This is a week delayed, but as I continue to reflect on how I’ve explored Christian traditions beyond my own, I thought I’d share a bit of what I told an adult Sunday school class about two more branches of the Protestant family tree: the Reformed and Anglican traditions.
Like Luther’s, these reformations embodied the “magisterial” alternative to the more radical path taken by the Anabaptists. Instead of embracing a kind of discipleship shaped by suffering, these Protestants often worked hand in hand with the kingdoms of this world — whether the governing councils of Swiss cantons or the Tudor monarchs of Great Britain.
Reformed and Anglican Origins
The Reformed tradition goes back Swiss-German reformers of the 1520s, like Ulrich Zwingli (Zurich), Johannes Oecolampadius (Basel), and Martin Bucer (Strasbourg), though its most famous figure was a French-born, second-generation reformer who had a complicated relationship with political elites in the city-state of Geneva: John Calvin. With their commitment to strip medieval Christianity of any traditions that risked false worship rather than that centered on God’s Word (e.g., doing away with many forms of church art), the Reformed reformers also invited their own radicals to push still further yet, with Michael Servetus famously meeting his terrible end in Calvin’s Geneva for daring to suggest that neither infant baptism nor the Trinity were biblical concepts.
Despite that incident, Geneva drew Protestant refugees from around Europe, with John Knox, the pastor of a community of English-speaking exiles, calling Calvin’s city “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.” Famously, as he returned to Scotland in 1559 to start that nation’s reformation (and the Presbyterian branch of the Reformed limb), Knox was denied passage through England by Queen Elizabeth I.
The unwanted daughter of an executed queen, Elizabeth inherited a land divided into religious factions. Her father, Henry VIII, had opposed Luther’s reforms, yet broke with the papacy over its refusal to annul his son-less marriage to a Spanish princess. To marry Elizabeth’s ill-fated mother, Anne Boleyn, Henry enlisted the help of the Protestant-sympathizing bishop Thomas Cranmer, then arranged for Parliament to make the monarch the head of both state and church. But while the Henrician Reformation broke with Rome and looted England’s monasteries, it was hardly Protestant in theology. That change waited for Henry’s death, when advisers to nine-year old Edward VI were free to reform the Church of England as they saw fit. But when Edward died, his elder half-sister Mary I attempted to bring England back to Catholicism. Among other victims of the purge that ensued, Cranmer denounced the Pope as anti-Christ just before thrusting the hand that signed recantations of his Protestant principles into the fire that would consume the rest of his body.
While Elizabeth was only somewhat less bloody than the half-sister she succeeded — executing dozens rather than hundreds of Jesuit missionaries and other Catholic martyrs, she did succeed in arranging a religious settlement that gave Anglicanism its reputation as a via media: a “catholic and reformed” synthesis that sounded Protestant and looked Catholic — at least, to the Reformed “Puritans” who wanted to purify the church of such extrabiblical amendments as royal supremacy, bishops, and vestments.
Reformed and Anglican Distinctives
Earlier this spring, confirmands at our Lutheran church played a game of “Stump the pastor.” For the most part, our clergy’s replies affirmed for me why I’m much more sympathetic to Luther than Zwingli or Calvin when it comes to intra-Protestant disputes. But when one student asked why God allows climate change to take place and the answer included not a single word about human sinfulness, I wondered if I was more Reformed than I realized. Surely there is something at least partially depraved in our individual willingness to make selfish choices that harm others and damage God’s Creation. But more than that, I thought of Reformed theologian Suzanne McDonald’s observation that “We are born into the web of everyone else’s sinful choices, and our own inclination away from God means that we will inevitably contribute to that web.” No Christian attempt to do justice will make much progress if it doesn’t start with humble honesty about how badly we need God’s mercy.
At the same time, I appreciate novelist Marilynne Robinson’s comment that “Calvin has a strange reputation that is based very solidly on the fact that nobody reads him.” After I finished my class, one of the especially well-read members of the audience came up nodding his head and telling me how much he appreciated the beautiful ways that Calvin describes Creation and Incarnation in The Institutes of the Christian Religion. But as importantly, Robinson is surely right that Calvin thought humans to be much more than the miserable worms that some of his contemporary namesakes like to think: “He says we have completely fallen away from the glory of God, and look what we are, and then he describes this glorious creature… He was ready to grant the dark side of reality, and completely lyrical about what is splendid about it… including human consciousness, human presence, most profoundly.”
Year after year, my favorite reading to teach in Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture course is Calvin’s explanation of divine vocation. While it starts with an affirmation of God’s sovereignty (“We are not our own, we belong to God”), it ends with an affirmation of all kinds of human activity, guided by God’s calling and empowered by God’s Spirit.
I did have my adult students sing one of the “Geneva Jigs” that Elizabeth I disdained — psalms rewritten with poetic meter to facilitate congregational singing. But no Reformed service has ever moved me as deeply as even the most humble instance of Anglican worship. Whether it’s choral chant echoing around Westminster Abbey or a sparsely attended Sunday morning service in your local Episcopal parish, no other Protestant tradition understands so well that what the psalmist calls the “beauty of holiness” (at least in the King James, another example of the Anglican theme) is itself worshipful.
But as a Pietist, my favorite aspect of Anglicanism is its commitment to unity. Now, I’m enough of a congregationalist and church-state separationist to have no affection for the state-coerced uniformity that originally characterized the Church of England.1 But I appreciate Cranmer’s insight that corporate worship could bring together a religiously divided nation, whose diverse members could all find meaningful the ecumenical poetry of his Book of Common Prayer. At its most latitudinarian, Anglicanism can seem indifferent to doctrine, but to this day, one of my favorite evangelicals of the 20th century is the Anglican priest John Stott, whose “balanced biblical Christianity” affirmed both Protestant essentials and a much longer list of adiaphora.
Multiple Acts of Uniformity compelled attendance at Church of England services, on penalty of fines.