All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

This great cultural divide is all the more strange because modern Western Europe and the United States are both societies created by the Enlightenment, the aftermath of the Reformation. The background was the series of wars of religion in the seventeenth century, in particular the very bloody Thirty Years War, which exhausted European society and led it to the beginnings of a kind of tolerance. Europeans were sickened by the violence, and the experience of just how futile it is to kill people in the name of religion was one of the reasons why Europe turned towards the Enlightenment. Enlightenment rethinking of old certainties involved a reassessment of what a sacred book is, and it suddenly seemed despicable to persecute people because they read that book in a different way. Many people went to North America just to escape the misery of persecution, but now most of their descendants in the United States still go to church, while most of the later generations in Europe have ceased to do so. American church-going may now be showing signs of following a European pattern, yet the long-standing and continuing difference is one of the greatest puzzles in the modern history of religion, and it lies at the heart of why Europe and America still find it so difficult to understand each other.

The transatlantic cultural divide.

The legislation Trent did pass was mostly for clergy and Church structures, but in one vital respect, its decree Tametsi altered the lives of every Roman Catholic thereafter. Christians (particularly when they are making categorical statements about Christian marriage) forget that there was no such thing as a church wedding in the first millennium of Church history.

Catholic marriage - an innovation.

A clear narrative emerges from Sharpe’s account. Henry VIII put a good deal of effort into persuading, manipulating or bullying his people into accepting policies which most of them did not like: the annulment of a marriage to a popular and conscientious royal spouse; marriage to another who was dismayingly clever and a bit flash; a breach with a reassuringly distant Holy Father in Rome and the rebranding of him as the Antichrist; the closure of the monasteries; and monetary debasement. Henry’s success against very considerable apparent odds was a tribute to his personal magnetism, still powerful enough to make plays about him saleable a century after his death.

Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson and our Independence Day.

The C of E has evolved willy-nilly towards a theological schizophrenia, in which self-consciously ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ identities are paradoxical but indestructible strands of a double helix.

A dyspeptic description of the fate and state of the Church of England.