Literature of Luther

Receptions of the Reformer

Wesley, Edwards

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879082
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Given the upcoming five-hundred-year anniversary of Luther's ninety-five theses, it is appropriate to reflect on the impact of Luther's ideas. This collection of essays, which began as conference papers on the literature of Luther, seeks to initiate conversations on the many and varied receptions of the reformer. Most of the essays are interdisciplinary, crossing boundaries between literature, history, and theology. Both Catholic and Protestant voices are well represented. The topics covered are wide-ranging so that for any interested reader several essays will likely strike a chord.

1

“A Most Stupid Scoundrel”

Some Early English Responses to Luther

J. Patrick Hornbeck II

Let us begin in the year 1521. It is four years after Martin Luther published his ninety-five theses on indulgences, theses that today appear to many scholars to constitute less the laying down of an ecclesiopolitical gauntlet than a relatively ordinary academic act.1 It is the year after Pope Leo X threatened Luther with excommunication and the year that, after Luther responded by burning the papal bull Exsurge Domine, the pope formally declared him to be outside the community of Christian faithful. Though what most contemporary scholars know as the Protestant reformations had therefore begun, in 1521 the English language does not yet contain the word “Protestant,” which appeared for the first time in writing in 1539.2 The word “Lutheran” had just begun to be used, for instance in the correspondence of Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham, and the word “Anglican,” at least in its modern sense, is at least half a century off.3 In 1521, Henry VIII of England, in the twelfth year of his reign, is stably married to Katherine of Aragon, and their one surviving child, Mary, is a girl of five.

Recalling these details about the early years of the Reformation period serves as a reminder of the uncertainty about its eventual outcome that the women and men alive at the time would likely have possessed. Lacking the historiographical and interpretative tools—not to mention the raw facts—that modern scholarship takes for granted, these women and men did not know, in 1521, that they were living at the beginning of what later generations would call the Reformation. Even if they had an inkling that with the writings of Luther and his successors the religious world they largely took for granted was about to change, it is unlikely that any of them could have predicted the series of upheavals—cultural, social, and especially religious—that would roil the kingdom of England through the rest of the sixteenth century. Instead of the retrospective and oftentimes confessionally self-aware perspectives that scholars today bring to the events of the 1520s, the women and men living then brought to bear on the defining events of their lives perspectives that reflect the categories they had available to them.4 Their ways of thinking were profoundly influenced by medieval and early Christian ideas about the tasks of theology and of theologians, about orthodoxy and heresy, and about the boundaries of permissible change in the church. Their worldviews framed religious difference almost exclusively in the categories of heresy and schism. And as this essay will seek to demonstrate with regard to several highly visible English anti-Lutheran texts of the 1520s, the limitations of such perspectives led them often to misinterpret, or at least to be unwilling to take on their own terms, the emerging theologies and ecclesiologies of Luther and other reformers.

• • •

On May 12, 1521, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor, and universally acknowledged the second most powerful man in England, organized a public burning of Luther’s books in front of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. While in some respects this conflagration differed little from the many other burnings, both of books and of people, that marked much of the sixteenth century, in its own time it was for at least two reasons remarkable. First, there is little evidence for the reading of Luther’s writings in England at the beginning of the 1520s, and even less evidence for the widespread dissemination of Luther’s ideas. His German compositions had not yet widely been translated into English, and his Latin texts had not yet attracted the interest that English scholars were to pay them in subsequent years.5 As Craig D’Alton has put it, Wolsey’s burning of Luther’s books therefore took place against the backdrop of only “a negligible Lutheran presence in England.”6 Second, even though Lutheran ideas were not a significant or even a significantly growing feature of English religious and intellectual life, Wolsey’s book-burning and other elements of the government’s official response to Luther far outstripped the measures that were taken by other European kingdoms. Thus in England, although there were few Lutherans, there were prominent anti-Lutheran sermons by churchmen such as John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; there were other public book-burnings; and perhaps most extraordinary of all, King Henry himself entered into the fray by writing in Latin a book against Luther, the Assertio septem sacramentorum (Assertion of the Seven Sacraments).7 It was of course this book that won Henry and his successors on the English throne the papal title Defender of the Faith.

Thus before we begin to explore the contents of the king’s book, as well as of other anti-Lutheran tracts written by men close to the king, we must confront this paradox: why, with so few Lutherans, was there so much anti-Lutheran activity on the part of English royal and ecclesiastical officials? Perhaps the king and his advisors were far-sighted enough to predict that the Lutheran controversy would achieve the international and historical importance that it eventually did. However, it is more likely that when Henry, Wolsey, and their colleagues began to assess the significance of Luther’s proposed reforms, they were looking not forward into the future, but backward into the past. For in 1521, England was still dealing with the remnants of another set of religious controversies, ones that in the immediately previous century had been thought to pose serious challenges to the stability of both church and crown.

I am referring, of course, to the Wycliffite or lollard heresy of what we know as the later middle ages, but what in 1521 would have been just a few decades prior. Much about lollardy—the meaning of the word itself, the coherence of the heresy as a “movement” or “sect,” the extent of its dependence on the ideas of its putative founder John Wyclif—remains contested among contemporary scholars.8 According to the narrative current in the early 1520s, however, lollardy owed its existence to primarily the heretical ideas of Wyclif, a once distinguished Oxford scholar who, perhaps out of spite at being denied promotion to the episcopacy, began toward the end of his career to articulate progressively more controversial views. Wyclif was exiled from the university in 1381 for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, but even after he left Oxford, he continued to exert influence through his followers. These equally or perhaps even more sacrilegious clerics and laypeople illicitly translated the Bible and composed religious texts in the vernacular, rejected orthodox understandings of the sacraments, shunned traditional devotional practices like the adoration of images of the saints, and proposed the disendowment of ecclesiastical institutions.9 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that accounts of lollardy like this one, which focus primarily or exclusively on the doctrines and practices that lollards rejected rather than on the alternative forms of Christianity that they embraced, are incomplete.10 However, it was on accoun...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: “A Most Stupid Scoundrel”
• Chapter 2: Reformation Never Ends
• Chapter 3: A Conversation among the Reformers in Heaven
• Chapter 4: Luther and Kleist
• Chapter 5: Vocation, Holiness and Freewill in Luther and Grisez
• Chapter 6: Luther’s Linguistic Innovation
• Chapter 7: Luther, Libertines, and Literature
• Chapter 8: Release from Torment
• Chapter 9: Luther’s Theology of the Cross
• Chapter 10: Never Such Innocence Again
• Chapter 11: Allusions to Wittenberg, the Four Last Things, and the Character of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark