Confessing Evangelical

Reading AG Dickens' The English Reformation, one of the most striking features is the early influence of Lutheranism on the English Reformation, and how that influence was so quickly lost - so that, by 1553, the Forty-Two Articles (forerunners of the Thirty-Nine Articles) explicitly repudiated Lutheran teachings on the Real Presence.

In the 1520s, Lutheran influences first began to be found in England. Many important figures in the English Reformation - Tyndale, Coverdale, Bilney, Latimer, Cranmer, Frith, Ridley, Matthew Parker - were in Cambridge at the time of the White Horse Inn meetings, chaired by the Augustinian friar, and Lutheran, Robert Barnes. Many of these are known to have attended the White Horse Inn discussions. Tyndale's 1526 New Testament included translations of Luther's prefaces, and became a major source of Lutheran influence in those early years.

Lutheran influence peaked in the period 1532-1540, particularly due to two factors: the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell (who appears to have been genuinely committed to Lutheran teachings) and the development of Bible translations by William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale and John Rogers (who later became the first Marian martyr). The early Bible translations - much of whose content was adopted by the Authorised Version - remain the single greatest bequest of English Lutheranism to the church as a whole:

That [Cranmer] took a warm interest in the Great Bible is not in dispute, but literary responsibility for this (and all other early translations) belongs to the English Lutherans in the Tyndale tradition. The political initiative, the planning of publication, the finance, the pressure to impose the Great Bible upon the English Church, these came from the vicegerent Thomas Cromwell. (Dickens, pp.191-192)

During that same decade, Cranmer married Osiander's niece while in Germany, and Cromwell's negotiations with the Lutheran princes of the Schmalkaldic League. These negotiations foundered over the German insistence that the English church adopt the Augsburg Confession. Dickens (p.244) describes Henry VIII as having "a natural desire to manage his own Reformation", rather than accepting the doctrinal standards - and, by implication, doctrinal control - of foreign theologians.

The ultimate outcome of Cromwell's efforts was his execution on trumped-up charges of heresy and treason following Henry's abortive marriage to Anne of Cleves, which had been engineered by Cromwell in an attempt to build an alliance with the Lutheran princes. Two days after Cromwell's execution in 1540, Robert Barnes was martyred in an "even-handed" hanging of three Catholic traitors and burning of three Protestant heretics. As Dickens observes:

Under the stern eye of their own godly prince, Englishmen already found themselves marching along a via media. (p.249)

But in the 1540s, this Lutheran influence rapidly waned. By 1546, first Ridley and then (under Ridley's influence) Cranmer became persuaded of the "Ratramnian" doctrine of the Lord's Supper: namely, that as the body receives bread and wine, so the soul receives body and blood of Christ, which are present only spiritually and not corporeally (p.259).

While Cranmer's first Prayer Book of 1549 is often regarded as the most "Lutheran" version of the Book of Common Prayer, Dickens refers to its "studied ambiguity" on the issue of the Real Presence, and observes that even by this stage Cranmer and his associates were "no longer reverent disciples of Wittenberg". They rejected the "basic Lutheran concepts of consubstantiation [sic] and the ubiquity of Christ's glorified body", and the Prayer Book's order for Holy Communion retained more of the Canon of the Mass than had Luther's order (which retained only the Words of Institution) (pp.302f.).

By 1549, there was a growing influence from refugees fleeing persecution in continental Europe. This included Reformed figures such as Martin Bucer, John a Lasco, Peter Martyr and (from Scotland) John Knox:

...the foreigners, so many of whom were not merely non-Lutherans but anti-Lutherans, helped to prevent Protestant thought from consolidating in its earlier forms. (p.328)

As a result, the 1552 Prayer Book became the most "Protestant" edition ever issued, including explicitly "memorialist" wording at the distribution, and the last-minute insertion of the "Black Rubric" to pacify Knox, who had objected to the retention of kneeling at the distribution (p.342).

This was followed by the Forty-Two Articles of 1553, which (while adopting a number of articles from the Augsburg Confession) expressly rejected the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence in what became Article XXIX in the Thirty-Nine Articles. (There is no doubt that this Article was aimed specifically at Lutheranism, since the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation had already been dealt with in the preceding article).

So by the end of Edward VI's reign, the landscape of English Protestantism had changed markedly from its beginnings in the 1520s. Calvinistic and Zwinglian influences had almost completely driven out Lutheran teachings, though Lutheran influence remained in the English liturgy, a generally conservative approach to Reformation, and supremely through the English Bible. Lutheranism in England has never recovered from this early rejection.

But why did Lutheranism fail to take root in England? Dickens makes some suggestions on this point, which I'll pick up in my next post on this topic.