July 30th on Church calendar is a remembrance of Robert Barnes, Confessor and Martyr. Now I know that most of us don’t pay any attention to the church calendar beyond Christmas, Easter and maybe a nip of green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. But Robert Barnes got me thinking about one of history’s great “what-ifs” and the history of Lutheranism in the English language. In the US it is always interesting looking at common languages at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The US was much closer to a Canadian two-language reality – with the two being German and English – than any of us can imagine. The turn of the century naturalization laws and then two wars against Germany eradicated that fact. The LCMS had been so German right until the 20th century that it kept The English Synod – which eventually became our English District – as a separate entity. The first English hymnal was by that English Synod in 1912. Which largely became the 1941 The Lutheran Hymnal (TLH) that I imagine many readers might still call “The Hymnal.”
And it is that which gets us on our way back to Robert Barnes. In translating the common service and all the prayers of the day and everything else that is part of liturgical worship the English Synod did what anyone not concerned about copyright would do. They stole Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s English. Which isn’t as big a stretch as you might imagine. Compared to today’s variance of service even within a body like the LCMS, most of the magisterial protestant churches had kept a liturgy that resembled the Common Service. The service in the Book of Common Prayer is quite close. Cranmer in his first edition of the BCP took from Luther’s reworking of the Mass (in our hymnal as the stub DS5). And so even today, many of the prayers and wording in our services bare a striking resemblance to that Anglican BCP.
And that leads to the great “what if?” In 1525 Robert Barnes brought the reformation formally to England. Cambridge educated and brother of the same Augustinian friars as Luther, he was a doctor of theology and prior of the Cambridge convent. And he preached the first public proclamation of the Reformation gospel from his pulpit in that year. He was arrested leaving the pulpit and charged with heresy. Somehow he escaped and made his way to Wittenberg and was a personal acquaintance with Luther. He returned to England in 1531 with the mission of converting Henry VIII. He rose in office and stature rather swiftly, until as with a lot of Henry’s advisors, he was tasked with getting someone to agree to Henry’s first divorce. Barnes was sent back to Germany to secure Luther and Lutheran theologians’ approval for the king’s divorce and remarriage. They would not agree. (Which is ironic compared to the response later given to Philip of Hesse over bigamy.) Barnes returned without what was desired and Henry soured on Lutheranism. The thought of a Lutheran England, which was quite possible, remains the what-if. What if the Virginia aristocrats (Washington, Jefferson, Madison) had been Lutheran-Anglicans? What would European history have looked like if England and the Northern Continent shared a church?
As it was, Robert Barnes would not recant his Lutheran confession and was burned at the stake for it, July 30th, 1540. His final words were a prayer, ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Luther wrote upon hearing that news something that probably sounds strange. “It is a particular joy for me to hear that our good and pious guest has been so graciously called by God to pour out his blood and to become a holy martyr…Hope betrayed him. For he always hoped his king would be good in the end.” As the apostle Peter says, “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. (1 Pet. 4:13 ESV).” Hope in earthly kings and their glory is bound to fail, but we have a more sure and certain Hope in the resurrection of Christ the King.