Phillip Jensen on Eulogies

An interesting take on the shifting shape of funeral services here. What a culture says and does at death is always evidence of what that culture understands meaning, identity and purpose to be. Diarmaid McCulloch often cites wills, for example, as evidence for the change from old Catholic to new Protestant beliefs during the Reformation period...

The survival of the Cathedrals

Salisbury Cathedral

Diarmaid MacCulloch reckons the synthesis of Reformed theology and Cathedrals makes for the distinctive, if paradoxical, nature of Anglicanism:

..there was nothing like the English cathedral close, with its round of regular liturgy involving a large staff of clergy and elaborat music sung by paid professionals, nothing of which seemed at the time to have much relevance to a Protestant Church. The English survival is a puzzle: a cynical view is that cathedral estates and offices could act as a reservoir of patronage for the powerful... But perhaps more important was the stubborn love of church choral music shown by that midwife of the Church of Englan, Elizabeth I. ...Strangely this exquisite sacred music...had virtually no effect on musical and devotional life in English parish churches from Elizabeth's reign to the time of the 'Oxford Movement'... the parishes sane metrical psalms in the manner of Geneva, at least until the major evangelical 'revival' in the eighteenth century popularised a new sort of hymn... Nevertheless the survival of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism. It struggled through whatmight have seem unpromising Elizabethen years to reveal the potential for liturgical spleandour in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (a development which, almost certainly, he would not have welcomed). Reformation, p. 511

This tension between parish worship and Cathedral worship is something that is still in evidence: not always a happy synthesis you would have to say.

Brad S Gregory - Salvation at Stake

Quite the most brilliant account of martyrdom in the Reformation is Salvation at Stake by Brad S. Gregory. Two things he has said have caught my eye:

Firstly, this about the relation of the will to the martyr's 'act':

The voluntary nature of martyrdom was profoundly paradoxical: the martyr’s agency depended up relinquishing control, their strength upon a naked admission of their utter impotence and total dependence on God. p.132

This is an essential description of the role of the will in the Christian life, in fact. It is, yes, an exercise of will, but in the form of a submissive and obedient - a properly faithful - will.

Secondly, this, on the inability of the contemporary world to file martydom in a convenient part of its draws:

…the martyr’s own words and actions show that whatever utility the postmodern, New Historicist notion of Renaissance self-fashioning might have, it is inapplicable to them. Prison experience entailed not calculating agency and self-interest, but passivity in a double sense – both suffering and “being done unto”. Behind stone walls there were no courtly patrons from whom to curry favor, no theatrical poses to strike; the Lord saw behind every mask, including dissimulation of his truth. The only sensible course of action lay not in “constructing” a self, but in stripping away every pretense to acknowledge the self one was: a weak, enfleshed soul, created by and radically dependent on God. p.133

Properly understood on its own terms, then, the martyr's intentions cannot somehow be reduced by Foucauldian cynicism to 'self-fashioning', or the construction of a suitable posture for the self. In fact, rather, we see here an unselfing...

Dairmaid MacCulloch on the Reformation

Dairmaid MacCulloch (whose name I now spell correctly!) has an interesting take on the theological/religious context into which the Reformation was addressed. Firstly, he stresses the importance, in Northern Europe in particular, of the doctrine of purgatory and prayers/masses for the dead. This was both an industry on a mass scale, and crucial to the inner spiritual self-conception of the whole culture. The whole bureaucracy and economy of the afterlife was written into the mentality of western Christianity. The Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith called into question, then, not only ideas but whole systems and institutions of worship and daily life.

Secondly, he notes the waxing power of the papacy in Western Europe, which itself was a fairly recent phenomenon. The conciliarist movement of the fifteenth century had only lately failed to challenge the papacy for supremacy in the Church.

The clergy family and the Reformation

Diarmid MacCullough, the doyen of Reformation historians, writes this intriguing paragraph:

The clergy wife, from being abused and despised by conservatives in the parish, came to provide a new model for all the wives of Protestant Europe: she was now without any female rival for iconic status since nuns and achoresses had been banished from Protestant society. Following the Bucerian ideal, she was of course obedient to her husband, but she was also a calm and experienced companion, ready to give advice and help to parishioners - also to sustain the cheerfulness of her spouse and her children in a publicaly enacted life which made them all potentially rather lonely objects of the curiosity and envy as well as the emulation of others. And so the parsonage or the manse, not so well-supplied with spare cash as with books, high ideals and high thinking, negotiated its way through a social position which was continually poised self-consciously and uncertainly between gentry and people. It took its place as one of the great cultural forces in Protestant societies, both in the Old World and the New. In the upheavals of the Enlightenment and after, it produced some of the most eloquent and troubled voices to face up to doubt and unflinching reassesment of the family business: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche and Karl Barth were all the sons of pastors... p. 653-54

MacCullough can speak so acutely here because he, too, was a child of the vicarage! It has always been my contention that we clergy children have punched above our weight, for good or for ill. Here are some others:

Alice Cooper (rock musician)
Bob Hawke (Australian Prime Minister)
The Bronte Sisters (novelists)
Manning Clark (Australian myth-maker)

Not quite of the rank of the three already mentioned: can we suggest some others?