A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

the time of Tyndale’s martyrdom in 1536, perhaps sixteen thousand copies of his translation had passed into a country of no more than two and a half million people, with a very poorly developed market for books.

by the man whose murder he had in effect arranged. Only a year after Tyndale’s death Thomas Cromwell secured a royal order for every parish in England to buy a complete Bible, most of whose text was in fact Tyndale’s translation

Tyndale’s biographer David Daniell has bluntly pointed out that ‘Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version’s New Testament is Tyndale’s.’

with a characteristically unpredictable swing of policy in 1543, the King sought to ban his less well-educated subjects from reading it, deeply troubled at the possibility that they might have radical thoughts as a result of irresponsible thumbing through its pages.

fatally verbose)

the English Prayer Book, only lightly revised in 1559 and finally given a slightly more Catholic-leaning makeover in 1662, has remained an extraordinarily flexible vehicle for a form of Western Christianity which, in its development as ‘Anglicanism’

Cranmer’s Prayer Book has left one liturgical legacy to all Western Christendom: an evening service or ‘office’ called Evensong. Evensong is the part of the Prayer Book now most regularly performed in Anglicanism, and so it is there that Cranmer’s superbly dignified prose is still most frequently appreciated in its proper context.

Although Mary’s status as King Henry’s daughter probably mattered to the kingdom more than her religion, once she had thrust aside Queen Jane, she embarked on as great an experiment as that of Edward, but in mirror-image. She returned an entire kingdom to Roman obedience and the possibility of innovations in Catholic reform. In the process she burned at the stake some of the leading English Protestant reformers, Thomas Cranmer included.

The man who led Protestantism out of stagnation in the 1550s was an exiled French humanist legal scholar who had wandered Italy and Switzerland and ended up by accident in 1536 on the margins of the Swiss Confederation in the city of Geneva: John Calvin.

Bucer had asserted that the New Testament described four functions of ministry, pastors, doctors, elders and deacons.

Elders bore the disciplinary work of the Church, leading it alongside the pastors in a Church court called a consistory. It was government by committee; in other contexts, the committees were called presbyteries, so the system is generally labelled presbyterian.

from 1536 Calvin published and repeatedly rewrote a textbook of doctrine, the Institution of the Christian Religion – commonly known as the Institutes.

scrutinizing ourselves honestly after contemplating God is bound to shame us. None of our capacities can lift us from this abyss in our fallen state, only an act of free grace from God. This is Augustine restated,

Over time, he came to explain the failures of the Reformation by reference to a doctrine which Luther had also held, but which many of his fellow Lutherans followed Melanchthon in finding difficult and downplayed: God’s plan of predestination.

Chalcedon’s careful crafting of the ‘Chalcedonian Definition’. Christ was one person in two natures inextricably linked – God the Son and so fully part of the Divine Trinity, while at the same time Jesus the human being, born in Palestine.

Chalcedon had a particular significance for magisterial Protestants, who saw it as the last general council of the Church to make reliable decisions about doctrine in accordance with the core doctrines proclaimed in scripture – they were all the more inclined to respect the early councils because radicals rejected that legacy

In the Eucharist, God does not come down to us to sit on a table; but through the sign of the breaking of bread and taking of wine, he draws us up to join him in Heaven. It is the idea proclaimed in the ancient exhortation of the Latin Mass, ‘Lift up your hearts’ (Sursum corda).51

Consensus Tigurinus (‘Zürich Agreement’).52 With its commitment to creating forms of words which could be understood slightly differently by different people, it represented a rare moment of statesmanship in the sixteenth-century religious divides, and as such, it failed to satisfy Lutherans fiercely guarding Luther’s theological legacy: they stuck as strongly as the Pope himself to the proposition that body and blood of Christ were present in the eucharistic bread and wine. As a result, the mid-century attempt to unite Protestantism against the Roman menace only resulted in a deeper divide among Protestants.

Calvin was for them, developed Lutheranism should be against them, regardless of whether Luther might have concurred with Calvin.

Reformed Christianity saved the Reformation from its mid-century phase of hesitation and disappointment. Lutheranism tended to remain frozen in German-speaking and Scandinavian cultures; Reformed Christianity spread through a remarkable variety of language groups and communities,

Like Luther, Calvin was a theologian of Romans 13.1 – of obedience. Yet as he built his Church in Geneva, he was much more

friars and Jesuits into overseas mission. They were fighting for their existence against Catholics, and bickering among themselves in their efforts to establish what Protestantism actually was.

The English were to some extent distracted from America by their own more accessible Atlantic New World in Ireland:

it was one of two places in the world, the other being the rather similar colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, where Anglicanism survived through the 1650s as an established Church.

Yet after 1660, the Virginian colonists’ theoretical love of bishops was not ardent enough to lend much support to proposals to establish a bishop on their side of the Atlantic, let alone any system of English-style church courts. They made sure that their parishes were run by powerful ‘vestries’ of laypeople rather than clergymen.

Virginian Anglicanism was thus made safe for gentry who appreciated a decent and edifying but not overdramatic...

Notably, for all their intense practice of piety, there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth’s existence; the sacrament of the Eucharist was not among their devotional priorities.

New England leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Company was generally less socially prominent than in the Virginian and Caribbean enterprises — ministers and minor gentry — and those in charge now proposed to migrate to the colony themselves rather than stay in England. This was a measure of their commitment to starting England afresh overseas. From the beginning, they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of the godly adult males who were the investors and colonists.

Although the New England settlers made their commonwealth much less like Old England than Virginia was intended to be, it is important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans.

The early foundation of Harvard College meant that Massachusetts was unique among the North American colonies in never being short of ministers to serve its parishes, and that made establishing a single dominant Church all the easier.

all who had crowded the Atlantic migration boats were pure in heart or sought godliness, and that some might have murkier reasons for fleeing England than objections to Laud’s sacramental theology.

In 1631, the franchise for the colony’s assembly was limited to Church members. Still it was compulsory for everyone to go to their parish church (known in New England simply as a ‘meeting house’), and the Massachusetts government tried to stop people settling beyond a certain distance from the meeting houses so that they could be properly supervised.

‘Half-Way Covenant’. Some could remain members of the Church by virtue of their baptism only, but the fully committed would have to offer proof of repentance and lively faith to gain the full Church membership which allowed them to receive communion at the Lord’s Table.

encouraged the indignity of an Anglican church built in the middle of Boston (worse still, in 1714 it acquired that engine of popery, a pipe organ, the first in New England).

Anne Hutchinson horrified the leadership by challenging the whole framework of Puritan piety established by covenant theology.

embrace complete religious toleration, even including Jews and ‘Turks’ in his envisaged freedom (Rhode Island was then likely to be short of Turks, but it was a striking rhetorical gesture).

Williams believed that all the non-elect would go to Hell, but it was not his responsibility to make matters worse for them in this

Quakers were publicly flogged and had their ears cropped; then, between 1659 and 1661, four were hanged for missionary activities — one of the victims was a woman, Mary Dyer, who had deliberately returned from banishment to see her previous sentence fulfilled.

The early English Protestant neglect of evangelizing among indigenous peoples makes a curious contrast with the precocious Spanish attention to converting native peoples in South and Central America, or French efforts to the north in New France.

Perhaps the most surprising outcrop of Reformed Protestant interest in the esoteric was the phenomenon of Freemasonry.

Masonic practice actually began in late-sixteenth-century Scotland as an outcrop of Reformed Christianity.

Part of Freemasonry’s continuing Reformed inheritance was a general hostility to the institution of the Catholic Church.

821–2).4 So a heady mixture of Paracelsianism, hermeticism and Cabbala bred an optimism in Protestant Europe which sat curiously alongside the pessimism about human capability built into the thought of Augustine of Hippo.

the Rosicrucians never existed. The texts which described this ancient and benevolent secret society of philosophers of the ‘Rosy Cross’ were principally written between 1614 and 1616 by a Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreae, who had spent perhaps too much time poring over hermetic wisdom and Paracelsianism.

the politics of the Elector Palatine Friedrich’s attempted Reformed Protestant crusade against the Habsburgs which led to the Thirty Years War

Charles’s patronage of England’s premier forum for a continuing gentlemanly discussion of natural philosophy. This ‘Royal Society’ was a regrouping of several of the most prominent speculative thinkers who had flourished under the Interregnum regime. Sir Isaac Newton,

Bacon’s writings were a great inspiration to the natural philosophers of Europe, and the Royal Society could be seen as a fulfilment of his posthumously published work New Atlantis, which had portrayed a ‘Foundation’ of philosophers devoted to improving human society through practical (‘empirical’) experiment and observation

Doubt is fundamental to religion. One human being sees holiness in someone, something, somewhere: where is the proof for others?

Amsterdam, most cosmopolitan of urban settings, stately synagogues were by the late seventeenth century a tourist attraction and an object of astonishment all over Europe – they looked remarkably like the most splendid of the Protestant churches being rebuilt at the same time by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London.

Plenty of the Dutch, those whom the Reformed contemptuously called ‘Libertines’, were weary of all strident forms of religion by the end of the sixteenth century, and they remembered with pride the fact that the great Dutchman Erasmus had talked much of tolerance and thoughtfulness.