Martin Bucer and Early Seventeenth-Century Scottish Irenicism

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Reformation History

The call for religious unification was part of a polemical project itself. Irenic concerns nonetheless represent another use of reception for reformation study: the hermeneutic of ecumenism. Scottish reception of the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer is a case in point. Bucer’s mediation between continental reformers and his prominent role in English Reformation history is more often noted than his appeal to Scottish divines in the seventeenth century. This chapter highlights the changing religious milieu of the Scottish Kirk as both Presbyterians and Jesuits alike appealed to Bucer’s writing. Bucer became a favourite of the Arminian Bishop and Royalist from Aberdeen, William Forbes. The chapter finds particular potency in Bucer’s ecumenical hermeneutic, which Forbes adopted as a means of bridging confessional divisions and even searching for agreement with moderate Catholics.

John Bale, Geoffrey Downes and Jesus College

1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 486-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD REX
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reformation History ◽  
The University

It was long a commonplace of Reformation history that John Bale, the Catholic friar turned Protestant firebrand, was during his time at Cambridge University a member of Jesus College. This received wisdom was enshrined in the pages of such standard reference works as Cooper and Venn, and was regularly repeated, where appropriate, in histories of the university and of the English Reformation. This was not questioned until J. Crompton observed over thirty years ago that there was no foundation for this tradition. Crompton's lead was followed some years later by L. P. Fairfield, who reiterated in his study of Bale that there was ‘no evidence whatever that Bale ever became a member of Jesus College’. However, despite these categorical conclusions, the editor of Bale's surviving plays, Peter Happé, now the leading authority on Bale's life and works, has recently maintained that after all he ‘probably entered Jesus College’. In making this claim, Happé argues partly from a passage in Bale's own writings relating to his connection with two early Fellows of Jesus College, Geoffrey Downes and Thomas Cranmer, and partly from a later tradition of Bale's membership attested in a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the college. A close analysis of the evidence, however, corroborates the contention of Crompton and Fairfield, and indicates that the later tradition arose from a misinterpretation by the Stuart antiquary Thomas Fuller of Bale's own recollections.

The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England

1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 620-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Relationship

There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Church and the role they played in triggering the outbreak of hostilities between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. While the focus of the first controversy has been the relationship between zealous Protestantism and the vast mass of the ordinary people, the second has been conducted almost exclusively at the level of the learned polemical literature of the clerical elite. So far little attempt has been made to bridge and span the gap. This is hardly surprising – sensible scholars think twice before venturing into two historiographical minefields simultaneously. Nevertheless the problem of reconciling these parallel but largely discrete bodies of interpretation and evidence remains, and it is one which historians like myself, whose interests straddle the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century divide and the Catholic–Protestant confessional fence, can no longer afford to sidestep and ignore. This essay represents a set of tentative reflections and speculations on recent research, a cautious exploration of three clusters of inter-related issues and themes.

Was John Foxe a Millenarian?

1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 600-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
Palle J. Olsen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Future Period ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
The One

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial study Godly rule that Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

Reformation without end

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

The Birth of Anglicanism

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (35) ◽  
pp. 418-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
European Context ◽  
Middle Way

The paper surveys the English Reformation in the wider European context to demonstrate that the concept of ‘Anglicanism’ is hardly appropriate for the post-Reformation English Church in the sixteenth century: it was emphatically Protestant, linked to Reformed rather than Lutheran Protestantism. Henry VIII created a hybrid of a Church after breaking with Rome, but that was not unique in northern Europe. There were widespread attempts to find a ‘middle way’, the model being Cologne under Archbishop Hermann von Wied. Wied's efforts failed, but left admirers like Albert Hardenberg and Jan Laski, and their Reformations gradually moved towards those of central Europe—the first Reformed theologians. Edward VTs Reformation aligned itself with this new grouping, and produced prototypes of liturgy and theological formulary which endure to the present day—with the exception of a proposed reform of canon law, with its provisions for divorce. Elizabeth Ts 1559 religious settlement fossilised Edward's Church from autumn 1552. It made no concessions to Catholics, despite later A nglo- Catholic myth-making: minor adjustments were probably aimed at Lutherans. There is nevertheless a ‘Nicodemite’ association among the leading figures who steered the Settlement through its opening years. Important and unlikely survivals were cathedrals, uniquely preserved in a Protestant context and a source of future ideological Catholic ‘subversion’. Nevertheless the theological tone of the Elizabethan Church was a broadly-based Reformed Protestantism, aligned to Zürich rather than to Geneva. Early seventeenth-century Arminianism or Laudianism represented a new direction, and the Puritanism of New England may better represent the English Reformation than the ‘Anglican’ synthesis which came to fruition in the English Church after Charles II's restoration in 1660. In any case, Anglicanism continues to represent in uneasy but useful tension the two poles of theology contending for mastery in the century after Elizabeth Is coming to power.

Bucer Study Since 1918

1956 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Bard Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Church Organization ◽  
Special Investigation ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Church Office ◽  
Reformation History

It should now be evident that Bucer is no longer “the little known,” “the forgotten,” “the lesser prophet” of which the literature as late as the 'twenties and even the 'thirties spoke. The rediscovery of Bucer began earlier, with the assertion of his formative influence upon Calvin, in writings by Seeberg, Lang and Anrieh, by Pannier and Otto Ritschl. Hyma (19) suggested that Bucer “made Calvin a Calvinist”; and Pauck (15) concluded that Calvin left Strassburg as Bucer's “pupil or follower.” That thesis in its broad assertion prompted research into specific aspects of his influence upon Calvin. The question of church organization drew special investigation, to which Lang, Courvoisier, Stupperich and Strohl made important contributions. It was generally agreed that the Reformed “type of church” was Bucer's creation.The point of Calvin's debt to Bucer has been well taken. But recent Calvin scholarship has tempered the claim (cf., 24, 25, 30). And Bucer scholarship inclines to redirect attention to the man himself, to his whole life and work.Two concerns mark the trend in Bucer study. The first is to understand his personality, and thus more fully his contribution. Strohl (30) notes “the openness of his mind, his faculty of comprehension and assimilation, which qualified him to be an agent of liaison among the great minds of his time.” Ritter (32) marks the same trait. Courvoisier (21) contrasts it to Calvin's greater clarity of mind. And Heinrich Bornkamm cites it as the reason why Bucer did not produce a firm kirchcntypus, why his work found no enduring form, why his contribution is so hard to grasp; for he “sought conciously the whole above particulars, unity above opposites”: Martin Bucers Bedeutung für die europäische Reformationsgeschichte: Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Nr. 69, Jahrg. 58, heft 2. Another side of his personality, according to Strohl (and Ritter and others), was “his practical sense, his pastoral spirit, his preoccupation of cultivating the Christian life individually and collectively, of realizing a Christian society.” Pauck (114) and others have found this trait underlying his social ethics. Weber (29) describes his thought as ein praktisches Erleben des Christusglaubens. Again, scholars have called attention to Bucer's humanism—Pauck (114) in terms of his social and political ethics, Strohl in reference to both his ethics (124–26) and his educational policies (111–12), Stupperich (127) in connection with his unitive efforts. Again, Holsten (128–29) has noticed the “germ” of Pietism in his attitude toward non-Christian religions. Frick (130) speaks of him more confidently as “the Pietist of the Reformers.” And Lang begins his study of Puritanismus und Pietismus (152) with Bucer. But Van de Poll (92) concludes:He cannot be called a spiritualist, as Köhler did, for then one forgets the connection with the whole of his liturgical activities; no more is it right to entitle him the pietist among the reformers, as Lang has done, for this name would do no justice in his conceptions on Church, Office and Holy Supper.The second concern is to reveal the extraordinary range of Bucer's activity and influence. Hastings Eells wrote Martin Bucer (8) to satisfy students of the Reformation who “have found his footprints not only in Germany but in Switzerland, France, England, and other countries as well.” Under “The contributions of Martin Bucer to the Reformation” (51), Eells lists: Reformer of Strassburg, Conciliator of the Lutherans and Zwinglians on the Eucharist; Imperial Statesman; Protestant Partisan (after Regensburg, 1541) and Reformer of Cologne; and Contributor to the English Reformation. Bornkamm (180) concludes thatthe union of inner-German Protestantism, Divine Worship and the organization of the Reformed Church, the Anglican conception of church and state, the Puritan and Pietist movements bear his touch in various degrees.Studies of this extensive career underscore Bucer's importance and make him an appealing figure to the twentieth century. In an era of ecumenical effort, McNeill recalls him to us as “the most zealous exponent of church unity of his age.” His teachings and negotiations concerning the Lord's Supper have been interpreted in many studies by Eells and illuminated in the important documentary articles by Ernst Bizer. In a time of liturgical reflection, Maxwell presents him as the father of the Reformed tradition; and Van de Poll ascribes to him the development of “the actual character” of the Reformed Church. His contribution to the English Reformation has been reported by Hopf; the enduring importance of his De Regno Christi upon English religious affairs, by Pauck; his influence upon Puritanism and Pietism, by Lang. Questions about the sacramental teachings of the Book of Common Prayer have prompted serious and controversial studies of Bucer by Smyth, Dix, Timms and Richardson. Bucer's influence upon Calvin need not again be mentioned; he is numbered among the fathers of the Reformed Church.Why then has Bucer been so little known? It was not his purpose to leave behind a separated church; and history counts him less than the founders. In Strassburg and elsewhere, the Gnesio Lutherans suppressed his writings and tried to discount him entirely. His career was marked by failures; but even they reflect the measure of his ambitions. “There is much of the tragic about his work,” writes Bornkamm (180), citing the frustrations in Strassburg and the failure of his unitive efforts. “But for that his stimulus flows in the whole of European Reformation history.”

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