From Meissen to Porvoo and Beyond

INTRODUCTION In its early phase-the 1520s, 30s and 40s-the Reformation in England was much influenced by the Lutheran Reformation, by the writings of Martin Luther and other reformers, by travellers and scholars, by theological conversations such as those held in Wittenberg in 1536, and perhaps even by marriage-Margaret Cranmer being the niece of Andreas Osiander. Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg, had some influence on the prayer book of 1552. However, the Marian persecution of the 1550s drove many Protestant Anglicans into exile in Geneva and Frankfurt. When they came back they brought with them the vision and experience of Reformed churches which owed more to Calvin than to Luther; and the English Reformers remained in contact and in correspondence with the successors to Zwingli in Zurich and Basel. There is and will continue to be controversy about the exact admixture of Lutheran and Reformed elements in the Anglican heritage. Suffice it to say that both are there, combined with universal catholic and some specifically English elements, and that this has been a help to us in dealing with the mixed heritage of German Protestantism now. If by the end of the sixteenth century, Anglican theologians were claiming to travel the via media between Rome and Geneva, two generations earlier the via media had run between Zurich and Wittenberg. Interestingly enough, if you draw a great circle route from western Switzerland to Electoral Saxony you will find that it passes through the suburbs of Strasbourg. Now, in our generation, we Anglicans have not made the theological contribution which we could have made, out of our historical experience, to the Leuenberg process of reconciliation between the German and the Swiss Reformations. We could have offered our theological method-the three-fold cord of scripture, tradition and reason; and we would have said that it is our experience that these two brilliant and complementary sets of insights, German and Swiss, find their true ecclesiological focus through the twin lenses of liturgy and of the historic ministry with the sign of continuity. Meanwhile, the Nordic churches, like the Church of England, remained churches for whole nations with their diocesan and parochial structures and the ministries which served them intact. Incidentally, because they were spared the attention of iconoclasts the Scandinavian churches preserved much greater visual continuity with medieval Catholicism than did the Church of England. MEISSEN German Protestantism, however, broke up along the lines of the German states, leaving us today with Landeskirchen of varying sizes, some Lutheran, some Reformed and some United. These churches developed in a fair degree of isolation not only from the churches of other lands, like the Church of England, but even from one another. There was no formal schism with the Church of England, and one great advantage in our present relations is that our churches have never unchurched or anathematized each other. (Contrast Lutherans and Baptists.) There is not much that we have had to undo, other than the effects of drifting apart during the centuries. The First World War came as a terrible shock to the basically friendly and respectful relationships between our churches. The German churches were shattered in 1918 not only by the defeat of their country in war but also by the abdication of the Kaiser and the other princes and by the de facto abolition of the Summepiskopat der Prinzen (the oversight of the church by the godly prince), which had provided the Landeskirchen with a framework of legitimacy and of church government since the abandonment of diocesan structures at the Reformation. Nineteen-eighteen left the German churches with as yet unsolved ecclesiological problems, which surfaced from time to time in the negotiations with the Church of England and which made those conversations quite different from the conversations with the Scandinavian, Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches, which share with us more substantial elements of continuity with the mediaeval church. …