Foundations of the Anglican Church XCVIII

The Hampton Court Conference

The biggest impact that King James had on the Church of England—and perhaps even of English culture way beyond the Established Church—is the edition of the Bible which he commissioned and which was first printed in 1611 and which is popularly known as “The King James.” 

This was not the first English language bible.  Bits and fragments of the Scriptures had been put into the various vernaculars of Anglo-Saxon England as far back as Bishop Aldhelm (d. 709) and the Veneable Bede (d.735).  Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (d. 899) had portions of the Pentateuch, including the Ten Commandments put in Old English.  He also had about fifty of the psalms translated from the Latin Vulgate.  England’s Protoprotestant, John Wycliffe, produced an English translation of the Vulgate in the late fourteenth-century.  It is slavishly faithful to the Latin text even when, much like Pope Benedict’s current Missal, the borrowed syntax makes the English unintelligible.  Because it was translated from the Vulgate and not the original languages (Hebrew and Greek), later Protestant authors such as Tyndale and Coverdale ignored Wycliffe’s work, but Catholic translators preparing the Rheims Douai translation (1582) however borrowed considerably from it. 

The English reformer and Protestant martyr, William Tyndale, published an English version of the New Testament in 1525-26 and the Pentateuch in 1530.  When Tyndale died in 1536—execution by strangling at the hands of the (Catholic) Emperor’s executioner to whom he had been betrayed by agents of Henry VIII who, though he broke from Rome, had no use for Protestants—the work was not yet complete.  Tyndale’s translation betrayed several strong Protestant biases.  For example the Greek εκκλεσια was translated as “congregation” rather than “Church” to de-emphasize the scriptural roots of the Church as institution.  Similarly the word πρεσβγτερ (presbyter from which we get the English word “priest”) became “senior,” and the phrases “to do penance” became “repent.” 

Myles Coverdale was authorized by Henry VIII (after the break with Rome) to produce an English language bible.  This book was published in 1538 and is often called “The Great Bible.”  Coverdale drew heavily on Tyndale’s work, but avoided the problematic vocabulary choices that did not fit Henry’s Catholic (though not Roman) biases. While in exile in Geneva under Queen Mary (Bloody Mary) Coverdale collaborated on a more Protestant translation in English, the Geneva Bible.  This is the translation used by John Knox, William Shakespeare, John Bunyan and John Donne and it served the Church of England well for over fifty years.  It would continue to be used by the Puritan party—because of its Calvinist bias in translation—and would be the first English language bible brought to America first to Jamestown and later to Massachusetts Bay on the Mayflower.

The Geneva Bible pleased the Puritans, but the High-Church party was not overly happy with its Reformed bias and neither was King James.  Remember James did not like the Puritan approach to the Church as James saw the link between episcopacy and kingship: “No Bishops, no King.”  Within six months of his coronation,  James summoned a conference at Hampton Court where it was agreed that a new translation, freed of the Puritan bias against “The Church” and its bishops, be prepared. 

This decision marks a very important development in the Church of England.  In Elizabeth’s day Calvinism and the Puritan faction within the Church of England that held rigidly to Puritan doctrines were allowed pretty free rein in determining the direction of the Church of England.  A “High-Church” party, more minded towards both Armenianism and a more Sacramental worship had smoldered beneath the surface of the Church of England but could not make much progress in balancing the rabidly Protestant direction of the Puritan controlled Church.    (Armenianism taught the doctrine of free will as opposed to Calvinism’s double pre-destination by which a person had been determined by God from all eternity either to salvation in heaven or damnation in hell.)  Elizabeth was no Calvinist but to achieve her political goals she needed the support of the House of Commons in which the Puritan faction long held power.   James set on a different course than Elizabeth’s religion-by-political-convenience.  Under James the Crown would take the theological lead.  This policy would, in the long run, be disastrous but we will get to that story in time.  

At James’ invitation, forty-seven scholars—all but one, clergy—divided into six committees (two each for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and one for Westminster) divided up the work.  The committees included members of both the Puritan and the High Church parties, though the King made his wish clear that the Bible not be slanted towards the Presbyterian/Puritan ecclesiology.  The scholars were commissioned to work from the ancient languages (Hebrew for the Old Testament, Greek for the New and for the Apocrypha), though they drew on existing English Translations (Tyndale, Coverdale, the Bishop’s Bible, and even the Rheims-Douai) for guidance.  In 1611 they finished their work and printed their Bible.

The King James has served well not only the Church of England or the Anglican Communion, but most Protestant denominations.  Only the mid-twentieth century did other translations become popular among Protestant groups and even today there are various religious groups that will not accept any other translation as the revealed Word of God.   But in the King James were planted the seeds of a religious division that would eventually bring down the monarchy and tear England—and its Church—apart.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church LIV

1884 photograph of Lollards' Tower at Lambeth

Palace--London Residence of the Archbishops

of Canterbury

In our last entry we saw the story of William Tyndale, an English priest who translated the scriptures into English, fled to the Continent to avoid the anti-Lutheran heresy hunts that went on under Henry VIII, and was put to death in 1536 for his Protestant ideas in Antwerp, then under the dominion of the very Catholic Emperor, Charles V.  In order to understand how Henry VIII was able to separate England from Rome we need to understand the religious mood in England in the sixteenth century.  Beneath the surface of an officially Catholic England, was a lot of discontent with the Church especially among the urban merchant classes.  The rural peasantry and the nobility were comfortable in their Catholic faith, but trouble for the hierarchical Church had been brewing for some time in England—at least since the days of John Wycliffe and those who followed his ideas and were known as “Lollards.”  If you want a refresher on Wycliffe and the Lollards look at the entries for April 27^th and 28^th  2011, and June 7^th and 8^th 2013.  I also want to tell again the story of Richard Hunne, a London merchant, whose 1514 murder while under imprisonment by  the Bishop of London gave a focus to the anger of many in the merchant class against the bishops and “The Church,” i.e. the institutional hierarchical Church. 
Richard Hunne was a merchant-tailor in the City of London in the early sixteenth century. His infant son, Stephen, died in 1511 and his funeral was at the Church of Saint Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel, London. The priest, Thomas Dryffeld, demanded the infant’s christening gown in which the tiny corpse was dressed, for a fee. Now this sounds gruesome to the modern reader, but it was standard in the Middle Ages that the various trappings of a funeral—the pall that covered the body, any cloths or bunting with which the church was draped for the funeral, and even the shroud in which the corpse was dressed belonged to the priest by ways of fee. Also any candles or other decorations that were used went to the priest. They would be resold to the undertaker (or in the case of candles, to the chandler) who could then sell them to the next grieving family for re-use. The baby most likely, at least by custom, would not have been buried in the Christening gown in any case but have been simply wrapped in linen or wool before being interred. Nevertheless Richard Hunne begrudged the priest the gown. He was a tailor, a very wealthy tailor, and the gown was of some more than usual value. Hunne could have afforded it. He was a man of means. But on principle he would not give in. It is difficult to know psychological motives of a person long dead unless they have left us some strong indication, and Hunne probably did not even understand himself why he was so tenacious on this point. Perhaps he was angry over the death of his son; that is a normal reaction at the death of someone we love. And the anger over the death of a child often is directed towards God—or religious figures who “represent” God to us—because we simply don’t know where else to direct it. We just don’t know why, on Hunne’s part, this escalated as it did, but it did.
Dryffeld for his part would not give in either and had Hunne summoned before the Archbishop’s court at Lambeth for settlement. The auditor of the case, Cuthbert Tunstall, would later be Bishop of London under both Henry VIII and Queen Mary. Tunstall had no axe to grind and simply applied the law. Hunne was ordered to give over the Christening gown or its value—6s 8d (probably about $225.00 in today’s money). There was no further punishment and Tunsall ignored Dryffeld’s demands that Hunne be excommunicated. One would think that the end of the matter. It wasn’t.
Hunne went to St. Mary Matfellon for evensong on December 27^th, the feast of Saint John the Evangelist. The priest conducting the service, this time Henry Marshall, Dryffeld’s vicar, recognized him and stopped the service, shouting that that Hunne was an excommunicate (he wasn’t, as I just wrote) and under the curse of the Church. The service, Marshall shrieked, could not continue until Hunne left. The scene was costly to Hunne’s business as devout Catholics would have nothing to do with an excommunicate. On the other hand, it seems Hunne was baiting the priest for this church, Saint Mary Matfellon, was not Hunne’s parish and was over two miles from Hunne’s home. Moreover, Hunne had brought a party of friends with him to the service and they all stomped out together. In the event, Hunne sued Marshall for slander in the Court of King’s Bench.
The case is very complex and we don’t need to go into all the details as we will only end up losing our point, but it involves the fact that in England at the time there were two judicial systems—the King’s and the Church’s. Certain offenses were to be tried in Church court—Hunne’s refusal to pay the mortuary fee to the priest, for example, was a matter for an ecclesiastical court, not the King’s Bench. Also, certain persons could only be tried in Church court, the clergy—from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to the lowliest parish clark—in point of fact. This privilege of exemption from the King’s Justice was a sore point for many going back to the time of Thomas Becket whose fights with Henry II were on this exact point of clerical exemption from civil law. At this very moment, Parliament was debating a bill to strip the lower clergy (those below the rank of subdeacon, such as acolytes, lectors, porters, etc.) of privilege in Church courts, demanding that they be tried for their crimes as everyone else in King’s Bench. Hunne by bringing the slander case against a priest into the King’s Bench was denying the right of the Church to try a case involving a member of the clergy. This implied that the Church was subject to the Crown. This was a dangerous compromise of clerical privilege. The Bishop of London thus went on to have Hunne arrested for “heresy.” The “heresy” substantially is denying the supremacy of the Church over the State.
Hunne was confined in Lollards’ tower—the prison reserved for heretics—in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence, Lambeth Palace. Two days later, December 4^th, 1514 he was found hanging in his cell. The jailers said it was suicide. The coroner’s jury said it was murder. Witnesses came forward and testified that they had heard members of the Bishop of London’s household plan the murder. One witness said that a servant of the Bishop had told him, the witness, that Hunne would be dead by Christmas. It seems that agents of the Bishop of London had attempted to murder Hunne in his cell by inserting a red-hot wire through his nostril into his brain—leaving no trace of violence and making the death appear natural. However there was a struggle, and in the struggle Hunne’s neck was broken. The corpse was hung to make it appear that the broken neck was the result of him having committed suicide by hanging.
Hunne was posthumously judged guilty of heresy and his body burned. As a convicted heretic, the Church confiscated his estate—leaving his wife and children penniless. This caused a huge outcry among the merchants of the city. Hunne was one of them, a member of the Guild of the Merchant Tailors, one of the guilds that controlled the political establishment of the city. When the Reformation came to England, it was slow to spread among the nobility and among the working classes—but it spread like wildfire among the business classes. They were educated and they were self-made men (and women) and they were ready to move on from the world of clerical privilege and control.
This story is one of many stories—more dramatic than most, but still only one—that hows the loss of confidence in the hierarchy and the clergy on the part of the Middle Class.  Part of this was the remnants of the Lollard movement which had encouraged a strong evangelical fervor among  the laity that differentiated the Lollards from the religious establishment.  But it was more complex than that.  You had, in the Middle Class, an educated group of people who were interested in religion but also had sufficient education to think for themselves and think critically.  They were not inclined to accept ideas simply on “authority,” but wanted their questions answered and their opinions heard.   We need today to be careful in the Church for we too have an educated laity who think for themselves and no longer accept something  just because “Father says so.”  Moreover, many of the laity today are better educated than the average priest—something not true sixty years ago—and even more educated and urbane than our bishops.  Authority today is answerable to its constituents.  Certain people in the Church may not like that, but they have to wake up and smell the coffee: thing have changed whether they like it or not.  Very frankly, the abuses of authority in the American Church by prelates like Cardinals Burke or George or Law or the late Cardinal Hickey,  or Archbishops Cordileone, or Lori, or Bishops Morlino, or Finn, have put the Church on some perilously think ice.  Part of Pope Francis’ appeal to people is that he seems to be more dialogical, or at least more aware of their perspectives and questions than his predecessors.   This is not a time for authority to be exercised peremptorily.  Indeed we see here those who understand authority as power (abuse) and those who understand authority as service and we need leadership whose trigger-finger is not quite so itchy as others would have it.  The tooth-paste does not go back into the tube and an educated and critically-thinking laity need far more sophisticated response from Church leadership than they have been getting in some circles.  It is a new day and a new day requires new ways of doing things.      

Foundations of the Anglican Church LIII

Woodcut from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs

depicting the martyrdom of William Tyndale

In my last posting about the foundations of the Church of England I mentioned that one of the defenders of Queen Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII was the English proto-Protestant, William Tyndale.  Perhaps we should do a short posting about Tyndale to better acquaint ourselves with him and to demonstrate the currents of thought that were prevalent in England at the time of Henry’s break with Rome.
Tyndale was born in a village in Gloucestershire in the west of England sometime around the year 1487.  As a young man he enrolled in Magdalene Hall Oxford (today Hertford College).  He was a gifted linguist and fluent in classical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as contemporary Spanish, French, German and Italian.  From the beginning of his education he was very dissatisfied with the University program because there was no systematic study of the Scripture.  One had to learn dogmatic theology and then approach the Scripture with the principles of dogmatic theology already in place.  This would, of course, bias the reading of scripture and reduce it to mere apologetics.  Tyndale had a passion for the scriptures and when a fellow priest (Tyndale was ordained sometime around 1520) said to him that we could do without God’s Law but not the Pope’s, Tyndale replied “I defy the Pope and all his laws, and if God spares me many years, I will see that the common plowman knows more Scripture than you do.”  So we have an incipient Protestant long before Henry is ready for his break with Rome. 
Tyndale was chaplain to Sir John Walsh.  A chaplain’s duties were provide liturgical service in the family chapel but also to serve as tutor to the children of the household.  Tyndale’s opinions got him into trouble more than once and he was summoned to the court of the Bishop of Worcester in whose diocese he lived, but not formally charged.  He went to London to appeal for patronage from Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, an admirer of Erasmus, for his (Tyndale’s) translating the bible into English.  Tunstall wanted to see reform in the Church but he, like most bishops of the time, was a political creature and saw where the wind was blowing with Lutheran ideas drifting over from Germany, and he did not want to jeopardize his own career by sponsoring a project that could be seen to lean in the Lutheran direction.  Bishop Tunstall declined to lend his help in the project but Tyndale was taken in by some merchant families and supported while he worked on his translation. He lectured at a London parish, Saint Dunstan’s in the West, where his ideas about scripture appealed to the merchant class.   
Tyndale was quick to embrace the ideas of Luther and that was dangerous in Henry’s England.  Henry had written—or had published under his name a book written by John Fisher—In Defense of the Seven Sacraments, an attack on the German reformer.  Tyndale, seeing that his ideas put him in danger in England, set out for Germany to meet Luther.  It is unclear if the two ever met but it is likely given the presence of both in Wittenberg in 1525.  While in Wittenberg, Tyndale finished his English translation of the New Testament and had it printed.  It was smuggled back into England where Bishop Tunstall warned booksellers against making it available.  Nonetheless, it was a best-seller as many, especially in the merchant class, were anxious to deepen their own personal religious experience.   Sometime about 1528 Tyndale moved to Antwerp and worked on translating the Old Testament as well as revising his translation of the Old Testament.  Antwerp was in the domain of the Emperor Charles V, a staunch opponent of Protestantism and Tyndale was arrested and betrayed to the authorities in 1535.  The following year he was strangled at the stake before his body was burned.  He is counted as one of the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation in England although he was executed on the continent by Imperial authorities. 
It is curious to know from where Tyndale got his ideas about scripture.  It was common methodology in the late medieval period that dogmatic theology (the teachings of the Church, or the “Tradition”) trumped scripture.  Scripture was seen as providing the “proof texts” to justify particular doctrines rather than seen as the foundations for what we believe.  Candidates for the priesthood—the only people allowed to study theology—spent their coursework on doctrine and canon law with very little attention to scripture.  There are those today who still put a primacy on doctrines—real or imagined—over Revelation, but the issue is not nearly as pernicious as (for the most part) what is being preached in the pulpit is in line with official Church teaching which, in turn, is more deeply rooted in scripture than it was in the late medieval period. 
In several entries in the not too distant past, I brought up the nouvelle theologie, the theological revival that began in the inter-war period of the twentieth century and which was a return to scripture and patristics over the neo-Thomism of the nineteenth century.  This nouvelle theologie, represented in the work of people like Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Josef Ratzinger, has anchored our faith much more closely to scripture than at any time since the end of “the Age of the Fathers”—usually marked as the death of Bernard of Clairvaux (1153).  As the patristic method went into decline with the rise of Scholasticism—often associated with Thomas Aquinas but generally embracing most theologians of the Late Middle Ages) theology found itself ever more independent of its scriptural foundation.  There was a strong movement among the Reformers to sweep away the Scholastic theology and do their theology from a scriptural base.  Luther himself was a Scripture scholar, not a dogmatic theologian.  While men like Luther—and to a lesser extent Calvin—were good scripture scholars and developed sound theologies, other, more radical, Reform groups often devolved into bizarre beliefs and practices unjustifiable by sound study of the Scriptures. As we study the evolution of the Church of England we will see some of these more curious groups that split from the Church of England in the seventeenth century such as the Tenth Monarchy Men, the Diggers, Levelers, Muggletonians, and Ranters.  The Quakers also have their roots in these movements as do many of the Anabaptist groups although their scriptural interpretations have over time stabilized in a quasi-orthodoxy.  In American culture, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints would have its origins in this scriptural popularism where a lack of sound scholarship leads communities into curious doctrines inconsistent with Christian orthodoxy.  We see that same subjective approach to faith in various Pentecostal groups and even among some so-called evangelicals who—like Catholics in the late medieval period—start with their beliefs and work backwards into scripture to justify them.    
Tyndale was no such radical.  Much in the same vein as Luther, but not as gifted into drawing out theological doctrines from scriptural study, Tyndale simply wanted to bring the scriptures back to the center of Christian belief and practice.  Unlike Luther, Tyndale seems to have been in no hurry to change the Liturgy which I find very curious.  One of Luther’s first objectives in the Reform of the Church in Germany was to make a revision—a conservative revision, but a revision—of the Liturgy.  While he kept the basic structure of the Mass quite intact, and even did not object to the use of the traditional vestments, and while he kept altars and the common position of facing away from the congregation at the altar, he did remove every trace of the idea that the Mass was somehow or other in and of itself a sacrifice.  This was due to a faulty understanding—both on Luther’s part and the part of most Eucharist and sacrifice.  Again, because of the separation of dogma from scripture, many Catholic thinkers had come to think of the Mass as a sacrifice that in some way repeats or makes anew the one eternal Sacrifice of the Cross.  That is they thought of each Mass as Christ being sacrificed again instead of understanding that in the Eucharistic celebration, the one, single, and eternal sacrifice of Calvary is made mystically present to the believer; or perhaps better, that in the Eucharistic Celebration the believer is made mystically present to the one, unique, and eternal sacrifice of Christ at Calvary.  Luther was appalled—and rightfully so—at this idea that Christ was somehow slain day after day, time after time, but such ideas are precisely the fruit of what happens when doctrine is allowed to run ahead of scripture.  Tunstall, on the other hand, like Wycliff before him, seems to have had some sort of spiritual schizophrenia which left him able to live with a divergence between faith and practice.    
Again, the liturgical revisions of the 1970 Missal of Paul VI were an attempt to clarify our Catholic understanding of the Mass by removing some of the doctrinal ambiguities that  had crept in over the centuries and to express our Catholic faith in a way consistent with the work of scripture scholars and theologians who had—thanks to the nouvelle theologie, done much to recover the patristic heritage that had been lost in the Middle Ages with the rise of Scholasticism. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LII

A question to consider is: Should Henry have gotten his annulment? 

Martin Luther defended

Katherine's cause against

an annulment.

The refusal of the annulment was purely political and shaped by the interplay of Medici and Imperial policies.  (Pope Clement VII was a Medici and Katherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V.)  Did Henry’s case have sufficient merits that he should have, if it had not been for the political aims of the Medici Pope, Clement VII, received an annulment from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon?

Before we go directly to that issue, we need to look at Katherine’s claims that her marriage to Henry’s brother, Arthur, had not been consummated.  Arthur was fifteen when they married; Katherine sixteen.  They were both in good health.  The marriage was solemnized and the couple was publicly bedded with prayers and a blessing by William Warham, then Bishop of London.   The marriage lasted only five months before Arthur died of a malady, probably influenza, which Katherine survived.  Although the Bride and Groom were young by today’s standards, it would be probable that the marriage had been consummated, but….
In order to obtain the required papal dispensation to marry the brother of her deceased husband, Katherine swore an oath that the marriage had not been consummated.  Now Katherine had plenty of reason to swear this oath—it was very much to her advantage as it involved both inheriting a crown and attaining a husband with whom she was in love.  But…in an age and in a court-culture where duplicity was the routine form of communication, Katherine stands as a monument to an inflexible integrity.  For her whole life Katherine could be counted on to tell the truth no matter what the cost; she was incapable of dishonesty.  If Katherine said the marriage was not consummated—you can take it to the bank. 
Shortly before her death, Katherine herself—in a frenzy of anguish about the consequences of her refusal to cooperate in the annulment process— acknowledged to the Imperial ambassador that had she ‘gone quietly’ i.e. acceded to the annulment, Henry would have been granted it.  She is undoubtedly right.  The annulment would have been granted, however, not on its merits but for political reason even as it was denied for political reasons.  Uncontested annulments of various royal marriages were routinely granted through the period before the Council of Trent—and often afterwards as well as in the case of Napoleon and Josephine’s marriage to permit Napoleon to marry Marie Louise of Austria in hopes of an heir. 
Thomas Cromwell in 1530 suggested to Henry that he poll the canon law faculties of the universities of Europe for opinions regarding the annulment.  The overwhelming response was in favor of the King’s argument.  While academics were always looking for patronage and Henry was in a better position to grant patronage than Katherine, they had to offer sound arguments in the King’s favor and many credible tracts were produced.  It was all a bit of a charade however as the universities did not have the power to grant annulments and while their arguments were meant to push the Pope into the King’s corner, Clement’s own political  interests made such pressure irrelevant to his decision.  Nevertheless, the Universities showed that credible canonical arguments could be made.  On the other hand, had Katherine been in a position to offer patronage, she too would have found her support among the academics.  Bishop Fisher, one of the leading voices of Church reform in England and a good theologian and canonist, went to the scaffold for defending the marriage. 
Curiously enough, two voices in favor of Katherine and the marriage were Martin Luther and William Tyndale.  We all know the former.  The latter was an English priest who was a pioneer in introducing Protestant thought into England in the 1520’s.  Tyndale provided an early translation of the Bible into English for the common folk to read.  Tyndale was arrested and executed in the Netherlands for his Protestant ideas in 1536, the year of Katherine’s death.  Both Luther and Tyndale said that it was unscriptural for Henry to end his marriage, but then each of them wanted to make the point that the Pope didn’t have the authority to over-rule the scriptural adjunction that what God has joined, man must not divide. 
In the end, I think we can say that were it not for Imperial/Medici politics trumping English politics, Henry would have gotten his annulment.  I also think, however—and I am not a canon lawyer—that for him to have gotten the annulment would have been a gross miscarriage of justice.  In the end, Katherine is vindicated.