This year’s five hundredth anniversary of the origin of the Protestant Reformation—the issuing by Martin Luther of ninety-five theses objecting to the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences—provides a convenient opportunity for a comprehensive exploration of Protestantism’s extraordinarily diverse past. Alec Ryrie, a historian at Durham University in England, has taken on that daunting project, and while some readers may take issue with his theological perspective, all will owe him a debt of gratitude for his impressive historical reconstruction.1
Date-marking considerations aside, this would not seem a propitious time for Ryrie’s project. Western Protestantism has fallen on lean days. To the most severe of its critics, it seems a burnt-out case. This is less so in the United States, where evangelical and Pentecostal churches often thrive, but even here the mainstream Protestant denominations derived from their Lutheran and Calvinist roots in the sixteenth century live with declining numbers and dwindling theological energy.
Professor Ryrie acknowledges the Western mainstream’s current low estate. But he reminds us that the West is not the world, and he shows that in Africa, Asia, and Latin America Protestantism is considerably more vibrant than it is in its European birthplace. In any case, Ryrie’s primary concern is not religious scorekeeping. He wants to tell the Protestant story, and, as his subtitle indicates, he thinks that story worth hearing if for no other reason than its protagonists’ ethos-making effect on the world we now inhabit. The long arm of the Reformation “helped to
