Alec Ryrie

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain

PART I: THE PROTESTANT EMOTIONS PART II: THE PROTESTANT AT PRAYER PART III: THE PROTESTANT AND THE WORD PART IV: THE PROTESTANT IN COMPANY PART V: THE PROTESTANT LIFE

The beginnings of English Protestantism

List of illustrations Notes on contributors List of abbreviations Introduction: Protestantisms and their beginnings Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie 1. Evangelical conversion in the reign of Henry VIII Peter Marshall 2. The friars in the English Reformation Richard Rex 3. Clement Armstrong and the godly commonwealth: radical religion in early Tudor England Ethan H. Shagan 4. Counting sheep, counting shepherds: the problem of allegiance in the English Reformation Alec Ryrie 5. Sanctified by the believing spouse: women, men and the marital yoke in the early Reformation Susan Wabuda 6. Dissenters from a dissenting Church: the challenge of the Freewillers, 1550-1558 Thomas Freeman 7. Printing and the Reformation: the English exception Andrew Pettegree 8. John Day: master printer of the English Reformation John N. King 9. Night schools, conventicles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology Patrick Collinson Index.

The strange death of Lutheran England

A Lutheran settlement was the natural outcome for a politically imposed Reformation such as that of Henry VIII. Some aspects of his settlement pointed in that direction, and English evangelicalism during his reign leaned more towards Lutheranism than has been hitherto appreciated. Reformed views only came to dominate the movement at the very end of the reign. This shift reflects the waning influence of German Lutheranism in England, and arguably also the influence of Lollard sacramentarianism. Henry VIIIs radical attitude towards images also brought some quasi-Reformed ideas into his settlement. Most important, from 1543 onwards the regime drove Lutheran-leaning evangelicals into open opposition, forcing them towards more confrontational Reformed doctrines.

PATHS NOT TAKEN IN THE BRITISH REFORMATIONS

Traditional historiographies of the Reformation, seeing it as a unified, directed transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, seem increasingly untenable. This article looks in detail at three individuals from the British Reformation whose careers did not fit this pattern: a Scotsman, John Eldar, and two Englishmen, John Proctor and John Redman. Enthusiasts for Henry VIIIs Reformation, they found themselves alarmed, but disempowered and compromised, in the face of Edward VIs more radical religious changes. Redman died in 1551, but Proctor and Eldar both celebrated Mary Is Catholic restoration, while not entirely forgetting their Henrician sympathies. The article argues that these men represent a distinctive religious strand in Reformation Britain. Such ‘latter-day Henricians’ valued Henry VIIIs distinctive Reformation: anti-papal, anti-heretical, sacramental, Erasmian, and Biblicist. The vicissitudes of religious politics in both England and Scotland in the 1540s and 1550s left no space for such beliefs, although the article suggests that traces of Henricianism can be seen in Elizabeth I herself. It also argues that the impotence of the latter-day Henricians under Edward VI is a symptom of the paralysing weakness of all English religious conservatives in the reign, a predicament from which they were rescued only by Marys restoration.

'Protestantism' as a historical category.

The term ‘Protestant’ itself is a historical accident, but the category of western Christians who have separated from Rome since 1517 remains a useful one. The confessionalisation thesis, which has dominated recent Reformation historiography, instead posits the two major Protestant confessions and Tridentine Catholicism as its categories, but this can produce a false parallelism in which the nature of the relationship between the confessions is oversimplified. Instead, this paper proposes we think of a Protestant ecosystem consisting of self-consciously confessional Lutheranism, a broad Calvinism which imagined itself as normative, and a collection of radical currents much more intimately connected to the ‘magisterial’ confessions than any of the participants wished to acknowledge. The magisterial / radical division was maintained only with constant vigilance and exemplary violence, with Calvinism in particular constantly threatening to bleed into radicalism. What gives this quarrelsome family of ‘Protestants’ analytical coherence is neither simple genealogy nor, as has been suggested, mere adherence to the Bible: since in practice both ‘radical’ and ‘magisterial’ Protestants have been more flexible and ‘spiritual’ in their use of Scripture than is generally allowed. It is, rather, the devotional experience underpinning that ‘spiritual’ use of the Bible, of an unmediated encounter with grace.

Sleeping, Waking and Dreaming in Protestant Piety

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The Protestant apolitical tradition and its legacy.

We tell ourselves two stories about the Protestant Reformation’s legacy to political cultures: the two quarrelling twins born from Luther’s magnificently impractical doctrine of the two kingdoms. One is a story of defiance and revolution, a story still imbued with a certain Whiggish satisfaction. This tells how some Protestants, chiefly but not only from the Reformed tradition, defied the kingdom of this world in the name of the kingdom of Christ, finding in their consciences the authority to resist princes and even to stand in prophetic judgement over them. The point was famously made by Andrew Melville to King James VI of Scots in 1596: insisting that there were two kingdoms in Scotland, and that while James was king of one, the other, rapidly turning itself into a recklessly expansionist empire, was the kingdom of Christ, “whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member!” A broad tradition can be plausibly traced from the early Protestant resistance theorists and monarchomachs; through seventeenth-century English and Dutch republicans and radicals; through theorists of toleration such as John Locke, who denied that princes had authority over their subjects’ souls, since souls are under God’s jurisdiction alone; through the anti-slavery Protestants of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; to, ultimately, the radical Protestants of the twentieth century, who stood against a range of oppressive regimes and systems. This reached a kind of apotheosis in the 1982 Belhar Confession and the 1986 Kairos Document, the key theological documents of the anti-apartheid movement. Opposed to this – so the story goes – is a subservient, craven Protestantism, which is either suborned by the temporal powers or willingly submits to and sacralises them. Here the line of descent stretches from the state churches of the confessional age, through the European missionaries who collaborated with imperialism and the American defenders of slavery, through the churches that stood firmly against liberalism in the generation of 1848, to twentieth-century

Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality

This chapter examines seventeenth-century English Puritan discussions of childhood death, notably those of Nehemiah Wallington and James Janeway, in order to argue that Puritan and Calvinist theology offered important resources to parents and children facing childhood death. Examining how deaths were confronted and were used pedagogically demonstrates how effectively Puritanism, especially the doctrine of predestination, could be used both to console grief and to train and discipline the young. The chapter also examines how Puritan parents of sick children used their religion to manage their fear and distress, from sometimes manipulative attempts to use prayer to change the outcome of an illness, to the struggle which parents and children shared to find assurance and spiritual solace in and despite physical suffering and impending death.

The Stages of Life

Stages of Life spans the life cycle beginning with birth and infancy and concluding with the aging and dying patient. We investigate the normal patterns of development, the physical/biological challenges and common concerns of each stage – infancy childhood, adolescence, adulthood and elders. We also delve into topics such as palliative care, grief and loss, life style changes over time and chronic challenges that can develop.

John Knox’s International Network

In the early twentieth century, the city of Geneva added to its existing tourist attractions with one of the most peculiar items of civic commemoration in Europe. The Reformation Wall is a queasy monument to Geneva’s glorious past, in which the tensions and prejudices of a very particular view of the sixteenth century are frozen into stone. As one moves towards the centre of the monument, one draws closer to the Genevan fount of Reformed Christian truth. Luther and Zwingli are commemorated, tersely, at the wall’s outermost extremes. Further in, a series of friezes celebrate the deeds of Reformed Protestants in France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The monument’s centre, however, is the set of four larger-than-life statues, fixing the viewer with their stern gazes. Three of the figures are obvious. John Calvin himself, of course, stands to the fore. The wall is at heart a memorial to him, to the man who wished to be buried in an unmarked grave, and it was begun on the quatercentenary of his birth. He is joined by Guillaume Farel, the Frenchman who first established the Reformed Church in Geneva and persuaded Calvin to join him in his ministry there; and by Theodore de Beze, Calvin’s successor, biographer and systematizer.