"There was a king of Yvetot, " wrote the French poet Pierre-Jean de
Beranger, "little known to history." Pick any period of history of which
you are especially fond, and you will feel strongly that some figure you
deem important is too "little known."Consider the era of the English Reformation. It is a time of tumultous
change. A king shifts his faith, leaders are burned at the stake, people
flee the country, many monasteries are destroyed, and the king's successors shift back and forth in the middle of the sixteenth century with astonishing
rapidity. Read any work on this time and the authors TEND to focus on the
politics, the leaders, the church, the liturgy and the men. When a woman is
mentioned at all, the one bright light that gets nearly all the attention is
Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Nearly all the other women are less noticed, and when they are focused on
little is said about the role THEOLOGY plays in their lives and ministries.
In a highly provocative and little noticed book, "When Life and Beliefs
Collide : How Knowing God Makes a Difference" (Zondervan, 2001), Carolyn
James writes: "As I have met with hundreds of women, I have encountered a
wide spectrum of negative attitudes towards theology, from casual
indifference to open hostility, and all points in between. Here and there,
a few women may find theology fascinating, may even devote a lot of time to
study it, but they are exceptional and, in the opinion of some, a little
peculiar. Beyond these rare exceptions, most women cannot be bothered." Well, in the period of the English Reformation women COULD be bothered,
indeed fascinated, by theology, as Paul Zahl's "Five Women of the English
Reformation" (Eerdmans, 2001) shows. Dr. Zahl picks Anne Boleyn
(1507-1536), Anne Askew (1521-1546), Katherine Parr (1514-1548), Jane Grey
(1537-1554), and Catherine Willoughby (1520-1580) for his examination. "All
of these woman thought theologically," he writes. "They were lay
theologians. They read theological books, most especially the Bible, and
anything to which they could gain access from the continental Protestant
Reformers. They talked theology. Their inner circles were
twenty-four-hours-a-day Bible studies. They saw everything that happened
through two lenses: the lens of the providence of God and the lens of the
furtherance of the Reformed religion." For Dr. Zahl, the "Reformed religion" comes to England in three successive
parts. "The first phase of Reformation theology was justification by grace
through faith rediscovered. The second phase was the implications of
justification by faith for the Mass, the Mass being the central action and
transaction of medieval Catholicism. The third phase of the English
Reformation was the focus on election and predestination." Phase one concerns Anne Boleyn, "who died meekly but gave away nothing." So
completely was she erased from the official record "it became as if she had
never lived." For Zahl, however, she left the indelible mark of her faith.
"As queen, Anne understood her providential mission to be.to bring the
Reformation to England and employ every single instance of patronage and
influence to that end." What is the human predicament? "The human person is
caught up in himself and herself until set free to love by a prior exterior
love." That prior love is the love above all loves, and the heart of Anne's
faith, "the forgiving love of Christ Jesus, without which all human
endeavors of love are doomed to be scripted and need projected." The second phase of the Reformation involves another Anne. "Anne Askew's
primary target was biblical teaching concerning the eucharist, and more
precisely the idea of transubstantiation. Anne was burned for denying
transubstantiation. Her denial of it was aggressive. In fact she mocked
the concept!" Zahl believes Anne Askew rejected transubstantiation for two reasons.
"First, it is irrational to say that God can be contained within any object
of any kind..`God will not be eaten with teeth': This is the Enlightenment
or critical, deconstructing side of Protestantism in early form." Anne's
second reason Zahl calls an "evangelical" one, namely the notion that Christ
's atoning death occurred once for all. "To conceive of the Eucharist as a
sacrifice of repetition, by which the benefits of Christ's death are
presented new and actual each time on the altar, was to denigrate the `one,
full perfect sacrifice'" of which Cranmer wrote. The final phase of the Reformation concerns Catherine Willoughby, the
duchess of Suffolk in 1533, who lived the longest of the five women treated
by Dr. Zahl. She addresses primarily the subjects of divine will,
providence, and election. When she loses her sons Charles and Henry to
death, she seeks to understand it as a "mercy. She means that by taking
away from her, her very most cherished prerogative-her children and her
attachment to them-God has intentionally forced her to rely solely on Him."
Zahl confesses this is "counterintuitive" yet sees it as the inevitable
outflow of Luther's theology. "If grace alone saves, then God alone is the
willing actor in all human events.Contemporary people make heavy weather of
this. Our ancestors generally accepted it." So here is vintage Zahl: compact, pithy, and theologically oh so rich.
Appropriately, there is a chapter of reflection by Mary Zahl which concludes
with the best call of the book: "Study the Bible.be courageous.See God as.
[your] only authority.Be grateful that .[we are] not being asked to die for"
our faith. For all the talk about theology, however, this theologian was most struck by
all the suffering these women went through, the physical agony, the
emotional trauma of becoming convenient victims in other's schemes, and the
lives cut so terribly short (Willoughby excepted). "What I think we can say
regarding the steel of our heroes' convictions is that in each case their
new convictions were made firmer by means of affliction, loss and
harassment." Indeed. "Shall I fall in desperation?" Katherine Parr asks.
"Nay, I will call upon Christ, the Light of the world. The Fountain of
life, the relief of all careful consciences, the Peacemaker between God and
man, and the only health and comfort of all repentant sinners." Oh how they suffered, but they suffered for and with Christ. May God grant
us similar rich and deep devotion to him in our generation. --The Rev. Dr. Kendall S. Harmon (ksharmon@mindspring.com) serves as Theologian in Residence at St.
Paul's Episcopal Church in Summerville, South Carolina |
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