All Things Made New Quotes

“Alongside this was the king who remained a conservative to his dying day. He never accepted the central Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, despite all Cranmer’s efforts to persuade him, especially in the revision of the Bishops’ Book; so he had lost his hold on purgatory while not finding his way to a coherent replacement doctrine on salvation.49 To see this is to make some sense at last of the apparently baffling twists of policy and inconsistencies in the king: he was caught between his lack of full belief in two mutually opposed ways of seeing the road to salvation. What did he have instead? A ragbag of emotional preferences. He cherished his beautiful personal rosary, which still exists; he maintained the mass in all its ancient Latin splendour and he left instructions in his will for a generous supply of requiems, in line with his new rationale for them in the King’s Book.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Lucas de Heere’s painting from the 1570s, now at Sudeley Castle, its subject precisely Henry VIII’s family (see Plate 4). It is a portrait with no sense of chronology. The old king sits in full vigour on his throne, handing over his sword to an Edward who is well into his teens. On the king’s right hand is his elder daughter Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and in body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth I, who upstages everyone else. The only figure as big as her is the lady whom she appears to be introducing to the gratified company, the personification of Peace. The message is clear: after all the upsets caused by her jovial but terrifying parent and her unsatisfactory siblings, Elizabeth is complacently pointing (literally) to her own achievement, a nation united in harmony.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Thanks to Archbishop Cranmer and a fleet of committees who thoughtfully revised his Prayer Book, Anglicanism has a liturgy whose dignity and solemnity can act as a sure support through choppy waters. Seek out Cranmer’s Evensong, hearken beyond its beautiful choral performance to some ghostly tut-tutting from a dead archbishop, and enjoy the way in which the past mocks our dogmatism and asks us to think again.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“An added paradox in the story of Hooker’s reputation is that no one has ever wanted to adopt everything which he propounded; everyone has made choices to suit themselves. There is no Hookerian Movement.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“It may be that Anglicans will have to realize that it is one of the glories of their tradition that it is a tradition without logic or consistency, which depends on the strong clash of opposites, and which in the end provides heroes who are examples of human frailty rather than role-models for uncomplicated courage – which forces the individual to undertake a good deal of hard thinking in order to make sense of the world around, rather than reaching for some simple model in a book.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“The earliest biography of Cranmer, probably conceived within a few hours of his death, began the villain narrative: Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons by Cardinal Pole’s Archdeacon of Canterbury and diocesan official Nicholas Harpsfield. 1 Written in Latin for an international audience, it effectively invents a new genre, anti-martyrology:”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“The preservation of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism, and it may be Queen Elizabeth’s chief original contribution to her Church.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Now its most ardent defenders are to be found amid the multiple Protestantisms which British emigration has bequeathed to the USA. Some of them, ‘King James Only’ folk, believe that it possesses an extra dose of the Holy Spirit not granted to any other English version, which is very generous of them, considering that it was commissioned by a monarch whose jovial bisexuality would cause them apoplexy at the present day.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“and it was the Church after 1559 which established ‘Communion’ as the norm. There’s a nice little doctoral project awaiting someone to trace out how ‘Communion’ won the battle against ‘Lord’s Supper’; I would make a preliminary guess that it was not until 1662.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Here is the first trivia quiz question on the Book of Common Prayer (BCP): who was the only layperson not of royal blood ever prayed for by name in the Prayer Book? Answer: Sir James Croft, Lord Deputy of Ireland, in the Dublin edition of 1551, and the fact that Sir James died in his bed three decades later, despite a risky career of double-dealing and his son’s execution for witchcraft, suggests that the prayers of the Irish faithful did him a bit of good. Second trivia question: who is St Enurchus? Answer: no one, because he is a misprint, and his original, the massively obscure St Evurtius, Bishop of Orleans, crept into the Prayer Book’s Calendar obliquely and entirely without authorization in 1604, almost certainly because his feast of 7 September happened to be the birthday of the lately deceased Queen Elizabeth I – it was some learned printer’s joke, and perhaps a little cock of the snook at the newly arrived King James I.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“With this clarification of Cranmer’s position in mind, it is interesting to note how it was mirrored in official policy in the reign of Edward VI. To begin with, no Catholic was executed solely for his or her belief by Edward’s governments; indeed, even among the political executions, far more convinced evangelicals than Catholics were put to death. Even more to the point, there were three burnings at the stake for heresy of radicals or Anabaptists who had proclaimed Unitarian views on christology.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth Field was one of the most astonishing political reverses in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in fifteenth-century England.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Successive popes included one pontiff whose eldest son, Pierluigi Farnese, was widely accused of raping a twenty-four-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was subsequently murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy Father, former principal papal legate at the Council, on being elected Pope Julius III, made his teenage rentboy lover a cardinal. It might seem appropriate that the Council’s official physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, was the first person to name and provide a detailed diagnosis for syphilis; contemporary senior churchmen would have provided Fracastoro with plenty of case studies for his epic poem on the subject.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“It is around the time of the passing of Elizabeth of England, as the Nativity carols began finding their way back into print, and as cultured Protestant noblemen began risking pictures of scriptural scenes from the life of Our Lady in their private chapels, that one finds hints of a different voice within Protestantism.85 With the passage of time, the heirs of the Reformation were better able to reflect on what might be missing in the Protestant devotional revolution. So, in the 1630s, the French Reformed pastor and popular devotional writer Charles Drelincourt was able to write a tract and a substantial follow-up book concerning the honour which was appropriate to the Blessed Virgin Mary, rather to the surprise of his Roman Catholic clerical contemporaries.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“In the Netherlands of Charles V, for instance, it could be heard on the lips of Pieter Florisz., a tailor in Gouda, who said that Our Lady was like ‘a sack that had once held cinnamon, but now only retains the sweet savour’. In a rather less flavoursome version, Willem die Cuper said that she was like a flourbag from which the flour had been emptied.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy

“Equally important is the effect of Last Days thinking on questions of world environmental damage. If the Last Days are coming, it is a profane distraction to bother with problems of pollution or exhaustion of natural resources, which in any case have been supplied in God’s providence for humans to use. Hence the Christian Right’s long-standing lack of interest in a matter which may bring the Last Days on human civilization, but not in the manner it anticipates.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy