A few considerations complicate your presentation here.
1. The Zürich connection thesis is a product of the 19th century. No one - literally no one - in the 16th or 17th c. presented the history of the English Reformation that way. And this raises a question: did no one know about it, was it proactively suppressed, or is its apparent truth today really just a product of later historiographical developments?
2. There is the issue of scale, that is, the size of Zürich's influence relative to Geneva, Wittenberg, etc. On the one hand, as multiple scholars of Tudor-era Anglo-German relations have noted, there was a vast correspondence between CoE leaders and various Lutherans, but it has never been edited. Extrapolating from this, Is the scale of correspondence with those in Zürich comparable to that of correspondence with other confessional communities?
On the other hand, when it comes to print history, most of the figures that you mention were never especially popular. Bullinger printed more often than either Vermigli or Bucer, but all paled in comparison to Erasmus, whether during Edward VI's reign or that of Elizabeth I.
3. Consequently, your appeal to Bullinger's Decades is only, at best, true for one English province (Canterbury). What about York? And, for how long was the Decades pushed? For example, Elizabeth revived the push to get Erasmus' Paraphrases into parishes, and inquiries into ownership of the Paraphrases have been documented into the 1640s. But can the same be said for the Decades? (And indeed, if Zürich was so important, why did its many supposed advocates fail so fantastically at exploiting the printing press to support such a commitment?)
4. You write that "If Anglicans today want to look to the formularies of the sixteenth century to help to ground Anglican identity, theology, and religious life (as I think we should!), they will find themselves looking to Zürich." There are multiple Lutheran sources for various aspects of, e.g., the Articles, but where did any of these sources ever borrow from Zürich? This, too, becomes a question of scale. Of course, there is the opposite question that is no less relevant: where did confessional norms in England differ from those in Zürich? I can think of a few.
5. Describing any single group or small collection of individuals as "the theological heart" of anything (in this case, the CoE) is simply hagiographical. And, at best, it risks taking the rhetorical context of a text - Jewel's comment to Vermigli, for example - at face value. Written sources ought to raise questions about rhetorical context precisely because history is multi-causal and multi-directional. Why bother with oversimplification?
Thanks for this, Ben. A full treatment of these some of these issues will need to wait till my dissertation, but I did want to begin to address them:
(1) The question of how precisely the English Reformation has been narrated is of course a very complicated and important one, and I defer to your own work on it. However, numerous English sources forthrightly describe the importance of Zurich for English theology or England's general accord with Zurich in the period studied. Jewel's very clear sense of himself as aligned with Zurich is quite significant given Jewel's own role in establishing the identity of the Elizabethan church. This was also recognized on the Zurich side of things. See, for example, Martyr's letter to Jewel about the Apologia, which was frequently published alongside it, especially on the Continent. As I mentioned above, it is a commonplace in Elizabethan conformist polemic to situate England alongside Zurich in the disciplinary disputes. Take, for a few examples, Whitgift, Hooker, and Cooper. Given your assertion about the lack of connection between Zurich and England drawn in accounts of the English Reformation, Hooker's own narration of the disciplinary dispute as another round of the dispute between Zurich- and Geneva-oriented theologians in Heidelberg is, I think, interesting. So, even if no one in the 16th century would have narrated the story of the English Reformation exactly as I did here, the close affinity between Zurich and England is quite commonly found in Elizabethan writing, particularly conformist writing (although it is worth noting that the disciplinarians/puritans also attempted to secure Zurich agreement with their views!).
(2) I agree with David Gehring and other scholars of Anglo-German relations that the archive of Lutheran/English correspondence is a valuable one deserving further study, and I take the point about how the works available to us (especially in edited, easily accessible form) may distort our records of the past. That said, whatever the relative numbers of letters one way or another, it is clear that the English political and religious establishment from Elizabeth on down saw the Church of England as committed to the Reformed side of the Lutheran-Reformed division. This is not, of course, to deny the continued significance of Lutheran figures and styles of piety to the English church, and it is true that some conformist writers did reference Lutheran church orders in defense of episcopal polity (interestingly, I haven't found similar arguments made about clerical apparel, but setting that aside...). But the fact that the English church evidently and self-consciously chose the Reformed position on the theological questions dividing international Protestantism makes it clear that, whatever relationships existed between England and Lutheranism, the influence of the Lutheran churches was quite limited.
(3) This feels a bit of an odd argument, frankly. Granted that the fact that nothing like the vice-gerency in spirituals was ever revived made clerical governing of the Church of England as a whole always a somewhat cumbersome affair (witness poor Matthew Parker and his Advertisements!), of course the Canterbury Convocation was the more significant of the two. I'm not arguing that the same number of copies of the Decades were printed as Erasmus' Paraphrases. But we do have a number of printings of the Decades, and other works of Bullinger's were quite popular, particularly his sermons on the Apocalypse. Other Zurich-oriented texts were also in regular production, but I would note that my argument does not depend on the existence of a vast quantity of published works by Zurich theologians in translation in England (though I grant it would strengthen it). I point you again to Martyr's argument (to be sure, one made with particular ends in mind) that the theology of the Apology of the Church of England -- which did indeed have a broad, significant, and lasting publishing history -- simply was that of Zurich. The question of how long the Decades remained in regular use is a very interesting one, which would require (I expect) some close attention to clerical libraries and the like.
(4) It is certainly true that certain of the Articles and the various parts of the prayer book were heavily dependent upon Lutheran sources. This is interesting and worth remembering! But this does not mean, in the end, that the 'Elizabethan settlement' looked significantly to Wittenberg. We cannot simply tally up the quantity of borrowed materials and make a judgment that way. For the Lutheran borrowings were in areas where Protestants as a whole agreed. On questions of Reformed/Lutheran difference, the formularies unambiguously took the Reformed position, and were widely seen by figures at the time as doing so. Alec Ryrie's work has been very helpful to me on this question, as has Stephen Hampton's. For what it's worth, it's not actually true that there is no direct Zurich influence on the formularies, either. The homily against idolatry is largely drawn from Bullinger. As to the questions of significant divergences from the confessional stance of Zurich, it seems that the leaders of both churches judged that whatever differences there were weren't particularly significant. Here I'd point you to Bullinger's letters on the vestarian controversy, for example.
5. I'm not sure I understand how you're using "hagiographical" here. I think the general meaning of hagiography in the pejorative sense is an overly-rosy account of some person or event that doesn't take seriously its flaws. I don't think that's what I'm doing here. I do think that historians can in fact make claims about the relative importance of various strands of influence on persons, events, theological movements, etc., and even assert that one strand is particularly definitive. And while I'd make the claim somewhat differently in the context of a formal academic article, I think it holds up.
Sorry to be late in responding here. Broadly speaking, there seems to be an upshot in your comment about Zurich vs. Geneva: namely, that "Reformed" is a confessional label that acquired its meaning really rather slowly, and perhaps far more slowly than "Lutheran" acquired its meaning. This is something we honestly need a study of. In Britain, the first to call themselves "Reformed" were the circle around John Knox, but they hardly looked on England as the same. After all, they hated the 1552 BCP. Even by the end of the 16th c., not many folks in England self-identified as "Reformed" after all. And that lack of identification, especially when so many up north embraced that label, matters. If the Genevans and Scots were quicker to identify as Reformed, was Zurich thus slower? If so, why? There is probably a story there.
To #2 above, you may want to dig a bit more into the Lutheran side of things. Elizabeth wanted the CoE "iuxta normam confessionis augustanae" - see the selection of letters edited by E.I. Kouri. And no, the points of agreement with Lutherans were definitely not in areas of broad Protestant consensus. In the 39 articles it became an attempt at splitting the difference. The 42 articles' rejection of Christ's physical presence (the original Article 29) was cut in the Elizabethan revision (Article 28), but the Elizabethan articles inserted an article (Article 29) on the manducatio impiorum that Lutherans came to reject later in the 1570s. Bishop Guest's correspondence on his revision of Article 28 survives and reveals that his goal was very much to create a space within the Elizabethan Articles for affirming Christ's physical presence in the Eucharist. At least some English contemporaries recognized this and disapproved. If you are interested, I discuss this more in a book chapter about the Eucharist in classical Anglican formularies: https://www.academia.edu/101182674/_Sacrifices_of_Laud_Praise_and_Thanksgiving_The_Eucharist_in_Classical_Anglican_Formularies
Ok, that is probably enough for now. You've got plenty of archival research to do, no doubt.
Thanks, Ben. I have to say, I think you're misreading the Articles of Religion and the Consensus Tigurinus in a way that is causing you to misconstrue the relationship between the two of them, and between the Articles and Lutheran confessional standards.
You write on page 56 that the Consensus Tigurinus declares that the sacraments do not confer grace, and appose that to the language of Article 26 that says that the sacraments are effectual signs of grace. But you don't place the quote from the Consensus Tigurinus in context, and the context is hugely significant. The declaration that "Sacramenta non conferunt gratiam" is in the context of an argument against scholastic accounts of sacramental efficacy as ex opere operato. While the Lutherans might put it slightly differently, they actually agree. The idea that sacraments do not automatically confer grace is a point of 'Lutheran'-'Reformed' agreement (this arguably gets slightly messier with debates around baptismal regeneration towards the end of the century, but as a general statement of sacramental efficacy, there is broad agreement here).
Moreover, the Consensus Tigurinus itself clearly has a sense of sacramental efficacy, even if Zurich concerns about derogating at all from God's exclusive power for salvation means that the Consensus is more cautious about such language than, say, some of Calvin's writings are. Thus for example "Organa quidem sunt, quibus efficaciter, ubi visum est, agit, deus, sed ita, ut totum salutis nostrae opus ipsi uni acceptum ferri debeat." This isn't so terribly different from Article 26.
This is especially so because, contra what you say on page 56, Article 26 doesn't reject the notion that sacraments are tokens (notae) of Christian profession. It just denies that they are ONLY such tokens. Once again, the Consensus Tigurinus says quite the same: "Sunt quidem et hi sacramentorum fines, ut notae sint ac tesserae christianae professionis et societatis sive fraternitatis, ut sint at gratiarum actionem incitamenta et exercitia fidei ac piae vitae denique syngraphae ad id obligantes. Set hic unus inter alio praecipuus, ut per ea nobis suam gratiam testetur deus, repraesentet atque obsignet." To be sure, the grammatical structure is slightly different; the Articles says they are not only notes but rather witnesses/signs; the Consensus says that they are notes of profession but primarily means by which God testifies/represents/signs his grace to us. But the meaning is roughly equivalent.
This should not surprise us, because the dispute between Reformed and Lutherans over the Supper already by the 1550s wasn't really about efficacy. They could generally accept similar language about the efficacy of receiving the Supper, even if they meant slightly different things by the same words. To be sure, Zwingli's sacramental writings of the 1520s DID suggest a dramatically different orientation of sacramental theology in which sacraments were primarily things we did to show our faith to God and neighbor. But already in the last years of his life -- and certainly as taken up by Bullinger -- this idea faded. And so, by the end of the century, someone like Chemnitz can state that the point at issue isn't really the efficacy of the sacrament, ie the spiritual eating of Christ's body and blood by faith. It's the oral manducation.
So the similarity between the Articles and the Augustana in Article 26 shouldn't surprise us, and also doesn't mean that the Articles tend Lutheran on a topic of Lutheran-Reformed disagreement. This language, that sacraments are signs of our profession but mostly efficacious signs of God's grace, is language that all parties in the magisterial Reformation debates can happily use by the period we're looking at. Consider, for example, the Scots or Belgic confessions, which arguably have stronger language about sacramental efficacy than even the Articles of Religion, but no one questions their 'Reformed' pedigree.
If you are starting a reading group, I'd love to be a part of it!
A few considerations complicate your presentation here.
1. The Zürich connection thesis is a product of the 19th century. No one - literally no one - in the 16th or 17th c. presented the history of the English Reformation that way. And this raises a question: did no one know about it, was it proactively suppressed, or is its apparent truth today really just a product of later historiographical developments?
2. There is the issue of scale, that is, the size of Zürich's influence relative to Geneva, Wittenberg, etc. On the one hand, as multiple scholars of Tudor-era Anglo-German relations have noted, there was a vast correspondence between CoE leaders and various Lutherans, but it has never been edited. Extrapolating from this, Is the scale of correspondence with those in Zürich comparable to that of correspondence with other confessional communities?
On the other hand, when it comes to print history, most of the figures that you mention were never especially popular. Bullinger printed more often than either Vermigli or Bucer, but all paled in comparison to Erasmus, whether during Edward VI's reign or that of Elizabeth I.
3. Consequently, your appeal to Bullinger's Decades is only, at best, true for one English province (Canterbury). What about York? And, for how long was the Decades pushed? For example, Elizabeth revived the push to get Erasmus' Paraphrases into parishes, and inquiries into ownership of the Paraphrases have been documented into the 1640s. But can the same be said for the Decades? (And indeed, if Zürich was so important, why did its many supposed advocates fail so fantastically at exploiting the printing press to support such a commitment?)
4. You write that "If Anglicans today want to look to the formularies of the sixteenth century to help to ground Anglican identity, theology, and religious life (as I think we should!), they will find themselves looking to Zürich." There are multiple Lutheran sources for various aspects of, e.g., the Articles, but where did any of these sources ever borrow from Zürich? This, too, becomes a question of scale. Of course, there is the opposite question that is no less relevant: where did confessional norms in England differ from those in Zürich? I can think of a few.
5. Describing any single group or small collection of individuals as "the theological heart" of anything (in this case, the CoE) is simply hagiographical. And, at best, it risks taking the rhetorical context of a text - Jewel's comment to Vermigli, for example - at face value. Written sources ought to raise questions about rhetorical context precisely because history is multi-causal and multi-directional. Why bother with oversimplification?
Thanks for this, Ben. A full treatment of these some of these issues will need to wait till my dissertation, but I did want to begin to address them:
(1) The question of how precisely the English Reformation has been narrated is of course a very complicated and important one, and I defer to your own work on it. However, numerous English sources forthrightly describe the importance of Zurich for English theology or England's general accord with Zurich in the period studied. Jewel's very clear sense of himself as aligned with Zurich is quite significant given Jewel's own role in establishing the identity of the Elizabethan church. This was also recognized on the Zurich side of things. See, for example, Martyr's letter to Jewel about the Apologia, which was frequently published alongside it, especially on the Continent. As I mentioned above, it is a commonplace in Elizabethan conformist polemic to situate England alongside Zurich in the disciplinary disputes. Take, for a few examples, Whitgift, Hooker, and Cooper. Given your assertion about the lack of connection between Zurich and England drawn in accounts of the English Reformation, Hooker's own narration of the disciplinary dispute as another round of the dispute between Zurich- and Geneva-oriented theologians in Heidelberg is, I think, interesting. So, even if no one in the 16th century would have narrated the story of the English Reformation exactly as I did here, the close affinity between Zurich and England is quite commonly found in Elizabethan writing, particularly conformist writing (although it is worth noting that the disciplinarians/puritans also attempted to secure Zurich agreement with their views!).
(2) I agree with David Gehring and other scholars of Anglo-German relations that the archive of Lutheran/English correspondence is a valuable one deserving further study, and I take the point about how the works available to us (especially in edited, easily accessible form) may distort our records of the past. That said, whatever the relative numbers of letters one way or another, it is clear that the English political and religious establishment from Elizabeth on down saw the Church of England as committed to the Reformed side of the Lutheran-Reformed division. This is not, of course, to deny the continued significance of Lutheran figures and styles of piety to the English church, and it is true that some conformist writers did reference Lutheran church orders in defense of episcopal polity (interestingly, I haven't found similar arguments made about clerical apparel, but setting that aside...). But the fact that the English church evidently and self-consciously chose the Reformed position on the theological questions dividing international Protestantism makes it clear that, whatever relationships existed between England and Lutheranism, the influence of the Lutheran churches was quite limited.
(3) This feels a bit of an odd argument, frankly. Granted that the fact that nothing like the vice-gerency in spirituals was ever revived made clerical governing of the Church of England as a whole always a somewhat cumbersome affair (witness poor Matthew Parker and his Advertisements!), of course the Canterbury Convocation was the more significant of the two. I'm not arguing that the same number of copies of the Decades were printed as Erasmus' Paraphrases. But we do have a number of printings of the Decades, and other works of Bullinger's were quite popular, particularly his sermons on the Apocalypse. Other Zurich-oriented texts were also in regular production, but I would note that my argument does not depend on the existence of a vast quantity of published works by Zurich theologians in translation in England (though I grant it would strengthen it). I point you again to Martyr's argument (to be sure, one made with particular ends in mind) that the theology of the Apology of the Church of England -- which did indeed have a broad, significant, and lasting publishing history -- simply was that of Zurich. The question of how long the Decades remained in regular use is a very interesting one, which would require (I expect) some close attention to clerical libraries and the like.
(4) It is certainly true that certain of the Articles and the various parts of the prayer book were heavily dependent upon Lutheran sources. This is interesting and worth remembering! But this does not mean, in the end, that the 'Elizabethan settlement' looked significantly to Wittenberg. We cannot simply tally up the quantity of borrowed materials and make a judgment that way. For the Lutheran borrowings were in areas where Protestants as a whole agreed. On questions of Reformed/Lutheran difference, the formularies unambiguously took the Reformed position, and were widely seen by figures at the time as doing so. Alec Ryrie's work has been very helpful to me on this question, as has Stephen Hampton's. For what it's worth, it's not actually true that there is no direct Zurich influence on the formularies, either. The homily against idolatry is largely drawn from Bullinger. As to the questions of significant divergences from the confessional stance of Zurich, it seems that the leaders of both churches judged that whatever differences there were weren't particularly significant. Here I'd point you to Bullinger's letters on the vestarian controversy, for example.
5. I'm not sure I understand how you're using "hagiographical" here. I think the general meaning of hagiography in the pejorative sense is an overly-rosy account of some person or event that doesn't take seriously its flaws. I don't think that's what I'm doing here. I do think that historians can in fact make claims about the relative importance of various strands of influence on persons, events, theological movements, etc., and even assert that one strand is particularly definitive. And while I'd make the claim somewhat differently in the context of a formal academic article, I think it holds up.
Sorry to be late in responding here. Broadly speaking, there seems to be an upshot in your comment about Zurich vs. Geneva: namely, that "Reformed" is a confessional label that acquired its meaning really rather slowly, and perhaps far more slowly than "Lutheran" acquired its meaning. This is something we honestly need a study of. In Britain, the first to call themselves "Reformed" were the circle around John Knox, but they hardly looked on England as the same. After all, they hated the 1552 BCP. Even by the end of the 16th c., not many folks in England self-identified as "Reformed" after all. And that lack of identification, especially when so many up north embraced that label, matters. If the Genevans and Scots were quicker to identify as Reformed, was Zurich thus slower? If so, why? There is probably a story there.
To #2 above, you may want to dig a bit more into the Lutheran side of things. Elizabeth wanted the CoE "iuxta normam confessionis augustanae" - see the selection of letters edited by E.I. Kouri. And no, the points of agreement with Lutherans were definitely not in areas of broad Protestant consensus. In the 39 articles it became an attempt at splitting the difference. The 42 articles' rejection of Christ's physical presence (the original Article 29) was cut in the Elizabethan revision (Article 28), but the Elizabethan articles inserted an article (Article 29) on the manducatio impiorum that Lutherans came to reject later in the 1570s. Bishop Guest's correspondence on his revision of Article 28 survives and reveals that his goal was very much to create a space within the Elizabethan Articles for affirming Christ's physical presence in the Eucharist. At least some English contemporaries recognized this and disapproved. If you are interested, I discuss this more in a book chapter about the Eucharist in classical Anglican formularies: https://www.academia.edu/101182674/_Sacrifices_of_Laud_Praise_and_Thanksgiving_The_Eucharist_in_Classical_Anglican_Formularies
Ok, that is probably enough for now. You've got plenty of archival research to do, no doubt.
Thanks, Ben. I have to say, I think you're misreading the Articles of Religion and the Consensus Tigurinus in a way that is causing you to misconstrue the relationship between the two of them, and between the Articles and Lutheran confessional standards.
You write on page 56 that the Consensus Tigurinus declares that the sacraments do not confer grace, and appose that to the language of Article 26 that says that the sacraments are effectual signs of grace. But you don't place the quote from the Consensus Tigurinus in context, and the context is hugely significant. The declaration that "Sacramenta non conferunt gratiam" is in the context of an argument against scholastic accounts of sacramental efficacy as ex opere operato. While the Lutherans might put it slightly differently, they actually agree. The idea that sacraments do not automatically confer grace is a point of 'Lutheran'-'Reformed' agreement (this arguably gets slightly messier with debates around baptismal regeneration towards the end of the century, but as a general statement of sacramental efficacy, there is broad agreement here).
Moreover, the Consensus Tigurinus itself clearly has a sense of sacramental efficacy, even if Zurich concerns about derogating at all from God's exclusive power for salvation means that the Consensus is more cautious about such language than, say, some of Calvin's writings are. Thus for example "Organa quidem sunt, quibus efficaciter, ubi visum est, agit, deus, sed ita, ut totum salutis nostrae opus ipsi uni acceptum ferri debeat." This isn't so terribly different from Article 26.
This is especially so because, contra what you say on page 56, Article 26 doesn't reject the notion that sacraments are tokens (notae) of Christian profession. It just denies that they are ONLY such tokens. Once again, the Consensus Tigurinus says quite the same: "Sunt quidem et hi sacramentorum fines, ut notae sint ac tesserae christianae professionis et societatis sive fraternitatis, ut sint at gratiarum actionem incitamenta et exercitia fidei ac piae vitae denique syngraphae ad id obligantes. Set hic unus inter alio praecipuus, ut per ea nobis suam gratiam testetur deus, repraesentet atque obsignet." To be sure, the grammatical structure is slightly different; the Articles says they are not only notes but rather witnesses/signs; the Consensus says that they are notes of profession but primarily means by which God testifies/represents/signs his grace to us. But the meaning is roughly equivalent.
This should not surprise us, because the dispute between Reformed and Lutherans over the Supper already by the 1550s wasn't really about efficacy. They could generally accept similar language about the efficacy of receiving the Supper, even if they meant slightly different things by the same words. To be sure, Zwingli's sacramental writings of the 1520s DID suggest a dramatically different orientation of sacramental theology in which sacraments were primarily things we did to show our faith to God and neighbor. But already in the last years of his life -- and certainly as taken up by Bullinger -- this idea faded. And so, by the end of the century, someone like Chemnitz can state that the point at issue isn't really the efficacy of the sacrament, ie the spiritual eating of Christ's body and blood by faith. It's the oral manducation.
So the similarity between the Articles and the Augustana in Article 26 shouldn't surprise us, and also doesn't mean that the Articles tend Lutheran on a topic of Lutheran-Reformed disagreement. This language, that sacraments are signs of our profession but mostly efficacious signs of God's grace, is language that all parties in the magisterial Reformation debates can happily use by the period we're looking at. Consider, for example, the Scots or Belgic confessions, which arguably have stronger language about sacramental efficacy than even the Articles of Religion, but no one questions their 'Reformed' pedigree.