The Unfinished Reformation by Gregg R. Allison and Christopher A. Castaldo
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The Unfinished Reformation
Gregg R. Allison and Christopher A. Castaldo
Bibliographic Information
Author(s): Allison, Gregg R. and Castaldo, Christopher A. Full Title: The Unfinished Reformation: What Unites and Divides Catholics and Protestants After 500 Years Publisher: Zondervan Year of Publication: 2016 Pages: 176 pp. ISBN: 978-0310527930 Series (if applicable): N/A
Author Background
Gregg R. Allison (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he has taught since 2003 after nine years on the faculty of Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He is secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society, book review editor for its Journal, an elder at Sojourn Carlisle Church, and theological strategist for Harbor Network. Allison's prior eighteen years with Campus Crusade (Cru) — including missionary service in Italy and Switzerland — gave him sustained firsthand exposure to Catholic culture and practice in the predominantly Catholic world of southern Europe, an experience that shapes the pastoral register of his Catholic scholarship. He is the author of Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Zondervan, 2011), Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Crossway, 2012), and, most directly relevant here, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Crossway, 2014), the academic monograph of which this volume is the accessible distillation. Allison's institutional home is among the most confessionally defined in evangelical Protestantism: SBTS operates under the Abstract of Principles (1858) and is broadly Reformed Baptist in its theological commitments. These commitments shape — and, as will be noted, at times constrain — his engagement with Catholicism.
Christopher A. Castaldo (PhD) was raised in a Roman Catholic household on Long Island, New York, and worked full-time in Catholic ministry before converting to evangelical Protestantism. He served for eight years as pastor of outreach and church planting at College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, followed by three years as Director of the Ministry of Gospel Renewal at Wheaton College, and serves at the time of this book's publication as Lead Pastor of New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic (Zondervan, 2009) and Talking with Catholics about the Gospel: A Guide for Evangelicals (Crossway, 2015). Castaldo's biographical arc — from Catholic practice to evangelical pastoral ministry — gives the book its most important apologetic asset and its most significant methodological liability in equal measure. The pastoral concern for people navigating the Catholic-Protestant boundary is genuine and deeply felt; the risk of presenting Protestant conclusions as self-evidently correct for anyone reasoning clearly from Scripture is correspondingly heightened. Both authors are best categorized using the Theological Traditions Reference Guide's Baptist/Free Church and broadly Reformed evangelical categories respectively, though both function for much of the volume as if writing from the Ecumenical/Broadly Christian category — a claim to broad representativeness that the review below examines with care.
Thesis and Central Argument
The governing thesis of The Unfinished Reformation is this: five hundred years after Luther's protest, the divisions between Catholics and Protestants remain theologically substantive on the two issues that generated the Reformation in the first place — religious authority (the Catholic affirmation of Scripture and Tradition as co-equal sources versus the Protestant principle of sola scriptura) and salvation (the Catholic insistence on infused righteousness culminating in final justification versus the Protestant insistence on the imputed righteousness of Christ received by faith alone). The Reformation is therefore unfinished, and must remain so until one side or the other either concedes the doctrinal ground in question or the eschatological return of Christ renders the question moot.
The book pursues this thesis across a twofold structure: first establishing the extensive common ground that Catholics and Protestants share on classical Christian doctrine (Trinity, Christology, atonement, pneumatology, anthropology), then delineating the specific points of continuing division with enough precision that ordinary readers — pastors, lay leaders, college students navigating mixed-faith families — can understand what is actually at stake. The proposed contribution is both ecumenical and apologetic: ecumenical in its desire to honor genuine Catholic orthodoxy where it exists; apologetic in its Protestant conviction that the Reformation's central insights are not negotiable and have not yet been accepted by Rome. This dual register — charitable and firm — is the book's most distinctive feature and also the source of its most persistent tension.
Chapter-by-Chapter Overview
Introduction — What Happened 500 Years Ago?
The Introduction situates the book in a world where Protestants and Catholics stand together at abortion clinic vigils and in civic coalitions while remaining divided at the Lord's Table and the font. The authors use this observation to generate the animating question: Is the Reformation finished? They provide a brief and competent historical sketch of the Reformation's origins — acknowledging precursors in Wycliffe and Hus, the role of urbanization and increased literacy, the centrality of Luther's confrontation with indulgences, and the parallel reforming currents within Catholicism itself, including the evangelical conversion of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini in 1511. The Introduction establishes the two core Reformation controversies — authority and salvation — as the analytical frame for everything that follows, and it does so with a brevity that serves the book's popular-level purpose without flattening the historical complexity it summarizes.
Chapter 1 — How Do the Fundamental Commitments of Catholics and Protestants Differ?
Chapter 1 deploys the conversion narrative of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) as a lens for examining the two fundamental divides. Newman's journey from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic is used to illuminate the logic of Catholic ecclesiology: his growing dissatisfaction with Protestant subjectivity and fragmentation, his attraction to apostolic authority and sacramental objectivity, and his eventual embrace of the Catholic theory of doctrinal development as a solution to the apparent discontinuity between early Christianity and modern Catholic teaching. This is a genuinely illuminating pedagogical move — Newman is the most sophisticated convert to Catholicism in the modern era, and his account of why Protestantism fails captures the Catholic position with a precision that caricature-based critiques cannot. The authors' discussion of the Christ-Church interconnection — the Catholic understanding of the Church as the prolongation of the incarnation, with the corollary that Christ and his Church constitute a single subject of divine authority — is the most theologically generative passage in the book. It explains, in a way that purely propositional treatments often fail to, why Catholic ecclesiology generates its distinctive claims about the Magisterium, the Mass, Marian mediation, and papal infallibility: all of these are downstream of a single organizing conviction about the ontological identity of Christ and his Church.
Chapter 2 — Where Protestants and Catholics Stand Together: Ten Commonalities
Chapter 2 is the most ecumenically significant section of the book and, measured against the academic literature on Catholic-Protestant dialogue, one of its most useful contributions. The authors identify ten areas of genuine doctrinal agreement: the nature of the triune God; divine attributes; general and special revelation; the person of Christ (fully human, fully divine, one person in two natures); the atoning work of Christ; the person and work of the Holy Spirit; the imago Dei and human constitution; original sin; the divine initiative in salvation; and eschatological hope. The treatment of these commonalities is substantive enough to resist the charge of shallow irenicism while brief enough to serve the book's pedagogical purpose. Particularly valuable is the careful delineation of where agreement becomes partial or qualified — noting, for instance, that Catholics and Protestants affirm similar language about the saving work of Christ while locating the application of that work in very different sacramental and soteriological frameworks. The chapter models the kind of charitable-but-honest assessment that the book's title promises, and it establishes the doctrinal baseline against which the subsequent chapters of difference must be measured.
Chapter 3 — Key Differences (Part 1): Scripture, Tradition, and Interpretation
Chapter 3 addresses the epistemological foundations of the Catholic-Protestant divide. The authors present the Catholic twofold pattern of authority — Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as two streams from one divine source, interpreted by the Magisterium — against the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, developed here as the claim that the risen Christ's authority extends to the church through Scripture alone, not through an institutionally maintained tradition. The authors are at their best here in explaining why each position has internal coherence: the Catholic argument from apostolic succession and the necessity of an authoritative interpreter, and the Protestant argument from the sufficiency and perspicuity of Scripture as God's speech to every believer. Less satisfying is the treatment of the varieties of Protestant hermeneutics. The chapter presents a relatively uniform Protestant position without adequately acknowledging the significant diversity within Protestantism on questions of biblical interpretation, tradition, and the role of the church in reading Scripture — diversity that includes voices (within Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and even some Reformed and Catholic-leaning evangelical circles) who have pressed significantly harder on the instability of sola scriptura as a hermeneutical principle. The chapter concludes with a crisp Q&A format summary — "How does God speak to the world? Catholics respond... Protestants reply..." — that becomes a recurring structural feature and one of the book's most useful pedagogical innovations.
Chapter 4 — Key Differences (Part 2): Image of God, Sin, and Mary
Chapter 4 treats three distinct but related topics. The discussion of the imago Dei is among the book's most scholarly passages: the authors challenge the traditional Catholic (and historically Protestant) identification of the divine image with human rationality, drawing on recent Old Testament scholarship — particularly the dominion-function interpretation of Genesis 1 — to argue that the image applies to human beings in their wholeness rather than in any single faculty or capacity. The treatment of original sin briefly notes the Calvinist-Arminian intra-Protestant debate over the transmission of Adamic guilt without adequately developing it. The most controversial section addresses the four Marian dogmas: the perpetual virginity of Mary, the immaculate conception, the bodily assumption, and Mary's roles as co-redemptrix and mediatrix. The authors assess each against the biblical record and find each wanting from a Protestant standpoint. The critique is clear and competent, but it reads somewhat quickly over the patristic and medieval exegetical traditions that generated these doctrines, leaving Catholic readers with the impression that the doctrines developed without serious theological reasoning rather than from centuries of argument about Christology, typology, and the nature of human cooperation with divine grace. The Q&A format at the chapter's conclusion again summarizes the divide economically.
Chapter 5 — Key Differences (Part 3): Church and Sacraments
Chapter 5 contains the book's most sustained ecclesiological engagement. The Catholic claim that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Roman Catholic Church (CCC 816) — with the corollary that Protestant assemblies are ecclesial communities rather than true churches — is presented and assessed against the Protestant understanding of the marks of the true church. The discussion of sacramental theology covers the seven Catholic sacraments against the Protestant ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper, developing the Catholic nature-grace framework (grace must be mediated through consecrated natural elements, administered by the ordained hierarchy) against the Protestant insistence that the sacraments are signs that either present, portray, or memorialize Christ's saving work. The presentation of Protestant positions on the Lord's Supper — distinguishing Luther's real presence (consubstantiation), Calvin's spiritual presence, and Zwingli's memorialism — is the most nuanced treatment of intra-Protestant disagreement in the book. The authors clearly favor Calvin's position over Zwingli's, and while they do not press this preference polemically, the evaluative framing will be apparent to careful readers.
Chapter 6 — Key Differences (Part 4): Salvation
Chapter 6 is the doctrinal center of the book. The authors distinguish Catholic from Protestant soteriology along the imputed/infused axis: for Catholics, God ultimately accepts sinners because Christ's righteousness is poured into them (infused, making them actually righteous through the sacramental process); for Protestants, God declares sinners righteous because Christ's righteousness is credited to them (imputed, received by faith, and constituting their standing before God from the moment of justification). The treatment of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) — signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church — is admirably critical: the authors note, following Anthony Lane, that the Declaration narrows the gap in terminology without closing the substantive divide, and that its omission of imputed righteousness limits its significance for non-Lutheran Protestants. The coverage of purgatory is clear and sufficient. The chapter's greatest weakness, as discussed below, is its handling of the New Perspective on Paul and its implications for the Protestant account of justification — a set of developments that the book largely passes over.
Chapter 7 — The Gospel of Jesus Christ: Hope for Both Protestants and Catholics
Chapter 7 is the book's most pastorally direct section and the one that most clearly reveals its intended readership. The authors argue that individual Catholics can be genuinely saved despite the institutional Church's doctrinal errors — appealing to Owen's principle (men may be saved by grace that they doctrinally deny) and to the Reformed and Lutheran tradition's recognition of the Catholic Church as a corrupted but not wholly apostate institution. This is a careful and important distinction, and the authors navigate it with more pastoral wisdom than the polemical literature on this question typically exhibits. The chapter's argument for relational engagement with Catholic neighbors and family members — intentional, honest, charitable, non-adversarial — represents the clearest statement of the book's practical purpose and is likely to be its most read and most applied section.
Conclusion — Is the Reformation Finished?
The Conclusion offers the book's threefold answer: yes (the polemical wars are appropriately over), no (the doctrinal divisions remain substantive and unresolved), and no, but (progress in mutual understanding and selective collaboration has been made, and the conversation must continue). This structure is satisfying as a rhetorical frame but somewhat anticlimactic as a theological resolution. The authors' Protestant conviction — that the Reformation must continue until Rome undergoes radical reform according to Scripture — is stated plainly and honestly, even as it reveals the asymmetry in the book's framing: the resolution they envision is Catholic repentance, not mutual discovery.
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
The book's primary mode is systematic and comparative rather than exegetical, which is appropriate to its purpose; but the biblical arguments deployed in support of key Protestant positions deserve scrutiny. The authors' defense of sola scriptura appeals primarily to 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (Scripture is sufficient to equip the person of God for every good work) and to Jesus' promises of the Spirit's guiding the disciples into all truth (John 14:26; 16:13). These are standard Protestant proof-texts, and the authors' use of them is competent. What they do not adequately engage is the Catholic counter-argument that these very texts are themselves interpreted by the Church, and that the Protestant canon is itself a product of tradition — a point raised with considerable force by Catholic apologists from Newman to Robert Sungenis, and one that the book waves at without pressing. The hermeneutical principle underlying the Protestant position — that Scripture is self-interpreting, clear in its central claims, and sufficient without magisterial guidance — is affirmed but not defended against its most sophisticated critics.
On the doctrine of justification, the exegetical choices are revealing. The authors present the imputed righteousness of Christ as the clear Pauline teaching without acknowledging that this reading is contested not merely by Catholics but by a substantial body of Protestant New Testament scholarship. The New Perspective on Paul — associated principally with E.P. Sanders, James D.G. Dunn, and N.T. Wright — has challenged the Reformation's reading of Paul's justification language for decades, arguing that dikaiosyne language in Paul is as much about covenantal inclusion as about individual forensic standing before God. One need not endorse the New Perspective's conclusions to recognize that its existence constitutes a significant challenge to the Protestant case as the authors present it, and the book's silence on this debate — which is noted in the Reading Religion review of the volume — is a genuine methodological lacuna. Readers shaped by Wright's Pauline theology, or by the Wesleyan tradition's different account of sanctification and justification, will find the book's treatment of salvation less than fully representative of the Protestant side it claims to expound.
Doctrinal Analysis
Measured against ecumenical benchmarks, the book's doctrinal content is orthodox throughout. The Apostles', Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds are explicitly affirmed as common ground, and the authors' treatment of the Trinity, Christology, and pneumatology reflects competent familiarity with patristic doctrine. The doctrinal questions arise not at the ecumenical level but at the confessional level, and they vary significantly across the traditions engaged.
From a Reformed and broadly evangelical perspective, the book's strongest doctrinal contribution is its clear articulation of the imputed/infused distinction as the central soteriological divide. Allison's formulation — that Catholicism and Protestantism agree that the initiative in salvation belongs to God, but disagree on whether Christ's righteousness is credited to sinners or poured into them — is a precision that much popular-level Protestant apologetics lacks. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), Chapter XI, teaches that "those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone" — a formulation that the authors' account faithfully expresses without, however, explicitly naming it as confessionally specific. Reformed readers will find the doctrinal content broadly consonant with their tradition's standards; they should be aware that the book's position on imputation, while shared by the Reformed tradition, is presented as pan-Protestant rather than as confessionally particular.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, the book's treatment of salvation is less than fully representative. The authors present a broadly Calvinist Protestant account of justification — emphasizing the decisive moment of conversion, the imputed righteousness of Christ, and the perseverance of the elect — without adequately acknowledging that Wesleyan theology has a significantly different account of the relationship between justification and sanctification, one in which the possibility of final apostasy and the concept of entire sanctification create a soteriology that is meaningfully closer to the Catholic process model than to the Reformed ordo salutis. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) and Wesley's own sermons describe a salvation that is more dynamic, more morally transformative, and more prevenient-grace-dependent than the imputed-righteousness account allows, and Wesleyan readers will find the book's Protestant synthesis less representative of their tradition than its universalizing language suggests.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, the book's doctrinal analysis is competent and fair by the standards of evangelical Protestant polemics, but it has a structural limitation that Catholic readers will immediately identify: it evaluates Catholic theology against Protestant exegetical conclusions without fully inhabiting the Catholic epistemological framework. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) is cited extensively and accurately; the documents of Vatican II (particularly Dei Verbum on divine revelation and Lumen Gentium on the church) are referenced; and the Council of Trent's decree on justification is engaged. But the book's assessment consistently applies the Protestant hermeneutic of sola scriptura to Catholic doctrines that were developed through a different epistemological process, then finds those doctrines wanting. This is circular reasoning from a Catholic perspective — and the book would be more persuasive to Catholic readers, and more useful to Protestant readers preparing for dialogue, if it acknowledged this structural feature more directly. That said, the book's sustained effort to present Catholic positions as internally coherent before critiquing them is genuinely unusual in evangelical Protestant literature, and it represents a meaningful advance over less charitable treatments of the subject.
From a Lutheran perspective, the treatment of justification has a notable peculiarity: the authors engage the Joint Declaration on Justification (1999) between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, citing Anthony Lane's assessment that the gap is narrower than supposed but real. However, the Lutheran theology of Law and Gospel — in which the alien righteousness of Christ is received by a passive faith that produces no meritorious cooperation — is not clearly distinguished from the Reformed-Baptist understanding that the authors primarily represent. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod's sharp rejection of the JD as a betrayal of the gospel is quoted approvingly, but the more complex engagement of Lutherans within the LWF who affirmed the document is not adequately examined. Lutheran readers shaped by the Book of Concord (1580) will find resonances in the book's defense of imputation, but will note that the Lutheran account of Law and Gospel, two-kingdoms doctrine, and the theology of the cross (theologia crucis) are largely absent from a volume that presents itself as covering Protestant theology broadly.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The secondary literature engagement is appropriate for a popular-level book but thin by academic standards, and the gaps are consequential. The authors acknowledge a significant debt to Leonardo De Chirico (Rome), whose articulation of the Christ-Church interconnection as the organizing category of Catholic ecclesiology is the book's most important scholarly borrowing. They also acknowledge Henri Blocher's application of this paradigm to the sacraments and Tony Lane's work on justification — Lane being the London School of Theology historical theologian whose assessment of the Joint Declaration is quoted in Chapter 6.
The most significant absence in the bibliography is engagement with Catholic scholars who have argued for reform from within — scholars such as Hans Küng, whose Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (1957) was a landmark in ecumenical dialogue and argued that Barth's Protestant doctrine of justification and Catholic teaching are more compatible than the Reformation assumed. Joseph Fitzmyer's work on Romans, which represents Catholic biblical scholarship engaging the Protestant exegetical tradition on its own terms, is also absent. On the Protestant side, N.T. Wright's Pauline theology — which bears directly on the justification debate and which, as noted above, complicates the Protestant case — is not engaged. The influential Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiative (1994), launched by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, is referenced but not carefully assessed; its theological implications for the book's central argument deserved more than a passing mention. Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom's Is the Reformation Over? (2005) — the most directly comparable previous work in the genre — is engaged and, appropriately, pressed on its evasiveness in answering its own governing question.
Strengths
The Christ-Church interconnection as an explanatory key. The book's most durable contribution is its deployment of De Chirico's Christ-Church interconnection paradigm as the organizing explanatory category for Catholic ecclesiology. Rather than presenting Catholic doctrine as a collection of strange beliefs assembled without internal logic, Allison and Castaldo show that the Church's claims about the Magisterium, the Mass, Marian mediation, apostolic succession, and papal infallibility all follow with coherent necessity from a single prior conviction: that the incarnate Christ has permanently taken the Church into himself such that the two constitute a single subject in the world. Once this principle is understood, Catholic ecclesiology ceases to appear arbitrary and becomes recognizable as a systematic and internally consistent elaboration of a specific Christological claim. This is excellent theological pedagogy, and it equips Protestant readers for dialogue at a depth that most introductory treatments of the subject do not achieve.
The Q&A summary format. At the conclusion of each section of doctrinal comparison, the authors crystallize the debate in a two-part summary: "Catholics respond... Protestants reply...." This is a pedagogically brilliant device that accomplishes several things at once: it forces the authors to articulate each position in its strongest rather than weakest form, it gives readers a memorable structure for retaining what they have learned, and it models the kind of respectful dialogue-in-difference that the book commends. The summaries are also admirably specific — not vague ("Catholics emphasize the Church; Protestants emphasize the Bible") but precise ("Catholics respond that they interpret Scripture 'with dependence on, and in accordance with, the Magisterium's official interpretation'; Protestants reply, 'with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, knowing that Scripture is clear, following sound interpretive principles'"). This format is the book's most exportable pedagogical innovation and will serve teachers and pastors well.
The treatment of individual Catholic salvation. Chapter 7's engagement with the question of whether individual Catholics can be genuinely saved despite the institutional Church's doctrinal errors is the most pastorally important passage in the book and among its most theologically careful. The authors' use of John Owen's principle — that men may be saved by a grace they doctrinally deny — is not a counsel of doctrinal indifference but a realistic assessment of the gap between institutional teaching and personal faith. The appeal to Luther, Calvin, and Charles Hodge as Reformed authorities who recognized the Christian foundation of the Catholic Church even while opposing its errors provides historical depth that more strident Protestant treatments typically lack. For pastors navigating mixed-faith families, this section provides a framework that is both pastorally warm and theologically honest — a combination that the subject rarely receives.
The chaptered differentiation of Protestant positions. Particularly in the chapters on sacraments and salvation, the book maintains a productive tension between representing a unified Protestant position on major dividing issues (imputed righteousness; baptism as sign rather than regenerative cause) and acknowledging the diversity within Protestantism on secondary issues (Calvinist spiritual presence versus Zwinglian memorialism in the Lord's Supper; Reformed perseverance versus Arminian conditionality in salvation). This is more honest than many Protestant apologetic treatments, which tend to either over-unify Protestantism or dismiss intra-Protestant disagreements as peripheral to the main Catholic-Protestant debate.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The Protestant perspective is not sufficiently disclosed as a perspective. The book presents itself as an even-handed guide to what unites and divides Catholics and Protestants, but it consistently frames Catholic positions as departures from a biblical norm that is identified, without qualification, with Protestant convictions. The Introduction's question — "To whom did God give authority to define Christian faith? Did it belong to the institution of the Roman Catholic Church? Or was Scripture its own interpreter?" — is presented as if the Protestant answer is self-evidently correct to any honest reader of the text, rather than as a contested hermeneutical claim that requires argument and defense. This framing will not mislead Protestant readers, who share the authors' starting assumptions; but it will frustrate Catholic readers and ecumenically-minded Protestants who expect a comparative guide to begin from a more genuinely neutral vantage point. The Theological Traditions Reference Guide's instruction — "avoid framing any tradition's conclusions as simply 'the biblical view' without qualification" — is not consistently honored here, and the book's subtitle promises more symmetry than its argument delivers. A more transparent acknowledgment that the book is an evangelical Protestant assessment of Catholic-Protestant differences — which is what it is — would be more honest and more useful.
The New Perspective on Paul is unaddressed. The book's account of Protestant soteriology, and particularly its defense of imputed righteousness as the clear Pauline teaching, proceeds as if the New Perspective on Paul — developed across five decades by Sanders, Dunn, Wright, and a substantial body of New Testament scholarship — does not exist. This is a significant omission in a book published in 2016. Whether one accepts or rejects the New Perspective's conclusions, its existence constitutes a standing challenge to the Reformation reading of Paul, and its relevance to the Catholic-Protestant justification debate is direct: Wright's account of justification as covenantal declaration rather than forensic imputation moves the Protestant and Catholic positions into a different configuration than the Reformation framework assumes. The book's silence on this debate gives its Protestant account of justification a false confidence — presenting as settled exegesis what remains a matter of active and consequential scholarly debate within Protestant New Testament scholarship itself.
Catholic scholarship is underrepresented as a dialogue partner. The book's bibliography is asymmetric: it engages extensively with Protestant authorities (the Westminster Confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, Reformed and Baptist theologians) and with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it does not seriously engage Catholic theologians as interlocutors. There is no engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar's Trinitarian and soteriological vision, with Karl Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith, with Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's extensive writing on Scripture and tradition, or with the work of Catholic Scripture scholars like Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown who have engaged the Protestant exegetical tradition from within a Catholic epistemological framework. The result is that the Catholic position is presented primarily through official magisterial documents — authoritative but not always representative of the range of Catholic theological reflection. A book that proposes to help Protestants understand what Catholics actually believe and why would be strengthened by engaging the Catholic theological tradition at greater depth.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
The Unfinished Reformation enters a field that has become increasingly crowded since the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement of 1994 brought the Catholic-Protestant question back to the center of evangelical theological discussion. The most important comparable works include Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom's Is the Reformation Over? (2005) — which the authors engage directly and with appropriate firmness — and Tony Lane's Justification by Faith in Catholic-Protestant Dialogue (2002), acknowledged in the footnotes as a primary resource. James White and Gerry Matatics's debate literature, along with Robert Sungenis's apologetic writings, represent the more polemical Protestant-Catholic exchange that this book explicitly positions itself against. On the Catholic side, Scott Hahn's Rome Sweet Home (1993) and The Lamb's Supper (1999) represent the genre of Catholic apologetics aimed at a Protestant audience that this book mirrors in structure if not in confessional direction. Allison's own Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Crossway, 2014) is the academic monograph that this volume popularizes, and readers who want a fuller and more rigorously documented treatment of the same material should be directed there. Christopher Castaldo's Talking with Catholics about the Gospel (Crossway, 2015), published just one year before this volume, provides the more evangelistically focused complement to the comparative-theological work done here.
The book's most important contribution to this conversation is not its doctrinal content — which is largely available in more detailed form elsewhere — but its tone and structure: it is the most accessible, most fair-minded, and most pedagogically effective introduction to the Catholic-Protestant divide currently available at the popular level. For the purposes for which it is designed — equipping evangelical Protestants for respectful, informed dialogue with Catholic neighbors and family members — it outperforms comparable works in the genre.
Conclusion and Recommendation
The Unfinished Reformation is a carefully constructed, pastorally motivated, and pedagogically effective introduction to the theological divide that five hundred years have not closed. Its deployment of the Christ-Church interconnection framework, its Q&A summary format, and its nuanced engagement with the question of individual Catholic salvation represent genuine contributions to the popular-level literature on this subject. Its weaknesses are real and proportional to its ambition: the Protestant perspective is not always disclosed as a perspective, the New Perspective on Paul is absent without apology, and the Catholic theological tradition is engaged at its magisterial surface rather than at the depth of its best scholarly voices. Read as what it actually is — a well-executed evangelical Protestant assessment of the Catholic-Protestant divide, aimed at equipping lay readers and pastors for honest dialogue — it is warmly and confidently recommended. Read as the evenhanded comparative guide its subtitle implies, it requires supplementation and critique.
Recommended for: Evangelical Protestant pastors navigating mixed-faith congregations or families with Catholic members; college students and young adults seeking a clear introduction to Catholic-Protestant differences; seminary students in evangelical and Reformed institutions as a starting point for ecumenical study; anyone who has encountered Evangelicals and Catholics Together and needs a careful Protestant assessment of what unites and divides the two traditions.
Not recommended for: Catholic readers seeking a genuinely symmetric treatment of the divide; readers shaped by Wesleyan, Anglican, or Lutheran theology who need a representative account of the full Protestant position on justification; scholars or advanced students who require engagement with contemporary Catholic theology, the New Perspective on Paul, or the full range of post-Reformation ecumenical dialogue; readers seeking a comprehensive introduction to Catholic theology who would benefit more from Allison's full academic treatment in Roman Catholic Theology and Practice.
Overall Assessment: ☐ Highly Recommended | ☑ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
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