Confessing Evangelical

Today is the memorial, in the Roman Catholic Church, of Thomas More and John Fisher, martyrs of the English Reformation. The Church of England marks the same commemoration on 6 July, 6 July being the date of Thomas More's execution and 22 June that of John Fisher's.

The martyrdoms of More and Fisher highlight the ambivalence of my own position about the English Reformation these days - the sense that I don't really have a dog in that fight any more. On an overall level, I'm rather more in favour of the English Reformation than against it - the overthrow of papal supremacy, restoration of justification by faith and the authority of Scripture, the English Bible and Prayer Book, choral evensong, etc. But when it comes to the details over which the numerous martyrdoms of the English Reformation actually arose, my position is more neutral.

More and Fisher, after all, were executed over their refusal to accept Henry's supremacy over the Church of England - a supremacy I do not accept either. And, as I've posted before, the Protestant Martyrs (Bradford, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer and the rest) were burned, not for their belief in justification by faith, but for refusing to affirm "the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper" - a doctrine that I now cheerfully affirm and embrace.

This calls to mind TS Eliot's words in Little Gidding (fourth of his Four Quartets). Eliot is writing about the English Civil War rather than the English Reformation, but much of what he says is applicable to both. And I only half agree with him in either case, but I'm not going to let that stop me seizing the opportunity to post some Eliot:

If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.

Indeed, this "folding in a single party" has come to pass in the Church of England's current calendar, which commemorates not only More and Fisher, but also many of the Protestant Martyrs.