It is no longer the case that Luther, Calvin and Zwingli loom so large in Reformation historiography that the many other sixteenth-century reformers in the Protestant tradition are consigned to the shadows of these colossi and are only dimly perceived. Yet it is still true that for most students and general readers, many important figures of the era continue to be less understood than should be the case. Among those for whom this would be an ‘astonishing’ fate in the eyes of his contemporaries is Martin Bucer, the subject of this very helpful survey by Donald McKim and Jim West.
The book begins with a brief review of Bucer's life as a Reformer, which he began as a refugee before settling in Strasbourg as leader of its Reform and that of south-west Germany. From there, he climbed steadily to his zenith as the ecumenical interlocutor in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1530s and early 1540s through his efforts to reconcile first Lutheran and Reformed and then Protestant and Catholic. Alas, his career ended as it began, with Bucer as a refugee, this time in England, in a setting that might have borne more substantial fruit but for his death less than two years after his arrival.
The bulk of the book is given over to a survey of the many facets of Bucer's teaching and writing over the span of his career. Beginning with Bucer's doctrine of Scripture (which underpins everything else he wrote), the authors take the reader through all the principal heads of theology (God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, sin and salvation, church and ministry, Word and sacraments, the state and last things) as they are found in his numerous works. As with many of his contemporaries, Bucer never wrote an orderly treatment of doctrine in the manner of Calvin's Institutes (anyone who is familiar with Bucer's turgid verbosity knows that orderly writing was beyond his ability), but he did have much to say on the full range of theology that attests to the fact that Bucer's mind was that of a first-order theologian, as McKim and West establish.
In their concluding chapter, McKim and West make it clear that Bucer's legacy was that of a theologian of the Word of God – the Word written, the Word made flesh, the Word made visible in the sacraments. This is not to say that he was unique in this, but he was among the more important contributors to the stream of Protestant theology that we call Reformed, best expressed by Calvin, who learned much from his mentor, Martin Bucer, even as he went on to surpass him in importance. Bucer was equally a theologian of the Church, which tragically began to fragment even as the Reformation got under way. This was a fragmentation which Bucer strove mightily to overcome through the effort to reconcile the opposing parties based on a common faith in the Word written and the Word made flesh, an effort that ended in failure, but which remains his best-known legacy.
