Pro Ecclesia Vol. XXII, No.4
Against Nostalgia? Brad Gregory on the Divisive Character of the Reformation
236KB ∙ PDF file
According to Gregory, modernity's probiems—and in particular its ^^r^uralism —should be traced to the Reformation. As he puts it in foe introduction to his m^isterial book, The Unintended Reformation, his principal argument is "that foe Western world today is an e^raordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity, in which foe Reformation era consti- tutes foe critical watershed" (2). In Gregory's genealogical account of modernity, it is the Reformation, and in particular its sola scriptura claim, that made it impossible to secure a unified, institutional life and that ulti- mately led to foe individualism of modernity with its lack of resources to shore up even the most basic common moral, political, and legal claims. No doubt-and not entirely unsurprisingly considering his genealogy of failures-Gregory will be accused of nostalgically looking back to foe institutionalized worldview of medieval sacramentalism.
Download
