ECCLESIASTICAL IMPROVEMENTS, LAY IMPROPRIATIONS, AND THE BUILDING OF A POST-REFORMATION CHURCH IN ENGLAND, 1560–1600

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCY M. KAUFMAN

ABSTRACTOne of the more difficult practical questions raised by the English Reformation was just how to support its clergy and its fabric. Despite extensive resistance from the godly members of church and state, the Elizabethan church maintained the pre-Reformation system of impropriations, lay ownership of ecclesiastical tithes. This article examines the historical, practical, and ideological stakes of these everyday economics in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the majority of impropriators were responsive to the needs of the church, sustaining rather than undermining the nascent English church. In the space opened up by the Reformation's rents in the social and physical fabric of the parish, new bonds between church, state, and society were knit. This process of building the post-Reformation church thus tied the laity closer to the interests and activities of the church in England.

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 111-127
Author(s):  
Olof H. de Vries

The Reformation was the religious representative of an encompassing breach in European history. In this transition Anabaptism combats infant baptism as being a symbol of the social-religious unity of the corpus christianum that was passing by. Hence it introduces believer’s baptism as being a major symbol of a new epoch, of which persecution by church and state was the sad and existential consequence. Baptism of itself pertains to a sacrament of transition from old to new, achieved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.


Author(s):  
John Witte

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Martin Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of Luther’s new theology, particularly his new two kingdoms doctrine. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets, and sermons published by Lutheran writers from the 1520s to 1550s. They were refined and routinized in hundreds of new reformation ordinances promulgated by German cities, duchies, and territories that converted to the Lutheran cause. By the time of the Peace of Augsburg (1555)—the imperial law that temporarily settled the constitutional order of Germany—the Lutheran Reformation had brought fundamental changes to theology and law, to church and state, marriage and family, criminal law and procedure, and education and charity. Critics of the day, and a steady stream of theologians and historians ever since, have seen this legal phase of the Reformation as a corruption of Luther’s original message of Christian freedom from the strictures of human laws and traditions. But Luther ultimately realized that he needed the law to stabilize and enforce the new Protestant teachings. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms. Fundamental legal reforms, in turn, would make palpable radical theological reforms. In the course of the 1530s onward, the Lutheran Reformation became in its essence both a theological and a legal reform movement. It struck new balances between law and Gospel, rule and equity, order and faith, and structure and spirit.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-291
Author(s):  
John Witte

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the Church but also law and the State. Despite his early rebuke of law in favour of the gospel, Martin Luther eventually joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of Church, State and society on the strength of his new theology, particularly his new two-kingdoms theory. These legal reforms were defined and defended in hundreds of monographs, pamphlets and sermons published by Lutheran writers from the 1520s onwards. They were refined and routinised in equally large numbers of new Reformation ordinances that brought fundamental changes to theology and law, Church and State, marriage and family, criminal law and procedure, and education and charity. Critics have long treated this legal phase of the Reformation as a corruption of Luther's original message of Christian freedom from the strictures of all human laws and traditions. But Luther ultimately realised that he needed the law to stabilise and enforce the new Protestant teachings. Radical theological reforms had made possible fundamental legal reforms, which, in turn, would make those theological reforms palpable. In the course of the 1530s and thereafter, the Lutheran Reformation became in its essence both a theological and a legal reform movement. It struck new balances between law and gospel, rule and equity, order and faith, and structure and spirit.


PMLA ◽  
1892 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-119

The introduction of the pastoral romance into Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the extreme favor with which it was received, may, in view of the social condition of the country, seem at first sight paradoxical. At the time of the accession of Philip II, Spain was at the zenith of her military greatness: her possessions were scattered from the North Sea to the islands of the Pacific; and her conquests had been extended over both parts of the western world. The constant wars against the Moors, during a period of over seven hundred years, and the stirring ballads founded upon them, had fostered an adventurous and chivalric spirit,—a distinguishing trait of the Spanish character. Arms and the church were the only careers that offered any opportunity for distinction, and every Spanish gentleman was, first of all, a soldier.


1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.


2012 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tine Reeh

The theologian and politician Bodil Koch was an influentialplayer in politics regarding the Danish national church in the 20th century.During her twenty-four years as MP for the Social Democrats shemade an effort to avoid an independent constitution of the Church anda separation of church and state. During her thirteen years as Minister ofEcclesiastical Affairs she worked to adjust the church to the welfare state.This article examines one of her initiatives: A commission to modernizethe structure of the church. The surveys and studies from the commissionintroduced methods from sociology and social science into the fieldof church politics in Denmark. The work focused on the activities of thechurch and it revealed a scarce knowledge of traditional Christianityamong the members as well as low Church attendance. Thus the introductionof social science in the ecclesiastical sphere reinforced public notionsof a gap between the Danish national Church and the Danish population– against all intentions.


Author(s):  
Wessel Bentley

The article describes briefly Karl Barth’s views on church, its role in politics and how it relates to culture. This is done by identifying the way in which the church participates in the social realm through its relationship with the State. The historic religious question asks whether there is a natural mutual-determining relationship between church and State. The church may ask whether faith and politics should mix, while a secular state may question the authority which the church claims to speak from. To a large extent culture determ-ines the bias in this relationship. History has shown that church-State dynamics is not an either/or relationship, whereby either the authority of the church or the authority of the State should function as the ruling norm. Karl Barth describes the dynamics of this relationship very well, within the context of culture, in the way his faith engages with the political status quo. Once the relationship is better understood, Barth’s definition of the church will prove to be more effective in its evangelical voice, speaking to those who guide its citizens through political power. “Fürchtet Gott, ehret den König!” (1 Pt 2:17)


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-57
Author(s):  
Erik A. de Boer

Abstract In their critique of the hierarchy in the Roman Catholic Church most reformers in the sixteenth century did not argue for retaining the office of bishop. In the English Reformation, led by the king, the bishopric was reformed, and in Hungary, too, the office of bishop survived. Did reformers like John Calvin fundamentally reject this office, or did they primarily attack its abuse? Investigation of the early work of Calvin shows a focus on the meaning of the biblical term ‘overseer’ and on preaching as the primary function of the episcopacy. While the title of bishop is reserved for the one head of the church, the office of the preacher is brought to a higher level. As moderator of the Company of Pastors in Geneva, Calvin would have a standing in the city comparable to the ousted bishop.


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.


Author(s):  
Monika Slodičková

Upbringing children in family in the context of secularized society The present thesis presents religious, psychological and pedagogical a view of the family as a place of fundamental unit of society. Just from the basic unit of society depends on personal happiness and fulfillment of every human life. Its prominent position is not only a formal status, which are today's busy times and unhealthy and coexistence education system offers. Family, which has its roots somewhere deep in our human nature, is the most precious treasure of all mankind, because no other community does not interfere with a man so strong as the right family, in which a man comes into the world, which it grows and shapes for further life in the family, Church and State. Each family has not only private, but also the social dimension and is focused on two basic objectives and the spiritual and earthly, and therefore a good family to be of concern not only the Church but society as a whole, they are just family.


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