LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

LTR XV (Academic Year 2002-03): 73-87
ROBERT BARNES AND EARLY ENGLISH LUTHERANISM,
1517-1540 1
Korey D. Maas
Anyone first being introduced to Robert Barnes, unless they have been
thoroughly desensitized by television and film, will be struck by the
fact that his life—and especially its tragic end—was a highly
dramatic affair. It includes, to offer just a sound bite: a rapid rise from
obscurity to prominence, frequent travel in disguise, more than one arrest
and several narrow escapes, one feigned suicide, and ultimately, as the
dramatic climax, death by being burned at the stake. If it is not necessarily a
Hollywood action film, it could at least be a swashbuckling novel by
Alexander Dumas, something in the vein of The Three Musketeers or The
Count of Monte Cristo. Barnes was well known in the courts of Kings Henry
VIII of England and Christian III of Denmark. He was equally well known
in those of the German princes John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and
Philip, Landgrave of Hesse. Barnes included Martin Luther, Luther’s own
pastor John Bugenhagen, and his fellow professor Philip Melanchthon—all
architects of the Reformation in Germany—among his closest friends.
Among his patrons he counted Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury,
and Thomas Cromwell, minister to the King, the two men we can
undoubtedly consider the masterminds behind the English Reformation. And
among lesser known but nonetheless influential men of the age, Miles
Coverdale, the first to offer a complete sixteenth-century English translation
of the Bible, is worth mentioning as having been a student of Robert Barnes
in the Augustinian friary that once stood in Cambridge.
Despite these credentials, or even in part because of them, Robert Barnes
has been almost all but forgotten. The reason, I will suggest, is that Barnes
was one of what is still a very rare breed: an English Lutheran. Lutheranism
world-wide remains by and large a German and Scandinavian commodity.
So it is that even in countries like the United States, Canada, or Australia,
each home to a sizeable number of English-speaking Lutherans, little
attention has been given by Lutherans to the country of England. And
conversely, England, which decided even in the sixteenth century that
Lutheranism was not a viable option as the national faith, gave little more
consideration to those Lutherans who had called England their home. The
1 Slightly revised versions of this paper were originally presented to the Oxford and
Cambridge University Lutheran Societies, and to a meeting of the pastors of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in England.