Abstract
This chapter lays out two controversial premises. First, from the perspective of Shakespeare’s England, the Protestant Reformation is usefully considered a European-wide movement, incorporating both the ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Reformed’ strands of Protestant theology. Second, if one defines Protestantism as involving such Lutheran innovations as simul juste et peccator, forensic justification, and alien righteousness, a distinction can be made, even early in the sixteenth century, between Catholic and Protestant theology in England. This approach was indeed taken in England in Shakespeare’s time; the narrative of a ‘true’ Protestant Church came to oppose that of the Roman Catholic Church and its belief in Christian history as an apostolic succession. This chapter also reviews some of the basic elements of Protestant thinking that define the chapters to follow.
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Notes
- 1.
My use of the term ‘Reformed’ to refer to all of these churches is normative, although some historians would distinguish between the Zurich and Geneva churches largely based on the ‘covenant theology’ associated with Zurich . See J. Wayne Baker , Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980). Lyle Bierma argues against this position. “Federal Theology in the Sixteenth Century: Two Traditions?” The Westminster Theological Journal 45 (1983), 304–21. Peter A. Lillback shows that theologians like Luther and Calvin also had views regarding covenant thinking, even if they rejected the implications, in Bullinger, that the covenant was a bilateral one between God and humans, which would place obligations on God. See Peter A. Lillback, The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001).
- 2.
This does not mean to ignore the frequent claims on the part of sixteenth-century Lutherans and Reformers that one’s opponents are even worse than Catholics ; the term used then was ‘Papists,’ which I will not use in this book.
- 3.
This book makes no claims about Shakespeare’s own religion or the influence of other ideas, supplementing Protestant theology, in his work. For instance, Shakespeare seems interested in Catholic theology and he often presents Catholic characters in positive ways. My argument in this book is that the source of many of Shakespeare’s most enduring and resonant ideas is a specifically Protestant theology.
- 4.
Diarmaid MacCulloch , The Reformation (2003) (New York: Penguin, 2005), 352.
- 5.
For an account of the 1529 Colloquy of Marburg, see G. R. Potter , Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976; rpt. 2008), 320–9.
- 6.
See Rosemarie Bergmann , “A ‘tröstlich pictura’: Luther’s Attitude in the Question of Images.” Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme 5.1 (1981), 18–9.
- 7.
David C. Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” Harvard Theological Review 103.2 (April 2010), 229.
- 8.
See Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” 233.
- 9.
Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xv.
- 10.
Qtd. in Bridget Heal , “ ‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany.” German History, 29.4 (2011), 594.
- 11.
Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” 207.
- 12.
See “The French Confession of Faith,” trans. Mary L. Schaff, in Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Arthur C. Cochrane (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 144. Cochrane considers this a “virus,” but such ideas were seen in much Protestant thinking, particularly in Calvin.
- 13.
As Fink explains, “analysis of the major confessional statements give us a stronger basis for indexing the emergence of a consensus position, precisely because these documents speak for communities, not simply for individuals.” “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” 235.
- 14.
Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” 235.
- 15.
John Fesko argues that the two groups had similar theories of justification: “to claim that significant difference exists on the doctrines of justification and union with Christ simply does not accord with the historical record.” John Fesko , Beyond Calvin: Union with Christ and Justification in Early Modern Reformed Theology (1517–1700) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 136.
- 16.
For Luther’s reaction to the First Helvetic Confession, see Arthur C. Cochrane, ed. Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 98. For Calvin’s relationship with the Augsburg Confession, see William Nijenhuis , “Calvin and the Augsburg Confession,” in William Nijenhuis , Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 97–114. Nijenhuis notes that Calvin may only have supported, rather than actually signed, the Variata, 109.
- 17.
This view differs from that of some others; Anthony Milton calls the text “determinedly anti-Calvinist” and Diarmaid MacCulloch sees its lack of inclusion of more material by Luther to signify both its divergence from Luther’s original vision and its presaging of the form of a future Lutheranism that would take on “much of the shape of the late medieval Western Church in the north.” Anthony Milton , Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 384. MacCulloch , The Reformation, 353. For a careful discussion of the range of Protestant theological positions being mediated in the “Formula,” see the chapter by Robert Kolb , “The Formula of Concord,” in Robert Kolb , Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method: From Martin Luther to the Formula of Concord (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans , 2005), 244–70.
- 18.
“Formula of Concord” (1577), trans. Robert Kolb , in The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 488.
- 19.
“Formula of Concord,” 493.
- 20.
“Formula of Concord,” 495–7. As Fink notes, the phrasing in “The Formula of Concord” refers not only to the non-imputation of sin in the elect person but also to the ‘later’ view regarding of the imputation of righteousness. Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’,” 229. The example suggests a richer degree of communication between Lutheran and Reformed theologies than is usually assumed.
- 21.
“Formula of Concord,” 519, 517.
- 22.
Zwingli always claimed to have developed many of his ideas before encountering Luther. See W.P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 20–1.
- 23.
Berndt Hamm I think overstates the Protestant position considerably when he writes that it “pointedly did not desire to introduce anything new into the Christian faith … renovatio, not innovatio!” Berndt Hamm , The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 254. Although Luther was hardly the first to call the Pope an antichrist, his utter repudiation of the Church and its replacement by faith could only have been seen, by both supporters and opponents, as a very new way of imagining the Christian life.
- 24.
See James Kearney , The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 155.
- 25.
Qtd. in Ronald H. Fritze , “Root or Link? Luther’s Position in the Historical Debate over the Legitimacy of the Church of England , 1558–1625.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37.2 (1986), 294. For the important role played by John Foxe and John Jewel in the early 1560s in establishing the idea of the ‘true church’ in opposition to the Roman Catholic one, see Lucy E.C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 229–30.
- 26.
Basil Hall , “The Early Rise and Gradual Decline of Lutheranism in England (1520–1600),” in Reform and the Reformation: England and the Continent c. 1500–1750, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 106.
- 27.
Carl R. Trueman, “Reformed Orthodoxy in Britain,” in A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy, ed. Herman Selderhuis (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2013), 269. For a similar assessment, see Anthony Milton who writes that the Church of England under Elizabeth was “strongly anti-Lutheran”—although he also writes that “Calvinist divines (including English ones) were anxious to affirm their unity with Lutheran authors.” Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 384, 389. Brian Walsh summarizes the range of opinions in his discussion of the 1605 play When You see Me You Know Me by Samuel Rowley (c. 1575–1624) which, Walsh argues, tries to remind the English (as Foxe did) of their origins in Lutheranism. Brian Walsh , Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the English Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 129–45. Trueman , as well as Alec Ryrie , has proven this strong influence of Lutherans on early English reformers in the reign of Henry VIII. See Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 6. See also Alec Ryrie , “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53.1 (2002), 66.
- 28.
See Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, 3.
- 29.
Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, for instance 14, 22, 33, 35, 92. Wooding reminds us that this distrust of Rome characterized the Marian era as well, 128.
- 30.
Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, 51. Wooding also refers to “Reformed Catholicism,” 112, 176.
- 31.
Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, 6–7, 269.
- 32.
Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies. Parts 1 and 2. Eds. T.M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), Part I: 352–3.
- 33.
See Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 259. He shows that “vague statements” on this matter in an earlier 1531 edition are “expanded to yield an unequivocal statement,” 259. Carl Trueman argues that Barnes probably “did hold to this doctrine in 1531.” Luther’s Legacy, 163.
- 34.
Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 103.
- 35.
Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 103.
- 36.
Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, 13.
- 37.
John Foxe, Acts and Monuments. 8 vols. (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1837–1841), 4:253, 5:114.
- 38.
See McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 208–28, 238–41, 254 and passim.
- 39.
Martin Luther, “On the Bondage of the Will ” (“De Servo Arbitrio”), trans. Philip S. Watson and B. Drewery , in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, eds. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 259.
- 40.
For example, Luther amended the Smalcald Articles (1537) to assert, in relation to those arguing otherwise, that, in the Old Testament, David , who was elect, “fell into adultery, murder, and blasphemy … at that point faith and the Spirit have departed.” Martin Luther, “The Smalcald Articles,” in The Book of Concord, eds. Kolb and Wengert, 319. Even those who argued (as in the “Second Helvetic Confession ” of 1566) in favor of attributing the righteousness of Christ to the elect did not go so far as to deny the elect needed frequent “chastisement” for their sins, David being a primary example. See for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill , trans. Ford Lewis Battles . Library of Christian Classics, vols. 20 and 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.4.31, 659–60.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_1
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