Obey God More than Human Authorities

Scripture and the whole Christian tradition speak of tyrants, and those who heroically resist them, but this theme seems at first to sit awkwardly with the Anglican tradition. The Reformation which took place in England has often been regarded as among the most ‘magisterial’, the most state-driven, of any which occurred in Europe, and for good reason. It was a change violently imposed by the state on a population whose attitudes, for the most part, ranged from profound shock and hurt, to apathy. It has, indeed, often been characterized as a power-grab by Henry VIII. Later English Protestants skeptical of state power have, in consequence, been seen as ‘radical’ deviations from an original, ‘magisterial’ norm. However, the nascent evangelical movement upon which Henry VIII seized as a vehicle by which to enact his vicious will predated, and in many cases opposed, his grandiose claims to religious authority. We should not, therefore, see later Protestant dissenters as deviations from the ‘normal’, state-oriented course of the English Reformation, but rather the true heirs of a politically and theologically revolutionary movement which was, to the great shock of those involved, coopted by the state. Christians who resist unjust civil authority therefore stand in continuity with a key early strand of English Reformation thought.

This resistance was not rooted in egotistical displays of bravura, but in the theology first worked out and expressed in private. Sometime in the early 1520s, right at the outset of what would come to be known as the Reformation, Thomas Bilney, among the very earliest English reformers, and converter of many in that first generation, wrote in his Vulgate next to Exodus 1: ‘The King of Egypt ordered the midwives to kill the males – God should be obeyed more than men’.^[1] This is a near quotation of Peter’s reply to the high priest in Acts 5:29, when asked why he was preaching about Jesus despite having been specifically commanded not to: ‘oboedire oportet Deo magis quam hominibus’. This was to become the standard text quoted by religious dissenters to justify their disobedience to the monarch for the sake of practicing their faith, but Bilney’s is a strikingly early example of its use for this purpose, particularly in England. This was an age in which kings were thought to rule by divine right, and defiance of royal authority was widely seen as de facto defiance of God’s authority as well. As the Bishop of Winchester, and secretary to Henry VIII, Stephen Gardiner put it: ‘princes ought to be obeied, by the commaundement of god: yea and to be obeied wythout exception’.^[2] This was because ‘the sentences [of scripture], that co[m]mau[n]d obedience are infinite, or without exception, but are of indifferent force universally, so that it is but lost labour for you to tel me of limites’.^[3]

By contrast, Bilney pointed to 1 Kings 18, in which Elijah rebukes King Ahab for his idolatry, by which Bilney wrote: ‘Elias does not fear the king but reproaches his fault to his face, which preachers should dare to do’.^[4] This conviction flowed from the very core of Bilney’s reformist vision. When asked to summarize his critique of existing ecclesiastical practice, Bilney referred to the injunction in Deuteronomy which he paraphrased as: ‘Thou shalt not do that whiche semeth good unto thy selfe, but that whiche I commaund thee for to do, that do thou, neither adding to, neither diminishing any thing from it’.^[5] No one, neither a king nor a prelate, had any power to add to or subtract from God’s law, and all must be measured against it.

This theology was displayed more publicly by Bilney’s convert, Robert Barnes, in a notorious Christmas Eve sermon of 1525, preached in St. Edward’s Church, which was associated with Trinity Hall, a Cambridge college specializing in the study of law. In a church full of lawyers, Barnes denounced lawsuits as means by which the rich, who can afford lawyers and court fees, exploit the poor. In full view of surrogates of Cardinal Wolsey, among the richest men in England, he asked whether it was right for a servant of God to wear elaborate hats, silken gloves, and fur lined shoes. These, he argued, represented the conflation of divine law and mere human custom. For his affrontery, Barnes was imprisoned and (after escaping by means of a faked suicide) fled abroad.

The same courage can be seen in Hugh Latimer, another of Bilney’s converts. Having heard that Latimer might be trouble, Bishop Nicholas West dropped in on a sermon he was preaching at Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge. Spotting his grace in the congregation, Latimer extemporaneously amended his sermon to focus on the worldliness of prelates, such as, say, the spectacularly wealthy West.^[6]

Even more bravery was displayed in a letter to Henry VIII probably written by Hugh Latimer, in 1530. Latimer wrote to the king: ‘I pray to God […] that you may do that God commandeth, and not that seemeth good in your own sight without the word of God; that your grace may be found acceptable in his sight, and one of the members of his church […] a faithful minister of his gifts, and not a defender of his faith: for he will not have it defended by man or man’s power, but by his word only’.^[7] Here Latimer strips Henry of his prized title, ‘Defensor Fidei’, and gives him precisely the same lowly status in the church as that of any other believer, basing his argument on precisely the same scriptural text, from Deuteronomy 12, used by Bilney to make the same point in 1533: ‘I pray […] that you may do that God commandeth, and not that seeemeth good in your own sight’.^[8] Part of reproaching the king’s fault to his face, as Bilney urges preachers to do, is confronting civil rulers with the gap between their policies and those commanded by God in scripture.

This Latimer did throughout his life. When he saw that Henry was stabling his horses in abbeys, he ‘took occasion to speak in the presence of the king’s majesty […] Abbeys were ordained for the comfort of the poor: wherefore I said, it was not decent that the king’s horses should be kept in them […] the living of poor men thereby minished and taken away’.^[9] Latimer rebuked the king for having insufficient care for the vulnerable in society. ‘But afterward a certain nobleman said to me, What hast thou to do with the king’s horses? […] Horses be the maintenances and part of a king’s honour, and also of his realm; wherefore in speaking against them, ye are against the king’s honour’. A sermon should focus on religion, not politics, and criticizing the king is unpatriotic. Latimer answered ‘to extort and take away the right of the poor, is against the honour of the king. […] extortioners, violent oppressors, ingrossers of tenements and lands, through whose covetousness […] people for lack of sustenance are famished and decayed – they be those which speak against the honour of the king’.[10] What is truly unbiblical and unpatriotic is to allow the poor and marginalized to be exploited.

When called upon some years later to preach a series of sermons before Henry’s successor, Edward VI, Latimer began the first of these sermons by declaring:

Indeed, Latimer observes, Moses rebuked Pharoah, and Micah condemned Ahab – he would not be doing his job as a preacher, if he did not rebuke wickedness when he saw it, even the wickedness of the king himself. Latimer went on to preach a sermon on Deuteronomy 17:17, in which God commands that a king shall not take too many wives, ‘neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold’. On this basis Latimer thundered:

Latimer goes on to identify the king himself, along with many members of the court in attendance, as unjust landlords. We see in this sermon a true preacher pleading with the king, in a time of political precarity and economic scarcity, to have mercy on the vulnerable and the weak.

On August 19^th, 1531, Thomas Bilney was burned at the stake for his preaching. Robert Barnes met the same fate on July 30^th, 1540, and Hugh Latimer on October 16^th, 1555. Resistance to state power has physical limits. Nevertheless, Christian preachers are called to witness to the gospel. Calling a ruler to mercy, and even rebuking him outright, stands firmly in the best traditions of scripture and the history of the church. But Bilney, Barnes, and Latimer did not simply condemn that which they felt instinctively to be wrong. Their critiques were rooted in a deep and specific theological conviction, that to conflate divine and human things – whether the salvation offered in Christ and the means to secure that salvation proffered by the late medieval church, the commandments of scripture and the commandments of the pope, or the authority of God and the authority of a king – was to deny the essence of Christianity itself and violate the first commandment. It was this profound theological faith which empowered them publicly to preach truth to power.

[1] Bilney’s Vulgate is kept in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Biblia cum concordantiis veteris et novi testamenti et sacrorum canonum (Lyon: Jean Marion for Anton Koberger, 1520), shelf mark EP.W.11. All subsequent references to the notes in this book are made solely with reference to the relevant biblical book and chapter; the transcriptions and translations are my own. ‘Rex Egipti iussit obstetricibus ut occiderent masculos – Deo magis obedientiam quam hominibus’.

[2] Stephen Gardiner, De Vera Obedientia (Roane: 1553), fol. xxii.r-v.

[3] ibid., fol. xxi.v-xxii.r.

[4] ‘Helias regem non veretur sed ei peccatum in faciem exprobrat audendum concionatori’.

[5] John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1563 edition) (Sheffield: The Digital Humanities Institute, 2011), 520. http://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe.

[6] British Library, Harley MS 422, fol. 84r-86v.

[7] G.E. Corrie (ed.), Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 308.

[8] Foxe, TAMO (1563), 520.

[9] Corrie (ed.), Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 93.

[10] Corrie (ed.), Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 93-94.

[11] Corrie (ed.), Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 85-86.

[12] Corrie (ed.), Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 98-99.