Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ the Defender of the Faith? The idea grew on Henry until it had him absolutely in its grip. By the time he formally repudiated the pope’s authority in 1534, his marital adventures had almost become a side issue. He was now convinced that he was, by God’s appointment, Supreme Head of the Church of England.⁴

      Lutherans might have swallowed that self-important title. They could not, however, accept what Henry did with it, which went beyond what any other prince of the age attempted and would not be surpassed until the French revolutionaries tried to impose the newly invented Cult of the Supreme Being. It was not merely that Henry took control of the church’s courts and senior appointments. Nor that he seized its property, although the scale of the plunder was staggering; something like a third of the land area of England passed into royal control when the monasteries were dissolved. German princes usually simply closed the monasteries to new entrants and allowed them to wind down gradually, but Henry shut them down. Monks who cooperated were pensioned off. Those who resisted might or might not escape with their lives. He promised to use the proceeds on pious projects. Instead, he spent most of them on futile wars, such that, despite this vast influx of cash, by the end of his life he was facing bankruptcy.

      Money and jurisdiction, however, were only the beginning. Henry earnestly believed he was Supreme Head of the church, and woe to those who defied him. Few did, but those few included some monumental figures. Erasmus’s friend Thomas More and the famed bishop and theologian John Fisher were both beheaded in 1535. It was the public-relations equivalent of decapitating a pair of Nobel Prize winners, and won Henry a Europe-wide reputation as a tyrant, only underlined by the killing of his second wife the following year. More and Fisher died for their loyalty to Rome, but in 1536 the leading English Protestant theologian, William Tyndale, was burned alive with Henry’s approval and connivance, for daring to disapprove of the king’s remarriage. That pattern, of parallel judicial murders of Catholics and Protestants, would persist to the end of Henry’s reign.

      The English church’s new orthodoxy, in other words, was defined by its king’s whim. Luther, appalled, claimed “that king wants to be God”. Henry did not quite put it that way, but he did believe God had delegated a great deal of spiritual authority to him. He toyed with the idea that he could ordain priests. He certainly thought that he could tell his bishops what to believe, debating with them and browbeating them into submission. His own extensive notes on doctrinal reform include such choice snippets as his attempt to rewrite the Ten Commandments. The biblical text forbids coveting others’ property, but Henry wanted it only to forbid coveting “wrongly or unjustly”. Usually he was persuaded to pull back from the more outrageous positions, but his own fickle, inconsistent theological prejudices were at the root of his entire Reformation. He loathed the pope and eagerly promoted the English Bible. He also loathed Luther’s doctrine of salvation and was extravagantly devoted to the Catholic Mass. It did not really make sense, but who was going to tell him that?⁵

      When he died in 1547, England began to return to religious coherence. The regency regime of the new boy king, Edward VI, was controlled by a Protestant clique who had prudently kept their convictions muted while the old tyrant lived. Even so, Henry’s legacy was pervasive. The principle of state control over religion was firmly established. England’s religion changed with its monarchs. After Edward’s death, a Catholic queen, his half-sister Mary, returned the kingdom briefly to Rome, and after her death England obediently followed a Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, back into schism again.

      Elizabeth was subtler than Henry VIII, and in any case, with orthodoxies hardening across Europe, the time for theological swashbuckling was over. Yet while she presided over an unmistakably Protestant church, her own prejudices could still override religious logic. She had a taste for trappings of traditional religion like vestments, choirs, and crucifixes, whether or not they were compatible with her new church’s doctrines. Her Protestantism in medieval dress left her subjects split between ceremonialists who treasured those echoes of the old ways and “Puritans” who wanted to complete the journey to the new. Her idiosyncrasies are not exactly to blame for the Civil War that engulfed England forty years after her death, but they helped make it possible.

      Henry VIII’s legacy to England was a state church in the fullest sense. British monarchs and prime ministers continued to choose the Church of England’s bishops until 2007. Parliament defined its liturgy, structures, and even doctrines deep into the twentieth century. The Church of England has never quite been a puppet of the state, but it has certainly been kept on a short leash. Its liturgy purrs with approval of royal and state power and is filled with obsequious prayers for the Crown, without a whisper of acknowledgment that sometimes governments do bad things. It even stretched its Protestant principles so far as to anoint one king, the beheaded Charles I, as a saint. Yet when the Church of England has needed help from the state, such as when it was desperately trying to set up workable structures in colonial North America, the state has felt free to block it at every turn. For three centuries, the church did not dare even to question this arrangement. Since then, some of its leaders have wondered whether they should stay in this unequal marriage, but they have never yet walked away. The Church of England even now clings to its subordinate but privileged place in British public life, readier to celebrate than to challenge state power. Henry VIII would have been proud.

The Two Kingdoms

      Few other Protestant churches were so easily tamed, but they all faced the same dilemmas. How far should they submit to a ruler who was, or claimed to be, on their side? And how far should they resist a ruler who was not?

      Luther’s first instinct was to caution against any thought of rebellion, even against the “anti-Christian regime” of the papacy. In a tract written in 1521, he argued that it is always the innocent who end up suffering in rebellions and that politics is none of ordinary people’s business. They could humbly petition their princes, but they could not take matters into their own hands. Who were they to think that they could tear down Antichrist’s kingdom by themselves? Only God could do that. If they truly had faith, they would wait.⁶

      This reflected Luther’s own political context. Saxony was not a law-governed bureaucratic territory. Its prince, the elector, was the beginning and the end of government. Any alternative such as the “rule of law” meant handing power to corrupt local noblemen. Luther disliked law both theologically and politically. As one scholar puts it, he had “more confidence in one enlightened prince than in battalions of lawyers”. In a sermon in 1528, he told his audience,

      You aren’t the one who ought to establish justice and punish injustice. When some wrong is done in my house, and my next door neighbour wants to break into my house and do justice there, what should I say to that?

      Better to be still and wait on the Lord.⁷

      Carte blanche for rulers, then? Not quite. In 1523, Luther published a longer book bluntly titled Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. His starting point was that princes themselves are no better than plunderers:

      They can do no more than strip and fleece, heap tax upon tax. . . . Since the beginning of the world a wise prince is a mighty rare bird, and an upright prince even rarer. They are generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth.

      That does not, however, detract from their authority. Rulers only rule with God’s permission. The reason princes are so dreadful is that “the world is too wicked, and does not deserve to have many wise and upright princes”. Indeed, the only reason God has established princes and governments at all is that human beings are sinners. “If the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, there would be no need for or benefits from prince, king, lord, sword or law.”

      That might seem like a banal enough observation, but Luther’s theology gives it immediate and practical importance. For him, all believers are “real Christians” СКАЧАТЬ