Superb post Dick, thank you. Very helpful to understand something of Parker’s academic credentials and the Christian Humanist tradition. Keep 'em coming, friend.
http://www.wargamer.com/forums/smiley/toppieplus.gif
(Not entirely sure what that means, but I’m going to pretend it means approval for the ongoing topic. 
)
Thanks Drew and Jason – very kind of you of you both. Continued support until this is finished is much appreciated; any praise only goes to my head for a very short time these days. (I’m at work tomorrow and have to have a tooth out on Thursday but will try to get this finished by Friday, or at least by Sunday, while I’m still inspired).
Before looking at the influence of Erasmus, I first want to look at the influence of Martin Bucer who was Parker’s academic colleague at Cambridge during the reign of the Protestant boy King Edward VI (mea culpa! - I said ‘Oxford’ incorrectly in my past post and stand self corrected; it seems that Parker was also a Cambridge man). Among the Continental Reformers, Bucer has a well deserved reputation for moderation. He was early on influenced by the writings of Erasmus that advocated moderate, Ecumenical and peaceful reform based on consensus over essentials and agreeing to differ in a spirit of charity over details.
Bucer was originally based in Strasbourg and from there he influenced Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican doctrines and practices. His time of authority in Strasbourg is notable in that although he was a Magisterial Protestant, he banished Anabaptists rather than having them killed – which was an improvement on the record of his fellow Reformers.
In the early Reformation he was noted as a conciliator when he acted as a mediator between the two leading reformers, Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, who differed on the doctrine of the Eucharist. Later, Bucer sought agreement on common articles of faith between the Reformers. He also believed that the Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire could be convinced to join the Reformation. Through a series of conferences organised by Charles V, he tried to unite Protestants and Catholics to create a German national church separate from Rome.
In 1549, Bucer was exiled to England, where, under the guidance of Thomas Cranmer, he was able to influence the second revision of the Book of Common Prayer. He died in Cambridge, England, at the age of 59. Although his ministry did not lead to the formation of a new denomination, many Protestant denominations have claimed him as one of their own. He is remembered as an early pioneer of ecumenism’.
With all this in mind we can imagine Bucer having a formative influence on the instinct for moderation in the young Matthew Parker – and Parker was named by Bucer as one of the two executors of his estate when he died in England in broken health at the age of 52.
I have found no explicit or implicit evidence to suggest that Bucer had Universalist sympathies. There is one thing I know that, perhaps, strikes me as telling about Bucer’s theological; sympathies. In the first revision of Cramner’s Book of Common Prayer the Service for the Burial of the Dead included the rite of Holy Communion and the offering of prayers for the dead, as in the Catholic rite. It was apparently Bucer that influenced Cramner to drop these from the service of the second revision so as to bring Anglican practice more in line with Reformed tradition. Now I understand that Holy Communion and prayers for the dead at a burial service were (and are) open to abuse – they can lead people to think that somehow their prayers can curry favour with God to alter His judgements, and they can even lead to a sort of fetish like, ancestor worship type mindset. However, although neither Holy Communion nor Prayers for the Dead during the Burial Service are part of my tradition, I do think that both practices, undertaken properly, can be very beautiful in expressing the solidarity of the living and the dead in both the Old Adam and the New Adam – and these are truly Universalist sentiments. That Bucer felt so strongly about their suppression suggests to me that he was not a hopeful Universalist. I wouldn’t want to make too strong an issue out of this; it’s impossible to say one way or the other, but I don’t think we have any clues about him being a Universalist at heart, and his suggestions for the revision of the Burial Service could be construed as suggesting the contrary.
All the best
Dick
Drew - just to speak up for MArtin Bucer, I note that in the early part of this thread you made the follwing quotation from him -
**The following quote from Martin Bucer is telling:
If you immediately condemn anyone who doesn’t quite believe the same as you do as forsaken by Christ’s Spirit, and consider anyone to be the enemy of truth who holds something false to be true, who, pray tell, can you still consider a brother? I for one have never met two people who believed exactly the same thing. This holds true in theology as well.
Bucer wrote this in 1530, after trying in vain to mediate between Luther and Zwingli over various differences.
(Source: Greschat, Martin (2004), Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 0-664-22690-6 . Translation from the original Martin Bucer: Ein Reformator und seine Zeit, Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich, 1990.)**
And this places him in the tradition of Erasmus (see next) although it is not on its own sufficient proof of hopeful Univeralsim on his part.
All the best old chum
Dick
I need to say something about Erasmus now. Erasmus of Rotterdam was the foremost Northern European Christian Humanist of the Reformation period. I’ve already linked him to the English Reformation – and he is a very important figure to account for in deciding whether Parker could have been motivated by secret Universalist sympathies in abrogating the 42nd Article. So here is a sketch of what I know about Erasmus.
Erasmus influence on the broad Northern Christian Humanist tradition – for whom his ‘’Praise of Folly’ was a much loved classic - on Anglican tradition, on the Reformed tradition of Martin Bucer, and latterly on the Anabaptist Spiritual Tradition (and through them on the Quakers), on the Socinians, and on the Protestant Armenian tradition is well attested. His influence on political thought in the concept of European Community is also acknowledged by many today (and celebrated currently by the EEC funded ‘Project Erasmus’).
Erasmus’ biting ‘Satires’ on the abuses of Late Medieval Catholicism – the sale of indulgences, the monastic retreat from the world into an easy life etc – were one of the key factors that motivated the Reformation; indeed they were perhaps as influential as Luther’s promulgation of his 39 Theses. Certainly it was a reading of the Satires that first inspired the young Thomas Cranmer to enlist in the cause of Reform.
At first Erasmus supported Luther, but Erasmus dreamed of peaceful Reform of the Church, and of an inclusive/comprehensive Church in which all Christians could agree upon essentials, but exercise charity in agreeing to differ about the details. Erasmus never fully specified what the essentials of doctrine were; but it seems that what mattered to him most was imitation of Christ in a life of gentle self giving.
As well as a man of letters and a scholar of the Greek and Roman classics, Erasmus was also a great biblical scholar. He produced the ‘Textus Receptus’ of the Greek version of the New Testament – based on only six manuscripts out of the hundred or more available to scholars today. His Greek text was not entirely complete and he had to fill in the missing bits with translations from the Latin Vulgate - but it was a start. He also wrote paraphrases of his edition of the Greek New Testament which were translated into English and were in common use by the early, pre-Elizabethan, Anglican Church (in which his ’Satires’ were also loved). Matthew Parker would have known both texts well.
(Note: in an earlier post I sated that ‘regarding the ambiguous meaning of ‘aionos’ in New Testament Greek, D.P. Walker states that Thomas Burnett (c.1635–1715), an Anglican Theologian connected with the Cambridge Platonists and ‘others’ – presumably other associates of the Cambridge Platonists - argued ‘with some success, that the word used for eternal in Matthew XXV and other crucial texts, need not mean more than age-long…”(‘Decline of Hell’, p.7). Burnett is writing more the a hundred years after the Convocation met to establish the39 Articles – but this does not mean that the issue was unknown earlier’. I have not been able to find evidence that Erasmus was aware of this distinction in his lexical labours on the Textus Receptus – but who knows? This is an issue that the scholars on this site may well be able to help with. Any takers?)
Erasmus actually stayed in England during the reign of Henry VIII, at a time before the English Reformation had gathered any momentum. He became firm friends with his fellow Catholic Christian Humanist Sir Thomas Moore who was then Lord Chancellor of England. He also advised Dean Colet of St Pauls on Colet’s lectures about St Paul’s Epistles in the original Greek tongue.
As the Continental Reformation gathered an all too violent momentum, Erasmus and Luther fell out irreconcilably. The key issue was Justification by Faith. Luther, working from the theology of St Augustine of Hippo – he had been an Augustinian monk - argued that the human will was powerless. Erasmus begged to differ. He respected Augustine but placed another of the Fathers above him in terms of esteem and soundness of doctrine; namely, Origen the Father of Christian Universalism. From Origen Erasmus argued for a synergistic understanding of salvation – that this entails collaboration between the Human and Divine wills, and therefore it is wrong to speak too simply about the powerlessness/bondage of the Human will. A bitter falling out ensued, with bitter invective and counter-invective exchanged.
Origen was much in vogue amongst the Christian Humanists. Erasmus claimed that Origen’s metaphysical speculations about the pre-existence of souls, the Final Restoration of All in Christ etc., were of little interest to him. Rather he admired Origen for other virtues–
• First, for his doctrine of the (limited) freedom of the human will
• Second, as the prototype for the Christian Humanist scholars – Origen was the first truly significant Christian scholar and compiled a massive compendium of the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek using comparison of multiple divergent texts to establish the best reading.
• Third as the systematiser of the threefold method of interpreting scripture according to the literal level, the moral level and the allegorical level of meaning in any specific text. I may get round to doing a supplementary post on his topic before moving on from the Elizabethan age to the 39 Articles in the context of later Anglican history. Suffice to say at the moment that Erasmus followed Origen in his interpretive methods. Luther also paid attention to the allegoric meaning of scriptural passages sometimes, but Calvin poured scorn on this method preferring the clear sense of the literal level of scripture.
• Fourth as a model of good rhetorical style – and the teaching of good rhetorical style was a key feature of the Christian Humanist education programme.
Well this is what Erasmus claimed – but perhaps he was being less than open about his interest in Origen’s metaphysical speculations – at least regarding the Restoration of All Things in Christ. I note the following from D.P. Walker’s ‘The Decline of Hell’ (p. 75) –
‘’…Erasmus of course was far too prudent to make any pronouncements about the eternity of hell. Indeed when he was criticised for the following passage in his ‘Enchiridon’:
The flame in which that rich feaster in the Gospel is tortured, and the torments of hell, about which the poets have written much, are nothing but the perpetual anxiety of mind which accompanies habitual sin
He replied, not very convincingly, that he was writing only of remorse in this life,
Nor was there then any doubt in my mind about the fire of Gehenna
But the whole tone of his evangelical philosophy of Christ, and his great admiration for Origen, might easily lead disciples to reject eternal torment.
So what is going on here? We can only speculate within the bounds of the possible. Erasmus may well have been a hopeful Universalist emulating the caution of his master Origen on this matter. I refer agina to D.P. Walker(p.5 this time) –
**The peculiar dangers attached to any discussion of the eternity of hell were such that they produced a theory of double truth: there is a private, esoteric doctrine, which must be confined to a few intellectuals, because its effect on the mass of people will be morally disastrous; and a public, exoteric doctrine, which these same intellectuals must preach, although they do not believe it. The second kind of truth is not, of course, a truth at all, but a useful, pragmatically justifiable lie. This secrecy was already being advocated by Origen, who, when discussing hell in his ‘Contra Celsum’, forbore to go beyond the mere statement that it was a place of punishment, because:
To ascend beyond this is not expedient, for the sake of those who are with difficulty restrained, even by fear of eternal punishment, from plunging into any degree of wickedness, and into the flood of evils which result from sin**
We today may find Origen’s argument depressing in its expediency – but it was the only show in town for magisterial Christians of a Universalist temper in the West until moral reasoning from the psychology of fear started to be questioned in the Eighteenth Century. I think Erasmus may well have been playing at the same game of ‘double truth’.
Open confession of Universalist sympathies would also have been the end of the road for Erasmus who had no enthusiasm for unnecessary martyrdom. He saw his friend Thomas Moore’s death in a different noble cause as pure ‘waste’. Indeed there appears to have been a strong tradition of dissembling during the dangerous times of Reformation Europe – with people outwardly appearing to conform to ‘orthodox’ beliefs (as defined by the religious system of power in which they lived and moved) but inwardly holding different beliefs. Elizabeth avoided death under Mary by outwardly confessing Catholic beliefs. Thomas Moore dissembled in silence and prevarication until he could no longer hold his peace about his views on Henry VIIIs divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Therefore, I think this is another good reason, in supplement to ‘double truth’ to the disparity between Erasmus’s utterances about hell noted above.
(Incidentally, the tradition of religious dissembling went under the title of ‘Nicodemite dissembling’ first named by Calvin in his Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites after Nicodemus who in John’s Gospel comes to see his Lord Jesus by night while remaining a pious member of the Jewish Sanhedrin by day).
Matthew Parker – and even perhaps Elizabeth - when viewed in this context could well have been Universalists holding to a standard of double truth out of expediency, and perhaps even Nicodemites if they feared that open Universalism could mean that their supporters would lose respect for them and unseat/kill them. We cannot prove any of this – but I have made the case as best as I can.
Finally, all of this dissembling and double truth telling in a dangerous time took its toll and could, I believe, have people living with split consciousness. For example, Thomas Moore, who in his fantasy ‘Utopia’ seems to recognise religious toleration as a good thing in an ideal world, in the real world, as Lord Chancellor of England, was a fierce persecutor of English Protestants (and pilloried for this as a villain ,with some cause, by John Foxe in his Book of Protestant Martyrs). Erasmus, the champion of toleration, in a few passages seems to advocate persecution of those who leave the comprehensive Church as sectarians.
John Jewell was another man with a split mind. I referred to him in an earlier post. He was Bishop of Salisbury during Elizabeth’s reign and an accomplished Humanist scholar. IN 1569 he wrote guardedly in support of his fellow Humanist scholar, the German Gerhard Jam Voss who in 1569was the first to cast doubt on the authorship of the Athanasian Creed – thus denting the authority of the Creed used in Elizabethan England to support the burning of heretics – as we shall see. However Jewel was also a strong supporter of the death penalty for heretics.
Christian Humanists were not always moderate people – but the general tendency of the movement, in the spirit of Erasmus, was towards moderation and tolerance.
All the best
Dick
Hi Drew (and Hi Paul Corinthians - havent; heard from you for a couple of days and hope you are still following) –
I’m home from work now (early start, early finish) – I’m just going to chill out for the afternoon and then will get going with this thread again in the early evening.
Any feedback from you as to how the argument is developing at this point is appreciated. I hope I’ve made valid distinctions in assessing the evidence between what we can be certain about, what is probable, what is possible, and what is plain ridiculous when we are talking about this fascinating area of history (at least for us Christian Universalists). I hope I am beginning to make a reasonable case for thinking that arguments suggesting Matthew Parker may have been a Universalist are not ridiculous; rather they wobble somewhere between the possible and the probable (indeed I’m beginning to think that the idea that Elizabeth nursed Universalist sympathies may be possible, despite her career as a persecutor from 1575).
You’ll just have to trust me about sources – because I am giving you a general sketch rather than the real McCoy here. If you would particularly like to question me about my sources on specific points of interest, do ask and I will supply them.
Before assessing the changes to Cranmer’s 42 Articles in any detail (at last!!)I think that I/we now need to pause to reflect on why we cannot expect the evidence from this period to yield positive answers. It’s not only that the evidence is fragmentary; it’s also to do with the lack of personal disclosure expected of most public figures at this time even in their personal correspondence (and there are sound reasons for this – expedient self protection, and also the lack of a clear language of personal revelation at this time).
I think perhaps I should also say a little more about the ‘double truth’ doctrine of early Universalism – we may find this troubling, D.P. Walker certainly stands in harsh moral judgement on it; but I think he is being anachronistic and we are being anachronistic if we feel as he does. Also, on reflection, I certainly feel that Walker’s use of the words ‘esoteric’ and ‘intellectual’ in his passage on Origen quoted in my last post needs to be qualified.
With my dentist appointment tomorrow – which I had conveniently put to the back of my mind since I don’t like having teeth pulled!!! – I think it unlikely that I will have everything completed by the end of Friday. But I do hope to have the argument about the abrogation of the 42nd in its original Elizabethan context settled, as far as is humanly possible.
After this I want to continue the story – mainly looking at how the Athanasian Creed was used by the Tudor and early Stuart Anglican Church as a charter for persecution, and how (some) Anglicans eventually learnt that this was wrong at the same time that they questioned the authority of this creed (this links to the English Civil War and its aftermath, the development of Religious Toleration from the late seventeenth in England and its Anglican supporters and detractors, the changes to the prayer book made by the Episcopalians in 1801, and the prosecution for blasphemy of an Anglican hopeful Universalist clergyman in the mid- Victorian period using the Athanasian creed as a pretext (Farrar alludes to this prosecution in the sermon I have already quoted).
An important sub-theme here is the different arguments put forward by Anglicans and others during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The eighteenth century arguments against hell are based on reason – threats do not produce good behaviour, disproportionate punishment eventually breed hatred of a tyrant and rebellion rather than compliance. This is in keeping with the Age of Reason/Enlightenment and part of the rational/classical ethos.
In the nineteenth century the arguments against hell are based more on feeling and imagination – ‘How can a loving father do such things to his children? How can we live happy knowing that or nearest and dearest departed may be suffering eternal torment?’ Etc. This is in keeping with the ethos/emphasis of Romanticism.
At the end of the thread I’d like to sum arguments about whether an Anglican today -,of whatever shade or party, and whether ordained or lay - can in good conscience describe themselves as Universalist (given the 39 articles, The Athanasian Creed etc; to which, of course, I hope to give a resounding ‘yes!!!’)
I think I will deal with this part of the argument on unused thread on the ‘Athanasian Creed, the Damnatory clauses and EU’ Drew started for me at Ecclesiology. I will refer everyone to the very full discussion of the theological issues regarding the Creed that has already taken place for excellent background reading. But will confine myself to the history outlined above in the new thread.
The new thread should not be as complex as this one, of which it will be a continuation, and I hope to have it ‘nailed good and proper’ by the end of next week. That’ll give everyone, including me, a time to take a breather between thread topics.
I hope you are all still on board and appreciate your support.
All the best
Dick
Still very much on board, Dick, but have been too busy to respond. I’m not pinning my hopes on Parker and Elizabeth being universalists, but it is fascinating that your research is leaning towards that possibility.
Hi Drew –
I always know you are there!! A quick word about primary sources for Matthew Parker
First he left a substantial library to Corpus Christi College on his death in 1575 –
**The Parker Library is the rare books and manuscripts library for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is known throughout the world due to its invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the core of which were bequeathed to the College by Archbishop Matthew Parker.
The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint venture run by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library and Stanford University Libraries in the United States of America.The main goal of the project is to digitise all of the medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library and to be the first project that seeks to make an entire library publicly accessible on the web. The project is funded by the Mellon Foundation.**
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Lib … ti_College
I note from the catalogue that his collection includes texts of both Erasmus and the Church Fathers, and plenty of texts concerning the History of the English Church – Venerable Bede, Alfred, Anglo Saxon Chronicle etc… I could do a proper scholarly trawl here, but I’m pretty content that this all accords with the picture that emerges from biographical information.
Second we have his correspondence from his time as Archbishop that was all published in the nineteenth century by The Parker Society, ‘For the Publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the Reformed English Church’. This society was formed in 1840 and disbanded in 1855 when its work was completed. The current Church Society gives the opinion that –
…The stimulus for the foundation of the (Parker) society was provided by the nineteenth-Century Tractarians. Some members of this movement, e.g., R.H. Froude in his Remains of 1838-9, spoke most disparagingly of the English Reformation: ‘Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more’. Keble could add in 1838, ‘Anything which separates the present Church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good’. Protestants within the Church of England therefore felt the urgent need to make available in an attractive and accessible form the works of the leaders of the English Reformation. To many it seemed that the Protestant foundations of the English Church were being challenged like never before. Thus the society represented a co-operation between traditional High Churchmen and evangelical churchmen, both of whom were committed to the Reformation teaching on justification by faith. Subscribers were also involved in the erection of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford, although this was as much anti-Roman Catholic as anti-Tractarian. The society had about seven thousand subscribers who paid one pound each year from 1841 to 1855; thus for fifteen pounds the subscribers received fifty three volumes – the General Index and the Latin originals of the 1847 ‘Original Letters relative to the English Reformation’ being special subscriptions. Twenty-four editors were used and the task of arriving at the best text was far from easy. The choice of publications was controversial and some authors and works were unfortunate not to be included in PS volumes. While some of the volumes have been superseded by more recent critical editions, today this collection remains one of the most valuable sources for the study of the English Reformation.
See -
churchsociety.org/churchman/ … namond.pdf
The Church Society – a very Conservative body within the Church of England - is involved in a project to re-publish the volumes first published by the Parker Society to encourage the faithful today. They are keen, like the original Parker Society, to give the lie to the idea that the Elizabethan Settlement, of which I shall write very soon, was a compromise between the ‘extremes’ of Lutheranism/Zwingli-ism and not a compromise between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism. My view is that those that stress the former view (Conservative Protestants) are as much guilty of historical myth making as those who stress the latter view (Anglo-Catholics), The Elizabethan settlement in Parker’s Prayer Bok with its 38 Articles was deliberately vague, and it always meant different things to different people (as he was content to be ‘all things to all men’).
However, the unwitting testimony of the publication of Parker’s correspondence by Conservative Protestant Anglicans must be that there is nothing in this correspondence to disturb their view. I hope you agree with this – and on these grounds I take it as read that I do not need to trawl through his letters etc, for new evidence.
Likewise I take it as read that Dean Farrar would have researched Parker’s correspondence before writing his Eternal Hope sermons and that he was well aware the arguments and historical myths/conjectures of Conservative Protestant Anglican’s when he wrote -
To say that it (the 42nd article) was struck out because the Anabaptists were no longer prominent is simply an unsupported conjecture. The conjecture may be true, but even if so I look on the elimination of the Article as distinctly overruled by a watchful Providence; since it is the province of the Church to decide only in matters of faith, and no church has a right to legislate in those matters of opinion on which wise and holy men have, in all ages, been content to differ, seeing that we have no indisputable voice of Revelation to guide our conclusions respecting them.
(see my first post in this revived thread - a couple of days ago)
A lot more is known about Christianity in the Renaissance and the Reformation today than was known in Farrar’s day – of how messy and disparate and fascinating Christianity was then (as it is today). This has allowed me to make my own conjectures (but I hope these are stated with due modesty rather than as historical myths- or ‘truths’ that go beyond the evidence). In the end we have to focus on ‘the watchful providence’ of how the abrogation of the 42nd article worked itself out in our history –this is the truly important thing in my view.
What I will do now is briefly address the issues I highlighted in my last post, and then crack on with an analysis of the Elizabethan Settlement. I think I will also start and Appendix thread for the two Ecclesiology threads that are developing here – I have other very relevant and interesting bits and bobs that the committed may well want to read and comment on; but I do not want this material to interrupt the main narrative thread
All the best
Dick
Correction to the above - I meant to say that the Church Society’s Conservaitve view of the Elizabethan Settlement is that it was a compromise between Lutheranism/Zwingli-ism and Calvinism (a narrow range).
In my view the C of E today - which is the C of E that matters most - has progressed from the Elizabethan Church through Acts of Toleration and through learning from its history as a persecuting Church and repenting of this. Today the Anglican compromise - in all but the rite fo Adult Baptism - is actually more like a compromise between Catholicism and Anabaptism.
All the best
Dick
Two thoughts (which I may expand on in a supplementary thread)
First a word about Walker’s scruples over Origen’s doctrine of double truth
Second a word about private and public selves during the Reformation
Regarding Walker – his book ‘The Decline of Hell’, is a fine study. However he does sometimes seem harsh in his value judgements. I’m convinced that Origen did not see the final truth of Christian Universalism as a matter just for ‘intellectuals’. Obviously Origen was a gifted intellectual but the pursuit of theology was/is never simply a matter of intellectual pursuit in the Eastern tradition, Study must always be allied to participation in the liturgy of the Church, and a life of contemplative prayer and ascetic discipline. I’m sure that what Origen meant by his double truth doctrine is that some things cannot be disclosed to people new to the faith, and should be kept for people more mature in the faith – and this goes for both the learned and the ‘simple’. He was concerned that new believers might hastily draw the wrong conclusions (like ‘since we are all going to be saved we can just let it all hang out and do what we like’).He was no intellectual snob. As he said to the Pagan Neo-Platonist Celsus – who was certainly a snob; ‘You prepare fine food for the elite. We (Christians) cook for the masses’. We differ from Origen today because, in my view, we have a better understanding of what motivates people to live a good life – and this is rarely done by having them internalise a psychology of religious terror from bad or partial religious teaching.
On another thread AllanS has intriguingly suggested that perhaps C.S. Lewis came round to thinking of Hell in terms of ‘double truth’. Allan wrote that
**There’s a suggestive incident in Dawn Treader where the crew mutiny against Caspian. He quashes the revolt by saying only a select few (the elect?) would be chosen to continue the mystical voyage into the Utter East. All the rest would be left behind. Upon hearing this, all the crew but one begged to be chosen, and were reinstated.
I cannot help but wonder if Lewis thought the threats of being shut out etc in the Gospels were designed to have a similar effect.**
(If you are reading this Allan – Ta for the insight! It is far more relevant here than in the context I originally suggested)
Regarding private and public selves – if you look at the portrait of Erasmus by Holbein he seems to have an almost mask like composure (and the same is true of many portraits from the period of many public figures). The wearing of a public mask was vital for those in power or who moved in the circles of the powerful; for death or banishment through incurring disfavour was always a terrible risk. So people played there cards closely to their chests (and Universalists of the time would not have deliberately courted martyrdom over a matter of private opinion). We do get fleeting glimpses of private selves – in the intimacy of the miniature paintings and in the coded messages of poems and private devotions (but these are always open to a variety of interpretations). However, we will not gain a window into a person’s soul of this type and from this period by looking at their public correspondence– apart from a few unique individuals, of whom I believe Luther was one.
All the best
Dick
I am also still very fascinated by all you are posting here. I have been silent because
- Just reading along
- Intermittent Net issues
But this is really good stuff so do not worry. I haven’t lost interest in the slightest. 
Hi Dick, I’m still reading along too and just about keeping up. Fascinating stuff about the influence of Erasmus and the need for caution in putting forward views which may be deemed heretical in those days. 
Hi Paul and Drew -
Lovely to hear from both of my encouragers - and keep it up; you are vital for my motivation, adn I thank you warmly
Paul - that’s a great quotation from ‘Abraham Lincoln’ you have as your motto (and the real Abraham Lincoln was a very fine and humble man who America should be proud of and revere above some of the more ‘certain of the destiny of America as the elect nation of God’ figures in its history - in my view).
Drew - yes you had to be very cautious. And ‘heresy’ was a slippery category in the fast moving falling outs about ever finer points of doctrine that was a feature of the Reformation (and this often went hand in hand with fast moving shifts in balance of power and alliances). And never mind hopeful Universalism, the idea of religious tolerance was itself often suspect as a damnable doctrine.
The context of martyrdom during the Reformation was also far more ambiguous than it was to the Christians in the first centuries of the Church. The early Christian martyrs knew that they were making a clear protest and witness against the brutality of Roman power, hoping to change hearts and minds thereby (at least this was the case of the less egocentric martyrs – I am more suspicious of some of the exhibitionist enthusiasts for martyrdom whose stories I have read). But in the reformation it was Christian killing Christian. The blood of martyrs was no longer the seed of the Church, but the seed of further sectarian violence.
Paul and Drew- I know both of you have a keen personal interest in the matters of which I am writing - and that’s wonderful motivation for me. Understand that I hurtle along at a fine old pace because I want to set down an overview; and also, because of my personal situation, I’m never sure when my time will be severely restricted again - so I’m making the most of this window of opportunity.
So take in the scope of my narrative - it will remain on site for you to ponder the details at leisure, and you can always, always get back to me with questions - I hope you know that I will try my best to give you an honest answer.
All the best friends
Dick
That’s enough background…
And so in 1558, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, hailed as the ‘New Deborah’ after the tragic reign of her Catholic half sister ‘Bloody Mary’. And Elizabeth’s reign was to last for more than forty years until her death as a frail old woman in 1603.
Again I must emphasise that her basic instinct was always for peace and tolerance. Mary had burned 300 Protestants at the stake in three terrible years. No one died under Elizabeth for their faith until 1575 – and she exacted no reprisals on the Marian persecutors. In addition she was initially a conciliator on the international stage. She had no real appetite for war and foreign adventures – unlike her father Henry VIII who it seems, at least in his prime, would wake up each spring with his blood up and full of heat for new battles. It was only new and threatening developments in the International situation that persuaded her to engage in war with the mighty Spanish Empire (with great success) and colonial repression in Ireland (with tragic consequences).
Elizabeth’s first big challenge on coming to the throne was to sort out the religious mess left by Mary (in an age when religion and politics were identical). As I wrote in an earlier post –
Elizabeth was in a difficult situation and was not fully confident of her position until late in her reign after the defeat o the Spanish Armada when she finally became ‘Gloriana Virginia,’ the Virgin Queen beloved by her people. At first she had to play different parties off against each other in order to survive, and also take care not to offend continental Princes of various religious sympathies so as to keep open the prospect of a marriage match and build defensive alliances on the basis of this guessing game. She also had to cope with religious pluralism and the need to prevent the sectarian violence that was all too common on the Continent.
I will add that her position was also difficult because of the slur attached to her name that she was illegitimate; the child of the Protestant whore Anne Boleyn who had supplanted the rightful Queen Katherine of Aragon and had eventually been tried and executed explicitly on charges of adultery and implicitly on charges of witchcraft. This slur was made good use of by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots later in Elizabeth’s reign.
The solution thrashed out by Elizabeth and her supporters and advisers in both the Lords and the Commons to the politico-religious quandary has become known as the Elizabethan Settlement. The Act of Settlement/Supremacy passed in 1558-9 made Elizabeth – rather than the Pope – the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This meant that she was empowered to appoint Archbishops and Bishops, and therefore had control of the reins of Church politics. However, regarding matters of Church doctrine it was agreed that while she should be consulted on these, she should not interfere unnecessarily in them (and most of the time she kept to her part of this bargain – she only influenced two of the 39 Articles explicitly, for example). The revision of the Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer with its 42 Articles by Archbishop Matthew Parker in Convocation with Bishops Cox and Gheast was the next stage of consolidation.
The ‘total package’ that was the Elizabethan Settlement rapidly came to be known as the Anglican ‘via media’ (‘middle way’). Richard Hooker was later to describe this in a ringing phrase as the ‘Golden Mediocrity’ (mediocre ‘in them days’ was used to describe the virtuous and moderate middle ground or ‘golden mean’, and had none of its modern idolatrous connotations of ‘second best’). By Elizabeth’s time the actual influence of Erasmus on doctrinal matters was on the wane – but Erasmus rhetoric of moderation still exerted a powerful influence on the formation of this ‘Golden Mediocrity’.
As I have suggested earlier, the various factions that existed in the Church of England then, and the slightly different factions that exist in the Church of England now, all have different interpretations of this ‘Golden Mean’ – is it set between Catholicism and Calvinism; between Lutheranism and Calvinism; between Calvinism and Radicalism etc…? My view, as you will have guessed, is that it was actually a piece of benign religious/political fudge to privilege the Peace of the realm over any factional understandings of Truth. It was indeed – ‘All things to all men’.
I note that in the early 1950’s a very influential theory – since discredited – was put forward by the historian Sir John Neale concerning the Settlement. He argued that Elizabeth’s real intention had been to preserve the old Catholic faith of England in everything excepting loyalty to the Pope and the restoration of Monastic lands – but she was pushed into a more radical reforming programme by a Puritan pressure group in Parliament known as ‘The Puritan Choir’. He noted hesitations in legislation in support of his thesis. However these hesitations are now almost unanimously put down to ‘government politicking round Catholic peers and bishops until a Lords majority could be constructed to pass the settlement’ (see ‘ The History Today Companion to British History’, p.282).
I go with the current consensus – Elizabeth wanted to avoid strife with English Catholics (while hoping that the old religion in its Roman form would die out in a generation). She needed to appease the powerful Calvinist lobby without bowing to them. And her own instincts, like Matthew Parker’s, were basically Lutheran softened by Christian Humanism. And this is the context for the shaping of the 39 Articles to which I will now turn (at last!!!) - obviously, with special attention to the abrogation of the 42nd Article of Cranmer’s Prayer Book.
A final word at this stage. Just to give you a seed thought about the subject that I will turn to after considering the Articles – that is, the Elizabethan church as a persecuting Church – I’d like to briefly introduce you to the character of John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist. I remember perusing Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ (commonly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’) as a child in a public library. It filled me with terror – all of those grisly, seemingly sadomasochistic depictions of deaths most horrid in graphic illustrations. The book begins with the stories of the early Christian Martyrs; then fast forwards to the martyrs of pre-reformation Protestantism (the Waldensians on the Continent, and the Lollards in England); then forwards to the persecutions of the new Reformed Christians under the still Catholic Henry VIII (with Sir Thomas Moore as the arch-villain); and finally forwards to the martyrs during the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’. The book has often been used as a rallying point for the fears of Protestant fundamentalists – the message seeming to be that persecution was always and only an attribute of Romish Popery . Indeed when John Locke was writing his epistle on Religious Toleration at the end of the seventeenth century he had to employ the collaborative skills of the scholarship of his Dutch Armenian Christian Humanist friends to debunk this myth.
However, for his time Foxe was a radical. Almost alone among magisterial Protestants he bravely protested that the burning of heretics – and indeed the death penalty for heresy – was not a good idea. When a congregation of Anabaptists who had fled to England to escape persecution on the continent were discovered worshipping in secret and tried and condemned in 1575, it was Foxe who bravely pleaded for their lives. It was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and its affect on the public imagination which meant that there was no public stomach for a large scale burning. And it was Foxe, who when two were finally burned at the stake, comforted them in their hour of trial. In addition to this, Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ was a very controversial book at the time. Elizabeth was none too keen on her half-sister Mary, also a Queen of England, being portrayed as a villainess, and Foxe also wanted to commemorate the twenty Anabaptists who had died under Mary, but this was censored. His inclusion of the Lollards in his martyrology was suspect, because like the Anabaptists the Lollards had disobeyed the ‘dread majesty’ of Christian Princes (albeit Catholic ones).
All the best
Dick
I’ll do another post on other significant changes to the Prayer Book; but I’ll not keep you waiting any longer. Let us now consider the Abrogation of the 42nd article in context.
Cranmer’s 42nd Article stated that:
All men shall not be saved at length. They also are worthy of condemnation who endeavour at this time to restore the dangerous opinion that all men, be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pain for their sins a certain time appointed by God’s justice.
The accepted view, which Farrar alludes with a degree of scepticism in ‘Eternal Hope’ (but remains agnostic on), is that this Article seems to be entirely consonant with the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg (1530), one of the documents on which Cranmer’s Articles of 1552 are based. The Confession states in Article 27—‘Of Christ’s Return to Judgment’ – that:
Also they (the Lutherans) teach that, in the consummation of the world (at the last day), Christ shall appear to judge, and shall raise up all the dead, and shall give unto the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting joys; but ungodly men and the devils shall he condemn unto endless torments. They condemn the Anabaptists who think that to condemned men and the devils shall be an end of torments.
The Article from the Augsburg Confession explicitly condemns the Anabaptists – it predates the Munster debacle by three years – but the Anabaptists were already associated, rightly or wrongly, with the Peasant Risings which had been put down ruthlessly by Lutheran Princes egged on by the explosive rhetoric of Martin Luther himself.
Cranmer’s Article, does not explicitly mention the Anabaptists but, the argument goes, it is placed in a sequence of other Articles – also deleted by Parker – which address the fears of Magisterial Protestants about Anabaptists and imply a fear of the repetition of the Munster debacle. These articles condemn the false teaching of –
Millennialism/Chiliasm – the utopian idea that men can set up the Kingdom of God here on earth (the condemnation is a clear swipe at the Messianic kingdom of Munster)
Soul sleep – the idea that the human soul is mortal, dies with the body, and that both await the general Resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Again this idea was anathema to Magisterial Protestants (although Luther had some sympathy with it). First because it might take away some of the deterrent effect of the imagined terrors of Hell by persuading people to think – in superstition- that the wait between death and Judgement could be a very long one, so a period of blessed oblivion could be anticipated before the torment begins. Second – and with this Luther would not have sympathised – it could become part and parcel of an annihilationist doctrine (the wicked are not raised from the dead, only the righteous are).
Perfectionism and Antinomianism – the idea that God’s elect are free from sin in this life and therefore can ‘let it all hang out’; again a condemnation that suggest the Munster debacle. Some of the stories that came out of Munster - of John of Leydon disporting himself with his concubines – are probably fictitious in my view. But the cruel imposition of polygamy by Leydon did give rise to the more lurid stories of unrestrained promiscuity and it is these that Cranmer addressed with his condemnation of antinomian perfectionism. (I note that these ideas – that the elect can do no wrong - have also been current in extreme/distorted manifestations of Calvinism throughout history, by the way).
As the accepted argument continues, Parker and friends felt that the danger of Munster had passed and the Church needed to address more pressing concerns (all conjecture since we have no minutes for the Convocation and no documents of personal reflection on the Convocation’s deliberations from its members). However we do note that articles condemning Anabpatists concerning their position on taking oaths, bearing arms , and on teaching that all goods be held in common were retained (and other articles on the relationship between Church and State all implicitly condemn the Anabaptists). We also note that it was actually the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed that were used as a pretext for continued persecution of Anabaptists eventually (for the teaching of at least some Anabaptist about the Incarnation was deemed heretical as I shall describe in a later post).
I’m sure the explanation about the receding threat /memory of the Munster debacle is a perfectly good explanation for the deleting of the Articles covering Soul Sleep, Chiliasm, and Perfectionism/Antinomianism. However – I may not be a Prince among experts – but I do have a wee problem with this as an explanation for the abrogation of the 42nd article. You see this article condemns Origen’s teaching that all will eventually be saved. As far as I know the Anabaptists at this time were annihilationist; and this teaching was implicitly condemned in Crammers article on Soul Sleep. (It is until the seventeenth century that Anabaptist sects appear – for example, the Dunkers, with explicitly Universalist teachings). I note that, quite properly, article 27 of the Augsburg Confession against the Anabaptists does not condemn Universal Salvation; rather it condemns the doctrine that the torments of men and devils shall have an end – which sounds very much like annihilationism to me. Curious eh?
All the best
Dick
Regarding other changes to the Prayer Book made by Parker in convocation with his brother bishops (and under Elizabeth’s watchful eye)…
First, I list some of the few changes made to the liturgy…
The very last rubric in the Communion service (called the “Black Rubric”) was dropped. This had sought to assure that kneeling during Communion did not in any way imply worship of the elements of the Bread and Wine. Its supression gave leeway to Catholics loyal to the Queen who privately understood communion in terms of transubstantiation and adoration of the Host as the ‘Corpus Christi’ (which is what the rubric implicitly cnodemned). The Thirty Nine Articles speak out against this very understanding of Communion – transubstantiation is not to be taught by Anglican clergy as sound doctrine. But put the two together and the implied message is that while the Catholic understanding of the ‘Mass’ it is not to be taught , each person is allowed to follow their own understanding of Communion in the secrecy of their heart
The prayers/curses against the Pope were dropped from the Litany to conciliate Catholic opinion (and at this time Elizabeth had not, as yet, been excommunicated from the Catholic Church and, I dare say, was not keen on this happening either)
A rubric was added to Morning Prayer prescribing the use of traditional vestments. This went against the Reformed view of vestments commended to Cranmer by Martin Bucer. It is consonant with Elizabeth’s ‘Lutheran’ instincts and was later use by her as a powerful weapon to assert her authority over the Calvinists.
Second a list of other changes to Cranmer’s Articles which are of note to us
Article 20
A preamble was added to Article 20 on the authority of the church, ‘asserting the authority of the Church to decree rites and ceremonies (one of two alterations thought to be made at the explicit request of Elizabeth). This preamble reasserts the Queen’s authority to impose vestments etc, on Calvinist clergy at her will. I’m sure Elizabeth had no sense that the wearing of vestments and the sacrificial understanding of communion are necessary to salvation. For her the vestments issue was simply a sticking point to assert her authority over.
Article 17
However, Article 17 on Predestination did give some leeway to the Calvinists. Cranmer’s version, asserts the election of the saved to salvation, but does not assert the election of the reprobate to damnation .Indeed Cranmer’s article gives a deliberate rebuke to the Reformed view of Predestination when it asserts that the elect cannot know Assurance of their salvation in this life (which became the Calvinist view in the generation after Calvin’s death). Parker and friends kept the Article as Cranmer wrote it – but deleted the rebuke about Assurance. So here was a wonderful piece of fudge that everyone could agree on – at least partially – and no one needed to disagree on. Pure genius!
• The wooly Lutheran influenced believers could agree with it, as could the Humanist pre-Armenian ‘freewillers’. Yes the elect are predestined to salvation but somehow the damned are dammed through their own free choice.
• The Calvinists and Reformed Christians could agree with it. Yes the elect are predestined to salvation – quite so; and although the Article does not state that the reprobate ear also elected to damnation (double predestination), it does not deny this. In addition although the Article does not affirm the Calvinist doctrine of Assurance, it issues no rebuke to those that do. Any moderate, non-sectarian Calvinist could buy into this. The Article is not Reformed, but it is partially Reformed and moving in the right direction.
• The secret Universalist Christians - if they existed - could agree with it. Yes we are all elected to salvation by the inescapable love of God who wills the final Restitution of All in Christ – and whose will cannot ultimately be frustrated.
Article 22
Article 22 against the doctrine of Purgatory – as Farrar notes in Eternal Hope – condemns the ‘Romish’ doctrine of Purgatory; but this leaves the door open for other understanding of Purgatory, at least in theory.
Article 29
Article 29 – ‘On the wicked that eat not the Body of Christ’ was omitted at first from the 39 Articles, and again it is thought this was done at Elizabeth’s explicit request (hence the 39 Articles were originally the 38 Articles). This Article argues that a wicked person receiving Holy Communion can derive no benefits from it, for their wickedness means that although they eat the Bread at Communion this does not become the body of Christ. I’ve always found controversy over Sacraments baffling – but as far as I understand it – (and stay with me on this because I think it leads to an important point)
• The Catholic view is that at Communion the whole substance of the Bread and the Wine are converted into the whole substance of the Body and Blood of Christ and only the appearances remain the same. So in the Catholic view the wicked do indeed eat the Body of Christ at Communion but do so to their condemnation.
• The Lutheran view is that the substance of the Bread and Wine co-exists with the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in Communion. So as with the Catholic view, the Lutheran view is that the wicked do indeed eat of the Body of Christ at communion but do so to their condemnation.
• The Receptionist view, which became the mainstream Anglican view, is that the Bread and the Wine only become the Body and Blood of Christ to those who receive it in faith. So in this view the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ at communion – they are condemned for not coming to Communion in good faith.
• The Calvinist view is that Communion is a memorial meal and the Bread remains Bread –although the Spirit of Christ is present to the Elect at Communion. So again in this view the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ at Communion, and the wicked are condemned anyway by being among the reprobate.
So the two groups of people that Elizabeth was careful not to offend here were the Lutherans abroad, and the Lutheran influenced Anglicans, and the Catholics. She was trying to keep her loyal Catholic subjects on board and, **according to the authoritative entry on the 39 Articles in ‘The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church’, she was also keen not to offend the Lutherans ‘probably in a move to facilitate good diplomatic relations with the Lutheran Princes of Germany’. Is this not curious? Surely if the 42nd article of Cranmer’s prayer book was simply a reworking of the 27th Article of the Augsburg confession she would have been equally cautious about that its abrogation might cause a stumbling block to her wooing of the Lutherans (I hope it’s now clear why I’ve laboured this obscure point!). **
Anyway in 1571 Article 29 was restored bringing the total to 39. Obviously by this point Elizabeth was past caring about delicate sensibilities over sacramental theology.
That’s quite enough on the 39 Articles. Are you still with me?
All good wishes
Dick
Still with you and am very impressed with all the info you have posted. Very appreciative and thankful.
Thanks Paul: you are keeping my spirits up – bless you
So where are we now? Well I hope I’ve been able to suggest to you – as fairly and truthfully as possible -that while there may not be necessary grounds for thinking that Matthew Parker was a secret Universalist – and that his Queen was at least a sympathiser – there are certainly sufficient grounds for thinking this might have been the case.
Likewise with the abrogation of the 42nd Article: there may not be necessary grounds for thinking that the abrogation was done to allow belief in Universal Salvation as a private option – but again, there are certainly sufficient grounds for thinking this.
Are we all agreed here? All for one and one for all? 
I must turn now to a more depressing topic. Seven people were burnt at the stake during Elizabeth’s reign – two Anabaptists and five Arian Unitarians. At one point paranoia about two ‘sects’ that were actually very small in England – namely the Family of Love and the Anabaptists - became epidemic And, very tragically, roughly two hundred and ninety Catholics were also killed – most by beheading, but some by hanging, drawing and quartering and Elizabeth’s reign saw some appalling massacres of Irish Catholics carried out by Sir Walter Raleigh. That’s a pretty stark picture and hard to reconcile with the idea that the Queen was a Universalist sympathiser. But the picture is more complex than my brief sketch suggests – far more complex in fact. And I’d like to spend a little time with you looking at it in more detail (unless you tell me to stop!).
It is hard to ‘read’ Elizabeth. The sources for her reign are – as would be expected of this period –fragmentary and inconclusive. And so much about Elizabeth was about public persona; she gave few clues away about her private self (and, to give her credit, this seems to have made her respectful of the private selves and private beliefs of her fellow human beings). Her public persona was carefully crafted. It is commonplace to observe that Catholic England, before the time of Elizabeth, had been known as ‘Mary’s Isle’ because of the depth of devotion to the Virgin Mary shown there. Old habits die hard, even when the new religion of Protestantism had come to ascendancy. So Elizabeth, in reinventing her public persona as ‘The Virgin Queen’, not only gave justification for her disinclination to marry, but also – whether consciously or not – filled the vacuum left by the suppression of the cult of the ‘Virgin Mother of God’ (this idea was popularised fairly recently by the International hit film about Elizabeth starring Kate Blanchett).
The pageantry and etiquette at court, the allegoric symbolism of court masques, and of court poetry, and of paintings and engravings on the Royal and Imperial themes all underpinned this new cult; as did the carefully staged ‘processions’ of the Queen from town to town in England receiving the loving devotion o f her ‘dear’ people.
If the ‘Elizabeth the cult’ is a block to our access to Elizabeth’s private thoughts, another factor makes it even more difficult to sift evidence about her with over confidence – namely that Elizabeth had some very powerful and influential advisers. She may have been a mighty Christian ‘Prince’ in her own way (she is referred to as ‘Prince’ as often as she is referred to as ‘Queen’ in sources from the time). However she was never a tyrant with absolute power. Elizabethan England was not a representative democracy; but Elizabeth still had to answer to her Parliament and heed the advice of her Privy Council – composed of men like Robert Cecil Lord Burgleigh, and Francis Walsingham who, it seems, could force Elizabeth’s hand to act and speak against her better and her worst instincts when considerations of statecraft/real-politick demanded this.
We need to bear these things in mind when considering Elizabeth’s record as a persecuting Prince/Queen, and the Elizabethan Church’s as a persecuting Church– and we always need to look at the political context of the different types and phases of Elizabethan persecution.
All the best
Dick
Yep, still with you Dick, and loving it. Interesting speculations about the editing of the Articles. It is frustrating that no minutes of the Convocation have survived. Not even personal reflections or jornal entries by the participants. What a shame. Still, there seem to be plenty of hints and clues for you to do your excellent detective work with.
Well thanks for that old chum – it is indeed a real encouragement to me. I also detect our Jason’s benign and tolerant presence hovering in the background somewhere, and I am so grateful that he mainly ,with other input, have already done such a marvellous job in expounding the pros and cons of the Athanasian Creed on a separate thread – it’s gonna make our job so much easier in the second part of this story.
Those who are reading this, whoever you are, I’d like to thank you for your patience thus far. Since Drew and Paul have given me the thumbs up I feel happy to proceed with this thread as planned. The next bit about persecution in the Elizabethan Church is important – it’s not just an afterthought now that I’ve considered the question about the motivation behind the abrogation of Cranmer’s 42nd article as best I can for the moment. A It’s really important for a fair assessment of the limits of Elizabeth’s tolerance – which I believe, despite the evidence I gave in the last post (given without any context) was actually very wide. It is also an important bridge to the next part of our story which concerns the history of the influence of the Athanasian Creed in the Anglican Church after the time of Elizabeth. However, I do intend to end my contribution to this first thread on an upbeat note by cutting and pasting posts I’ve already made about Richard Hooker’s seeming ‘hopeful universalism’ elsewhere on the site to here with some small additions (the additions will be marked in bold so that those of you who have read the original posts already can speed read the bits you are already familiar with),
I’d like to say something at this point about the relevance of history to us today. History never ever repeats itself in exactly the same way – but we can often discern some general trends in the human story (like the lesson that brutal treatment of the vanquished by the victor – no matter how just the victor’s cause - is nearly always a recipe for future violence). I strongly believe that however strange and violent the Elizabethan religious world may seem to us it also yields important lessons to us of general trends.
Very soon we will consider the case of the treatment of Catholics under Elizabeth. The initial attempts at limited toleration of Catholics within the Elizabethan Settlement were well intentioned. However, as the political situation worsened with internal and external strife in dangerous times some Catholics became involved in treason, although it seems that most remained fiercely loyal to their Protestant Queen. Many were quite unfairly persecuted, and some put to death, who were completely innocent as extremist Protestant voices whipped up fury against picturing all Catholics as a monolith in which extremists and loyalist became one beast. I’m not the first to point out the parallel between the situation of loyal Elizabethan Catholics and the parallel between loyal and moderate Muslims in the United States, Britain and Europe since 9/11. And we should continue to mind the lessons of history here in my view
There is another parallel trend that occurs to me very strongly at the moment. Just last week the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey has been speaking about the persecution of Christians in Britain and how Christians should now be prepared to fight and die for their British Christian heritage and traditions as Africa Christians are prepared to die for their faith today. I don’t wish to be unkind to George Carey – I actually know someone who was a member of his staff for a time and testifies to him and his wife being enormously kind and humane people. In addition I was always very uncomfortable when public school educated wits in the Church of England used to mock him as ‘a bit of a thicko’. However, I do take issue with his words last week.
Just from thinking about the historical issues for this thread I would conclude that the question of our ‘Christian traditions and heritage’ in the UK and elsewhere in the world is not a simple matter; rather it is a matter of competing stories which we need discernment to interpret and to sift the wheat from the chaff. Also I take issue with George’s contention that Christians are actually persecuted in the UK (although they most certainly are in other parts of the world). What he really means is that Conservative Christians have sometimes been discriminated against in the UK by insensitive and ill informed secularist. These cases have been rare and most of them have been resolved quickly and without acrimony. Yes there is a continuing row about Civil partnerships for Gay people and how recognition of these in the law has sometimes presented Conservative Christians with a choice to act against their consciences or give up their jobs (i.e. if they happen to have a job as a Registrar of births, marriages, and deaths). I think these cases could and should be dealt with more sensitively and the matter should be constantly under review – it is a terrible thing to force people’s consciences -but none of this amounts to persecution. Indeed the paper in the UK that shouts most loudly about this persecution of Christians in the UK with angry headlines has a very poor record in painting Christians concerned with social justice issues etc., in the worst possible way, and was none too supportive of Desmond Tutu in his righteous and loving struggle against Apartheid.
Speaking of Desmond Tutu I also take issue with George concerning his romantic statement about African Christians’ being prepared to die for their faith. Indeed, in a sense this is true – and I’m sure Desmond Tutu would certainly have died for love if circumstances had made this unavoidable. However, what worries me about George’s statement is that in some parts of Africa we have a parallel situation developing to that of pre-modern Europe in the time of religious wars and persecutions; where the blood of martyrs fuelled the cycle of retribution. I think we can see the following parallels between Reformation Europe and certain parts of North and Central Africa today –
We have intra religious strife between competing Christian denominations – made worse in Africa by inter religious strife with Islam
We have plague (Aids in the African context)
We have hunger and scarcity
We have the beginnings of an urban middle class who are losing touch with and sympathy for the poor as disparity in wealth and poverty rises
We have the social upheaval of urbanisation with people being displaced from their traditional village communities
We have the replacement of traditional religion with more rational monotheistic faith but with traditional beliefs persisting in debased and corrupted forms while the new order is being born
We have the beginning of centralised state and law – but older forms of social organisation and justice persisting in a fragmented and debased form
And I am sure there are other parallels too. But all of this is a perfect context for religious violence and scape-goating violence, as it was in the days of the Reformation.
We may marvel at the courage and dignity of our African brothers and sisters – but we also have to understand their situation without romanticism and do what we can to help them and pray for them.
I give a plug to my favourite charity here:
www.steppingstonesnigeria.org/
Stepping Stones Nigeria is a wonderful example of how we can be aware of the complexities of African Christianity and the potentially tragic consequences of some of its manifestations (but not all by any means); and we can help if we so choose (given that many of us will already be up to our eyes in charitable commitment).
All the best
Dick