Richard Rex

The crisis of obedience: God's word and Henry's reformation

The new political theology of obedience to the prince which was enthusiastically adopted by the Church of England in the 1530s was essentially founded upon Luthers new interpretation of the fourth commandment. It was mediated to an English audience by Tyndale, but his ideas were not officially adopted as early as some recent research has suggested. The founding of royal authority on the Decalogue, and thus on the ‘word of God’, was a particularly attractive feature of this doctrine, which became almost the defining feature of Henrician religion. Rival tendencies within the Church of England sought to exploit it in the pursuit of their particular agendas. Reformers strove to preserve its connections with the broader framework of Lutheran theology, with the emphasis on faith alone and the ‘word of God’, while conservatives strove to relocate it within an essentially monastic tradition of obedience, with an emphasis on good works, ceremonies, and charity. The most significant achievement was that of the Reformers, who established and played upon an equivocation between the royal supremacy and the ‘word of God’ in order to persuade the king to sanction the publication of the Bible in English as a formidable prop for his new-found dignity.

THE RELIGION OF HENRY VIII

This article takes issue with the influential recent interpretation of Henry VIIIs religious position as consistently ‘Erasmian’. Bringing to the discussion not only a re-evaluation of much familiar evidence but also a considerable quantity of hitherto unknown or little-known material, it proposes instead that Henrys religious position, until the 1530s, sat squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’ and that the subsequent changes in his attitudes to the cult of the saints, monasticism, and papal primacy were so significant as to be understood and described by Henry himself in terms of a veritable religious ‘conversion’. This conversion, which was very much sui generis, is not easily to be fitted within the confessional frameworks of other sixteenth-century religious movements (though it was by no means unaffected by them). It hinged upon Henrys new understanding of kingship as a supreme spiritual responsibility entrusted to kings by the Word of God, but long hidden from them by the machinations of the papacy. His own providential deliverance from blindness was, he believed, but the beginning of a more general spiritual enlightenment.

Christopher St German on Scripture, councils, and monarchs

Abstract This article explores the idiosyncratic reflections on ecclesiastical and royal power in England sketched out in a little known manuscript by the Tudor lawyer and publicist, Christopher St German (d.1540/41). His unpublished ‘Dyalogue shewinge What we be bounde to byleve as thinges necessary to salvacion’ investigated the question of ecclesiastical authority with respect to Christian doctrine. Its argument hinged on a unique interpretation of the Matthaean ‘binding and loosing’ texts (Mt.16:19; 18:18) that was designed to identify the point in history at which ecclesiastical authority was transferred from bishops to kings. It is proposed here that the ulterior motive was to insulate Christian monarchs in general (and the king of England in particular) from the impact of any ecclesiastical power, be it papal or conciliar.