together according to scripture.’
It is also significant that given his view of the law, Tyndale can see the Old Testament and the New Testament as standing on the same level. Tyndale’s preface to the New Testament contains noteworthy remarks about the relationship between the law in the Old Testament and the gospel in the New: ‘And because the lawe (which is a doctryne thorow teachynge euery man his dutye, doth vtter our corrupt nature) is sufficiently described by Moses, therfore is lytle mention made therof in the new testament, save of love only wherin all the lawe is inclu- ded.r148 Naturally even according to Tyndale’s view the ceremonial regulations, above all in the Book of Leviticus, are no longer valid; by contrast the moral commandments remain in force unaltered. According to the Prologue to the Book of Exodus Moses is ‘an ensample vnto all princes and to all that are in authorite, how to rule vnto goddes pleasure and vnto their neyghbours profette’.14’ The chief significance of the New Testament is that it provides the motivation for keeping the com- mandments that are materially present in the Old Testament.‘50 The fact that the Old Testament largely remains in force - qua law - in a literal sense at the same time stands in the way of the typological understanding of Moses and Aaron as figures of Christ.15* Tyndale’s overall judgment on the usefulness of the whole of scripture can there- fore be summed up in an early statement which has already been mentioned: ‘So now the scripture is a light and sheweth vs the true waye, both what to do, and what to hope.‘15* This move towards the de facto identification of the Old Testament with the New in a legalistic understanding sets a course which in many respects is to become sig- nificant for the later development of English Protestantism.
The incorporation of the idea of the covenant into the overall concep- tion I have described is characteristic of the last period in Tyndale’s activity. *53 The idea of the covenant is the clamp by which he finally succeeds in holding together two sets of ideas: redemption through Christ in faith without the law and the validity for Christians of moral obligations on the fulfilment of which salvation depends. Tyndale in- serts a comment into the revised Prologue to the 1534 edition of the Five Books of Moses:
’ . ..a11 the promyses thorow out the hole scripture do include a couenant. That is: god byndeth him selfe to fulfil that mercie vnto the, onlye if thou wilt endeuore thy selfe to kepe his lawes.‘154 The Preface to his new edition of the New Testament of November 1534 immediately starts to discuss the covenant: ‘The gener- all covenaunt wherin all other are comprehended and included, is this.
If we meke oure selves to god, to kepe all his lawes, after the ensample
of Christ: then God hath bounde him selfe vnto vs to kepe and make
good all the mercies promysed in Christ, thorowout all the scripture.‘155
108 The Crisis over the Authority of the Bible in England
In this last period as it were a change has taken place over against Luther’s doctrine of the free grace of God and the justification of the sinner without the works of the law: of course there is still mention of grace in Christ, but the way in which God is bound by the promise is clearly conditioned by the fulfilment of the law and made dependent on it. As a consequence the fate of those who reject the covenant, or first believe and then do not offer the obedience that is required of them, is vividly depicted in colours drawn from the Old Testament curses.156 The new edition with marginal glosses and prologues to the various individual writings is, as Tyndale already declares in the Pre- face, oriented on the notion of the covenant understood in this way:
‘For all the promyses of the mercie and grace...are made vpon the condition that we kepe the lawe.‘157
A second line which can also be observed in Tyndale is his open hostility to the ceremonial and institutional heritage of the mediaeval church. One sign of this is the way in which he constantly renders the New Testament presbyteros as ‘senior’ (in 1531 changed to ‘elder’)15*
instead of the ‘priest’ required by More. Tyndale also wrote the strongly anti-hierarchical writing The practyse of Prelates..
.(1530),‘59 the larger part of which contains an example of the typically humanistic and spiritu- alistic understanding of history: the assumption of an ideal period of Christianity in the earliest church with a subsequent falling away, which for Tyndale begins at the moment when the priests take control in the church. The polemic is openly directed against the papacy as the source of centuries of idolatry in the church; underlying this is an attack on the episcopal system in general. For Tyndale, it also follows that he regards the New Testament form of the community, which he naturally believes to be clear and obvious,160 as being also the normative model for the reform of the present constitution of the church which he re- quires. Similarly, he always renders the word ekklesia as ‘congregation’.
In a sphere which was to be characteristic of later English theology, Tyndale still did pioneering work in a special way: he was the first to conceive of what has been called a national covenant theology.161 He developed his thinking on this theme above all in the Prologue to Jonah, which has already been mentioned. There we have a pronounced expression of the view that England has an obligation to observe its own temporal, national laws, like the covenant people of Deuteronomy, who in Dem. 28 are confronted not only with the blessing but above all with the curse if they should break the covenant law. The catastrophes in their own national history become examples of the way in which nations who break their temporal, national covenant law are summoned to repentance by crises. This leads to an appeal to people in the present to have a concern for the prosperity in all material things which has been promised on these conditions, by showing penitence and new
-
The Age of the Puritans 109
obedience to the laws (this is how Tyndale understands the task of the Reformation). Thus the Old Testament, and especially Deuteronomy, takes on the character of a direct model for contemporary English pol- itics.161a The long-term effect of these ideas was tremendous and will continue to occupy us at length.
There is a second element which is closely connected with this first one: Spalding“j* indicates that in his coronation sermon for Edward VI, Archbishop Cranmer described the young ruler as a new Josiah who, like the reforming king of the Old Testament, will put aside idolatry and the tyranny of the papacy, guard against vice, reward virtue and practise righteousness.163 However, this notion is already older than the reign of the young king, since even under Henry VIII theologians and humanists had transformed the mediaeval pattern of the hierarchi- cal ordering of society in a national sense, and in so doing had given the king a central ro1e.l” Already at that time (mixed up with other motivations) we find an endorsement of the peerless position of the king which is derived from the Old Testament;‘65 at the same time, as early as this period we have the development of the theory of an obedience which is unconditionally owed to the king even if he is a tyrant. 166
One can read from the development of Tyndale’s theology how at a very early stage the moral and anticeremonial tendencies already estab- lish themselves in the face of the legacy of the Reformation; both of these, like rational thinking, represent trends deriving from the Middle Ages. In this connection we should not be deceived by the vigorous polemic against the Roman church, ‘popery’, since this it is presented according to the conventions of the old opposition, that of Humanism and Spiritualism, not least in its references to scripture. This is why at a later stage this polemic could so easily be transferred to the institution of the episcopal Church of England, while the Reformed doctrine re- mained intact in dogmatic terms. This course of events is not limited to England; as has long been recognized, a similar pattern can often be found in the Reformed churches on the Continent. So Tyndale’s theo- logy has been compared with that of Zurich, though no direct connec- tion can be established between Tyndale and people there.167 Evidently these are parallel developments, though in the long run they are much more marked in England.
During the whole of the heyday of Puritanism confrontation with the
Catholics remained the breeding ground on which anti-ceremonial and
anti-hierarchical propaganda developed and always found a ready hear-
ing among the public. As early as the time of Henry VIII, when it was
not yet possible to talk in terms of a Reformation in the evangelical
sense, the anti-ceremonial weapon was wielded by the first fighters
who had been influenced by Humanism and the Reformation. Under
110 The Crisis over the Authority of the Bible in England
Thomas Cromwell the state itself made use of certain iconoclastic writ- ings in implementing the royal claim to supremacy and appropriating church property for the crown, which in this way found iconoclasm extremely useful. 16* During Henry’s last years, when his politics had again shifted in a clearly Catholic direction and a series of prominent Protestants fled to the continent, vigorous anti-Roman polemic thun- dered out from the ranks of the exiles. William Turner’s work The Huntyng and Fyndyng Out of the Romish Foxe,‘69 which we shall be dis- cussing shortly, combines criticism of priests and criticism of the cult with hostility to Rome by attempting to demonstrate to Henry VIII that the treacherous clergy are concealing the Pope and his works, which have just been driven out of England, in the customs of the English church. Fears of a re-Catholicizing of England, which came to a climax with the papal ban and Bull of Deposition dated 25 February 1570 against Elizabeth I, were quite justified throughout the greater part of Elizabeth’s reign. Abroad there was confrontation with Spain, and at home there was opposition to the Reformation, and temporary reassur- ance came only with the defeat of the Armada in 1588.17’ The fears revived again to a lesser degree under Charles I: he was suspected of having pro-Catholic sympathies because his French wife was a Roman Catholic. They were more widespread during the long-drawn-out attempts to regain the throne made by the Catholic James II and later his son, the Pretender, after the former’s deposition and flight. These religious snuggles in fact extend down to our own time in the tragedy of Northern Ireland.
In essentials, the writings of those who were exiled under Henry continue the line begun with Tyndale. In R.Barnes’ Vitae Romanorum pontificorum171 there is a new example of the view of history with which we are already familiar, contrasting the purity of the original church with the periods of decay which inexorably set in soon afterwards. Here the innovations introduced by the Popes in the mediaeval church are continually the dark undertone to the description of the lives of the Popes which are drawn together from all kinds of material. Even more important is the work by Turner mentioned above, The Huntyng and Fyndyng Out of the Romish Foxe,‘” for in a way which has still not been noted sufficiently it contains the hermeneutical principles of later Puri- tanism. The logical starting point of all its criticism of the church is a legalistic biblicism. The Bible has to take the place of the canon law which hitherto has governed the outward form of the church: ‘for the law of Christes chirche, of which englod (England) is on(e) part is the new testamet & the old / that is to wit the doctrine that the /Prophetes / the Apostelles & Christ taught..
. ‘*73The earliest church was the ideal church: ‘But in Christes tyme and the Apostelles tyme and in the tymes of the holy martyres was the most perfit chirch.’ It follows from this:
111
‘therfor then was the perfitest law of the chirche / then the law of Christes chirche / was in the Apostelles tyme all ready made & so perfit that no man could make any thing more perfit.’ The humanistic conception of the ideal primal period is bound up with a legalistic understanding of scripture. This belongs in the context of a way of thinking which still lacks the chronological and historical dimension;
that becomes clear in Turner’s observation: ‘The word of god which is the law of the chirch lasteth for euer & is not changed / so that the chirche of Christ at all tymes hathe no other law but Christes word.“75 The conciusions which Turner draws from this principle are, how- ever, only indirectly connected with it. His line of thought runs in another direction, as we can see from the overall construction of his writing. To begin with’76 he gives a long list of church customs and practices in England which in his view still perpetrate ‘the popes doc- trine and traditiones’. The list begins with the sign of the cross (as we saw, an age-old stumbling block’77), mentions blessing of water and salt, churches and vestments, the traditional form of the sacrament (the chalice, and also the mixing of elements, vicarious receiving for the dead, and so on) and also the canon of the mass, its Latin form, fast times and oaths, the celibacy of the priests. Some of these are features which all the Reformers wanted to have abolished, but there is also much evidence of a basically polemical attitude towards ceremonies which can also be noted in all the accentuation on scripture. In the case of each individual feature to be discussed we are given the Pope (and in some instances the Council) through whom it was introduced; the author is concerned above all to demonstrate that a particular feature is popish, and only in a later part of the work178 does he also go on to demonstrate that it is not in accordance with scripture either.
In addition to its main content, Turner’s writing also contains some further features which are characteristic of later Puritan theology. Men- tion should be made of the Exodus typology which appears in Turner’s interpretation of Henry VIII’s Declaration of Supremacy: the action of the king, who drove the Pope out of England, ‘intended suche a thynge as all myghty god dyd when he delyuered the chylder of Israel from the bondage of Pharao / and drove the chanaanites of theyr lande that the true Israelites myght haue that land and succede them.‘179 Referring
to
Lev.lS(lff.), he goes on to declare: ‘So learned men whom the kyng apoynted to delyuer hys subiecties from the bondage of the Romish Fharao the pope / ought to haue sweped the chirch & dryuen quite out of it all that euer any pope had made...‘lsO The negative type, Pharaoh/
the Pope, is established even more directly than the positive, in which
Henry’s role is deliberately left vague. In connection with Turner’s
attitude towards the Old Testament it should be observed that among
the proof texts used in examining ceremonies the Old Testament quo-
112 The Crisis over the Authority of the Bible in England
tations are profusely mixed up with those from the New. The central, basic conclusion about the use of the sign of the cross (‘I haue proued now by sufficient witnesses of the scripture / that to worship before an image is to worship if’181
)is justified by Ex.20(4); Lev.20 (If.); Dem. 4 (15-19); 27 (15); 5(8). ‘** On the other hand, there is a clear distinction between the ‘Law of Moses’, which was only for the Jews, and the ‘law of the gospel’(sic!) which is valid only for Christians.183 In this respect Turner is still very close to the attitude of the Erasmians.
2. A basic humanist trait can also be followed through the later statements of the ‘Anti-Vestment Party’. One interesting document which above all illuminates the relationship of the radical Puritans to the Bible is the Notae of Hooper to the State Council of 3 October 1550.
Here he gives reasons for his rejection of vestments.l&P Right at the beginning Hooper puts the demand: Nihil est Ecclesiae in vsu habendum, quod non aut expressum Dei verbum habeat quo se tueatur, aut alioqui res sit ex se indifferens, quae facta, et vsurpata, nihil prosit, infecta vero, et praeter- missa nihil obsit. One postulate of the Reformation as a whole was that scripture (verbum Dei) must be the basis not only of doctrine but also of church life. However, Luther and his followers argued that in external forms of church life anything was permissible that was not expressly forbidden in scripture. This position is the starting point for the doctrine of adiaphora developed by Melanchthon,185 which distinguishes be- tween the sphere of dogmatics, where only pura doctrina may count, and the sphere of ceremonies and church government, which is neutral and which may be regulated by the authorities. At first glance Hooper’s introductory sentence seems to follow this division between what is commanded by scripture and the adiaphora. The syllogism which con- tinues it, however, Priuata et pecularia vestimenta in Ministerio, non habent verbum dei quo praecipiuntur, neque sunt res ex se lndifferentes. Ergo non sunt in vsu habenda, cannot be understood on Melanchthon’s presupposi- tions. Evidently he deliberately does away with this distinction between the two spheres of doctrine and outward church forms: these, too, are not indifferent, but must be regulated by scripture as the supreme authority. That is true not only in respect of Hooper’s second condition, in which he declares that things commanded or prohibited by God include not only those for which there is an explicit command or pro- hibition but also those which can be derived from the general tenor of scripture (examples may be infant baptism or the admission of women to the eucharist). More important is the fact that his first Nota stands Melanchthon’s attitude to the adiaphora on its head: Res lndifferentes, originem suam et fundamentum in verbo Dei habere debent. Nam quod ex verb0 Dei probari non potest, non est ex fide, fides autem ex auditu verbi Dei.
Rom
.1 O(2 7). On closer examination Hooper is not caught here in a logical contradiction to his opening sentences, since even according to his view
The Age of the Puritans 113
the adiaphora do not have the expressum Dei verbum. But they do have
originem et fundamentum in the Word: there is no sphere within the
church which is not to be regulated by the norm of scripture.‘86 This
comment corresponds exactly with the attitude which Hooper also took
consistently and emphatically elsewhere. As W.M.S.West has shown,187
it is the result of his early contact with the writings of Bullinger and
above all the fruit of his lengthy stay in Zurich. West quotes from the
contemporary work by Lavater about church praxis in Zurich, De Ritibus
et lnstitutis Ecclesiae Tigurinae, ‘** the central statement: ‘Nothing is done
in the church of Zurich which was not the practice of the church at the
time of the apostles.‘l*’ In Zurich Hooper had had the opportunity of
seeing the churches stripped of all decoration and of all superfluous
ceremonies and returned to a form of worship which in the view of
Bullinger and others there corresponded to the earliest Christian cus-
toms, the chief characteristic of which they believed to be the utmost
simplicity. For them simplicity was at the same time purity, and Hooper
also based the rest of his activity in England on this postulate. As it
was in reality a humanistic ideal, so too Hooper’s most important theo-
logical presupposition was the legalistic conception of the covenant:190
for him the covenant signified first of all the offer of divine grace to all
men, but it could be realized only through unconditional obedience to
Gods commandments. Here the statements of the Decalogue were
normative as being basic conditions of the law.“* Against this back-
ground it is also not surprising that for Hooper there is only one
covenant and that the church of the Old and New Testaments is one
and the same.*‘* The covenant concluded with Adam after the Fall
(Gen.3.15)lv3 still holds today, but it binds God in his offer of grace only
insofar as people respond to him by being obedient to the command-
ments. The area which is to be governed by scripture is therefore
extended enormously, so that we can arrive at the position which
Cranmer, the representative from the established church, puts ironi-
cally: ‘It is not commanded in the scripture to kneel, and whatsoever is
not commanded in the Scripture is against the scripture and utterly
unlawful and ungodly.‘194 Now what determines what has its originem
et fundamentum in Holy Scripture? Evidently there is need for some
additional criterion if something is not supported by the expressum Dei
verbum. At this point the whole weakness of Hooper’s position becomes
evident. He attempts to provide a criterion in his third demand: Res
Tndifferentes, manifestam, et apertam vtilitatem cognitam in Ecclesia habere
debent, ne videanturfrustra recipi, autfraude ac dolo in Ecclesium intrudi. The
key word here is vtilitas, the use that something must have if it is to be
introduced into the church, even though it is only an outward form.lv5
However, in itself the term is vague, and the other expressions like
fides, which appears in the same context in the first and second Notae,
Dalam dokumen
The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World
(Halaman 56-62)