The World’s Reformation: How Protestantism Became a Global Religion Author: Alec Ryrie ISBN-13: 9780300279047Publisher: Yale University Press Guideline Price: £35; 576ppThe missionary impulse of early Protestantism comes under consideration in this lengthy and incisive treatment from one of today’s most respected Reformation history scholars. How Protestants took their revolutionary expression of the gospel and the life of faith to the nations is a story beset by insecurities, failures, rivalries and contradictions, which Alec Ryrie records in prose that combines academic authority with gripping readability. In his introduction, Ryrie situates himself as a “believing Christian and a licensed lay minister in the Church of England” descended from Church of Scotland missionary stock. Should this raise concerns about impartiality or objectivity in the reader, these are quickly dispelled by Ryrie’s judicious and historically nuanced handling of his theme. We would expect no less from a scholar of his standing. What makes this worth mentioning is that Ryrie’s insider status regarding the Protestant faith makes his analysis and moral assessments of its missionary movement all the more damning at critical points in the narrative.Departing from a long-held orthodoxy that Protestantism was not inclined towards missionary endeavour before the 18th century, Ryrie traces the repeated attempts on the part of denominations, individuals and trading companies to bring their message to chiefly non-European peoples. Where history has traditionally read an absence of missionary activity, we can discern the presence of activity that failed to find reception or traction in the cultures that it encountered.The World’s Reformation selects four areas of emphasis by which to rationalise the vast and fragmentary sources for its story: principles, templates, approaches and outcomes. These categories prove helpful, allowing the events and the motives that underlie them to receive detailed and, at times, repeated analysis. By the close of the volume, the reader feels well acquainted with important figures in the individual stories of missionary endeavour in the period, while understanding some of the psychological and organisational factors behind them. Rivalry with the success of global Catholic mission, naivete about the nature of evangelism and conversion among peoples in the New World, and the gap between conceiving of reaching Jews, Muslims, enslaved people and “pre-Columbian peoples of the American continent” and actually fulfilling that ministry are handled with compelling dimension and judiciousness. Several features of the text particularly commend themselves, not least of which is Ryrie’s scholarly compassion. When handling the morally vexatious area of slavery and Protestant mission, the reader can clearly sense Ryrie’s justified ethical and historical outrage at its degradation of human dignity. The physical, psychological and spiritual condition in which enslaved people lived during the period in hand are portrayed with neither gratuity nor reserve, making the failure of Protestant missionaries and agencies to confront the issue all the more egregious. In the popular evangelical imagination, the atrocity of human enslavement is readily framed around the abolitionists whose faith informed their social action, but the historical period recorded by Ryrie betrays a dreadful abdication of moral principle and resolve among Protestant emissaries before that era.[ Herta Müller’s The Village on the Edge of the World: Survival under Ceausescu’s regimeOpens in new window ]That sense of humanity is also extended to the main subjects of Ryrie’s study and, in a concluding chapter abounding in balance and caveat, he cautions against readers making “morality tales” from the failures of people locked in their own time period. This latter emphasis in no way dulls the accusatory edge of earlier chapters, but it does insist on a nuanced view of historical evils that can be woefully lacking in much modern popular discourse. The text also rescues the story of Protestant mission in the period from its most devoted and hagiographical storytellers. As an example, Ryrie’s handling of the much-celebrated missionary David Brainerd insists on exposing the sociological and personal strengths and weaknesses that steered his ministry’s course. The effects of Brainerd’s work are not evacuated of divine possibility, but factors leading to its eventual success are explored in pragmatic depth. The treatment that Brainerd’s interpreter Tatamy receives here is nothing short of enlightening.The World’s Reformation brings to light a story of hubris, naivete, western-centredness, inhumanity, idealism and ultimately failure that recalibrates our understanding of the early Protestant mission, while constantly insisting that history is a human story – a story which we inherit but that is inhabited by principles and perspectives that are utterly unlike our own context. This is a work of rigorous empathy and richly informed humanity, providing a wide-ranging and finely rendered picture of Protestantism’s earliest attempts to reform the world.