Derek Wilson - A Brief History of the English Reformation

Derek Wilson is one of our leading popular historians with more than sixty books to his credit. Over the decades since he graduated from Cambridge in History and Theology, his main passion has been the Reformation.

DEREK WILSON

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First published in the UK by Robinson,
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Copyright Derek Wilson, 2012

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ISBN: 978-1-84529-646-9
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Four hundred and eighty years ago, a movement began which transformed every aspect of English life. It changed the social order. It changed the way the nation was governed. It changed intellectual assumptions. It changed educational aspirations. It changed the seasonal rituals which defined reality for every man, woman and child. It changed the very landscape of England. More importantly, it changed what people thought and believed about the big questions of life, death, eternity and God. For, whatever its political, social and cultural consequences, the English Reformation was, essentially, a religious movement. By that I do not just mean that it was the process by which the official religion of the country changed from Catholicism to Protestantism. Though it may seem a strange claim to make, I believe that change was almost a by-product. To understand this remarkable revolution we have to see it as the supreme example in our history of what later ages would call revivalism. Like all revivals, the Reformation worked because the conditions in society were right for it, because Gospel propaganda in the form of sermons, printed works and person-to-person evangelism was remarkably effective, and primarily because of the explosive impact of the vernacular Bible. This revival was a religious high tide which beat upon the cultural coastline and permanently altered its configuration. Then, as revivals always do, it retreated, leaving the people to adjust themselves to their new environment.

And that presents a problem to anyone setting out to tell the story of those momentous years for a twenty-first-century audience. A society which is or, at least, which constantly tells itself that it is secular or post-Christian, will find it difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. Why on earth should it matter if, in the central ritual of the Christian church, Christ is really or symbolically present in bread and wine? The argument of whether mans relationship with God rests on faith or good works must appear arcane in the extreme to anyone who considers himself not religious. That believers were prepared to be burned alive or hanged, drawn and quartered rather than deny the truth as they understood it must look like deluded fanaticism to modern people free from such inconvenient convictions. And that rulers in church and state should actually inflict those punishments on citizens can only appear from the standpoint of a more enlightened age as proof of the barbarism and bigotry of our ancestors.

The modern historian might almost wish that he could set aside the religious aspect of the Reformation and concentrate exclusively on its momentous political, social and intellectual consequences. These are easier to explain to todays readers. Some commentators have actually adopted an analytical method that marginalises the spiritual dynamic. They have focused on the emergence of the nation state or the loss of great medieval artistic treasures or the tussle between Crown and Parliament or the development of capitalism or the emergence of rational individualism. These are all important elements in the Reformation story, but they are the branches and leaves of the tree and not its trunk. As Diarmaid MacCulloch observes, Social or political history cannot do without theology in understanding the sixteenth century.it. So in our survey we must try to keep our eyes fixed on what the momentous changes of the sixteenth century actually meant to real people at every social level.

Another fact of modern life is the virtual absence of sectarian conflict. Relations between the mainstream Christian churches are more cordial than they have ever been. This, in turn, makes the arguments between Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians and Anabaptists seem not only irrelevant but regrettable. Given this background, fresh approaches to the subject tend to downplay the deeply felt animosities between the various faith groups which confronted each other in the sixteenth century. This can be as distorting as the blatantly partisan historiography which has dominated scholarly debate for most of the last four hundred years. Foxe, Strype, Burnet, Constant, Dodd, Froude, Dixon, Gairdner, Dickens, Hughes and Duffy are just some of the honoured names in the annals of Reformation scholarship, but all of them either did not seek or experienced difficulty in finding objectivity.