IT WAS not until 1540, almost 15 years after a notorious sermon provoked accusations of heresy, that Dr Robert Barnes was burned at Smithfield. But — as a congregation gathered at St Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge, heard on Sunday — it was a fate foreshadowed on this sermon. “We make nowadays many martyrs,” he told his congregation. “I trust we will have many more.”
Sunday’s congregation had gathered to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Dr Barnes’s sermon, delivered at St Edward’s on Christmas Eve 1525 and billed in publicity this month as one which “helped spark the English Reformation”. Its real significance was “not a lot what it reveals about that one febrile moment, but what it set in motion”, Professor Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University, observed in a lecture prepared for the occasion.
In the presence of two Church of England bishops, it fell to the Dean of Trinity Hall, the Revd Dr Stephen Plant, to read aloud a few of Dr Barnes’ broadside against the episcopacy of his time: three of the 25 paragraphs of his recollection of what he had written, compiled as a part of a broadcast defence written six years later. The sermon itself doesn’t survive.
The bishops were, Dr Barnes had said, the “false masters that Peter speaketh of. These be fountains without water, for they provide no good doctrine to the people. Now they sell us; they sell the people; they sell holy orders. They sell church hallowing. There isn’t any higher merchandise in Cheapside.”
Having ascended the famous pulpit — “almost definitely” that from which Dr Barnes delivered his denunciation — Professor Ryrie observed that there was “little question that Dr Barnes was trying to start out something, though I also think there’s little question that he began greater than he intended.”
In 1525, Dr Barnes was 30, an Augustinian friar, and a physician of theology. That Christmas Eve, he had accepted an invite to evangelise at St Edward’s, Hugh Latimer’s church, on the request of Thomas Bilney. All three were, Professor Ryrie noted, set to change into “giants of the English Reformation” — and martyrs.
The principle goal of Dr Barnes’s sermon was Cardinal Wolsey, before whom he would shortly appear for interrogation. The Cardinal was, in Dr Barnes’s eyes, “just one representative of a wholly corrupt episcopal class”, Professor Ryrie said.
Anticipating that there may be “malicious listeners” amongst his audience, Dr Barnes had compared them to dogs, “who in the event that they a lot as hear the voice of somebody who doesn’t belong to their household will set about barking furiously”.
In this case, Professor Ryrie suggested, hearing a real preacher’s voice would prompt barks of “heretic” and “to the hearth”.
Yet, he also suggested that the persecution that followed was “almost definitely harder and faster than [Dr Barnes] expected”. Dr Barnes was summoned for an interview with the Vice Chancellor of the University, where he was told that a few of his words were seditious, some slanderous, and a few heretical. A “good case may very well be made”, Professor Ryrie said, that this last charge was unmerited. As Dr Barnes argued in his defence, “criticising the wealth, the hypocrisy, the corruption of senior clergymen: this has been a mainstay of Christian preaching for hundreds of years.”
One of the “most potentially explosive” elements of his sermon was his attack on the usage of secular courts: “A Christian man may not contend in judgement along with his brother for his private wealth.” There was, Professor Ryrie suggested, “a frisson of radicalism about that claim. It sounds positively sectarian . . . you possibly can catch only a whiff of fanaticism.”
His sermon didn’t contain “the variant of heresy that will later be called Protestantism”, Professor Ryrie said. Absent were any of the key theological themes already being articulated by Martin Luther, reminiscent of the doctrine of justification by faith alone or sola scriptura. Yet, “if we widen the lens, we will see why this sermon on this place at this moment meant greater than just its already inflammatory content. . . [and] set off a sequence of events which not one of the participants could have foreseen.”
Professor Ryrie went on to sketch the broader European context, including the impact of one other “combative Augustinian friar and doctor of theology” who had used his university platform to “issue an unguarded denunciation of church corruption”. Dr Barnes had been preaching one yr after the Peasants War in Germany, and 4 years after the burning of Martin Luther’s books at St Paul’s Cross.
During his remarks, Professor Ryrie defended the English bishops of this era, who were “by European standards . . . a remarkably impressive group of men. Scholars, theologians, expert administrators, most of them men of relatively humble birth who had risen through the ranks on talent, none of them the obviously debauched corrupt aristocrats, simoniacs, who all too obviously filled the episcopate in France, Scotland, in much of Germany, not least in Italy.”
Dr Barnes was speaking, Professor Ryrie observed, as “a form of spokesman for a restless, reformist mood” amongst a gaggle of young scholars in Cambridge on the time. But, he argued — drawing on the work of Dr Colin Donnelly, associate professor of Reformation and early modern Christianities at Oxford University — the concept this movement was Lutheran requires difficult.
“While later Protestant generations naturally wanted to assert these early English reformers for their very own cause, that’s not quite the way it checked out the time.” The Evangelical mood in 1520s Cambridge wasn’t a lot Lutheran as “Erasmus’s ideas with the guardrails removed”.
It was this “restless” mood, somewhat than doctrines, that Professor Ryrie encouraged his audience to think about. “It’s not Lutheran heresy but it surely’s land that’s been cleared and ploughed. It will only take a couple of heretical seeds to land in it for them to have the option to take root and discover that the climate suits them perfectly,” he said. Dr Barnes’s arrest served as an encouragement, not a deterrent, to this burgeoning movement.
After spending time in prison, Dr Barnes escaped to Germany, and by 1530 was in Wittenberg where he became friends with Martin Luther. Dr Barnes stood today, Professor Ryrie suggested, as “the symbol of how English evangelicalism transitioned from a nascent, nebulous mood of reformist idealism to serious life-on-the-line commitment to what was going to change into Protestantism”.
By the time Dr Barnes returned to England in 1534, much had modified. The following yr, Hugh Latimer was made a bishop, But at this point, the court was a “shifting minefield”. After a “ferocious sermon” in 1540, he was burned alive, “almost as an accidental side casualty of that summer’s murderous religious politics”.
It was, Professor Ryrie concluded, “in his death in addition to in his life, that he can function an emblem of the English Reformation”.
Asked what Dr Barnes might preach today, in the identical spirit of critiquing the clergy of the Church, Professor Ryrie professed being “wary”. He said: “The temptation is to start out recruiting Barnes to my very own prejudices.” But, he concluded, “I think his disdain for the strategy of pursuing each other in law . . . is one which he might feel still had some purchase in our own time.”
