Overview
It is impossible to understand what Christianity means today, to Christians and to the world, without the context that Reformations provides.
Reformations explains how and why the Reformation was not a unique watershed at all, but rather a typical episode in a long history, shared by all the main Christian traditions, of evangelical commitment and confrontation with the world. The authors create a loom vast in time and space on which they weave a many-colored cloth, one whose unfurling brings our time closer to Luther's, and our churches closer to each other. On that cloth, they map the evolving relationships between the Bible (the Word) and the Church (tradition), and individual experience (the spirit), revealing an ongoing cycle of stagnation and renewal that began not long after Christ's death and flows onward to this day. The authors lay out their argument with grace, virtuosity, and penetrating intelligence, without once losing sight of the human scale, the individual and social experience of being a Christian in modern history. Their insights are as a salve to the wounds of five hundred years of sectarian bitterness and bloodshed.