Jeremy Marshall critiques David Starkey’s BBC2 documentary on the Reformation shown on 3 October
According to recent reports, up to 200,000 mainly young people gathered recently in the main square of Kiev to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
The Ukrainian President passed a decree recognising the anniversary. Given that Ukraine was hardly an epicentre of the Reformation, the contrast with the UK could not be greater.
Here we should, I suppose, be grateful for a one hour BBC 2 documentary fronted by the irrepressible TV historian David Starkey. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, it was ‘good in parts’. Dr Starkey bounds around various historical sites, there were some clever graphics using printers ink to show the Reformation spreading through print and, in the inevitably compressed one hour time frame, quite a lot was covered. However, Calvin, Zwingli, the Counter Reformation and indeed the rest of Europe were not even mentioned: the focus was very much pre-1540 on Luther in Germany and Henry VIII, William Tyndale and Thomas More in England.
Luther’s ideas
On the positive side, the programme paid careful attention paid to what Luther’s ideas were and especially how they spread. sola sola The importance of scriptura and fides came across clearly, as did the way in which Luther’s early attack on purgatory and indulgences broadened out into a much more general attack on the whole doctrinal edifice of medieval Catholicism. As Starkey said ‘the church had forgotten Christ and become fixated on wealth’. Joel Osteen, you see, had his forerunners!
Luther’s central idea was of course the question (as now) of authority: once you sola accept scriptura as the cornerstone, everything else flows from that. Andrew Pettegree, the author of an exceptional new book on Luther, Brand Luther, was interviewed. To understand Pettegree’s ideas more generally you need to read the book, but the programme managed to convey the gist of Pettegree’s ideas.
Luther as marketing man?
Luther was not only a superb theologian but also what we might call nowadays a brilliant marketeer. He was not a theologian debating abstract ideas in Latin with other theologians, but a man with his finger on the pulse of everyman and everywoman. He boiled down complex theological ideas into short and easy-to-read pamphlets. The 95 Theses in Latin became 20 points in a few pages in German. Rather than two hour sermons he produced snappy, pithy, easy to read pamphlets which were expertly marketed and attractively branded.
Luther was also heavily involved in the business process of actually getting his ideas out. Of course, all this was guided by the Holy Spirit, but nonetheless it is amazing to realise how quickly Luther’s ideas spread. Within five years he had produced 60 original books and was the world’s best-selling author.
Reformation in England
Similarly, William Tyndale’s massive contribution to the Reformation in England was recognised. Ironically, the first recorded arrival of the 95 Theses in England was as an attachment to a letter sent by the humanist scholar Erasmus to the man who was to become Tyndale’s sworn enemy, Sir Thomas More.
Debating ideas in Latin was one thing: Starkey points out the revolutionary impact of the Bible in a language that everyone who was literate could read. Uniquely in England – because of the fear of the Lollards – the Bible was unavailable in any shape or form in the vernacular. The Bible, as the programme made clear, went from something the ordinary man or woman knew about only as a concept, which could only be accessed or interpreted by their priest, to something that was directly available for all. As Starkey says, thanks to Tyndale: ‘The Bible comes alive’.
Disappointments
So far so good. What was disappointing about the programme was the question of motive. Why did the ideas spread as they did? What motivated men and women to be willing to die horribly for an idea? The answer, argued Starkey, was effectively politics. He maintained that Luther’s ideas appealed to the German princes because it meant they could pay less tax and to the English, because as proto Brexiteers they could shake off the papal European bureaucracy.
Now there were, of course, elements of the Reformation that were political, especially in England. Had it not been for Henry VIII’s wandering eye catching that of an attractive lady-in-waiting to his estranged Queen Catherine of Aragon, things might have been very different. Truly, God works in mysterious ways.
Anne and Henry
As the programme argued, Anne Boleyn, who was accused by her opponents of being ‘more Lutheran than Luther’, was a decisive influence in propagating Lutheran ideas at court. Even to the extent of giving Henry one of Tyndale’s books with relevant passages highlighted for his ease of perusal. Henry was always wavering theologically backwards and forwards, depending on where his marital interests lay, even burning three Protestants and having three Catholics hung, drawn and quartered on the same day, in the interest of balance. But the fundamental claim of the programme, that the main motivation of the Reformers was nationalism and politics, and by implication that it was ‘ top down’ is deeply flawed.
The idea that the Reformation was a top down imposition of Protestant ideas in the teeth of a devoutly Catholic populace, is that of the Catholic historian Eamon Duffy in his books, such as The Stripping of the Altars. But recent historical research has shown that, both in England and Germany, the main drivers were rather ‘bottom up’ – ordinary men and women who believed that the ideas of the Reformation were true and were willing to die for what they believed.
Anne Askew
Perhaps the most remarkable of all these in England was a young woman, Anne Askew. Unlike her namesake Anne Boleyn she came, not from the court, but from an obscure corner of England – Lincolnshire. Anne became convinced of the truths of the new religion through reading the Bible in English and this led her, perhaps uniquely, to challenge not only the church, but her own violent and abusive husband. So off she went to Lincoln Cathedral, leaving her two young children behind, and started reading the Bible (in English of course) out loud, to the consternation of the assembled male clergy.
Next, she is repeating this act in London, is promptly arrested, eventually tortured on the rack (highly illegally) and running theological rings round her male persecutors. Her refusal as a woman to submit to all the assembled ecclesiastical dignitaries infuriated them. Her courage is simply – even 500 years later – astounding. Replying to Bishop Gardiner she said: ‘the Bishop said I should be burnt. I answered that I had searched all the Scriptures yet could I never find there that either Christ or his apostles put any creature to death’. So weakened was she by her torture that she had to be carried by chair to the site of the execution. Her example, and that of others, inspired the watching crowds, in the same way that the Roman spectators were struck by the courage of unschooled men and women who were thrown to the lions. You can read more about Anne and similarly brave witnesses in a recent book, The Burning Time by Virginia Rounding, which chronicles the Smithfield martyrs.
Failing to engage
This is the real reason the Reformation succeeded. The BBC programme ultimately fell down therefore in failing to even engage with the reason why the Reformation spread like wildfire: not, in the final analysis, because it was politically expedient, but because the ideas revealed to everyone from the Scriptures in their native languages lit a flame in the hearts of ordinary men and women that has continued to this day. 500 years later, may God fan these embers back into the flame of a new Reformation.
