Review 1: Introduction to Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over?

For the next couple weeks, I hope to review Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom's 2005 book Is the Reformation Over? (see link at the side) Noll was a Wheaton professor at the time of the debacle over an Episcopalian professor of medieval history converting to catholicism. The individual in question was forced to resign. Noll has since moved to Notre Dame.

As far as I know, he continues to identify himself as a Protestant evangelical.

Indeed, in the Introduction he makes it clear that he and Nystrom are examining developments in Roman Catholicism from an evangelical perspective. In other words, the book uses evangelical canons to evaluate whether catholicism fits. The book does not evaluate the canons of evangelicalism themselves (at least this is my impression from the introduction).

Aims of the Book
The book is clear in the Introduction about the two goals of the book:

1. To survey the evidence for active and vital Christianity within the contemporary Roman Catholic Church and

2. To evaluate that evidence with as much discernment as possible.

The Canons of Evangelicalism
Noll and Nystrom use the four markers of evangelical identity proposed by David Bebbington (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain) as the basis of their evaluation:

1. Authority of Scripture

2. Personal Conversion

3. Importance of Evangelism

4. Centrality of the Cross

At the same time, Noll and Nystrom mention three battle cries of the Reformation as criteria as well, which they identify in the following ways (these are all Reformation themes to be sure, sola gratia and sola Christi are sometimes mentioned as well):

sola scriptura--the supreme authority of Scripture

sola fide--salvation by grace alone through faith alone

priesthood of all believers--corrective to the corruption of medieval catholic priesthood

Well see what we think of what they've come up with. They provide some interesting statistics about changes in Canada in relation to Catholicism in this introduction. They begin with a quote from 1873 where Catholicism is decried as a worse enemy of living Christianity than atheism. They go on to speak of charismatic and evangelical movements within Canadian Catholicism today, where 1/4 of Canadian Christians agree with all four of the evangelical benchmarks above and 34% more with three of the four.

D.v. ("Lord willing"), chapter 1 tomorrow...