The Saved and the Damned: A History of the Reformation, written by Thomas Kaufmann

In 2017, many books were published to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther's initial attack on the authority and theology of the Catholic Church.In the English-speaking world, for instance, no fewer than thirteen new biographies of Luther appeared, one after the other, along with many other books that contained the word "Reformation" in their title or subtitle.In Germany, as one might expect, the Lutherjahr was celebrated with keener intensity than anywhere else, and that fervor spilled over beyond publishing houses to the crafters and hawkers of all sorts of memorabilia, such as Playmobil's plastic figure of Luther-which, brandishing a Bible in one hand and a quill pen in the other-became the fastest-and best-selling item in the toy company's entire history.Thomas Kaufmann's Saved and the Damned is one of the German books published during the quincentennial of Luther's Reformation, now available in a superb English translation.It is a brief survey history of this world-changing event, very scholarly, yet highly accessible to a broad range of non-experts, including students.As its title suggests, Kaufmann views the Reformation as a religious cataclysm caused by disagreements over the issue of salvation.The book's contents clearly suggest that it was written with a German audience in mind, so it is no surprise that much of it is devoted to the evolution of the Protestant Reformation in German-speaking lands during the sixteenth century.Its focus on this narrow slice of Protestant history is intentional and clearly reflected in its structure.Kaufmann devotes two chapters to setting the stage for Luther's defiant entry into history, plus another to the emergence of Lutheranism, and, finally, one more to the spread of Protestantism to the world beyond Germany.Within this fourth chapter, which surveys all the various branches of the Protestant family tree, twelve pages are allotted to the Catholic Reformation, four of