C
Contarini
Guest
quote=stbruderklaus;4271880]
I will note, however, that Anglicans tend to have a peculiar view of Luther, and the Lutheran reforms, that is quite hostile… and often surprising to me.
Yes, I agree. I am not one of those Anglicans. I appreciate Lutheranism very much. I am concerned about people of all confessions (including Anglicans) telling the story of the Reformation so as to give their own confession (you generously include Anglicans, which I appreciate
) a claim to historical continuity, in contrast with a caricature of “Protestantism” which is then ascribed to some other confession or confessions (usually the Reformed, though as you note many Anglicans do this to Lutheranism as well).
To my mind, one of the great tragedies of the Anglo-Catholic movement was that it tried to re-catholicize Anglicanism by claiming that Anglicanism had all along been something radically different from Protestantism as a whole. A more historically truthful and ecumenically fruitful approach would have been to say, “Yes, we all have been affected by the Reformation–let us–Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, anyone who is willing to sign on–consider how we can renew our respective traditions by holding them accountable to the historic faith of the Church.”
I will note, however, that Anglicans tend to have a peculiar view of Luther, and the Lutheran reforms, that is quite hostile… and often surprising to me.
Yes, I agree. I am not one of those Anglicans. I appreciate Lutheranism very much. I am concerned about people of all confessions (including Anglicans) telling the story of the Reformation so as to give their own confession (you generously include Anglicans, which I appreciate
) a claim to historical continuity, in contrast with a caricature of “Protestantism” which is then ascribed to some other confession or confessions (usually the Reformed, though as you note many Anglicans do this to Lutheranism as well).Melanchthon wrote to Brenz rebuking him for relying too heavily on Augustine in matters of soteriology. I translated this letter and you can find it here as part of an argument between myself and Dave Armstrong (though we weren’t differing too sharply, in the end). Chemnitz is a different story, I agree. I said in my previous post that I am not talking about Lutheranism as a broad confessional tradition, but specifically about Luther, particularly in the formative years of the 1520s. One of my sources for Luther’s harsh statements on the Fathers is Gerhard Ebeling’s Evangelische Evangelienauslegung, by the way. It’s long and dense, but if you read German you could dip into it sometime (I don’t have access to it right now and don’t have page numbers, I’m afraid).
There are historical reasons for this. Anglo-Catholicism was shaped in part by a reaction to the growing influence of liberal Protestant theology in the Church of England. Most of the early Anglo-Catholics had a very limited understanding of continental Protestantism and caricatured it (somewhat as I suspect you of caricaturing the Reformed position). In his Idea of a University (written after he became Roman Catholic), Newman refers to “the Lutheran leaven,” by which he seems to mean primarily a subjectivist approach to the faith. He admits that the original Reformers didn’t teach this in the form that folks like Schleiermacher did, but he seems to see a logical progression from the Reformers to the Pietists to liberalism.
To my mind, one of the great tragedies of the Anglo-Catholic movement was that it tried to re-catholicize Anglicanism by claiming that Anglicanism had all along been something radically different from Protestantism as a whole. A more historically truthful and ecumenically fruitful approach would have been to say, “Yes, we all have been affected by the Reformation–let us–Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, anyone who is willing to sign on–consider how we can renew our respective traditions by holding them accountable to the historic faith of the Church.”
I have to object to that comparison. Henry is not a major Anglican theologian, and at the very least Luther would have to be regarded as a major theologian in the Lutheran tradition, wouldn’t he? If you were to say that Lutheranism is no more centered on Luther than Anglicanism on Hooker, that would be more defensible, though I’d still have to question it. Anglicanism is theologically far more amorphous than Lutheranism, and Luther’s theology does have a pervasive influence that is unmatched by any single figure in Anglicanism, in my opinion. (Perhaps we could name Cranmer as the parallel, not so much for his theology per se but for his liturgical work, which of course has had an immense theological influence.) However, given the way in which Anglicans and many others mistakenly assume that Lutheranism is reducible to Luther, I understand and agree with your basic point. I was not in fact talking about Lutheranism as a confessional tradition but about Luther himself as a historical figure trying to reform the Church in the early sixteenth century. This is what you referred to in your earlier post (“Luther’s early reforms were quite mild,” etc.). I am quite aware that later confessional Lutheranism paid a lot of attention to the Fathers.
for continued division.
And I treat them the way St. Jerome did.