Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries

The Presbyterian Story in America

Nathan Feldmeth, S. Donald Fortson, Garth M. Rosell, Kenneth J. Stewart

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467460910
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022) A definitive history of evangelical Presbyterianism in America

Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries tells the story of the Presbyterian church in the United States, beginning with its British foundations and extending to its present-day expression in multiple American Presbyterian denominations. This account emphasizes the role of the evangelical movement in shaping various Presbyterian bodies in America, especially in the twentieth century amid increasing departures from traditional Calvinism, historic orthodoxy, and a focus on biblical authority. Particular attention is also given to crucial elements of diversity in the Presbyterian story, with increasing numbers of African American, Latino/a, and Korean American Presbyterians—among others—in the twenty-first century. Overall, this book will be a bountiful resource to anyone curious about what it means to be Presbyterian in the multidimensional American context, as well as to anyone looking to understand this piece of the larger history of Christianity in the United States.

CHAPTER 1

Increasing Divergence after Common Origins in the British Reformations

A common notion among Presbyterians is that our branch of the Christian family is chiefly descended from John Calvin (1509–1564) and emanates from Geneva, the city where he labored. While this notion contains elements of truth, a too-rapid emphasis on Genevan influence becomes an obstacle to a fuller understanding. We should instead accept the principle that the heritage of the Reformation came to us by diverse means; some of these were native to the regions from which our forebears came; others crossed national boundaries.

Initially, we will focus chiefly upon the nations of England and Scotland and how the Protestant movement took hold there. Welsh and Irish Protestants would eventually make their own impact in the New World; yet, because of the vastly greater numbers of Protestant immigrants to America from England and Scotland,¹ these latter nations will occupy center stage.

England and Scotland were influenced—in tandem—by the European events set in motion by Luther’s 1517 protest at Wittenberg. His writings were soon available in both countries. Into each, Baltic traders illegally imported Lutheran literature.² At the universities of Cambridge and St. Andrews there were students ready to read and espouse the Lutheran teachings about the supreme authority of the Bible and salvation in Christ received by faith alone. Arrests and executions followed in both countries.³ We must also acknowledge that in both nations Luther’s tracts found a reception in regions where there had been an earlier popular religious movement known as Lollardy.

LOLLARDY: A FORCE IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

Originating through the teaching of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (1320–1384), the Lollard movement consisted of roving preachers and their followers. Lollard preaching oriented people to the supreme authority of the Bible; the preachers stressed that only scriptural teaching could provide the standard by which the life of the church and the individual could be judged. The Lollards also critiqued the medieval church’s wealth (accumulated in land and money) and the readiness of its bishops and archbishops to function as ministers of state (to the neglect of their churchly duties). They also contested the requirement of celibacy for the clergy, of the confessing of one’s sins to a priest, and of offering prayers for the dead; such practices lacked adequate biblical foundation. Most notoriously, they opposed the medieval Christian teaching that in the Holy Communion there is a physical transformation of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.⁴

Late in the lifetime of Wycliffe, Lollards translated the Latin Bible into the English of that day. At least five persons collaborated in the initial production of this word-for-word rendering of the Scriptures. It was an arduous and extended process, but the translation yielded from it was stilted and awkward. Later, Wycliffe’s associate John Purvey (c. 1351–c. 1414) improved the initial effort by utilizing what is today called an idiomatic translation strategy, which he termed “translation according to the sentence.”⁵ This superior method had first entailed the establishing (by comparison) of the best text of the Vulgate among numerous variants. Purvey also consulted patristic and medieval Bible commentaries to establish the meaning of passages difficult to translate.⁶

We can note both the pervasive extent of Lollardy’s spread and the persistence of its influence. Whole regions of England’s south, east, and midlands were influenced by this teaching; so also was the southwest of Scotland in the regions of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire.⁷ In both countries, those found holding Lollard opinions or possessing Lollard Scriptures were arrested and executed. That some 250 copies of this hand-copied Lollard Bible survive (some consisting of individual books of Scripture, others of complete Bibles) tells us something of this movement’s spread.⁸ The movement also had staying power: in spite of the persecution that raged against it, it persisted in families and in local communities.

In the south of England, the later Bible translator William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) came from a Gloucestershire family with Lollard associations.⁹ After completing his studies at Oxford, he would be influenced by the teachings of Luther and of Zwingli, but one modern researcher claims to have found earlier Lollard themes expounded in his writings as well.¹⁰ In Ayrshire, Scotland, a Lollard disciple and contemporary of Tyndale, Murdoch Nisbet, had turned the New Testament portion of the improved second (Purvey) Lollard Bible into the Scots dialect by the early 1530s.¹¹ According to the preface to his translation, Nisbet had been reading Luther and had been exposed to the Tyndale New Testament, available in English in 1525.¹²

Thus, there are ample indications that the preexisting Lollard movement had both survived into the age of the Reformation and, as it were, “passed the baton” to these later developments in both countries. To urge this is not to maintain the strict identity of Lollardy with later Protestantism, but only to observe that a definite overlap of concerns existed. In consequence, when Luther’s pamphlets did reach English and Scottish seaports, there was a segment of the population predisposed to take them up and to devour them.

THE ERA OF LUTHERAN INFLUENCE WITHIN BOTH COUNTRIES

That there was a definite Lutheran “phase” in the progress of the Reformation in the two neighboring countries is also beyond controversy. The early illegal importation of Luther’s writings meant that, in both countries, student populations were among the first to be affected. At the White Horse Inn at Cambridge and St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews, students—by now exposed to the Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus in 1516¹³—began also to read and debate Luther.¹⁴ Other students came in contact with Luther’s ideas while studying in Paris, Louvain, and Cologne. Some of those caught up in this new theology went subsequently to Wittenberg to sit at the feet of Luther and Melanchthon. Tyndale did so temporarily; he was followed by fellow Englishman Robert Barnes. The Lutheran center of Marburg was the temporary destination of another future English martyr, John Frith. Lutheran Wittenberg was also the destination of choice for the St. Andrews graduate Patrick Hamilton. One whom he influenced for the gospel while at St. Andrews, Alexander Alesius, eventually made Lutheran territory his permanent domain; he served as professor of theology initially at Frankfurt an der Oder and subsequently at Leipzig.¹⁵

The migration to Lutheran territory was usually a preliminary to attempting something for one’s homeland. In Tyndale’s case, while at Wittenberg he gained momentum in translating the New Testament from Greek into English; presses in Antwerp printed his efforts, until he was arrested and executed there in 1534. For Patrick Hamilton, the Wittenberg sojourn was a prelude to his open-air preaching in St. Andrews, leading to his arrest and martyrdom in 1528.

Thereafter, the Lutheran connection developed very differently in the two neighboring nations. In Scotland, Luther’s teaching continued to be opposed with arrests and prosecutions. Well into the 1540s, these policies of opposition ensured an ongoing migration of Scottish university graduates into Lutheran territories. They sometimes remained there until the theological climate changed at home.¹⁶

But England was about to pass through uncharted perils that followed King Henry VIII’s obtaining a parliamentary divorce from his first wife, Catherine, in 1533. Faced with the prospect of a retaliatory invasion led by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (nephew to Queen Catherine), Tudor England looked abroad for potential military allies. The Tudor regime found Lutheran Saxony open to such an alliance, but Saxon support was contingent on England’s endorsing of the Augsburg Confession of 1530. On again, off again negotiations involving diplomats of both countries never quite succeeded in bringing the matter to resolution; King Henry VIII—while antipapal—was not in fact pro-Lutheran. As the threat of imperial invasion receded, so did Henry’s interest in Saxon diplomacy. During the last decade of Henry’s reign the Church of England followed a course that might be called “national Catholicism.” The era of Lutheran influence in England had clearly crested.¹⁷ By 1530, two things had become clear about the fledgling European Protestant movement.

THE LIMITATIONS OF MAGISTERIAL-STYLE REFORMATION

First, it was no longer realistic to expect that Protestantism would remain one movement extending across western Europe, since strong disagreements about the Lord’s Supper had emerged between Luther and the Swiss pastor-theologians Zwingli and Oecolampadius. At the Marburg Colloquy (October 1529) and after, Luther was unbending in insisting that his literal understanding of the words of Jesus, spoken in instituting Holy Communion (Matt. 26:26), was nonnegotiable. This position was not one that the Swiss could endorse.¹⁸ Similarly, it had become clear—both at Wittenberg while Luther was hiding in Wartburg Castle (1521–1522) and at Zurich in 1522–1523—that there would be dissenters from the young reformation that began in 1517. At Wittenberg, spiritualists or prophets demanded revolutionary changes based on claimed promptings of the Spirit.¹⁹ As well, at Zurich, a fledgling Anabaptist movement dissented against the role played by the cantonal government in determining the pace of religious reform; they also repudiated the universal baptism of infants practiced within the canton. It was clear that early Protestantism would not remain unified. But there was a second limiting factor.

The Lutheran movement had relied upon what was becoming the dominant method of advancing religious reformation: dependence on a regional ruler to authorize and defend church reform within his territories. This came to be known as the magisterial pattern of reform. Thus, in Saxony, for instance, the approval and support of Prince Frederick was absolutely fundamental to the advancing of reform; were it withdrawn, Luther and his colleagues would have faced all the hostility that the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire could muster. Accordingly, Frederick had protected Luther from arrest after the Diet of Worms in 1521 by having him kidnapped and hidden in Wartburg Castle. At Frederick’s death in 1525, his brother, John, continued in this supportive role. The number of German princes who would act similarly and advance a reformation of religion in their territories increased in the period leading to the 1530 Diet of Augsburg. But, in England and Scotland, it had become clear by the 1540s that lack of similar royal support would not allow the cause of reform to advance in any orderly way.

The Tudor monarchy, while it had proved to be antipapal, was at the same time unprepared to support church reform as it had gone forward in Europe. Permission for clergy to marry was granted, only to be revoked. The freedom to own and read a Bible was granted, only to be restricted. As for the Stuart monarchy to the north, there is no evidence that it ever became antipapal enough to support efforts to uproot corruption. Thus, the question naturally arises whether church reform on the magisterial plan was within the realm of possibility. The answer to this question, prior to 1547, would have to be no. There could be no nationwide Reformation for England or Scotland without royal protectors, like the Saxons Frederick and John.

The death of Henry VIII in 1547 did open the way for a brief, energetic endorsement of further reformation under the sponsorship of the boy-king Edward VI. Ruling at first through two different “lord protectors” (regents) and, eventually, in his own right, Edward became the energetic promoter of further Protestant advance. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) began to actively cultivate relationships with various European leaders of reform in Strasbourg, Zurich, and Geneva. In Edwardian England, Scottish Protestant refugees such as John Knox (1513–1572) and John Willock (1515–1585) found a liberty to preach that had been denied them in Scotland. Draft Protestant articles of faith were prepared for the Church of England, and a prepared service book, the Book of Common Prayer, rapidly went through two editions.²⁰ During this five-year window of time, it appeared that the magisterial model of advancing Reformation might yield results in England after all. But as is well known, Edward’s death in 1553 opened the way for a religious reaction directed by his Roman Catholic half sister, Mary Tudor.

Because of Mary’s half-decade reign of oppression, she is justifiably remembered as the great pers...