The Imaginative World of the Reformation, by Peter Matheson

The Imaginative World of the Reformation. By Peter Matheson. Fortress, 153 pp., $24.95; paperback, $15.00.

Many of today's scholars and church folk find the Reformation era and its concerns hard to comprehend. It is possible, of course, to know a great deal about what happened nearly 600 years ago, about the ways people thought and about how their social location conditioned their actions. Unfortunately, neither a "doctrinal archaeology" nor "social reductionism" allow us to understand the Reformation in any profound way. Indeed, we tend to be slightly embarrassed by the whole movement.

Peter Matheson asserts that in our postdenominational era the doctrinal distinctions sorted out by the Reformers, around which modern denominations were formed, often are misunderstood or dismissed as insignificant. Even thoughtful ecumenists are more keen on the similarities than the differences between denominations; and antiecumenists hardly present an attractive picture of the Reformation.