Not understanding the past

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination. That’s a harder thing to do than [many] seem to think.

Paul Fussell, ‘Thank God for the Atom Bomb’ in Killing in Verse and Prose and Other Essays, 1988

The Elizabeth Settlement of 1559 was no such thing. It was the Elizabethan Truce, and a truce which became increasingly out of date over the course of her long reign. The enemy at the beginning of her reign was, as we have seen, the papalists: those who wanted to bring England back into communion with Rome. By the 1590s it was the Puritans: those more radical Christians who wanted to take the examples of reformation to be found in Zurich and Geneva and apply them to England.

There was another example of a thoroughly reformed church, closer to home. The Church of Scotland, by law established, was presbyterian in governance and doctrine, “one of the best reformed churches”¹. Perhaps when the King of Scotland became King of England as well he might bring some of his presbyterian ethos with him. Elizabeth died in 1603, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Even while he was travelling south the Puritans of England approached him. They presented him with the Millenary Petition, so-called because it was supposed to have been signed by a thousand ministers. The Petition was, as these things go, moderate and peaceful. The petitioners wanted a number of catholic hangovers from the Elizabethan Settlement to be finally removed from Church of England worship:

• the sign of the cross at baptism
• forbidding the administration of women at baptism (ie in emergencies)
• making the cap and surplice optional
• abolition of the ring in the marriage service
• restrictions on the use of music in worship
• forbidding kneeling at the name of Jesus

There were some other, godly, proposals. The Puritans wanted ministers to hold one living only, and not many parishes in plurality; that people should not be excommunicated for “trifles and twelve-penny matters”, and that only learned men, “able and sufficient”, should be admitted to ministry.

The Puritans didn’t know two things about James. First, he loved a good debate. Second, he had no intention of allowing any reforms which questioned, even remotely, the status of the monarch. To the consternation of the Bishops, he said that the Petition deserved a good discussion. Some Puritans took this as a sign of the King’s favour and began petitioning for more radical reforms. This had the expected effect on the Church: reaction. All Puritan agitating was condemned, and Archbishop Whitgift undertook a survey of all dissenters and sectaries within the province of Canterbury: know where your enemies might be.

The Conference met at Hampton Court Palace, the home of Wolsey and Henry VIII, in January 1604. The English Bishops were represented by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Puritans by John Rainolds, fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, Dean of Lincoln, tutor to Richard Hooker and former Roman Catholic. The conference was run amicably, although it soon became apparent to the Puritans that James was more interested in arguments than outcomes. The king agreed to act against ministers not being resident in their parishes, and to improve the quality of preaching (OffPreach?), but he had no intention of budging on church discipline and ceremonies. Rainolds made a tactical error when he recommended the king set up a synod of bishops and presbyters to determine contested issues in the church. This so infuriated James that he walked out of the room, snapping ‘No bishop, no king’ as he went.

Various bits and pieces were agreed upon; commissions were to be set up to tinker with certain small reforms, only one of which was every achieved; an agreement to produce one uniform translation of the Bible led directly to the Authorised Version of 1611: the so-called “King James Bible”, which is so much a defining possession of the English speaking world.

Two different, ideologically determined translations were in use in the Church of England at the time: the Geneva Bible (with its biased explanatory notes in the margins) and the Bishop’s Bible (1568). James entrusted the task to Bancroft, who formed a network of committees to produce the new translation: six committees of fifty-four scholars in all, meeting in Oxford, Cambridge, and the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. They took as their starting point the earliest English translations of William Tyndale and was completed in five years.

Looking at the way the AV has been worshipped subsequently, it is interesting to see how little loved it was when it first appeared. It was said to be filled with ‘uncouth and obsolete expressions’, and to have ‘all the disadvantages of an old prose translation’. It wasn’t until 1760 that it had completely superceded the Bishop’s Bible or the Geneva Bible as the standard English translation (which is why Book of Common Prayer of 1662 uses Coverdale’s Great Bible translation of the psalter). Curiously, it was never “Authorized”.

1. Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II: 1558-1688 v. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 94 [↩]

A Good Emperor?
Edward Gibbon on the emperor Septimius Severus:

“He promised only to betray, he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.”

Quoted in ‘Yes, I am a walking advert for reform’ by the Earl of Onslow, The Guardian, 26 November 2003

The Failings of Secularism

The remedy for the shortcomings and sins of Christian peoples is surely not to substitute
secularism for godliness, human vagaries for divine truth, man-made expedients for a God-given standard of right and wrong. This is God’s world and if we are to play a man’s part in it, we must
first get down on our knees and with humble hearts acknowledge God’s place in His world. This, secularism does not do.

On Secularism, The Annual Statement of the Bishops of the United States, 14 November 1947

Christian Humanism

Nowadays, if you say “humanism” people tend to think you mean “atheism”: the British Humanist Association is prominent in opposing all public expressions of religion in our society. But in the early sixteenth century humanism didn’t mean such a feeble-minded thing. Then “Humanism” was a liberal arts movement: it was an attitude towards learning, which emphasised the skilful use of the past, applied to the present. The Christian humanist wished to apply his knowledge of the ancient writers, Christian and pagan, in the betterment of the lives of his fellows.

Christian humanists advocated a synthesis of classical, biblical, and patristic learning as the basis for an ambitious renewal of theology, piety, and public morality.¹

This was a Europe-wide movement, and something that was shared in with enthusiasm by English scholars. Early examples are John Colet, (founder of Saint Paul’s School at London), John Fisher, (prime mover in the foundation of St John’s College Cambridge), Lady Margaret Beaufort, (founder of Christ’s College Cambridge) and Thomas More. Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, was a huge influence on the development of Anglican learning, and the church and universities weren’t afraid to import the best continental learning: Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli are two of the most prominent scholars of the period.

For the consequences of which see… here.

1. James Michael Weiss “Humanism” Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. Ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand. (Oxford University Press, 1996) [↩]

The Church and its learning

Despite being the product of a national church asserting its national identity (and its submission to the secular power of the realm), in the period in which the Church of England was learning to define itself as opposed to its mother church on the continent, it is significant that it was an intellectual movement which had the greatest influence. The Church of England was founded as a church of learning: often it has been able to remember that legacy.

The Worshipping Assembly

The worshipping assembly is neither a machine nor a species of plant. It is a human society suffused with the unpredictable presence of One who is not content with remaining a first principle, a ground of being, or a transcendent way, but who had the effrontery to take flesh and pitch his tent beside ours. And whom we crucified. This endows the assembly with a certain wariness.

Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York : Pueblo,c1984), p94

Muddled Disagreement

The Daily Telegraph found one priest in the diocese of Newcastle, the Rev George Curry, to condemn the idea: “You cannot have the Church endorsing immorality particularly in a marriage ceremony which in the eyes of God is an adulterous union. The church is getting muddled in our moral views.”

I love this use of “muddled” to mean “people are disagreeing with me.”

Andrew Brown, The Church Times, Friday, 6th November 1998

One way in which the mythful retelling of the events of the sixteenth century works its way out is this: after the confusion of the reign of Henry, the austerity of Edward’s and the sheer bloody eventfulness of Mary’s, once Elizabeth came to the throne, all was peace and light; we had a Queen who was also tolerant, respectful and wise:

I would not open windows into men’s souls¹

But Elizabeth was a queen who tortured heretics to death in public. What she meant by this supposed espousal of toleration is “she did not care what people understood by the formularies of the Church of England; only that they would assent to them.”²

Continue Reading »

1. Oral tradition only. The earliest written record of this espousal of toleration is in J. B. Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936), p. 19. [↩]
2. Andrew Brown, ‘Shuttered windows to the soul’, The Guardian : Comment is Free website [↩]

How to treat false prophets 2

I read in one of Montaigne’s essays an account of what the Scythians used to do to makers of false predictions. They bound them, he says, hand and foot, laid them in an ox-drawn cart filled with brushwood, and burned them. What a relief for some of our own cherished pundits that such practices never caught on in Britain.

David McKie ‘Clouded crystal balls’ The Guardian, Thursday 6 November, 2003