History 320 Home, Schedule of Readings

MacCulloch, Reformation, 502-575.

Identify:
Chapter 12: Anglicanism, Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, adiaphora, Lancelot Andrewes, James I, avant-garde conformism, Arminians, William Laud, Westminster Confession, Interregnum, Restoration, Act of Toleration, Half-Way Covenant, Quakers

Chapter 13: Gregorian calendar, Joachim of Fiore, Malleus maleficarum, greasing, Martin Del Rio

Questions

For Chapter 12:

1. What is distinctive about Anglicanism? How did the Church of England become Anglican? Consider the ideas, policies, and events from the second half of the sixteenth century to 1700.

For Chapter 13:

2. What effects did an eschatalogical outlook have in Reformation Europe? What factors imposed limits on this outlook? (Make sure you know what eschatology means.)

Chapter 12 is the coda, or conclusion, to Part II. MacCulloch ends his regional approach to a Europe divided by religion with a consideration of the "British Legacy" in the world of the Reformation. He already discussed in detail the situation in what he calls the Atlantic Isles in Chapter 8 (378-99), but now he returns to them and journeys across the Atlantic to British colonial America because the "story of the Reformation in the Atlantic Isles after 1600 deserves special treatment" (502). Ask yourselves why this is so and consider whether the Reformation in the Atlantic Isles possesses a uniqueness that it does not have in other parts of Europe.

We learn about a "rebellion against European Reformed orthodoxy." The rebellion carried on by the English Arminians was "as serious as that of the Arminians in the Netherlands" (515). At stake was not simply the doctrine of predestination but the entire religious culture in which this doctrine could (or could not) abide. The construction and maintenance of church buildings, liturgical ornaments and vestments, reception of the Eucharist, the system of church government: these and other things helped shape the religious culture of the English Church. The Arminians and the avant-garde conformists ensured that the religious settlement of 1559 underwent no Puritan revisions. These groups in the English Church are vital parts of the development of modern Anglicanism. You should be aware of how early modern Anglicanism lost some of its Protestant moorings and of how various individuals, e.g. Hooker, Andrewes, Laud, James I, Charles I, Charles II, contributed to this.

The English Civil War was in part a response to developments within the English Church and had significant ramifications for English Christianity. MacCulloch writes: "the war altered everything. The whole structure of the pre-war Church was dismantled, and with the end of government control people could begin to make religious decisions for themselves" (525). The Interregnum ushered in "religious experiments" (528) and concomitant religious tolerance. With this experimentation we can associate Quakers, Congregationalists, independents, and separatists. The Restoration may have re-established the Anglican Church and disheartened Puritans and others, but it did not eradicate the "spectrum of Protestantisms," which in a generation found protection in the Toleration Act, which "was a faltering step in allowing Christians of opposing views to live side by side" (532).

Competition with Spain encouraged the first efforts at English colonization in the Americas, but opposition to royal ecclesiastical policy also turned religious dissenters into emigrants. The story of English Christianity in the early modern New World differs from that of imported Catholicism. MacCulloch believes that theology explains the slow place of English missionary work, for Puritan covenant theology "may have inhibited the idea of mission" (540).

Religious diversity, not conformity, characterized Christianity in the settlements in what later became the USA. Even before New Amsterdam became New York (and English) in 1664, it was home to a "religious cosmopolitanism." New York "first experienced the bewildering diversity of settlers that during the eighteenth century swelled into a flood, and made any effort to reproduce old Europe's compartmentalized and discrete confessional Churches seem a lunatic enterprise." English Catholics in Maryland shrewdly adopted a policy of "complete toleration" in 1649 for "all those who believed in Jesus Christ" and outlawed a series of confessional insults (542). William Penn in Pennsylvania went further than the Maryland Catholics, inspiring "a different ideal from the development of religious toleration as we have seen it in most of Reformation Europe: now religious liberty was developing" (543). Liberty means the repudiation of all forms of coercion and equality for all expressions of faith. So it appears that MacCulloch has brought Part II to a conclusion on a positive note. Does the Reformation have anything to do with this?

Chapter 13 initiates Part III, which "takes up social and intellectual themes which do not lend themselves so readily to chronological treatment" (xxiv). The themes of this chapter include chronology, apocalypticism, iconoclasm, the interior design of churches, and witch persecutions. You learn about the origins of the Gregorian calendar--the prevailing calendar in the modern West--and the confessional controversy that it sparked. Whereas confessional allegiances divided Europeans on the subject of what day it was, they did not stand in the way of the anticipation of the end of time, an anticipation nourished by apocalyptic thinking in the old, pre-Reformation, Church. Indeed, "expectation of the Last Days strengthened rather than died away in the course of the Reformation" (554).

Reformed Protestantism's horror of idolatry inspired the destruction of church art. Protestants "purged church buildings" and "brutally dispensed with" unnecessary buildings only to recreate sacred space in their houses of worship. A Protestant church became "a giant scrapbook of the Bible" (559); its interior was "betexted" (565).

When writing of witchcraft, MacCulloch uses a traditional term, "witch craze,"--"a major killer in the Reformation" (563)--which has gone out of fashion with experts in the field. They tend to write about the witch hunt or witch persecutions. MacCulloch is aware of this. He asks: "Why did witch-persecution not go the way of Transubstantiation, the five unbiblical sacraments or compulsory clerical celibacy?" (567-68) Witchcraft was an ecumenical anxiety. The development of "an effective and largely unchallenged disciplinary system" within Catholic and Protestant Churches went hand in hand with "witchcraft persecutions" (573). Spain is an important exception to this rule.

Note the dramatic language of MacCulloch's interpretations in the chapter:

  • "time changed in a literal fashion during the Reformation and the change turned into chaos because of it" (549).
  • "the Reformation tore apart the fabric of European society" (550).
  • "The Reformation would not have happened if ordinary people had not convinced themselves that they were actors in a cosmic drama plotted by God: that in the Bible he had left them a record of his plans and directions as to how to carry them out" (550).