Recultivating The Vineyard

Scott Hendrix argues in this book that the sixteenth-century Reformers all shared the same goal–to replant authentic Christianity in the vineyard of the Lord, the same European Christendom which, they believed, had been devastated by the medieval church. Thus he believes it is more accurate and useful to speak of one Reformation and to locate its diversity in the various theological and practical agendas that were developed to realize their goal of Christianization. Hendrix emphasizes the common concern of the reformers rather than the better known conflicts that developed among them, and he chooses the term “Christianization,” whose goal embraced Catholic as well as Protestant reform, for that concern in order to denote the unity in their goals and express both continuity and discontinuity between the Middle Ages and the Reformation.