Faith Works 5-13-06
Jeff Gill

Reforming the Reformers

Our season from Easter to Pentecost series on the branches of Christendom continues with reforms of the Reformation.
Last week we saw Martin Luther in 1517 start the ball rolling, so to speak, although Czechs would proudly note that an early reformation movement was in their province of Moravia, under Jan Hus, over 50 years earlier. And they’d be right: the Moravian Church ushered in the Protestant Reformation, and their descendants would be some of the first Protestant Christians to reach the Ohio country in the 1700’s, giving us Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhutten and Lichtenau, so we daren’t forget them!
The Swiss Reformation under John Calvin was quickly exported to places like Scotland by way of French Hugenots, so even today the Church of Scotland is what today Americans know as Presbyterian, a church led by elders in session consulting and discerning together, the word for elder in Biblical Greek being roughly "presbyter" transliterated to English. John Knox and other Scots reformers brought Calvinism into the Anglosphere, but not without some resistance.
At first, the king of England called Henry the Eighth was indignant at "the monk Luther" challenging God’s authority through the church, which he rightly saw as challenging royal prerogatives. Writings he "helped" pen led to his receiving from the Roman pontiff the title "Defender of the Faith." Ironically, British monarchs still hold this title.
The irony is because the same Henry, heir-less from his first wife, led a reformation of the English, or Anglican Church, which led them away from Roman primacy and towards a "Church of England," with the monarch as, well, "Defender of the Faith." The Archbishop of Canterbury became another "primus inter pares," or first among equals in a form of church leadership for what is still known as the Anglican Communion, the third largest world branch of Christendom after Catholic and Orthodox Christian bodies.
Is the ruler of England the head of the church? Elizabeth the Second today, like her esteemed ancestor of the late 1500’s Elizabeth I, child of Henry, is exactly that for most Anglicans, but her son Charles, hapless Prince of Wales, may find a way to step aside from such a role given his complex marital history.
What is as true now, as then, is that the English Reformation was both less and more than many other Protestant revolutions, so their American branch, the Episcopal Church (from "episcope," or overseer aka bishop in New Testament Greek) has a liturgy quite similar to a Catholic mass. The major difference is in the authority structure, or hierarchy, tracing to the archbishops and primates of the still vital Anglican Christian stream.
Back in Europe, the idea of authority was thrown entirely aside by some reforming groups, especially in Bavaria and southern Germany into Switzerland, who thought Luther was far too restrained in his reform of the church.
Under leaders like Jacob Amman, becoming the Amish, or Menno Simons, with Mennonites, groups who saw authority as primarily in the local or congregational unit of the church, and who removed baptism from the infant to the adult stage of spiritual growth, were called "Anabaptist." They strongly weighed against ("ana") baptism as a rite of the church, and made it a decision of the mature adult to be, most often, immersed ("baptizo") in water, and many if not most were sent across the waters of the Atlantic for their troubles. Anabaptist groups are to this day both mostly found in the New World, and often associated with the clothing and habits of the time period that gave them birth, the 1600’s.
And even the Lutheran Christian movement of Germany, once made the official state church, provoked a reaction of what became known as "Pietism," a group seeking the original passion and purpose of Martin Luther’s first reformation. Some of these Pietist groups, Brethren and Dunkards German Evangelicals and the like, included a renewed Moravian Church, staying largely loyal to their Lutheran roots, helped to spin off movements and energy for groups that we know today in America in many forms . . . which we’ll talk about next week.
Suffice it to say that the Anglicans had protesters against their structures of authority, some who were more "pure" and some who wanted adult baptism or more congregational government (at least in the colonies) and some who were quaking in their silent prayer assemblies; these Puritans and Baptists and Congregationalists and Quakers all left the episcopal way of being Christian for organizing principles that still are with us in Licking County today.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story through disciple@voyager.net.