LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

MAAS: BARNES AND EARLY ENGLISH LUTHERANISM 75
Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which pointed up the radical differences
between Luther’s thought and that of received tradition. This Babylonian
Captivity was a direct attack on the sacramental system of the church of
Rome, in many ways the heart and soul of the church. It is here that Luther
dismissed the great majority of Roman sacraments as unbiblical inventions
of the medieval church, and in doing so placed himself in a position outside
of and against that church.
What exactly does this all have to do with England, much less with
Robert Barnes England first. With Luther’s publication of the Babylonian
Captivity, conservative theologians throughout Christendom took up their
pens to refute what they saw as outright and dangerous heresy. And the
theologians of England were no exception. What was exceptional on this
island is that the refutations of Luther were not solely the work of
theologians. Strangely, the first systematic English rebuttal of Luther’s
Babylonian Captivity was penned by a most unexpected author, King Henry
VIII himself. Henry, despite the fact that he is most often remembered as the
man who eventually removed England from obedience to the Roman church
and had himself proclaimed Supreme Head of the church in England, was, in
the early 1520s, one of Rome’s most loyal supporters. It was in
demonstration of this loyalty that he took it upon himself to write what he
called an Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, condemning Luther’s dismissal
of the majority of these. And so impressive was Henry’s work considered by
those in high places, that, in the first of many ironies of the English
Reformation, he was rewarded with the title Defender of the Faith. 3
This is where things stood in the England of the early 1520s. The King
was praised as defender of orthodoxy; Luther was condemned as dangerous
heretic; and any who showed signs, however faint, of favouring Luther’s
opinions would of course fall under the same condemnation. Enter Robert
Barnes. 4 Barnes, like Luther himself, was a friar of the Augustinian order.
He had been born in the market town of Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn),
in Norfolk, in the year 1495, and while he was still quite young—by best
estimates when he was only ten or eleven—he was sent from his hometown
to the Augustinian house in Cambridge. The fact that there was an
Augustinian house in Bishop’s Lynn itself suggests that it was not simply the
monastic life which his parents intended for him. By sending him to
3 Lest there be any confusion, especially in the light of Prince Charles’s fairly recent
intimations that English sovereigns should be considered defenders of “faith”, in an inclusive
and generic sense, it should be stressed that this title was granted by the Roman pope, and
referred strictly to the Roman Catholic faith.
4 The following biographical details can be found in most works on Barnes. Still the best
overview of his life is that by James P. Lusardi, “The Career of Robert Barnes”, in The
Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 15 vols, ed. C. H. Miller, et al. (New Haven, 1963-
1997), 8:1365-1415.