Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 73 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
On the continent, the Reformation was a movement of conviction: the word of God gripping hearts until reform became inevitable. In England, at the highest levels, it began as a reformation of convenience, sparked by a king who wanted a different wife. This lecture traces the pendulum from Henry VIII through Edward, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth, explains where Anglicanism and the Puritans come from, and then crosses to Scotland for the dramatic life of John Knox, galley slave turned preacher, whose prayer was that God would give him Scotland or he would die.
Reformation stirrings had already reached England: Wycliffe's legacy, Tyndale's Testament, and Cambridge men like Hugh Latimer meeting at the White Horse Tavern to talk reform. But it took political events to separate the English church from Rome, and Dr. Busenitz argues that this beginning of convenience rather than conviction explains much of the compromise that has marked the Anglican church, known in America as the Episcopalian church, ever since.
Henry became king in 1509, the year Calvin was born, and married his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and aunt of Emperor Charles V. In 1521 he wrote against Luther and was rewarded by Pope Leo X with the title Defender of the Faith. By the late 1520s, with no male heir and Catherine past childbearing, Henry sought an annulment.
The pope refused, partly on canon law but mostly, the lecture argues, from fear of Charles V, Catherine's nephew and the most powerful monarch in Europe. So Henry, in effect, divorced the pope instead: Parliament passed laws separating England from Rome and naming the king supreme head of the English church, and Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury. The Puritans would later object that Christ alone is head of the church, not pope or king.
Henry married Anne Boleyn, who had Protestant leanings and bore Elizabeth, then had her executed in 1536, the year Tyndale died. Jane Seymour bore Edward and died. The old rhyme runs divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. When Catholic pushback rose, Henry backtracked: in 1539 he reinstated Catholic practices, forbade priests to marry, executed his minister Thomas Cromwell, and restricted Bible reading to the nobility. Yet Tyndale's work still became the Great Bible, the first authorized English Bible. Henry died in 1547 essentially Catholic in conviction.
Nine-year-old Edward VI, raised under a strongly Protestant uncle, was compared to the young King Josiah, and under his six-year reign reformation flourished. Cranmer, his own secret marriage now public, was freed to publish the Book of Common Prayer, a book of sermons so churches would have weekly preaching, and the Thirty-nine Articles, the Protestant theology of Anglicanism. Images came down, clergy married, altars gave way to wooden communion tables. Edward died at fifteen in 1553.
The Protestants' attempt to crown Lady Jane Grey lasted nine days before Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, took the throne and had Grey executed. Married to the king of Spain and heir to the mentality of the Spanish Inquisition, Mary spent five years trying to undo the Reformation, executing nearly three hundred of the best Protestant leaders, writers, and thinkers. The lecture asks us to imagine the three hundred most faithful evangelical leaders in America executed over five years to feel the weight of it.
Many Protestants fled to cities like Geneva, and John Foxe compiled his Book of Martyrs to record the deaths under Mary alongside the early Christian martyrdoms, as testimony, encouragement, and warning. Foxe's verdict on Mary was that no nation's annals should ever again be stained with such sacrifices to papal power.
Mary died after five years and Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, reigned more than forty, long enough for Protestantism to take deep root. The 1559 Act of Supremacy named her supreme governor of the church. Her settlement combined an episcopal church government, a high liturgy that kept much of the feel of Rome, and a reformed soteriology, a compromise between high Anglicans and Puritan Anglicans that has marked Anglicanism ever since.
The exiles returned from Geneva shaped by reformed thinking and pressed for the church to be purified further: they loved the Calvinistic soteriology, disliked the Book of Common Prayer as too Catholic, and rejected both episcopacy and a monarch as head of the church. Puritan began as a mocking label they adopted. Dissenters who skipped Anglican services fell afoul of acts of uniformity, and the lecture points ahead to the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell, and the colonies at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.
The Scottish Reformation centers on John Knox, a trained priest converted to the gospel who served as literal bodyguard to the preacher George Wishart. After Wishart was burned, others avenged him by killing a Roman Catholic cardinal and holed up in a coastal castle; Knox joined them as chaplain, and when French allies of Catholic Scotland took the castle, Knox spent about two years as a rower on French galley ships. When officers forced the slaves to kiss a statue of Mary, Knox threw it overboard and told them, in effect, to let her learn to swim.
Released during Edward's Protestant years, Knox ministered in England, then fled under Bloody Mary to Frankfurt and Geneva, pastoring the English refugee church beside St. Peter's from 1556 to 1559 and drinking deeply from Calvin. There he published his First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous rule of women, aimed at the Catholic queens of England, Scotland, and France. Calvin urged him to soften it; Knox refused, and when Protestant Elizabeth took the throne the treatise came back to bite him.
Knox returned to Scotland in 1559, and through his thunderous preaching, he is pictured nearly flying out of the pulpit, the nation turned Protestant. He confronted Mary, Queen of Scots to her face and is remembered as the man who made the queen of Scotland cry; she was later implicated in a plot against her husband, fled to England, and was eventually executed. Scottish Calvinism became Presbyterianism, which shaped the Covenanters, contributed six theologians to the Westminster Assembly, fed the rise of Puritanism, and crossed the Atlantic to become a pillar of the American church. Knox lies today beneath a flat slab in a parking area marked only with his initials, and the lecture counts that fitting: his prayer for Scotland was answered, and the glory goes to the God whose word was preached.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture contrasts the continental and English Reformations as
2. Pope Leo X awarded Henry VIII the title Defender of the Faith for
3. The lecture argues the pope refused Henry's annulment chiefly because
4. When Catholic pushback rose in 1539, Henry responded by
5. Under Edward VI, Thomas Cranmer produced
6. Young Edward VI was compared to which biblical king?
7. Bloody Mary's five-year reign was marked by
8. John Foxe wrote his Book of Martyrs to
9. Elizabeth's settlement of the church combined
10. The name Puritan began as
11. Before his own ministry, John Knox served George Wishart as
12. After the castle fell, Knox spent about two years
13. Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet argued against
14. Knox's grave today lies
All fourteen correct. Lecture 10 is complete.
The lecture argues that Anglicanism's beginnings in political convenience shaped centuries of compromise. How much do the origins of a church or movement shape what it becomes, and can a poor beginning be overcome?
Under four monarchs England swung between Rome and Reformation. What sustained ordinary believers through those reversals, and what would sustain a church today if the political winds turned against it?
Knox prayed for Scotland with an intensity that still startles. What would it look like to carry that kind of holy urgency for the place God has planted you, without confusing passion with anger?
Paul commended the Bereans as noble because they searched the Scriptures to see whether the things he preached were so.
The lecture engages the course readings by Verduin, Olson, and Nichols as three deliberately different vantage points on the Reformation, and points students to Foxe's Book of Martyrs for the Marian persecution.