WHITHER GOD BRINGS US
Cambridge and the Reformation Martyrs
By David Llewellyn Jenkins
Charenton Reformed Publishing. 354 pages.
£20.
ISBN 978 0 992 946 586
Most days, as I make my way to work, I pass a very ordinary park bench overlooking the grassy visage of Jesus Green in Cambridge.
A closer inspection of the seat reveals a small steel plaque of the sort often used to commemorate a dear old soul who enjoyed the spot in years gone by. This plaque, however, relates a different story altogether: ‘In memory of John Hullier, Eton and Kings, Reformation martyr, Jesus Green 1556.’ Little known today, Hullier ministered through the reign of Edward VI in the village of Babraham, Cambridgeshire.
The gospel he preached reflected the core of New Testament essentials recovered by the Reformation: justification by faith alone, the sufficiency of the once-for-all death of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and the supreme authority of God’s Word in Scripture. Having provoked the ire of Mary Tudor’s Catholic hierarchy, Hullier was arrested and burned at the stake on Maundy Thursday of 1556, maintaining his witness to the lordship of Christ to the very end. His story is just one of 22 short biographies skilfully narrated by David Llewellyn Jenkins in Whither God Brings Us: Cambridge and the Reformation Martyrs.
Group bravery
Alongside household names such as Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, Jenkins invites us to learn from the faith and bravery of a group of Cambridge-affiliated reformers who paid the ultimate price for their Christian testimony during the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughter Mary. While Jenkins shows himself to be a careful historian, he makes no attempt to veil his own operative commitments. The book is hearty history, which, with no apologies offered, engages the English Reformation as a Spirit-inspired movement of desperately-needed resuscitation in the context of an apostate institutional church. Although necessary, however, we are left in no doubt that the English Reformation was far from perfect and its ambassadors are treated sympathetically, but never uncritically. Jenkins’ great gift to the church of today is to remind us, through a gripping re-telling of the lives of these courageous men and women, that we have a faith worth living, and if necessary, dying for.
