What fun And now here comes the party pooper post
Hi All
I was thinking about the original thread here –which was started perhaps three years ago? – as a way of rounding this one off. It was started by Rev Drew - and I wonder if someone could tag my dear friend Drew and Luke (who I’ve never actually dialogued with) into this thread; I don’t know how to tag people here. The OP for this thread is a brief summary of my settled views about Universalism and the C of E and the cancelation of the 42nd Article (and it really is an easy read). There is a lot more that I can say – but I’m not giving everything away because I hope to write a book about this – or at least a series of essay – and if I don’t get these published I think I’ll still copywrite them before posting online (or something like that - whatever it is you have to do to retain a little bit of ownership).
But I do remember that on the original thread – in the brainstorming stages – that a couple of good suggestions were made by both Drew and Luke – ones that I wasn’t quite sure what to say about then; but in the light of plenty of research I’ve found them to be good pointers but pointers that need to now be discarded (well that’s my view and you are free to disagree and to dialogue about my view .
Notes for Rev. Drew ([tag]revdrew61[/tag])
Hi Drew – I remember that you speculated that Matthew Parker via Martin Bucer may have been behind the abrogation of the 42nd article along with Elizabeth. So here is my take on this now (I’ve dealt with Liz in the OP) -
Regarding Matthew Parker; well he was a moderate man and an irenic one certainly – which was why Elizabeth chose him as her first Archbishop of Canterbury – a post that he really did not want to take. But there is nothing in his private correspondence to suggest that he was a universalist and, as I’ve said above, in his initial proposals of amendments to Cranmer’s Articles from the Edwardian Second prayer book the 24nd article still remains – it has not been crossed out. So there’s a mystery for us. It seems very unlikely that a consensus of bishops and clergy at the Convocation decided to back a measure to cancel the 42nd article – since some of these were strict Calvinists returned hot from Geneva where they’d sought refuge from the persecutions of Bloody Mary (they were not as powerful a block as they later became in Elizabeth’s reign (but they still had weight).
Regarding Martin Bucer -he was a moderate among the Continental Reformers (like Philip Melanchthon and other names less well know) and he had some of the hallmarks of a Christina Humanist ( and Erasmus never disliked’ him). Also Bucer was involved in attempts to build new bridges between Catholics and Protestants at a time when the old bridges were well and truly ablaze. He was also a colleague and friend of Matthew Parker’s when he at the University of Oxford for a time - but the poor man died completely worn out after only a few years of safety). He wasn’t around at/ alive for the Elizabethan Settlement the Convocation – but was his spiritual presence ( as it were ) behind the cancelation of the 42nd Article)? I think almost certainly not and here are my reasons:
Yes, Bucer was moderate Reformer but ‘moderate Reformer ‘does not necessarily mean he was universalist – and he showed no sympathy for the Origenist traditions of his day in his writings.
In addition, he had Hans Denck the Anabaptist spiritual – who was certainly influenced by Erasmus – banished from Strasbourg for suspected universalism and suspected Unitarianism. The two charges went together but the charge of universalism was as serious as the one of Unitarianism. In the end Bucer himself was banished from Strasbourg and fled to England (I have also read that the young John Calvin was arraigned before Bucer on a charge of Unitarianism – but Bucer let him leave unmolested which compares very favourably with Calvin’s treatment of Servetus arraigned later in Geneva on the same charge when Calvin had come into his time of influence (but I only have one secondary source for this information currently– and anyway it’s not important to the current story).
Bucer and his refugee colleagues at Oxford who were invited to England by Cranmer – Peter Martyr (the Italian Reformer) and Jan Laski ( the Polish Reformer)– advised England’s chief Archbishop about the shortcoming of his First Prayer Book – which Elizabeth secretly favoured – that did not include the 42nd article and did include prayers for the dead and a high Lutheran doctrine of the Eucharist. The high doctrine of the Eucharist disappeared from the Second Prayer book along with prayers for the dead because of the advice given by Bucer and his companions. Indeed the 42nd article – based partly on a similar article in the Continental Protestant Augsburg confession – may have been formulated with the collaboration of Bucer (an hypothesis I’d like to run past another scholar in the field)
Notes for Luke
Hi Luke I remember you arguing or a t least strongly implying that Cranmer’s Anglicanism was a very Calvinist Anglicanism and that Cranmer’s teachings about hell in a couple of his Homilies show that Universalism and Anglicanism don’t mix.
Calvin did vie for influence in England when the boy king Edward was on the throne – dedicating some of his biblical commentaries to Edward and writing to Cranmer advising him to hunt down and kill Anabaptists without mercy for example – but Cranmer was canny about Calvin and kept him at arms length. The Reformers he asked to help him were moderates. We can see this in the seventeenth article on predestination which they advised on – retained with only a few modifications by Parker. This affirms predestination to life but says nothing about predestination to damnation. Towards the and of Elizabeth’s; reign when the Calvinists were growing strong in power in England a group of Calvinist hotheads did formulate six articles which they hoped to have imposed on the Church of England one of which affirmed double predestination. Elizabeth’s Archbishop at this time – John Whitgift was a moderate Calvinist and probably agreed with the hotheads in principle. However he also abided by the idea of comprehensiveness within the Church and was loyal to Elizabeth. So he quickly dealt with the hotheads– and the appointment of Whitgift, a loyal Calvinist, to deal with the disloyal Calvinist when they were growing in power is another example of Elizabeth’s political acumen. Certainly she was very fond of Whitgift and called him ‘ my little black husband’ affectionately.
I also remember you citing passages from the Book of Homilies concerning teaching about hell in defence of his argument that universalism is not consonant with Anglicanism – either today or in the past. The Homilies were standard sermons written by Cranmer and later added to mainly by Bishop John Jewell for the clergy to preach in Churches. Well the article in the Thirty Nine Articles about these specifically refers to the relevance of these sermons to ‘these times’ and not to all times. Also an Elizabethan Origenist could easily accommodate these as referring to age long purifying fire in the light of their knowledge of New Testament Greek
Any questions gratefully received
In Christ our Hen
Dick