LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

82 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
Barnes, through his association with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, was
scheduled to preach on the first Sunday in Lent, 1540, from the most
influential pulpit in England: Paul’s Cross in London. But Stephen Gardiner,
the man who had warned against Barnes’s preaching, managed to have
Barnes ousted and himself placed in the pulpit instead. From there he got
right to the heart of matters by denouncing the central Protestant doctrine of
justification by grace through faith alone. If Barnes had some cause to be
irritated at being replaced, he became all the more infuriated by the content
of his replacement’s sermon. And though he had been bumped from
preaching on the first Lenten Sunday, he had his turn two weeks later when
he preached from the same pulpit. At that point he decided against preaching
on the assigned text, and instead took up the same text on which Gardiner
had earlier preached. As he warmed to the subject and finally culminated his
refutation of Gardiner—who himself happened to be present that day—
Barnes pulled off a glove, threw it down in challenge, and announced that he
would defend his position even to death. 27 The gesture was rash, but the
announcement was prophetic. If Barnes had failed to read the times in 1525,
when his temper led him to prison for the first time, he had even more
radically misjudged the times in 1540.
Seven months earlier, during one of Barnes’s absences from the country,
the Act of Six Articles was passed in parliament and came into force. 28
Promulgated for the purpose of putting an end to the sort of religious
disagreement displayed by Gardiner and Barnes, the Act was a brief
statement of official English dogma on certain disputed points of theology. It
also announced the penalties for preaching contrary to the doctrines there put
forward. The most severe penalty for doing so was death itself. Barnes knew
this. He also knew that, in spite of any previous indications that his King
favoured Protestant doctrine, the Six Articles were an incredibly explicit
denunciation of this theology. As such, they further indicated that men like
Gardiner, defenders of traditional Roman doctrine, were again in the King’s
favour. It thus took only a complaint from Gardiner to the King to set in
motion the events leading to Barnes’s downfall. He was forced to retract the
opinions he had preached against Gardiner. But the venue for doing so was a
public one, and there Barnes’s formal (and obviously insincere) retraction
was quickly followed by another sermon that rehearsed his true views. His
hearers were scandalised, and he was almost immediately escorted to the
Tower of London. 29 He remained there for four months, never being tried
27 The episode is recounted in several contemporary letters and chronicles, but the fullest
account is that provided by Gardiner himself in The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. J. A.
Muller (Cambridge, 1933), 168ff.
28 The articles are reproduced in Documents, 222-32.
29 See LP 15:485.