Hi Drew –
I always know you are there!! A quick word about primary sources for Matthew Parker
First he left a substantial library to Corpus Christi College on his death in 1575 –
**The Parker Library is the rare books and manuscripts library for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is known throughout the world due to its invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the core of which were bequeathed to the College by Archbishop Matthew Parker.
The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint venture run by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library and Stanford University Libraries in the United States of America.The main goal of the project is to digitise all of the medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library and to be the first project that seeks to make an entire library publicly accessible on the web. The project is funded by the Mellon Foundation.**
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Lib … ti_College
I note from the catalogue that his collection includes texts of both Erasmus and the Church Fathers, and plenty of texts concerning the History of the English Church – Venerable Bede, Alfred, Anglo Saxon Chronicle etc… I could do a proper scholarly trawl here, but I’m pretty content that this all accords with the picture that emerges from biographical information.
Second we have his correspondence from his time as Archbishop that was all published in the nineteenth century by The Parker Society, ‘For the Publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the Reformed English Church’. This society was formed in 1840 and disbanded in 1855 when its work was completed. The current Church Society gives the opinion that –
…The stimulus for the foundation of the (Parker) society was provided by the nineteenth-Century Tractarians. Some members of this movement, e.g., R.H. Froude in his Remains of 1838-9, spoke most disparagingly of the English Reformation: ‘Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more’. Keble could add in 1838, ‘Anything which separates the present Church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good’. Protestants within the Church of England therefore felt the urgent need to make available in an attractive and accessible form the works of the leaders of the English Reformation. To many it seemed that the Protestant foundations of the English Church were being challenged like never before. Thus the society represented a co-operation between traditional High Churchmen and evangelical churchmen, both of whom were committed to the Reformation teaching on justification by faith. Subscribers were also involved in the erection of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford, although this was as much anti-Roman Catholic as anti-Tractarian. The society had about seven thousand subscribers who paid one pound each year from 1841 to 1855; thus for fifteen pounds the subscribers received fifty three volumes – the General Index and the Latin originals of the 1847 ‘Original Letters relative to the English Reformation’ being special subscriptions. Twenty-four editors were used and the task of arriving at the best text was far from easy. The choice of publications was controversial and some authors and works were unfortunate not to be included in PS volumes. While some of the volumes have been superseded by more recent critical editions, today this collection remains one of the most valuable sources for the study of the English Reformation.
See -
churchsociety.org/churchman/ … namond.pdf
The Church Society – a very Conservative body within the Church of England - is involved in a project to re-publish the volumes first published by the Parker Society to encourage the faithful today. They are keen, like the original Parker Society, to give the lie to the idea that the Elizabethan Settlement, of which I shall write very soon, was a compromise between the ‘extremes’ of Lutheranism/Zwingli-ism and not a compromise between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism. My view is that those that stress the former view (Conservative Protestants) are as much guilty of historical myth making as those who stress the latter view (Anglo-Catholics), The Elizabethan settlement in Parker’s Prayer Bok with its 38 Articles was deliberately vague, and it always meant different things to different people (as he was content to be ‘all things to all men’).
However, the unwitting testimony of the publication of Parker’s correspondence by Conservative Protestant Anglicans must be that there is nothing in this correspondence to disturb their view. I hope you agree with this – and on these grounds I take it as read that I do not need to trawl through his letters etc, for new evidence.
Likewise I take it as read that Dean Farrar would have researched Parker’s correspondence before writing his Eternal Hope sermons and that he was well aware the arguments and historical myths/conjectures of Conservative Protestant Anglican’s when he wrote -
To say that it (the 42nd article) was struck out because the Anabaptists were no longer prominent is simply an unsupported conjecture. The conjecture may be true, but even if so I look on the elimination of the Article as distinctly overruled by a watchful Providence; since it is the province of the Church to decide only in matters of faith, and no church has a right to legislate in those matters of opinion on which wise and holy men have, in all ages, been content to differ, seeing that we have no indisputable voice of Revelation to guide our conclusions respecting them.
(see my first post in this revived thread - a couple of days ago)
A lot more is known about Christianity in the Renaissance and the Reformation today than was known in Farrar’s day – of how messy and disparate and fascinating Christianity was then (as it is today). This has allowed me to make my own conjectures (but I hope these are stated with due modesty rather than as historical myths- or ‘truths’ that go beyond the evidence). In the end we have to focus on ‘the watchful providence’ of how the abrogation of the 42nd article worked itself out in our history –this is the truly important thing in my view.
What I will do now is briefly address the issues I highlighted in my last post, and then crack on with an analysis of the Elizabethan Settlement. I think I will also start and Appendix thread for the two Ecclesiology threads that are developing here – I have other very relevant and interesting bits and bobs that the committed may well want to read and comment on; but I do not want this material to interrupt the main narrative thread
All the best
Dick