Beeson podcast, Episode 402
Dr. Gerald Bray
July 24, 2018

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. 
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today my guest is Dr. Gerald Bray. Gerald Bray has taught at Beeson Divinity School for 25 years. This is his 25th anniversary. He is a world renowned scholar, author of many, many books and articles and essays. I couldn't begin to name them all. Let me just mention a few of them. He actually edited the very first volume in the Reformation Commentary on Scripture and before that he edited three volumes in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, so he's very interested in the history of biblical interpretation, has a book by that title, in exegesis, but also in theology. He is the author of both a systematic theology called God Is Love and a historical theology titled God Has Spoken, both from Crossway. 
Timothy George:	So we're talking here to a person who has made a tremendous contribution to the knowledge of the history of the church, its theology, its spirituality, and we're going to talk today about two very recent books he's also been involved in that illuminate the English Reformation. So, welcome, Gerald, to the Beeson Podcast. 
Gerald Bray:	Thank you very much. 
Timothy George:	Now, the book, there are two of them. Let me begin with the one that is most recent, published 2018, by James Clark and company in Cambridge, England. It's called The Institution of a Christian Man. Would you tell us what this book is about and why we should even be aware of it? 
Gerald Bray:	Oh yes. Well, the title comes from the first of three books, which belong to the series, which go together. I had to choose a title for the collection as a whole, so I thought we'll start at the beginning and we'll fit the others in. I mean, each of the three has a slightly different title. One is A Necessary and Profitable Doctrine. This kind of thing, but it's very minor and I thought they could all go under the same original title because they are developments. The later two books are developments of this initial one. 
Gerald Bray:	What it is, The Institution of a Christian Man, is really the first post-Reformation theology book to be produced in England. It came about as a result of conversations between the Church of England and Martin Luther and his colleagues in Wittenberg. In 1536 there was a delegation that went to Wittenberg to try to form an alliance between Luther and the newly independent English church. That's a complicated story but basically they came back to England with something called the 10 articles which are 10 points of doctrine which were approved by the church in 1536, and The Institution of a Christian Man is an attempt to create a kind of comprehensive theology on the basis of the 10 articles. 
Gerald Bray:	What they did was they took the standard medieval approach. That is to say that to become a clergyman in the Middle Ages, you had to show a deep knowledge of three things. The 10 commandments, the Lord's prayer and the Apostle's Creed. 
Timothy George:	It goes back to St. Augustine, doesn't it? 
Gerald Bray:	Yes, that's right. 
Timothy George:	That structure. 
Gerald Bray:	That's right, and then in the high Middle Ages, they added the sacraments to that list of three, and everybody had to know them. They had to be able to expound them and so on, in order to get ordained. So, because of this, The Institution of a Christian Man takes then these basic documents and says what the candidates for ordination ought to say about them, how they should understand them. It's really a textbook. 
Timothy George:	So it's a way of doing theological education ... 
Gerald Bray:	Yes, that's right. 
Timothy George:	... In this time of transition between Catholicism and what becomes Anglicanism. 
Gerald Bray:	That's right. I mean, it's the first step in that direction. Now, of course, because of this, it represents what we would, today, think of as a Protestant position on a number of things because otherwise there would be very little point in writing one at all, but I suppose the surprising thing from a modern point of view is that while there's a strong concentration on justification by faith alone and also on purgatory, the question of prayers for the dead, which figure very strongly in the 10 articles, and on other things where you might imagine they would've changed things. They don't. 
Gerald Bray:	They keep the seven sacraments, for example. They keep what could be regarded as a doctrine of transubstantiation and the Eucharist, although that could be questioned, but basically if you believed in transubstantiation, you wouldn't have any problem with it, and also something like the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary, which is to our minds rather surprising, but it just shows that they didn't do that, I don't think, deliberately, because they believed it as opposed to not believing it, but simply because it wasn't an issue. It hadn't come up in debate and so they carried on. I mean, in that respect, quite conservative. 
Timothy George:	So they include the Ave Maria also. 
Gerald Bray:	Yes, and for the same reason, because the Ave Maria, you know, "Hail Mary, full of grace," this was something that a lot of people knew, and so they threw it in because it was a widely used and well known prayer. 
Timothy George:	I think this raises a question that we're dealing here with a time of transition between ... So things are not entirely mature at this point, we might say, or fully developed in terms of English Reformation theology. Would that be accurate? 
Gerald Bray:	Well, that's certainly accurate from our modern point of view, because we can see the development over a long period of time. Whether that's how it was perceived at the time is, of course, a different matter altogether. I mean, the bishop spoke, as we call it, The Institution of a Christian Man, is called the Bishop's Book. It's known as this because it was signed off by the bishops of the Church of England. Every single one of them attached his signature to it. What that means is very hard to say because presumably the bulk of the work itself was done by only two or three people. It couldn't have been done by all 27 or 26 bishops that there were. It wouldn't work. The others just signed on to it and again, why they signed on to it is unknown. 
Gerald Bray:	I mean, some of them probably didn't really like it very much, but, you know, it was easier and safer to do that than to do anything else, so they signed on, but if you look at the Bishop's Book by itself, you find that it's actually not very well written, not very well composed. It's clearly been thrown together, you know? That, for example, the Lord's prayer and the 10 commandments, they'll talk about them, and then there are extensive notes and in some cases, the notes seem to be longer than the original text, and that's probably because somebody just didn't do a proper job of editing, and you get quite a lot of things like that. 
Gerald Bray:	There's also a relative dearth of biblical quotation, which is surprising. I mean, I know that the Lord's prayer is in the Bible and the 10 commandments and so on, so in that sense, biblical, but cross referencing with the Bible and so on, this is not what you would expect. Not as extensive as you would expect. So, in this sense, yes, it appears to us as a transition. Now, it went to the king, to Henry the eighth, who commissioned it, in a way, at the beginning, or at least had allowed it to be produced, and he got at least two copies of it, which he looked at at different times and made comments, quite extensive comments. 
Gerald Bray:	Some of those comments are grammatical. You know, simply correcting mistakes and so on, but quite a number of them are theological, and the general drift of Henry's theological remarks is that he thought The Institution of a Christian Man was too Lutheran, too Protestant. He wanted to reign back, and what is interesting is that Archbishop Cranmer, in a separate document, wrote an extensive refutation of the king's objections. 
Timothy George:	That was a dangerous thing to do. 
Gerald Bray:	Well very dangerous, yes, and it was a very dangerous thing to do, but it shows that the relationship was such that he could do that and get away with it. Now, of course most of the king's recommendations were accepted and then you could only get away with so much. There are one or two that weren't, but what happened and what is interesting is that the revised text, which we call the King's Book, because the king basically said, "It's got to be revised," was revised in a more conservative direction, but a lot of the things that he objected to in the Bishop's Book were just left out so that the degree to which the king influenced the revision was less than might appear if you just look at the Bishop's Book as it was, because he didn't restructure it. He just commented on what was there and then various bishops took it away and reconfigured the whole thing, and in the process, dropped whole sections, including, of course, the king's remarks. Making them redundant, really, in those instances. 
Gerald Bray:	So, we can follow this process, you see? This is a very interesting thing because we have the manuscripts which have survived and with the king's own notations in them. It's very interesting to see how he did that, and the King's Book, which came out six years later ... 
Timothy George:	1543. 
Gerald Bray:	1543, represents a much more conservative approach to things. It covers the same ground, but on some things it says much the same sort of thing. I mean, there's only so much that you can say about the 10 commandments, for example, and that wasn't really a controversial subject. So, you get those things, which are basically just repeated, but on justification by faith, for example, the article's completely rewritten and things like that. I mean, anything that would stand out as being particularly Protestant is either omitted or rewritten to remove that kind of implication in the King's Book. 
Gerald Bray:	Well, the King's Book died a dead when the king died. I mean, it didn't really survive him. 
Timothy George:	He died in 1547. 
Gerald Bray:	So it survived only about three or four years as a functioning text and it kind of lay dormant for a long time, but then under Queen Mary, the Marian reaction, the restoration of Catholicism, Edmund Bonner, who had been involved in the King's Book, originally bishop of London, decided to do a similar thing for his own dioceses, London dioceses. He couldn't really do it for anybody else because he was bishop of London, and what he did was he took the King's Book and basically rewrote it, and rewrote it much more extensively than the revisers of the King's Book had done initially, to reflect what was now, of course, seen as traditional Catholic doctrine. 
Gerald Bray:	By the time he did that, of course, 1555, the dividing lines between Protestant and Catholic were becoming much clearer, and so therefore it's much more obvious. He picks up various points and says "the heretics," meaning the Protestants, "are wrong about this and that and the other," and it's much more polemical. However, you know, from our point of view, what is interesting is that Bishop Bonner's Book, as we call it, has far more biblical references and quotations than either the King's Book or the Bishop's Book, so what we realize from this is that scripture had become the battleground and Bonner had to defend his positions very much from scripture in a way that the earlier writers didn't think was necessary, so that's interesting. 
Timothy George:	When we think about biblical commentary in the time of the Reformation, we always think, of course, of the great Protestant, Calvin. The Great Exegete and so forth. [Bucer 00:13:30], but there were a significant number of Catholics who were also very scholarly, reading scripture, writing commentaries on them, and so it's only understandable that the Bible would become the battleground then in the middle part of that century. Let me shift, because I want to give a good chunk of time to another very important work. In some ways I would say maybe more influential book in the English Reformation, even than The Institution of a Christian Man, and that's the Book of Homilies. You yourself brought out a critical edition of this very important book a couple of years ago, 2015. Tell us about the Book of Homilies, its context and what it was intended to do. 
Gerald Bray:	Right. Well, first of all, there are two Books of Homilies which are officially recognized by the Church of England to this day. The Books of Homilies are formal and authoritative in a way that The Institution of a Christian Man is not and never will be. I mean, The Institution is a historical curiosity, really, but the homilies are still part of the church's official doctrine today, so they're very important. There's a third book which was, again, produced by Bishop Bonner and bound together with his revision of The Institution of a Christian Man. This is where the two things come together in Bonner's revision, because he produces The Book of Homilies first and then the revised version of the King's Book and puts them together. 
Gerald Bray:	They're connected in another way because the first Book of Homilies is relatively short. There are 12 of them, and we can only identify the authors of seven of them. Four of them were written by Archbishop Cranmer. At least we believe they were. One of them was written by a Protestantizing bishop ... Not bishop, but member of the church, called Thomas Bacon. That was the homily on adultery, but two others, the one on original sin and the one on love, interestingly enough, were written by very conservative pro-Catholic bishops initially, and we only know that because Bishop Bonner recycled them virtually unchanged in his Book of Homilies, so this is an important source, you see, from that point of view. 
Gerald Bray:	Now, what was the purpose of these? Well, the plan was to provide, again, a teaching medium for the general public. The Institution of a Christian Man was in a sense designed for the public, the general public, but it was more specifically geared, of course, to people training for ordination, whereas the Books of Homilies were meant to be read from the pulpit. Now, this is a complicated issue because ever since 1407, the English clergy could not preach from a pulpit unless they had a preaching license and one of the things that the reformation tried to do was issue licenses only to qualified people, and a qualified person was basically somebody who had a university degree, but these people were a minority. People who'd actually studied theology. 
Gerald Bray:	Most people who ended up being ordained got into the ministry by other means, I mean either because of who they knew or because they'd been in a monastery or whatever it was, but they didn't really have theological education. So, what do you do with them? They have to preach because preaching is a central thing in the reformation. The only thing to do is to provide them with sermons that they can preach. This is what they were supposed to do. The homilies were designed as theological instruction for church members, for lay people, to be preached from the pulpits, and anybody who didn't have a preaching license, who was not allowed to preach in their own words, this is what they had to do. This is what they had to use. 
Gerald Bray:	Now, whether people who did have a preaching license, people who could have preached in their own words, used the homilies or not. This is harder to tell. We have a lack of evidence, you see? But certainly before very long, the homilies were also being used as theological education, so everybody knew them. They would have read them at some time and presumably most people at some point or other would've heard them. Now, the initial 12, as I say, were written probably around 1542, around the same time as the King's Book was being produced, but they were not published at that time because Henry the eighth was moving in a more conservative direction and wasn't really interested in this. 
Gerald Bray:	I mean, the homilies were too radical, too Protestant for his liking, but they were published six months after his death, and this is how ... Well, we know, of course, that they were planned before and they must have been written before, because six months to produce 12 homilies, this is too short a time, so they were probably sitting around in drawer. It got pulled out and there they were. They were just printed. There was a plan at that time to produce a second book and there were a list of topics given that would be covered, but that second book didn't appear until 1563 because other things intervened, you know? 
Timothy George:	Which by that time, Queen Elizabeth is [crosstalk 00:19:19] ... 
Gerald Bray:	That's right. Yes, yes, and it appears that nobody had got round to actually writing anything until the 1560s because Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury is credited with having written them. We don't really know that for sure but we kind of guess that ... 
Timothy George:	They're well written and he was a great writer [crosstalk 00:19:41] we know. 
Gerald Bray:	Yeah, and interested in the subject and so on, and he must have written some of them at least, but, you know, we're not entirely sure. Well, some of them are taken from other sources. That we do know, so Jewel, whatever he did, was a compiler as much as [crosstalk 00:19:56] ... Now, the initial 12 were meant to be preached and they're not particularly long. I mean, you could get through them in half an hour preaching. The first one and one of the best ones is on scripture, the use of scripture, and it is probably the best short introduction to scripture in the English language still. Cranmer doesn't go into things like inerrancy of scripture or anything like that. I mean, it's not really that sort of approach. It's more a devotional thing. How to use the scriptures. How to grow in Christ by reading the scriptures, and there's really nothing quite like that in such a short and succinct form. 
Gerald Bray:	I haven't ever preached that myself, but I have heard other people do so and for something that was written in the 1540s, it can still be read today and understood with very little difficulty at all. I mean, it's very fresh and that, of course, shows it wasn't written in a highfalutin academic style, but for communication, it's very good. Then there are the homilies on salvation and so on. In the articles of religion, the 42 articles initially and then the 39, the homilies are referred to and it is thanks to that, really, that they have the status that they have because the articles, of course, are a brief digest of doctrines, but from time to time you get a notice saying, "For further information about this, read the homily on justification or something," so, you know, you go and do that. 
Gerald Bray:	So, they are sort of brought in in that way. Now, the second book of homilies is less purely theological. You might say it's much longer than the first book, about three times longer, but it tends to be more to do with practicalities like how to look after the church building, having reverence in church, getting rid of images in church. There's a lot of that. Prayer and setting aside time for prayer, and then it goes through the Christian year. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and so on. There's a very interesting sermon on the Holy Spirit which is unusual in the 16th century but there it is, and then it comes down at the end towards things like civil obedience, because that was a big thing, of course, and the last of them was about rebellion and of course the evil of rebelling against the authorities.
Gerald Bray:	Because the homilies in the second book are so much longer than the ones in the first, they're mostly subdivided and they would be read in portions. A portion would be read every Sunday. That was the idea, and there was a pattern, you see, that was meant to be followed, so you could read through the homilies in a year, you know, following the pattern laid down. That's what people were expected to do. 
Timothy George:	Well, you've done a wonderful service for the church and for the academy in giving us these critical editions of both The Institution of a Christian Man, published in 2018 by James Clarke in Britain and the earlier Books of Homilies, a critical edition, 2015. Thank you, Gerald, for this conversation and for your labor, loving labor in producing these classic documents that enrich our life and understanding of the English Reformation. 
Gerald Bray:	Oh, thank you very much.
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