You don’t hear much about Spain’s Protestant Reformation. It did happen, though, and Steven R. Martins has been working to remind us of that. In 2020, Martins established the Canadian-based Cántaro Institute, which publishes and translates work germane to Peninsular (Spanish) Protestantism. In this first known English translation of Cipriano de Valera’s A Treatise to Confirm the Christian Faith of the Barbary Captives, Martins has retrieved and revalorized a jewel from the Spanish Reformation. Known primarily for his work on revising Casiodoro de Reina’s Spanish Bible, Valera’s Treatise makes equally important spiritual, theological, and historical contributions to both Spanish and Western Protestantism.
Martins’s critical edition offers a helpful foreword with footnotes that draw widely from the lesser-known and certainly lesser-studied field of Peninsular Protestantism. Next, the introduction incorporates the words of Spanish intellectual Don Luis Usoz y Río, who edited a nineteenth-century Spanish language edition of Valera’s Treatise. With scathing censure, Usoz sears the Spanish monarchs, Carlos I (1516–1556) and his son, Felipe II (1556–1598), for their slowness in helping the “fifty thousand captives” (p. 1) taken by man-stealing Ottoman corsairs (pirates) and held in the nearby North African city of Algiers. Valera, then, has seemingly written his Treatise to a subset of sullen Spanish Protestant captives “so that you may no longer be Christians only in name, as you were before, but in the reality of truth” (p. 10, emphasis added).
Valera’s not-so-subtle nod to Catholicism here prefigures his “point-counterpoint” polemic, from which emerges a triumphal Protestantism that exhorts these Spanish captives to “meditate on what you have read or heard from the sacred Scripture” (p. 134), “call upon the Lord to assist you and give you strength, not only to believe in Him but also to suffer steadfastly for His name” (p. 135), and “pray for our Spain, especially for the king and all those in charge of the republic, that God may grant them the grace to read and meditate on the sacred Scripture” (p. 136). As Treatise ends with such appeals (Section 1.10), Valera’s work carries an apostolic, epistolary tone, following the Pauline template of a hearty, authoritative greeting continued by a didactic, pastoral survey of doctrine.
Martins thematically delineates Valera’s work into 10 sections (1.1–1.10). In section 1.1, Valera derides the medieval flavor of Catholic Christianity, which had shaped Spain’s spiritual imagination and informed its religious practice. Showing no measure of charity to the Catholic understanding, Valera sharply scorns the ever-expanding theological system, which Cardinal Newman would later dub “the development of doctrine.” In section 1.2, Valera fervently exhorts the believers toward biblical literacy: “Read the Holy Scripture, and if you cannot read it, listen when others read or discuss it” (p. 33). Practicing what he preaches, Valera transcribes an abridged version of 1 Peter for the weary Christian captives, regularly interpolating an applicable series of anti-Papal, pro-Protestant lines. These Protestant distinctions are doxological, and they convincingly frame Reformed Christianity as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic deposit of faith aligned with the early church.
Sections 1.3–1.5 develop a Protestant orthopraxy rooted in prayer and Scripture, which can withstand the perils of Barbary captivity, Inquisitorial malevolence, “imprisonments, whippings, exiles, forces labor in galleys, killings, and burnings” (p. 47). Writing in an early modern world wherein religious identity readily treated transcendental reality, Valera warns: “Therefore, as you profess to be reformed Christians, you will necessarily have to face conflicts with three types of people while living in this land of Barbary: with anti-Christians [Catholics], with Jews, and with Moors, and particularly with the devil” (p. 52). Valera’s categorical distinctions of religious pluralism set the scene for his stirring apologetics which ensue in sections 1.6–1.9.
Valera’s argumentative scope in section 1.6 engages Jewish hermeneutics, rabbinic teaching, and Roman history to grieve how post-resurrection Judaism has sadly missed the Messiah. Although Valera undermines Judaism with candid clarity, we ought not to misjudge and thereby miss what sounds like his sincere compassion: “May God extend this grace to the Jews and all other peoples and Nations who do not yet know Him and therefore blaspheme him” (p. 85).
To set the basis for refuting Tridentine Catholicism (section 1.8) and Islam (section 1.9), section 1.7 affirms the divinity of Christ and explains the efficient, material, instrumental, and final causes of salvation. Section 1.8, then, categorically deconstructs the Roman doctrine of justification, ridicules Catholic anthropology, and posits a Calvinistic ordo salutis constructed with Reformed-sounding snippets from Rome’s big-S Saints: Basil, Hilary, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome (pp. 118–19). Valera crowds the catholic cloud of witnesses and asserts with boldness:
This sound, holy, Christian and catholic doctrine that a person is justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ, without their works, was preached by the holy apostles, taught by the holy scholars of the Church guided by the Holy Spirit according to what God has declared in His holy Scripture, and confessed by the holy martyrs of Jesus Christ. (p. 100)
Section 1.9 turns to “speak about the Moors” (p. 122), and Valera argues that Islam’s epistemology and Christological presuppositions render thoughtful interreligious dialogue futile: “If Muslims accepted the sacred Scripture, there could be debate with them” (p. 129). Thus, Valera admonishes the (little “c”) catholic captives to “progress from virtue to virtue” so that their Muslim “adversaries might be inwardly convinced, even if they do not openly admit it” (p. 129). While winsome apologetics is never unsound, Valera sees practical wisdom in disengaging theologically when there are not even mutual shared theological touchstones a priori–which explains why Valera does enter theological dialectic with Jews and Catholics.
Valera handles historical, ecclesial, and Scriptural sources with deft confidence, showing the possibilities of a Protestantism that refreshingly reaches beyond Calvin and Luther. Likewise, Valera’s treatment of Mary shows the possibilities of a Reformed reverence of “the Blessed Virgin” (p. 65), “the Holy Virgin” (p. 75), and “the most sacred womb of the Virgin Mary” (p. 106), regularly using her name and her Son’s in the same sentence.
Theological retrieval for evangelicals is certainly a worthwhile work. Yet, for Protestants enrolling in OCIA classes (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults) or otherwise boarding a boat to “cross the Tiber,” who are drawn by the rhythmic tide of daily Mass, consistent practice, ontological ethics, top-notch aesthetics, and reliant childlike faith, I recommend Valera. He dares to deconstruct Catholicism (and construct catholicism!). Western Protestants have been asking “these thorny questions” for several centuries now. As Treatise shows, Reformational hermeneutics and ecclesiology, enhanced by a robust historical theology, can bring comfort to those in need of deliverance.
Nevertheless, the supposed enchantment of Orthodoxy and the seeming constancy of Catholic Rites beckon. However, Valera shows us how to retrieve theology for the Reformed tradition while simultaneously putting hard stops on any extra-biblical development of doctrine. Valera’s sharp rhetoric, clear communication, and delineated distinctions remind us that no matter how much Vatican II assuaged Trent’s language, and no matter how much Chuck Colson and Father Neuhaus have brought Evangelicals and Catholics together, Catholics and Protestants do not share a Eucharist, and for good reason: they remain substantively two different religions.
Yet, toward ecumenism: could Valera have drawn from Thomism/Scholasticism, the contemplative tradition, or Catholic social ethics to offer the captives even more comfort? Although Valera’s quasi-epistolary form mimetically enacts his wish to recenter Scripture, Valera’s apostolic template could arguably betray a hubris and perhaps even downplay the captives’ multifaceted needs (facing hunger, forgiving enemies, missing home, fearing death, etc.). Nevertheless, the daily bread of Scripture which Valera rightly prizes in his Treatise is more than enough to fill the hungry with good things.
