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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Luther was in a strange position, he was more like The Last Catholic than being The First Protestant. He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time. A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition). Often the only thing on which they all agreed was "the Pope is wrong and we're not Romans". So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

The Low Church and Pietist movements which came later probably were influenced more in that direction, and of course the way things developed in America put their own spin on things.

He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time.

Not exactly. There were major Thomists at the time (he interacted with some noteworthy ones, most importantly Cajetan, who was perhaps the most important Thomist in history), but I believe in northern Europe Aquinas wasn't terribly popular, and people more frequently made use of other authors, such as Scotus or Biel. The mystic part is fairly accurate. He republished Theologia Deutsch, a work written centuries earlier due to the influence of German Dominican mystics, in which work you can pretty clearly see the influence on Luther's thought, with its emphases on humility and the worthlessness of the self (probably not the best summary, but that's from memory).

A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

True, and not true. Henry VIII did not solely want that the pope would agree with him, but did actually have committed religious beliefs. He was named Defensor Fidei by the pope for his writings against Luther, arguing that there are actually seven sacraments. Henry maintained his belief in the seven sacraments his entire life and tried to crack down on the Protestants at some points, even after he'd broken with Rome. I'm not extremely knowledgeable on it, but I'd believe that Henry's actions could have been sincere as to what he thought right, not merely a power grab.

Luther definitely did have a bunch of things he wanted corrected, though (far more than Henry). There's a sense in which he merely wanted the pope to agree with him, but what he wanted agreement on was far more extensive, and more about teaching (as well as the moral reform of the church). His thoughts on the pope changed fairly quickly at the beginning, going from that the pope was good etc. but not able to do quite as much as was claimed re:indulgences, to thinking that the pope was the antichrist. (but even at that later point, in 1520, when he thought that the papacy was the Antichrist, he still would have reconciled had the pope just fixed things—stop seizing power, clean out the corruption, and correct the problematic teachings and practices.)

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition).

This is overstated. Assuming you're not talking about the anabaptists, there was a general consensus on quite a lot, and a lot of the theologians were more conciliatory than Luther. Calvin wanted to be considered Lutheran and wanted to reconcile, and there were others pushing for unity and moderation (e.g. Melanchthon, Philp of Hesse, Bucer). But Luther and some others were prone to be scathing rather than charitable, and did not think Zwingli's view within the range of being acceptable on the Lord's Supper. (Though Luther did put up with some in-between stances like Melanchthon's or Bucer's, if I remember correctly).

So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

Sort of true, as German Lutherans didn't really have bishops, because the existing bishops in Germany weren't convinced (not sure to what extent this was motivated by the power they'd lose if they did turn Lutheran). Swedish Lutherans do, as the turn to Lutheranism came from the king, allowing the bishops to be preserved.

I'm not sure to what extent presbyterianism was considered to be instituted jure divino. I know that belief was common in England when there were conflicts with the puritans, but I don't know whether that was something earlier, or whether it was merely something they recommended. I was under the impression that they got along pretty well with the Anglicans for a while. (e.g. Vermigli was in England for some time and worked with Cranmer)

Oh, Henry definitely thought he was a theologian; there's an account in MacCulloch's biography of Thomas Cromwell of Henry personally presiding over a heresy trial, all dressed in white, to argue theology with the accused. It wasn't simply about a power grab, I agree; that's why he was so upset when things did not go his way. He wanted this thing, he had convinced himself he was in the right on this thing, he had been promised this thing, why wasn't he getting this thing? That's why Wolsey fell, when his arrogance and power-grabbing weren't balanced out by being able to deliver the divorce for Henry, and why Henry got his pet scholars and theologians to scrabble up a decision that agreed with him on the rightness of the divorce. He couldn't see why the Pope just wouldn't agree with him, so the Pope must be in the wrong, and the genuine Reformers used that to get Henry to implement certain amount of reform in the new English Church.

That's also why Henry was so angry with the likes of Thomas More and the Carthusians; if people with good reputations at home and abroad were disagreeing with him, this was painting him as being wrong. And he was the King, and the King could never be wrong, so they had to pay for that. He was even-handed about burning as heretics both Catholics and Protestants who went too far from what he considered correct:

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life

This agenda had its problems, because the autumn of 1538 proved a switchback of religious extremes, always dangerous for what by now we can call a new evangelical establishment. ...The evangelical clergy were much more clear-cut in their views, more committed by vocation and hence more exposed, than the noblemen. Nevertheless, all were painfully aware of their vulnerability, particularly now that one of their most determined opponents, Stephen Gardiner, had returned from near three years of embassy in France, vigilant for any opportunity to arouse the King’s suspicions of evangelical proceedings. The evangelicals’ strategy to cover their backs was to show themselves as severe as possible to those on their more radical flank.

In any case they saw the persecution of Anabaptists as a necessary and congenial task to protect godly religion, as was apparent when the threat first appeared in 1535 ...Radical activity, it turned out, had extended to a printed English tract challenging orthodox views on the nature of Jesus Christ. Cromwell acted straight away, appointing vice-gerential commissioners from the areas around London where the threat was most acute; the commissioners were balanced between evangelicals and conservatives. Burnings of Anabaptists followed in the capital and in Colchester.

Alongside that campaign was an affair potentially far more dangerous to the evangelical cause, because it involved one of their own, a former don of Queens’ Cambridge called John Lambert alias Nicholson. In 1531, when the old Church leadership was still fighting its corner, Convocation singled Lambert out for prosecution alongside such figures of the future establishment as Hugh Latimer. By winter 1536 it was Cranmer and Latimer who found themselves constrained to get Lambert imprisoned by Chancellor Audley for sounding off about prayer to saints. Now, in autumn 1538, Lambert confronted a prominent London evangelical and royal chaplain, John Taylor, with outspoken scepticism about the bodily presence of Christ in eucharistic bread and wine. Taylor called on Robert Barnes to help him defend a real-presence theology which avoided papal error (Barnes was, after all, the most obvious and authentic Lutheran in all England), and he then brought in Cranmer. The Archbishop prudently put Lambert in confinement again – but all in vain: fatally convinced of his own rightness, Lambert appealed to the King to hear his case.

This was a disastrous misjudgement. Henry’s customary inclination to occupy himself with theology when lacking a wife made him take a particular interest in the case, and his mood was currently veering towards the conservative end of his volatile spectrum. That was apparent from a new royal proclamation on religion: a personal public intervention, sidelining his Vice-Gerent, who one might have thought had already produced enough regulation for the Church less than two months before. The proclamation followed up various of Cromwell’s orders, and repeated condemnations of Anabaptism and Becket, but it also imposed censorship on the printing press, including unauthorized versions of the Bible, and it expressly forbade clergy to marry – a reaction to the fact that in southern England a number of clergy were doing just that (not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife Margarete, lurking obscurely in one of his palaces in Kent).

Even if we did not possess a draft of this proclamation emended in the King’s own hand, the general shapelessness and theological incoherence of the final version is redolent of brusque royal papering-over of disagreements among his bishops. Worse still for John Lambert, this document was issued on 16 November as part of the theatrics in the most high-profile heresy trial that early Tudor England had seen, with Lambert himself and King Henry as joint and opposed stars of the proceedings. The Supreme Head of the Church of England chose to preside himself over the event in Westminster Hall, symbolically clad in white, with his bishops merely as assistants to undertake the theological detail of prosecution. Cromwell’s only substantial part was to house the condemned prisoner, presumably at The Rolls, before Lambert was taken to the stake at Smithfield on 22 November: the same fate as Forest had suffered there six months before, but for polar-opposite beliefs.

The whole Lambert business hugely embarrassed John Foxe when he wrote it up in Acts and Monuments, given that it implicated some of his chief Protestant heroes in burning a man who looked in retrospect like a good Protestant. Cranmer in particular has come in for plenty of abuse for inconsistency among later writers. Yet the Archbishop’s own theology of the eucharist at the time was opposed to the views of Lambert, who may also have affirmed some real radicalism on infant baptism and the nature of Christ, and the Lutheran princes of Germany expressed no disapproval of the condemnation. Cromwell kept his counsel. Two days later, effectively in a continuation of the same theatre, Bishop Hilsey returned to Paul’s Cross to deliver a definitive exposure and mockery of the Holy Blood of Hailes, this time with the relic on hand as his visual aid – in careful pairing with this symbol of old error, new error was represented by four immigrant Anabaptist prisoners standing beside the pulpit bearing their heretics’ faggots, preparatory to burning at the stake. The occasion was a necessary act of damage limitation for the evangelical establishment in relation to King Henry.

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