LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

MAAS: BARNES AND EARLY ENGLISH LUTHERANISM 83
and never having formal charges brought against him. Nevertheless, on 30
July 1540, with no further explanation, he and two other Protestant preachers
were, on orders of the King, removed from the Tower and burned at the
stake. In a strange twist of fate, three Roman Catholic prisoners, on the very
same day, also met their death at the King’s orders.
These six deaths—three Catholic and three Protestant—highlight like
nothing else the ambiguities and contradictions of Henry VIII and his
reformation of the English church. He can hardly be considered Catholic,
since he denounced the papacy and executed its supporters as traitors. But he
also systematically persecuted Zwinglians and Anabaptists, so he certainly
cannot be considered one of those brands of Protestantism. He disagreed
with the tenets of Calvinism and, despite years of negotiation, he
consistently refused to be allied with those of a Lutheran confession. It is
probably not being too blunt to state that Henry never knew exactly where he
stood theologically. Nor is it saying too much to state that his subjects never
knew where he stood. The safest thing any of them could do was to remain
flexible, speak vaguely, and be willing to change their opinions as those of
their King changed. This is precisely what Barnes had failed to do. He
unashamedly professed his beliefs, and then consistently maintained them
even in the face of opposition. Before closing, then, it will be worth briefly
attempting to define Barnes’s faith more exactly.
I will not take the time to systematically spell out his stance on every
conceivable doctrinal point. What I will instead attempt, by an admittedly
oversimplified process of elimination, is to offer some evidence in support of
the previously stated conviction that Barnes was a convinced proponent of
Lutheranism. In many ways this opinion is not a novel one. But it is worth
pursuing for at least two reasons. The first is that Lutheranism in any narrow
sense was quite rare in sixteenth-century England; if Barnes did indeed
support such a confession then it is definitely worth noting. The second
reason, not unrelated to the first, is that some in the past half-century have
attempted to undermine claims that Barnes was or remained a Lutheran. 30
Any attempt to portray Barnes as a Lutheran must provide evidence first
and foremost of his adherence to that doctrine standing at the centre of
Lutheran theology: justification sola fide, by faith alone. And anyone
picking up Barnes’s first publication, his 1530 work titled Sentences
Collected from the Doctors, will immediately be faced with the evidence of
30 Most notably, W. A. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520-1535 (New Haven,
1964). More recently, see also R. W. Whittall, “Cambridge Preachers: Robert Barnes’s
Advent Sermon”, in Teach Me Thy Way, O Lord: Essays in Honor of Glen Zweck on the
Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Houston, 2000), 235-46.