Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation assesses the understandings of the Christian doctrine of royal priesthood, long considered one of the three major Reformation teachings, as held by an array of royal, clerical, and popular theologians during the English Reformation. Historians and theologians often present the doctrine according to more recent debates rather than the contextual understandings manifested by the historical figures under consideration. Beginning with a radical reevaluation of John Wyclif and an incisive survey of late medieval accounts, the book challenges the predominant presentation of the doctrine of royal priesthood as primarily individualistic and anticlerical, in the process clarifying these other concepts. It also demonstrates that the late medieval period located more religious authority within the monarchy than is typically appreciated. After the revolutionary use of the doctrine by Martin Luther in early modern Germany, it was wielded variously between and within diverse English royal, clerical, and lay factions under Henry VIII and Edward VI, yet the Old and New Testament passages behind the doctrine were definitely construed in a monarchical direction. With Thomas Cranmer, the English evangelical presentation of the universal priesthood largely received its enduring official shape, but challenges came from within the English magisterium as well as from both radical and conservative religious thinkers. Under the sacred Tudor queens, who subtly and successfully maintained their own sacred authority, the various doctrinal positions hardened into a range of early modern forms with surprising permutations.

The priesthood of all believers is a pillar undergirding Protestant ecclesiology. Yet the doctrine has often been used to serve diverse agendas. This book examines the doctrine's canonical, catholic, and contextual dimensions. It first identifies the priesthood of all believers as a canonical doctrine based upon the royal priesthood of Christ and closely related to the believer's eschatological temple-service and offering of spiritual sacrifices (chapters 1-3). It secondly describes its catholic development by examining three paradigmatic shifts, shifts especially associated with Christendom (chapters 4-6) and a suppression of the doctrine's missional component. Finally, the book argues that a Christian doctrine of the priesthood of all believers should be developed with a Christocentric-Trinitarian understanding of the missio Dei. This suggests there are especially appropriate ways for the royal priesthood to relate to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. A canonically and catholically informed priesthood of all believers leads contextually to particular ecclesial practices. These seven practices are 1) Baptism as public ordination to the royal priesthood; 2) Prayer; 3) Lectio Divina; 4) Ministry; 5) Church Discipline; 6) Proclamation; and 7) the Lord's Supper as the renewal of the royal priesthood.

A sumptuously written people’s history and a major retelling and reinterpretation of the story of the English Reformation Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in a generation—argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora’s Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, Marshall frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of “religion” itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the English Church.

Fifteen sermons that aid both laity and clergy in a better understanding of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, the most basic of Baptist principles.

Theses on any subject submitted by the academic libraries in the UK and Ireland.

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.

Analysing the lollard legacy in the post-Reformation era, this book identifies the significance of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments in shaping these medieval dissenters for early moderns. It shows that Foxe left much of their radical beliefs intact, inadvertently contributing to later contentions in the Church of England's struggle for iden.

J. Patrick Hornbeck II explores the wide range of lollard beliefs on some of the key issues in late medieval Christianity. He argues that the beliefs of individual dissenters were conditioned by a number of social, textual, and cultural factors.