Tag: English Reformation

What If?

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Fr. Dwight thinks that ecumenical talks between Anglicans and Roman Catholics are at a dead end:

Unless there is some unexpected turnaround in the Church of England and the Anglican churches of the developed world, GAFCON is the Anglican Communion of the future. If so, what does this development mean for Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenism?

First, it should be recognized that the old form of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue is finished. Started during the fresh optimism of the 1960s, ecumenism between Anglicans and Roman Catholics included convergence on liturgical matters running parallel with regular discussions among theologians on both sides. The problem with this model is that the Anglican theologians were invariably from the more Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Church. They were also almost exclusively drawn from the Church of England and the Episcopal Church. The Africans were scarcely included. Like Cardinal Walter Kasper, most members of the Episcopal and Anglican churches didn’t think the Africans were worth listening to.

As the Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic proceeded with their progressive agenda, discussions with the Catholic Church became increasingly strained. Despite diplomatic noises from both sides, it is generally agreed that the Anglicans have introduced such “grave obstacles to unity” as to put any real ecumenical hopes on hold. Pope Benedict XVI did not improve matters by erecting the Anglican Ordinariate — a structure within the Catholic Church that provides disenchanted Anglicans a semi-detached home within Catholicism.

But think about what Pope Francis said recently about people who are divorced:

Speaking out on one of the most contentious issues of his papacy, Pope Francis on Wednesday told a gathering at the Vatican that the church should embrace Catholics who have divorced and remarried, and that such couples “are not excommunicated, and they absolutely must not be treated that way!”

“They always belong to the church,” he added, calling on pastors to welcome Catholics who have remarried without an annulment, even though such Catholics are currently barred in most cases from receiving the Eucharist, the central sacrament of the faith.

“The church is called to be always the open house of the Father. … No closed doors! No closed doors!” Francis told the crowd at his weekly public audience, which resumed after a monthlong summer break.

Imagine if Pope Francis had been the Bishop of Rome when Henry VIII sought an annulment. If Pope Francis had been as pastoral with the English monarch as he is with today’s marriage challenged Roman Catholics, would the Reformation have happened?

Getting over the Puritans, Say Hello to the Huguenots

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

I cannot say enough good things about Philip Benedict’s Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002). Among the reasons for recommending the book, aside from careful scholarship and judicious conclusions, is Benedict’s attention to the variety of Reformed expressions as they took shape in diverse cultural and political contexts. This is what historians do and Benedict does it greatly.

One of the arresting parts of Benedict’s narrative is his account of the French Reformation. Obviously, the politics of France never cooperated with the aims of church reform (as if they did in England). As a result, the Huguenots failed to institutionalize a reformed church in ways that could be sustained in France, or that served as the inspiration for colonial churches in the New World where Calvinism of British descent would dominate the Reformed experience. Even so, his comments about the French Reformed church prior to St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre are music to Reformed confessionalist’s ears:

The achievements of the Reformed by early 1562 were little short of remarkable. Within just a few years, hundreds of congregations had assembled across the kingdom. A set of national church institutions had been defined that would endure for more than a century with only minor modifications. Reformed worship had obtained legal toleration. In a few locales, it had even displaced Catholicism. . . .

. . . [T]he wars of Religion taught the churches to rely on their own resources to survive. At successive national synods, they increasingly marked their distance from the secular authorities. Synodal decrees warned against selecting magistrates to serve as elders, forbade consistories to denounce church members discovered to be guilty of heinous crimes to the secular judges, and declared all consistory proceedings secret, even those in which consistory members were insulted in manners that might be actionable before the secular courts. All this was a far cry from the sort of defense of consistorial authority that Calvin sought and obtained from the Genevan magistracy. The French Reformed churches thus became the enduring model of a network of churches that maintained purity of doctrine, quality control over local clergy, ecclesiastical discipline, and reasonable uniformity of practice with a minimum of reliance on secular authorities. (pp. 144, 148)

Not to mention that the Gallican Confession wasn’t too shabby.

If only the Huguenots were more the model for American Reformed church life than the Puritans.