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Protestants by Alec Ryrie

28 July 2017

Judith Maltby finds an account of Protestants an engaging read

WHAT’S in a subtitle? Alec Ryrie’s splendid 500-year history of a people called Protestants is published in this country with the subtitle The radicals who made the modern world. The US edition is strikingly subtitled The faith that made the modern world. This is a case of a distinction with a difference.

The build-up to marking the 500th anniversary of Luther’s request for an academic seminar on some things that needed fixing in the church in a one-horse college town has brought forth publications by some of the giants in the field. Ryrie’s Protestants stands alongside other quincentenary books, such as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s essays All Things Made New (Books, 28 April), and Lyndal Roper’s biography of Luther, but offers a sweeping global narrative from Wittenberg to Seoul, from the 1500s to the 21st century.

Although Ryrie is primarily a distinguished scholar of the English and Scottish Reformations, the real pleasure in this book, as well as its buoyant and engaging prose style (the non-specialist will never feel left behind or patronised), is the way he takes the subject forward in time and moves beyond the confines of Europe and the Anglophone world for a global reach.

That said, I found the absence of any discussion of Ulster Protestantism a surprising omission — to be fair, perhaps made more pointed by reading the book in the midst of the surreal, evolving circumstances after the UK’s General Election. Given that “Protestantism” is an umbrella for a range of contradictory religious instincts — legalism and libertarianism; freedom and predestination; biblical literalism and biblical criticism — Ryrie has set himself a formidable task.

Moravian Archives in Herrnhut, Germany“There is a long story behind that private smile”: Rebecca Freundlich Potten, a former slave who became an ordained Moravian missionary, painted in the early 1750s; from the bookRyrie successfully corrals his unwieldy subject into three sections. The first, covering from Luther to the Enlightenment, tells perhaps the most familiar aspects of the story. The second section charts Protestantism’s engagement with modernity in Europe and North America, and one of the most interesting chapters in this section is his treatment of Protestants and slavery — the “ghastly saga”, as he calls it. He reminds us that there is another story of pro-slavery and equally biblical Protestants to balance a heroic, and oversimplified, narrative of Evangelical abolitionists. As he notes, “Generations had worked with or even defended slavery. Yet since 1865, the doctrine that slavery is evil has become a fixed reference point on Protestantism’s moral map, despite its shaky biblical basis.”

Part three becomes fully global and explores Protestant complexities in South Africa (where perhaps slavery was condemned, but the theology underpinning its racism prospered), the extraordinary growth and success of Presbyterianism — in particular, in Korea — and the surprising success of Protestantism, even in China, where the main competition was the state as a religion.

Readers of this publication may especially want to know whether Ryrie thinks Anglicans are Protestants or not. Don’t we all? He is in no doubt that the 16th-century English Church is a Protestant Church, but a combination of theological controversy and bloody revolution in the 17th century helped shape the Church of England as a “weird hybrid”, and much of what we think of as distinctively “Anglican” was solidified by the experience of Prayer Book Protestants as a persecuted “civil war sect”. I sense that Ryrie is out to provoke just a bit his Anglican readers, but there is nothing wrong with that.

“Radicals who made the modern world” or a “faith that made the modern world”? The former, surely, as, although theology has its place, Ryrie has kept people — though people who hold a variety of complex and conflicting beliefs — at the heart of his compelling narrative.

 

Canon Judith Maltby is Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and Chaplain, Fellow, and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College.

 

Protestants: The radicals who made the modern world

Alec Ryrie

William Collins £25

(978-0-00-746503-3)

Church Times Bookshop £22.50

 

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