medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I deliberately left Anglo-Catholics out. Most reject the label Protestant precisely because of these and similar issues. The present Anglican calendar cannot be equated with the 16thc and early 17thc calendar because, as you note, Archbishop Laud came in between. Things were confused in the 16thc century and certainly some parties within the Church of England had a very Catholic view of these matters but others had a very Reformed (meaning Calvinist) view of these matters. For all these reasons and more, I mentioned Lutherans and Calvinists. Even comparing Lutherans and Calvinists one finds significant differences.
And that is the point I am trying to make: I think a fairminded assessment of the spectrum of Protestantism by the later 16thc would put the Calvinists at the one end as "most Protestant" and the Lutherans and Anglo-Catholics at the other end as the most Catholic--which is why the Presbyterians and Puritans had it in for the Catholicizing party within the Church of England. And veneration of saints as well as other "high church" liturgical matters were at the heart of these disputes.
That all traditions honor their dead heroes, respect them, look up to them, are inspired by them is certainly true from a sociological, anthropological perspective. And it is a point worth making. But it can also obscure real differences, differences over which people died (including St. Charlie I) in the English "Civil War." Veneration of saints was really a divisive issue at the time and we undermine any valuable sociological perspective gained by observing the common tendency to honor past heroes and martyrs if we obscure the religious and theological differences in the way that honor was carried out. What happens to the dead, whether they are still actively part of our lives by intercession or whether they are actively part of our lives as historic memories reflects important, intuitive, deeply felt aspects of our religious worldview.
Finally, there is the important historical methodological requirement of avoiding anachronism--one cannot go from present-day Anglican or Episcopalian practice directly back to 16th or 17thc Church of England practice--the recatholicizing of large segments, though by no means all, of the Church of England (accompanied by controversy well into the 19th or early 20th century) is an important but easily overlooked development. I would think that the Puritan divines (and some of the Anglo-Catholic divines of the early 17thc) would be turning over in their graves at the thought of liturgical veneration of Ridley and Latimer, perhaps even Cranmer. But then I could be mistaken in my perception of what made 17thc Anglo-Catholicism tick.
Dennis Martin
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 09/16/02 04:40PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 03:59 PM 9/16/2002 -0500, Dennis Martin wrote:
>There was a definite retention of the evangelists' and apostles' feasts in
>the liturgical calendar for Lutherans, perhaps in some Calvinist
>circles. But even that actually marks out a difference: these could be
>retained liturgically because they were the first generation and were
>"biblical".
<snip>
>Yes, all deceased Christians who died in faith (who were of the Elect in
>Calvinist terms) are in heaven, but from the Protestant perspective one
>did not add them to liturgical calendars or invoke their intercession.
Yet the post from Phyllis Jestice to which this is a reply mentions
(correctly, in my experience) Anglican liturgical commemorations of
Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley. I have attended an Anglican commemoration of
Charles the Martyr in which Laud and (because this was in a mostly black
congregation whose priest had been ordained by an Ethiopian bishop) Haile
Selassie were also commemorated in prayers. Leaving aside the matter
of intercession, it seems incontrovertible that Anglicans have added to
their liturgical calendars saints who were not "biblical". Does the
above-quoted statement about "the Protestant perspective" (clearly
different from "most Protestant perspectives" or even from "the perspective
of most Protestants") mean that Anglicans were not Protestant when they
made these additions? If not, what does it mean?
Best,
John Dillon
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