Carl Trueman is making the fat lady sing over at Reformation21 by pounding hard on Wittenberg’s door (and Wheaton’s).

In his latest review of Mark Noll’s book Is the Reformation Over? Trueman answers that it may well be (given the current state of evangelicalism) but also that it ought not be over if evangelicals returned to the roots of the matter.

Trueman argues that the thesis of Noll’s book does not hold up because it attempts to define the relationship between two entities that are quite different - the institutional Roman Catholic Church and a fuzzy and undefined entity called “evangelicalism” which is unsure about its own identity. Along these lines, Trueman remarks:

The major problem with the book, and one which significantly skews some of the analysis, is the central place it accords to the relationship between Catholicism and evangelicalism. Thus, at the outset, we have an institutional church, with clearly defined authority structures, creeds, and an identifiable history – in other words, a self-conscious identity – being discussed in relation to a movement which lacks all of these things and is really only unified by a somewhat nebulous and ill-defined field of family resemblances – and family resemblances which have, over the years, become increasingly vague.

Trueman also relevantly asks:

What is evangelicalism? It is a title I myself identify with on occasion, especially when marking myself off from liberalism, another ill-defined, amorphous, transdenominational concept. But in a world where there are “evangelicals” who deny justification by faith as understood by the Protestant Reformers, who deny God’s comprehensive knowledge of the future, who deny penal substitutionary atonement, who deny the Messianic self-consciousness of Christ, who have problems with the Nicene Creed, who deny the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s person, who cannot be trusted to make clear statements on homosexuality, and who advocate epistemologies and other philosophical viewpoints which are entirely unprecedented in the history of the orthodox Christian church, it is clear that the term “evangelical” and its cognates, without any qualifying adjective, such as “confessional” or “open” or “post-conservative,” is in danger of becoming next to meaningless. And, even when one qualifies the noun in these ways, it is not immediately clear that one is then talking about subsets or modifications of a single, overarching, coherent movement.

Trueman’s review is a primer on Reformation issues and points of debate between Protestants and Catholics. Is it a review? It is that, too. But, oh, so much more.

After all, he has also renewed my determination to get up in the morning:

Not being a Catholic should, in others words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day.

And all that he accomplished without any help from Dr. Martin Kenunu and his bunch of Zen Calvinists…