2 of 3

Thomas Bilney was the first of these reformers to pay for his beliefs with his life. He became a licensed preacher in 1525, and soon stirred up trouble by exhorting people to pray directly to God rather than asking for the prayers of the saints. Twice angry hearers dragged him from the pulpit. Cardinal Wolsey, the powerful ecclesiastical statesman whose arrogance did much to turn people against the Catholic church, hauled him in on two occasions for interrogation as a Lutheran, and on both occasions Bilney denied the accusation. He even swore an oath not to preach Lutheranism. Eventually, threatened with condemnation as a heretic, Bilney agreed to a public declaration of repentance and reconciliation with the church.

After his release, Bilney was plagued by such deep depression that his friends were afraid he would commit suicide. Convinced that he had denied Christ by confessing that his teaching was heretical, in the end he found peace by seeking a new condemnation.

Bilney told his friends that he was "going up to Jerusalem," resumed open-air preaching, and began handing out copies of Tyndale's New Testament. He was arrested and condemned to death as a relapsed heretic, though Bilney saw himself not as a rebel against the Catholic church, but as a preacher of evangelical faith within it.

Thus the spiritual father of so many English Reformers died at the hands of the church he refused to leave, a martyr less to Protestantism (which on many points he never accepted) than to an evangelical faith born of the reading of Scripture and similar in many ways to the reforming Catholicism of Erasmus.

Unlike Bilney, Erasmus was incapable of being a martyr to either Catholicism or Protestantism. He hoped he would be able to die for Christ, he quipped, but was unwilling to die for Luther. The Protestantism that eventually triumphed in England in some ways resembled Erasmus's faith more than Luther's, but it was an "Erasmianism" sanctified by the blood of martyrs.

Continental Protestants have always found such English forms of Protestantism as Anglicanism and Methodism maddeningly untheological, and English-speaking evangelicalism is often faulted for its vague experientialism. But the combination of evangelical piety with what John Wesley called a "catholic spirit" and C. S. Lewis called "mere Christianity" remains a living and powerful force today. Bilney's example shows that a piety focused on the study of Scripture and the joyful leaping of bruised bones rather than on theological definitions can also give timid scholars the power to face the flames.

Edwin Woodruff Tait is adjunct professor of history at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine Christian History & Biography are also available.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50