Abstract
Celebrating the career of Diarmaid MacCulloch, latterly Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, and published to mark his seventieth birthday, this volume explores ‘the making, breaking and enduring of orthodoxies’ (p. 4), which its editors take as ‘a lens for interrogating the historical record of change, variety and continuity in the history of Christianity’ (p. 5). Such an approach – including the recognition of ‘the way our conventional historical frames and narratives – the secular orthodoxies of the historical profession, some of which are not as secular as they look – have persistently distorted our view’ (pp. 5–6) – pervades MacCulloch’s own work. Seventeen scholars, including colleagues and MacCulloch’s former doctoral students (the categories are not mutually exclusive!) explore this theme with a strong – albeit by no means exclusive – focus on the early modern English Church.
The Festschrift opens with a discussion by James Carleton Paget of the concept of ‘Jewish Christianity’, a problematic term that Carleton Paget concludes can through its very inadequacy shed light on the complexities of Jewish and Christian identities in the ancient world. Morna Hooker’s reappraisal of Luther’s doctrine of sola fide comes to the unsurprising (at least for this scholar of Luther) conclusion that Luther did not show much interest in forensic righteousness; nor (at least after 1520) did he view faith as a work. Korey D. Maas explores Luther’s qualified support for Philipp of Hesse’s bigamous marriage in 1539 and his consistent view that bigamy was ‘preferable to adultery or concubinage’ (p. 59), drawing out the implications of these interventions for the formation of Lutheran orthodoxy. The shifting categories of orthodoxy and heresy during the Reformation form the focus of Euan Cameron’s essay. Observing that as a result of the Reformation the Western Church had to engage with the idea of competing and plural orthodoxies, he concludes that the term heresy tended to be restricted by Protestants to ‘those who challenged historic doctrine on the Godhead and the natures of Christ’; other dissent tended to be classed as ‘error’ (p. 118).
Turning to the English Reformation, Anik Laferrière explores the influence of Thomas Cromwell on the reform of the English Austin Friars, in whose precincts Cromwell for many years lived, arguing that Cromwell helped to transform London’s Austin priory ‘into a hub of evangelical ideas’ (p. 55), as exemplified by the careers of three of its members: Robert Barnes, Miles Coverdale and George Brown. Ashley Null considers the influence of the little known Scottish theologian Alexander Alesius and of Thomas Cranmer in defining the scriptural basis of the reformed English Church (a debate that, for Null, has parallels in current tensions in the Anglican Communion). Ethan Shagan presents the church porch, the locus in which medieval marriages took place, homeless people might find shelter and much of the church’s economic business was conducted, as ‘a site of transgression where the boundaries of orthodoxy were crossed, where alternative understandings of holiness were canvassed and where Christian society was reordered’ (p. 121). Felicity Heal discusses the decoration of English churches, tracing the disappearance of images and their replacement by often ornately presented scriptural and doctrinal texts. She emphasizes, however, that both forms of decoration provided ‘stimulus to meditation and general edification to the spirit’ (p. 158).
Personal grappling with orthodoxy and its boundaries is explored by Sarah Apetrei, considering the Puritan turned radical mystic John Everard (c.1584–c.1641); Alison Dight, considering the Oxford theologian Arthur Bury (1624–c.1714); Jonathan Yonan, considering the Moravian turned rationalist Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820); and, in the nineteenth century, Eamon Duffy, considering John Henry Newman (1801–90), and particularly his struggles with the notion of papal infallibility. Michael Snape offers a reconsideration of the theme ‘Religion and the British Soldier’, arguing that historical scholarship has been founded on ‘a distorted understanding of the religious state of the ordinary British soldier’ (p. 279) and that the true picture is much more complicated, and much more religious.
Playing on the title of MacCulloch’s influential article ‘The myth of the English Reformation’ (Journal of British Studies 30 (1991)), Alec Ryrie posits ‘the myth of the Church of England’, suggesting that the term ‘Church of England’ has tended to elide important ecclesiological distinctions about the nature of the Church(es) in England (and Wales). Judith Maltby shows how shifting understandings of sacrilege and the sacred helped to shape the self-understanding of the English Church as it was reconstituted after the Restoration. Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer suggests that the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible (known in the USA as the King James Version) effectively replaced the Vulgate not only in early modern but in modern England. Finally, Hannah Cleugh explores ‘The myth of the Anglican Communion?’, emphasizing that while the Anglican Communion is not a church, it is much more than ‘the historic Church of England translated abroad’ (p. 311).
This is a wide-ranging collection of essays, appropriately for a scholar whose work has sought to cover the whole history of Christianity. As might be expected of a Festschrift, the quality is somewhat uneven; nonetheless, there are some important insights here and some of these essays promise – like MacCulloch’s own work – to be significant indeed.