solid knowledge of the secondary literature.