A Shocking Omission

I’ve been reading Alister E. McGrath’s Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (HarperOne, 2007). I’m enjoying the book so far and find McGrath’s retelling and reinterpretation of the history of Protestantism quite informative and entertaining. I love it when a writer makes history come alive; and, for me, McGrath is one such writer.

With that said, however, I noticed a startling omission toward the close of his chapter on Martin Luther. In order to feel the force of this, let me give you the context. Here’s one of his closing paragraphs on Luther (p. 58):

Luther’s reforms, it is clear, were neither an opportunistic attack on the morals of the church nor a piecemeal demand for reform here and there. His fundamental conviction was that the church of his day had lost sight of some fundamental themes of the Christian gospel. After all, the theology he had been taught at Erfurt now seemed to him to be heretical, amounting to the idea of “justification by works”—the notion that humanity can achieve its own salvation by its morals or religious achievements.

Well and good. But notice the very next paragraph (Ibid):

Yet Luther is open to criticism here, in that he appears to have extrapolated from his own local situation to that of the entire Christian church throughout Europe. As historians have rightly pointed out, the evidence simply does not sustain Luther’s picture of the medieval church as totally doctrinally corrupt or out of touch with the New Testament—a fact that helps us make sense of the mixed response to his demands for reform.

Can you see it? This is absolutely appalling. No, I’m not arguing with McGrath’s assessment at this point; in fact, I’m intrigued by it. What has me dismayed is McGrath’s glaring failure to provide an endnote for that last paragraph! What historians? What works is he referring to? He doesn’t say.

Oh well, I hope I don’t find more of these "dangerous" omissions in the rest of the book.