http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/note.php?note_id=396126118994&id=1023978751&ref=nf
"Diarmaid MacCulloch and Scott Wenig have recently restated the old Tractarian canard that the Elizabethan Church of England sought to achieve a middle way between Rome and Geneva, the so-called Anglican via media. According to MacCulloch, the Settlement of 1559 represents a "theological cuckoo in the nest." That is to say, the Church of England was an essentially "Catholic" structure operated by a "Reformed" clerical leadership. On this view of the matter, "the story of Anglicanism, and the story of the discomfiture of Elizabeth's first bishops, is the result of the fact that this tension between Catholic structure and Protestant theology was never resolved." According to this interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement, the criticism levelled against the Establishment by such radica
l critics as Thomas Sampson, Laurence Humphrey, and Robert Crowdley is taken to be representative of Reformed orthodoxy. On our reading of Vermigli's and Bullinger's contribution to the vestarian controversy, however, as well as to the discourse on the relation between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction more generally, the question plainly arises whether the claim to Reformed orthodoxy may in fact lie more plausibly with the Queen and her loyal bishops. For as we have seen, it is the latter who succeeded in enlisting the two pre-eminent Reformed divines of Zurich in support of the key elements of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. Vermigli's letter to Hooper, along with Bullinger's to Sampson and Humphrey, suggests that far from intruding a evangelical cuckoo into a Romish nest, the architects of the Elizabethan Settlement may very well have succeeded in demonstrating--at least to their sixteenth century contemporaries--the essential consistency of the ecclesiology of the Settlement with the principles of magisterial Reformed orthodoxy as formulated by the Schola Tigurina."
Torrance Kirby, _The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology_, pp. 219-220.
"Diarmaid MacCulloch and Scott Wenig have recently restated the old Tractarian canard that the Elizabethan Church of England sought to achieve a middle way between Rome and Geneva, the so-called Anglican via media. According to MacCulloch, the Settlement of 1559 represents a "theological cuckoo in the nest." That is to say, the Church of England was an essentially "Catholic" structure operated by a "Reformed" clerical leadership. On this view of the matter, "the story of Anglicanism, and the story of the discomfiture of Elizabeth's first bishops, is the result of the fact that this tension between Catholic structure and Protestant theology was never resolved." According to this interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement, the criticism levelled against the Establishment by such radica
l critics as Thomas Sampson, Laurence Humphrey, and Robert Crowdley is taken to be representative of Reformed orthodoxy. On our reading of Vermigli's and Bullinger's contribution to the vestarian controversy, however, as well as to the discourse on the relation between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction more generally, the question plainly arises whether the claim to Reformed orthodoxy may in fact lie more plausibly with the Queen and her loyal bishops. For as we have seen, it is the latter who succeeded in enlisting the two pre-eminent Reformed divines of Zurich in support of the key elements of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. Vermigli's letter to Hooper, along with Bullinger's to Sampson and Humphrey, suggests that far from intruding a evangelical cuckoo into a Romish nest, the architects of the Elizabethan Settlement may very well have succeeded in demonstrating--at least to their sixteenth century contemporaries--the essential consistency of the ecclesiology of the Settlement with the principles of magisterial Reformed orthodoxy as formulated by the Schola Tigurina."Torrance Kirby, _The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology_, pp. 219-220.
No comments:
Post a Comment