LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

74 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
result is that Barnes, who for much of his life in England and on the
Continent seemed to straddle the English Channel, was eventually left by
churches on both sides to sink to its bottom.
What I would like to do here is offer some small attempt at a
resuscitation. I will not attempt to argue any particularly profound thesis
about Barnes’s importance for the Reformation. Barnes was not, regardless
of the connections I have already mentioned, and as much as many modern
English-speaking Lutherans might like him to be, a major player in the
Reformation. But this is not to say that he is not an interesting and in some
ways a unique individual. Illustrating this will perhaps be enough to
encourage further and continued interest in both Robert Barnes and early
English Lutheranism. To do so, though, we will first have to put Barnes into
context by sketching a shamefully brief history of the ecclesiastical scene in
early sixteenth-century England.
We can perhaps begin where many histories of the Reformation begin,
with Luther’s famous posting of his ninety-five theses. The date, of course,
was 31 October 1517. And though Luther posted his theses on a church door
in Germany, less than four weeks later the controversial opinions there
outlined were being read and discussed across the channel in England. In the
few years following, it was quite possible to see Luther not necessarily as a
theological reformer attempting to undermine the tradition and authority of
the institutional church in which he himself was raised. Rather, many were
reading Luther as merely another proponent of the intellectual movement
known as humanism, which found fault with what it considered the “nitpicking”
and “hair-splitting” of so much medieval theology. The humanists,
though, were not primarily critical of the conclusions reached by medieval
theologians, but most often simply of the methods by which those
conclusions were reached. So while it is true that the humanists could very
often be critical of the church and some of her more dubious claims and
practices, they were early on and almost to a man sincere supporters of the
church’s official theology. And many thought Luther could be included in
this camp. Thus some could even claim that Luther agreed in everything
with Erasmus (far and away the most prominent humanist), saying that “the
only difference [is] that what Erasmus merely hints at, Luther teaches
openly”. 2
That opinion, however, had soon to be abandoned by those who
continued to read Luther’s growing number of publications. The year 1520 is
in many ways decisive for the turning point in popular opinion. In that year
Luther published three treatises which together offered a fairly thorough
summary of his theological thinking. It was one of these in particular, his
2 The remark is that of Martin Bucer. See Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of
Humanism in Germany (Oxford, 2000), 23.