What Caused the English Reformation?
Causes of the English Reformation - talking points
Henry VIII's marital and personal problems - the “occasion” for the Church of England (Lev 20:21 he took his brother’s wife!)
Henry needed a religious and political solution for his inconvenient marriage to Katherine of Aragon
But cries for church reformation had been ongoing for centuries in England, long before the 16th century
At the time Henry broke with Rome and became the Supreme Head of the Church of England (1534), almost everyone was disgusted with the Medieval Catholic Church that was rife with corruption and separated from the catholic and apostolic faith
There was groundswell support for reforming the Catholic Church
Growing support for the fast-growing evangelical movement (later called “Protestant”) that had been brewing in England and on the continent for many years
The perfect storm
At first, no one wanted to leave, only “reform”
But when the Roman Church resolutely resisted any reform based on the teaching of Scripture…
Who caused the English Reformation (the perfect storm):
God - the people of England hungered for a righteousness beyond their self-righteousness, for an “alien” righteousness (Phil 3:9)
Wycliff and the Lollards - anti-authoritarian, ground work for the Bible as the basis of authority
Gutenberg - 1450 moveable-type printing press
Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) - the opulence, wickedness, and corruption in the Medieval Catholic Church cried for reformation
Erasmus - Renaissance and Humanism the engine running the Reformation - ad fonts (back to the sources)
Tetzel - German preacher, Grand Comissioner for indulgences in Germany
Tyndale - using Erasmus’ Greek (and Latin) Bible, translated the Bible into English
Coverdale - completed Tyndale for what became the Matthew Bible (Great Bible)
Luther - whose writings were smuggled in (unfree will, justification by faith, universal priesthood, 2 kinds of righteousness)
Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell - Protestants both, influenced Henry towards reformation (Great Bible)
Henry VIII - “nationalism,” approved King’s Bible in all Church of England (1536, 1538)
Edward VI - Somerset and Dudley
Cranmer - penned the four “formularies” of Anglicanism: the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, the Ordinal, and (edited and wrote several of ) the Homilies
Bishops Ridley (theology), Latimer (preaching), Barnes (Lutheran)
Elizabeth 1 - provided the political protection for the “Elizabethan Settlement”
Calvin - whose influence especially in sacramental theology
Jewel, Perkins, Hooker, Puritans (Sibbs, Goodwin, John Owen) - meat on the bones of Protestant Reformation
Matthew Parker - compiler of the writings of the English reformers (The Parker Society publications)
The late Medieval Church
1 Poorly educated and underpaid clergy; some clergy grew wealthy on the profits of simony and nepotism; indulgences - which remitted the punishment of sin in Purgatory after death to those willing to pay in life.
2 Monasteries (with a few exceptions - Franciscans, Carthusians, etc) were in decline, corrupt, and dysfunctional.
3 Renaissance popes (for example the Borgia Alexander VI, and the Medici Leo X) lives of greed, corruption and sensuality, and people greatly resented paying the imposed taxes to Rome (Annates, Peter's pence); English Cardinal Wolsey was no less corrupt.
4 Although many English parishes remained faithful centers of worship - the Mass was in Latin and inaccessible to the people, Holy Communion was considered a re-sacrifice of Christ by a sacrificing sacerdotal priesthood (Transubstantiation), the Church (tradition) gradually assumed a separate but equal authority status to the Bible, and Christianity was generally highly moralistic and performance driven.
Lollardy
1 Lollards were followers of “England’s first Protestant” John Wycliff (c.1320-84); 150 years before the English Reformation Wycliff spoke of the Bible as the only sure basis of belief and that it should be translated into the vernacular; wrote 1st English translation; denied that “tradition” is as important as Scripture; rejected transubstantiation; advocated for marriage for clergy; denounced the abuses of clergy and Pope.
2 Initially some important nobles supported Wycliff but from about 1410 Lollardy became largely the occupation of the working-class and artists of South-East England.
3 Lollards, considered heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, grew in number and maybe even into 1500; they paved the way for the Protestant Reformation in England.
Humanism
1 Medieval universities were dominated by heirs of the great medieval philosophers Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Duns Scotus.
2 Italian universities were not as enamored by scholasticism; instead encouraged the study of medicine, law, and rhetoric based on the texts of classical antiquity.
3 Humanists were a small elite group of intellectuals, born from an ad fonts (back to the original sources) desire to study Latin and Greek classics.
4 Christian humanists, Erasmus, John Colet, and Thomas More applied these ideas to Scripture seeking to find in the Bible a basis for living truly Christian lives; exposed clerical ignorance and promoted educational reform.
5 Paved the way for the invention of the moveable type printing press (Gutenberg,1450) and the translation of the Bible into English (Tyndale, 1526).
Luther and Protestantism
1 October 31, 1517: Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk/priest, posted 95 Theses to the door of the castle church of Wittenberg.
2 Over the next few years, Luther attacked the corruption and false-teachings of the Catholic Church
3 Abandoning the monastic rule, married an ex-nun Katharina von Bora, who was placed in a convent when only ten years old. (She and Luther had six children).
4 Translated the Bible into German in ten weeks in 1522, sold over 100,000 copies over the next forty years.
5 The most important doctrines put forward by Luther were:
i solifidianism (salvation by faith alone)
ii unfree will
iii priesthood of all believers
iv rejected transubstantiation
v communion in both kinds (bread and wine) for laity
vi rejected Purgatory
vii rejected of clerical celibacy
viii reduced number of sacraments from 7 to 2
ix rejection of papal power - sola scriptura
x law & gospel distinction
6 In 1540 the English Reformation was “Lutheran,” but by 1552 it was reformed (Calvin)
Edward VI (1537-1553) & Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)
1 Sola Scriptura
2 Sola Fide (salvation by grace through faith alone)
3 Universal priesthood (of all believers)
4 View of sacraments based on the grace given and the faith to receive
5 “Via media” - agreement on evangelical essentials and generosity for nonessentials
6 Four “Anglican formularies”: Articles of Religion, Homilies, Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal
7 Worship in English, participatory, reflecting the theology of 1-6 above (1552, 1662 Book of Common Prayer)
Diarmaid MacCulloch writes on the effects of the Edwardian Reformation:
“The extent of the change would have been obvious to anyone walking into a fully reformed English church building in 1553. The greatest visual impact came from words: words in painted plaster, boards or on printed posters stared down from the whitewashed walls, turning the church interior into the pages of a giant scrapbook of scripture. Three new pieces of church furniture stood out amid the hastily adapted and purged remains of the old. A wooden table, moveable into the body of the church for communion services, symbolized the overthrow of the old mass, with all its associated theology of a sacrificing, celibate priesthood; to emphasize this rejection the table was placed at right angles to the alignment of the old altars. A poor box to collect alms, which the Edwardian government ordered to be placed in every church, was an official reminder that people’s charity was to be directed not to masses or graven images, but to needy people made in God’s image. A pulpit reinforce the message of the walls that God was to be approached most directly through his biblical words: even where the pulpit was inherited from the old pre-reformation days, it was now used exclusively for preaching . . . The pulpit would remain the central visual emphasis in most English parish churches down to the nineteenth century, when the Oxford Movement, in a remarkably successful piece of theological alchemy, restored he primacy of the altar.” (The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation)
The Articles of Religion “are Catholic in the ecumenical doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, especially drawing upon the Lutheran Augsburg and Wurttemberg Confessions. They are Augustinian in the anthropological and soteriological doctrines of free-will, sin and grace… They are Protestant and evangelical in rejecting the peculiar errors and abuses of Rome… They are Reformed or moderately Calvinistic in the two doctrines of Predestination and the Lord’s Supper… and they are Erastian in the political section.” (Philip Schaff)
Elizabethan Settlement
1 Strong politician, weak theologian; Protestant, but not Cranmerian; Lutheran 1549 Prayer Book preference
“Elizabeth was an evangelical, but of a distinctive and (in the conditions of the late 1550s) an extremely old-fashion variety. She disliked the marriage of clergy and enjoyed more ceremonial and decoration in worship than her half-brother would have considered tolerable. If we wanted to place her beliefs, we should do so not at the court of Edward, but at the court of Henry VIII and Catherine Parr in the mid-1540s.” (Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation)
2 John Jewel “Challenge Sermon” November 26, 1559 (Apology for the Church of England; between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, which is more catholic and apostolic?)
3 Williams Perkins - England’s Calvin, popularizer of Reformation Anglicanism (predestination, preaching, law& gospel distinction)
4 Richard Hooker - The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
5 Conforming Puritans (Sibbs, Goodwin, John Owen) the heart and spirit of the Reformation
John Wycliffe
Who caused the English Reformation? John Wycliffe did. Wycliffe (1320-1384) was “England’s first true Protestant” (Anne Hudson “John Wyclif”) - the “morning star of the Reformation.” He was the leading theologian and philosopher at Oxford University when he began to talk about all the ideas of reform a century and a half before the Reformation was on people’s minds. Wycliff and his followers, the Lollards, laid the foundation for the recovery of the Bible as the primary authority for the church. He wrote the first English translation of the Bible (from the Latin Vulgate). “Directly relevant as heroes battling with Antichrist were the Lollards, who could claim that their survival into Edwardian England provided a real and continuous century and a half of precedent for the religious revolution” (D. MacCulloch).
Gutenberg
Who caused the 16th century Protestant Reformation? Johannes Gutenberg did - at least in part. He was not a priest, theologian, or Christian martyr, but an eccentric German entrepreneur who died on this day, February 3, 1468. Gutenberg invented (he actually stole the concept from the Chinese and Koreans) the moveable type printing press in 1450 that very literally changed the way everyone ever since has learned things. His invention ignited a fast-moving wildfire across Europe, making the Bible and the writings of Martin Luther and other reformers widely available to common people. Before Gutenberg there were only an estimated 30,000 books in all of Europe in libraries and in the hands of rich people, but by 1500 there were more than 20 million books printed. He is most famous for the 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible of which 49 still are known to exist today (check your attics!). The invention of the printing press, added to the growing undercurrent for reform by John Wycliff and the Lollards in the 14th century, the translation of the Bible into German (1522) and English (1526), the rise of Humanism (encouraging the study of original sources, Hebrew and Greek), and the God-given widespread hunger to know a righteousness outside ourselves that is far more than our self-righteous attempts at holiness, all made the 16th century Reformation inevitable and an unstoppable force.
Erasmus
Who caused the 16th century Reformation? Erasmus did. In some ways Desiderius Erasmus was nearly as important as Luther, Calvin and Cranmer. But unlike the others who would become Protestant leaders, Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a theologian and he never brought himself to embrace the evangelical faith. So how is it that someone causes a reformation that he doesn't come to hold? The "ad fonts" (back to the sources) cry of the Renaissance and 16th century Humanism is what drove Erasmus to write and publish the first edition of the Greek New Testament from ancient sources, "Novum Instrumentum," which he wisely dedicated to the pope 505 years ago today, February 1, 1516. In the course of two decades he published five editions. This was the text used by the 16th century Reformers (including Tyndale and Luther) to translate the Holy Bible into the languages of their people. A shock wave went throughout Europe when the Bible was released from ecclesiastical captivity for the first time in 1,500 years! "Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched," was the motto of his Franciscan detractors.
Erasmus was as much admired as he was despised: a true provocateur. Lutherans turned against him because he wouldn't join them. Catholics threatened his life and banned his books because they blamed him for starting the Reformation and for poking fun of the blatant abuses of the church of his day ("In Praise of Folly"). But as lines began to be drawn in the sand, Erasmus chose to be a spectator rather than an actor. "Let others court martyrdom," he said, "I don't consider myself worthy of this distinction."
Along with the Greek New Testament, Erasmus also translated a new Latin version and he wrote paraphrases of every book in the New Testament (except Revelation). Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII who was a devout Evangelical (the word used then for "Protestant"), arranged for Erasmus' Paraphrases to be translated into English. In 1547 King Edward VI issued a royal proclamation requiring the Pharaphrases, along with a copy of the English Bible, to be publicly displayed in every parish in the Church of England.
Erasmus mostly wanted people to know the Bible, not an interpretation of the Bible that was covered with 1,500 years of dust and spin. As he put it, he wanted it to be read by everyone - "the farmer, the tailor, the mason, prostitutes, pimps, and Turks." He had confidence that God's word that goes out will not return empty, but it will accomplish all that God purposes. When people begin to read the Bible for themselves they see the importance of the primacy of Holy Scripture over all other authorities, they discover the freedom and hope of a righteousness that is more than their failed attempts at self-righteousness, and they experience a relationship with Christ who is their only true and sufficient mediator between God and man.
Tyndale
A collision of factors went in to paving the way for the 16th century Reformation, but the hunger for God's Word written is perhaps the most important. It was food for starving people who had been kept from reading it for 1500 years. When it finally became available for all to read in their own languages, men and women discovered that the Word has innate power to draw the human heart towards God, "that by patience and comfort of thy Holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life."
William Tyndale was denied permission to translate the Bible and he fled England for his life in 1524. In exile he translated and published several thousand copies of the English New Testament which were smuggled into his native home. In one exchange with a clergyman, he wrote, “If God spare my life, ere many years pass, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.”
Sir Thomas More was commissioned by Henry VIII to refute Tyndale, and More accused Tyndale of preaching treason. On October 2, 1528 Tyndale responded with a pamphlet, "The Obedience of a Christian Man," arguing that a good Christian obeys the king in so far as the king obeys God. He justified his position from the Bible, declaring that Scripture is the Christian’s final authority.
William Tyndale's New Testament became a best seller, guaranteeing his place on the king's "most wanted" list. In Antwerp, Belgium he succeeded in translating two thirds of the Old Testament before he was betrayed and returned to England for punishment. He was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. His last prayer reportedly was “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Just three years later, in 1539, Tyndale’s prayer was partially answered when Henry VIII required every church in England to provide a copy of the Bible in English. The translation selected was Miles Coverdale's The Great Bible which was largely based on the work of William Tyndale.
Cranmer
Who caused the English Reformation? Archbishop Cranmer did. Thomas Cranmer and all the English reformers began as devout Roman Catholics, but their context exposed them to the “new learning” of Renaissance humanism. This led them directly to the Bible and the early church fathers where they caught the Reformation bug. There were many matters on which Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century agreed, like the core doctrinal teachings of the church’s creeds. And there were many other matters in which Protestants considered Catholic teachings unbiblical, like their understanding of the pope’s authority, transubstantiation, the extraordinary place of Mary alongside Jesus as a co-redeemer, and purgatory. But it is when we speak of “the gospel” that the differences appear starkly between Protestants and Catholics. Job’s question is our question and the question of every human heart: how can sinful men and women have fellowship with a holy and righteous God (Job 4:17)? The Reformation’s biggest discovery, after the Bible, was finding and experiencing a way of righteousness and justification that was all but forgotten in the Middle Ages.
When we speak of justification and righteousness, we are speaking about God’s saving actions for sinners - for our salvation. Roman Catholics and, sadly, not a few Protestants, understand justification as salvation-by-incremental-steps: personal transformation that happens over time as someone cooperates with God’s grace and participates in the sacraments. In this understanding, there is no real distinction between justification and sanctification, or worse, sanctification is required before salvation. Sinners are left wondering if they have done enough to heal themselves. This, as they understand it, is a “process” of infused righteousness to make them holy enough for the coming Day of Judgment. They hope to avoid as much time as possible in Purgatory for purgation (cleaning) of the sins that remain in them at death. Sadly, some may reach the end of their lives without confidence that they have been good enough Catholics or righteous enough to be saved. They hope that a final infusion of divine goodness is waiting for them at death’s door to finish the process of making themselves acceptable.
The sixteenth century reformers begin at a totally different place: with the conviction that no one is ever righteous enough and that all fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). With the Reformation, the church recovered a biblical understanding of sin, and because we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, we are “very far gone from original righteousness” (Article IX). Protestants understand that their only hope is outside of themselves - another righteousness - a perfect righteousness that can somehow relate unholy men and women to a wholly righteous God. This salvation is not based on an internal change which somehow makes someone “okay,” but rather on the righteousness of God himself which he credits to our account by faith. "Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith" (Philippians 3:8), "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith" (Romans 1:16-17). When sinners trust God’s promise to forgive their sins (because of Christ’s death on their behalf), Protestants believe that God credits to them Christ’s own perfect righteousness.
If all this sounds formulaic, propositional and cold, it wasn’t so for Thomas Cranmer and the reformers, and neither is it for Christians today. It is a life-changer! Dane Ortland reminds us that “the gospel offers us not only legal exoneration - inviolably precious truth! - it also sweeps us into Christ’s very heart.” Saving faith is much more than a legal agreement for adoption signed in some far-away heavenly courtroom; it is adoption! It’s not just about having our sins forgiven; it’s union with the one who created us and loves us for such a relationship. Now that our salvation is “finished,” he is not sitting around waiting to see how we do with it - in heaven he lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25). “Intercession is the constant hitting ‘refresh’ of our justification in the court of heaven (Ortland).” In justification, God moves into a Christian’s heart to take up residence in the power of the Holy Spirit - Christ is in you, the hope of glory! Anglicans affirm their belief in God’s abundant grace every time they come to receive Holy Communion, asserting that “we are not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord whose property (whose property!) is always to have mercy... that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.”
Anne Boleyn
Who caused the Protestant Reformation in England? Anne Boleyn had a hand in it. She was Henry VIII's second wife for only three years (nicknamed "Anne of the Thousand Days") when she was beheaded by order of the king on May 19, 1536. She was convicted of adultery and treason which were almost certainly all trumped up charges. Her crime was giving Henry a daughter rather than the male heir he desperately wanted. Their child, Elizabeth, was to rule England as Virgin Queen for 44 years. If you watch Netflix's "The Tudors," the impression you will get of Anne is one of a conniving, unprincipled political opportunist. She may have been, and there is no doubt that she was a French-educated socialite who loved clothes, but she was also a quiet supporter of Lutherans for the religious Reformation ongoing in England at the time (starting with John Wycliffe 150 years earlier). This likely played into Henry's grumpiness about the Boleyn girl. The pope's refusal to give permission for Henry to divorce Katherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne was "the occasion" for Henry VIII to declare the Church of England its own separate church from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534. In collusion with Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn is considered an early champion of the English Reformation. Even, by some, a Protestant Martyr.
Katherine Parr
Katherine Parr was the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, and Queen of England and Ireland (1543-47). Katherine left the throne as a confirmed Protestant calling for reformation, but she started out like the other evangelicals as a follower of Erasmus (Humanism). When did she get the reformation bug? Henry appointed Katherine - yes, a woman! - as Regent in 1544 for a year while he worked out of the country, and he ordering Thomas Cranmer to serve as one of her advisors. Some think she might have had daily contact with the architect of the Church of England's liturgy and theology. From John Foxe's account, it was Katherine who strongly encouraged Henry to press for more of Cranmer's reforms and to end the "superstitions" of Rome. Her greatest influence for reformation in England might well have been the impact she had on Henry's children, and especially Elizabeth and Edward. She instructed, guided, and provided a real family for them. Following Mary's short reign as Queen, Edward VI and Elizabeth settled the Church of England as a decidedly Protestant church with the publication of the first Books of Common Prayer and England's confession: The Articles of Religion. Katherine also did something quite novel, something that women at the time simply did not do: she wrote books. Included in her writings was an intensely personal testimony, The Lamentation of a Sinner (1546), in which she chronicled her journey from the traditional Catholicism of the pope the “persecuter of all true Christians,” to the justification by the only faith of which Luther spoke. The Lamentation of a Sinner was not published until after Henry’s death in January 1547. Katherine is an unsung hero of Reformation Anglicanism.
John Jewel
Why started the English Reformation? John Jewel certainly didn’t start it, but he had a big part in establishing it. His contributions to Anglican thinking cannot be overestimated: alongside, in importance, the liturgy of Thomas Cranmer, the sermons of Hugh Latimer, and the systematic theology of Richard Hooker. On November 26, 1559 Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, preached a sermon and issued a famous challenge, 27 disputed points with the Medieval Roman Catholic Church, in which he said he would become “Catholic” if anyone could show any connection of the church's teaching to Scripture and the early church fathers. Several took up the challenge and, in the context of this debate, Jewel wrote “The Apology for the Church of England.” In this short essay he explained in concise and beautiful prose why schism is, at the same time, regrettable and sometimes necessary - the only proper response towards an institutional church that refuses to reform itself according the authority of Holy Scripture. The schismatic is the one who causes the separation, not the one who separates (schismaticus est qui separationem causat, non qui separate), i.e. the Medieval Roman Catholic Church.
Jewel, like Cranmer and all the other reformers, went through different theological phases in his personal life, but he landed with both feet with Cranmer and Hooker in Reformation Anglicanism. When Jewel died September 23, 1571, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Richard Hooker, whom Jewel had helped as a boy, wrote that Jewel was the “worthiest divine that Christendom hath bred for some hundreds of years.”
"The Apology of the Church of England" is available and accessible on the internet for all to read. The English translation (originally written in Latin) is short, accessible, and compelling. It was translated into English by Anne Cooke Bacon, a serious self-trained scholar and Protestant theologian in her own right (I love this part of the story!). Every Anglican and Episcopalian should read The Apology every year - well, at least once, and see the beauty and logic of Jewel's case. The Church of England stands for the supreme authority of Holy Scripture and common consensual (catholic) Christianity over the novel traditions and magical inventions of the Medieval Catholic Church.
William Perkins
Perkins (1558-1602) was a Cambridge scholar and a widely respected theologian in the reign Queen Elizabeth I. He is sometimes written off as a “puritan",” but in fact, in the words of W. B. Patterson, “Perkins was not a Puritan or even a moderate Puritan, terms that suggest opposition to the established Church. He was mainstream English Protestant, notably for his systematic theology, his stress on ‘practical divinity’, his rationale for the importance of preaching, and his social and moral concerns.” He was a mainstream Anglican in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition who helped settle the Church of England into that theological family. He famously wrote books on predestination and the art of prophesying (preaching), and he became the most widely read English religious writer of his day, even more so than his contemporaries John Jewel and Richard Hooker. He passionately believed that Scripture can be best understood and preached from a reference of law & gospel: the law (the Bible’s commandments and imperatives) show us God’s standard for living and our failure to live up to it, and it then leads to our need for a righteousness beyond our own self-righteousness. The gospel is the word of Scripture about God’s solution for human sinfulness: Jesus who lived the life we failed to live in our good efforts, and who died the death that we deserve because of our sin.
Matthew Parker
Matthew Parker is a name that enthusiasts of the English Reformation will remember. He became the Archbishop of Canterbury on December 17, 1559, just a year after Elizabeth became Queen of England making her the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. For 16 years as Archbishop, Parker was the construction manager for what came to be know at the "Elizabethan Settlement" that fixed the Church of England into Protestantism. He saw to it that Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1552) was preserved with very minor tweaks in the 1559 version, supervised the revision of Anglican's confessional statement that was authorized in 1571 as the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, organized and contributed to a new and improved Bible translation, the Bishop's Bible (1568), that served the church until the King James Version in 1611, and he helped keep the church focused on faith and worship essentials by curbing the more radical Puritans who sought to out-reform the English Reformation.
When the Tractarians (Oxford Movement) of the 1830's threatened to undo the Church of England's Reformation identity, a group of (mostly) evangelicals in the Church of England countered the attempted coup by publishing 56 volumes of letters, essays and sermons of the early English reformers (1841-1853). They named it after Matthew Parker whose Protestantism defined the Church of England and who was a world-renowned collector of early church manuscripts. The Parker Society publications are available on-line for everyone to read the inside thinking of Thomas Cranmer, Myles Coverdale, John Bale, John Jewel and many other leaders who were behind our Anglican heritage.