240 - Elizabeth I and the Religious Settlement Of 1559

Elizabeth I and the Religious Settlement Of 1559
By Carl S. Meyer
182 pp. St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1960. $4.95

Since Henry VIII broke with the Pope in 1529, England had undergone extensive changes in its formal religious character and system. Henry repudiated the Pope, but retained the essentials of Roman Catholic doctrine: he set up what amounted to a national Catholicism, with himself, instead of His Holiness, as Supreme Head. Under Edward VI, Henry's son who succeeded to the throne on Henry's death in 1547, the Church of England was moved in a definitely Protestant direction: two Prayer Books were issued and forty-two Articles of Religion. When Edward VI died in 1553 and was succeeded by his strongly, almost fiercely, Roman Catholic half-sister, Mary, Roman Catholicism was re-established in England by

241 - Elizabeth I and the Religious Settlement Of 1559

act of Parliament, and England witnessed such martyrdoms in the cause of religion as she had never seen before, nor has seen since. When Mary died in 1558, to be succeeded by her younger half-sister Elizabeth I, the time was ripe for something like a definitive settlement of the religious issue. This is exactly what Elizabeth gave England. The two main elements in this settlement-its essential foundation, according to Meyer -were the Act of Supremacy of 1559, which declared Elizabeth to be "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, of the same year, which ordered all clergy of the Church of England to follow only the services of the Prayer Book which was soon to be published. In 1562 the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were issued as the doctrinal standard of the Anglican Church, though not till 1571 was subscription to these Articles required by a canon of Convocation and an Act of Parliament. Though today many divergences from the Elizabeth Prayer Book have come to be tolerated in the Church of England, the Elizabethan Settlement still largely determines its formal character.

In this book Dr. Carl S. Meyer, of the Chair of Historical Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary, St. Louis, has sought to investigate how this Settlement came into being, what forces shaped it, and what it was intended to mean. He does this partly on the basis of a careful examination of the parliamentary proceedings which led up to the passage of the two famous Acts, and partly with the help of the work of the leading authority on Queen Elizabeth's reign, Sir John Neale.

While it would not be true to say that Dr. Meyer's exposition provides many surprises, nonetheless he makes certain points that are at least fresh and suggestive. For one thing it is not generally realized that-as he makes clear-there were three different versions of the Act of Supremacy, though the actual process by which the final version was settled upon and passed into law is not very clear from the records which remain. Again, Dr. Meyer proves that, originally at least, "No act of uniformity was intended by the government and that the worship of the Church of England would be ordered perhaps according to the Sarum Liturgy, with Holy Communion celebrated sub utraque, bypassing the First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI. Such at least would be the interim arrangement" (p. 32). Again, the Thirty-nine Articles have traditionally been supposed to be Calvinistic in their viewpoint, according to William Pitt's famous epigram that the Church of England has a "Popish liturgy, Erastian clergy, and Calvinistic articles." But Dr. Meyer analyzes these Articles carefully, and concludes that they are mainly Lutheran in their theological viewpoint. This applies even to Article Seventeen on Predestination. The only really Calvinistic articles are the two (Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine), which deal with the Lord's Supper.

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There is one matter on which Dr. Meyer does not express himself very clearly, namely the controversial question of Elizabeth I's real religion. He says that "her personal religious convictions were genuine and sincere"; but he goes on to add, almost at once, that "she was not deeply religous, however" (p. 7). The truth would seem to be that Elizabeth was what in contemporary France would have been called a "politique" -that is, one whose real concern was for the political welfare of England, and who would use religion as astutely as possible in order to further that welfare to the maximum.

Dr. Meyer's exposition has the great merit of making clear what some historians have not realized, or have overlooked, namely, that the Anglican Settlement of Elizabeth I was a via media, but not simply a compromise between Romanism and Puritanism. Rather it had a distinctive religious character of its own, as a church system which sought to combine the best in traditional Western Catholicism with all that was sound and true in the Reformation rediscovery of the Christian Gospel.

Dr. Meyer has produced a scholarly and valuable interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement.

Norman V. Hope
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey