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Brad Gregory’s Unintended Revelations

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Simpson, J., Allgemein.

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation is an extraordinary book. Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation is a shockingly bad book. This essay explicates the force of these contradictory statements. On the one hand, the potential of Gregory's understanding of periodization may be applauded; his reading may likewise be applauded: there are exceptionally useful tracks through entire libraries of books compacted in his notes. On the other hand, the book's ethical purpose (to denigrate the liberal West) profoundly damages the entire project. Gregory's account of the "whatever" culture is lazy, inaccurate, and arrogant; but his determination to attack the "whatever" culture determines his entire strategy—he wants nothing more than to get into attack position, at the expense of understanding how liberalism might have been hammered out less by lazy whateverists than by those straining to avoid the violence unleashed by early modern religion. The book's weakness, then, is ethical.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/545?rss=1

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Proximate Common Goods in the Context of Pluralism

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Herdt, J. A., Allgemein.

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation bemoans the loss of the shared "institutionalized worldview" that was Christendom, claiming that the resulting hyperpluralism renders it impossible to adjudicate among competing conceptions of the good. Our contemporary moment is better seen, though, as postsecular rather than as individualist and subjectivist. It is a context within which many different communities (of sometimes overlapping and shifting membership) seek to articulate the public character of their faith and accompanying conceptions of human flourishing. In such a context, it becomes possible for contemporary Christians to shift their attention from resenting the fact that Christianity no longer provides the West a shared cultural background and teleology to a more productive task: that of identifying proximate common goods and constructing piecemeal shared practices in pursuit of those goods, even as Christians keep their sights on a comprehensive eschatological beyond.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/583?rss=1

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Implicit Faith and Reformations of Habit

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Picciotto, J., Allgemein.

In post-Reformation England, intense pressures on belief produced sophisticated theorizations of habitual assent and of habit itself. These have been largely overlooked by scholarship on the Reformation because of its fixation on doctrine and confessional identity—the very obsession this scholarship imputes to its subjects. Implicit faith emerges again and again in these theorizations not just as a menace to, but also a condition of, strong belief. Nor is this a local phenomenon: examples are drawn from a wide doctrinal and chronological range (William Perkins, Godfrey Goodman, John Milton, John Wesley). There is evidence of a parallel development in scientific circles, as practitioners like Robert Boyle reflected on the necessary role of implicit faith in the collective production of knowledge, a project to which the ideal image of the self-determining individual, inwardly persuaded by testimony, was not finally adequate. Recent critiques of the Reformation by such writers as Brad Gregory and Jennifer Herdt have thus underestimated the extent to which their critiques were immanently produced within Protestantism itself.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/513?rss=1

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New Books across the Disciplines

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Cornett, M., Allgemein.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/653?rss=1

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Geeraardt Brandt, Dutch Tolerance, and the Reformation of the Reformation

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Leo, R., Allgemein.

Published in four volumes between 1671 and (posthumously) 1704, Geeraardt Brandt's monumental History of the Reformation and other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and about the Low-Countries challenges abiding assumptions about Reformation, confession, and modernity. Recasting the Reformation as a long series of jurisdictional conflicts that begin in the early Middle Ages and continue well into the Dutch Golden Age and beyond, Brandt illustrates how most, if not all, "theological" doctrinal conflicts are at a basic level contests of jurisdiction and imperium. Moreover, Brandt redefines the very term "Reformation" against confession—not with reference to Luther or Calvin but to Desiderius Erasmus, the irenicist hero of the History, for whom doctrine is remarkably simple, unchanging, and conducive to unity. Based on this account of minimal orthodoxy, Brandt introduces a striking vision of "mutual forbearance" that complicates vaunted accounts of Dutch tolerance.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/485?rss=1

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Unintended Reformations?

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Aers, D., Leo, R., Allgemein.

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012) is a book whose aspirations dovetail with the aims of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. The journal fosters scholarship that crosses current disciplines and their periodization of western history, that is both committed to historical research and attentive to the theoretical models shaping such research. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation not only meets this criteria but goes beyond by unfolding an immensely erudite narrative of modernity and its sources. It is a work on the ideological and historical origins of the contemporary western world. What makes it especially relevant to JMEMS is that it puts the Reformation at the center of its story: how has it come about that contemporary western people are no longer capable of rational deliberation, capable of resolving substantial moral disagreements? Gregory's account of how we have become what we are centers its genealogical answer on the European Reformation of the sixteenth century and on the influences and "unintended" consequences of this Reformation. And Gregory's concentration on the world historical significance of the Reformation continually glances at that which the agents of this Reformation sought to reform: the Christian church and culture of the Middle Ages. It is a work that compels us to dissolve conventional periodization. And it is a work by a historian who is also a moralist, which has elicited both enthusiastic affirmation and passionate opposition. This special issue contributes to ongoing discussion of issues raised in The Unintended Reformation that many in today's universities feel are crucial to debate.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/455?rss=1

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„Botched Execution“ or Historical Inevitability: Conceptual Dilemmas in Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation

September 9, 2016, 7:43 p.m., Pfau, T., Allgemein.

This essay takes up a variety of issues arising from within the narrative offered in Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation. This book has been widely perceived to be informed by a Catholic metaphysic, even as Gregory continues to disavow that framework, or declares it as irrelevant to his historical analyses. Maintaining that The Unintended Reformation amounts to a declensionist narrative, this essay scrutinizes the model of historical causation underlying Gregory's narrative. Avoiding the pattern of numerous earlier critiques, which contest the book from a liberal-secular-progressive standpoint whose validity Gregory evidently means to contest, this essay instead focuses on tensions and contradictions internal to The Unintended Reformation. Key here is the alleged, comprehensive "failure" of post-Reformation Europe. Premising his declensionist account on alternative choices and histories—roads not taken—The Unintended Reformation evinces a conceptual tension underlying its overall narrative agenda, namely, that between a discretionary model of historical development and a fatalistic model of historical inevitability.

Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/46/3/603?rss=1

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