We’ve looked several times at the first two “waves” of reform that swept Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Those resulted in the formation of the Lutheran and several Calvinist Churches. Now, let’s look at the third “wave”: the one that gave us almost all the Churches around here.
Now, that’s not to say there are no representatives of the first two to be found, locally. There are Lutherans here, and there are Presbyterians, but they’re not very many. Most of the Presbyterians, for that matter, are Cumberland Presbyterians, who were much more a factor of later reforms than of the original Calvinist ones. No, the vast majority of Christians in Marshall County belong to either the Baptist or the Methodist Churches, or else one of the “restoration” Churches (Christian, Church of Christ and Disciples) or Pentecostal bodies. All those Churches descend through the Anglican, or English Catholic strand of reform. Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses, please be patient. Your time will come, but not for another three hundred years.
In the mid-1530s, King Henry VIII had two huge problems. First, having come to the throne as a boy, he had been shoehorned by the Pope into a questionable marriage with his older brother’s wife (widow), in 1509, while still in his teens, and he later blamed his inability to sire a male heir on this fact. Second, at the same time, by the 1530s, Henry also had begun to notice that every other king in Europe had considerable flexibility in his relationship with the Church. That is, Henry had no say in the appointment of Bishops; the Pope did it all. Henry derived no revenues from Church lands in England, but the kings of Spain and France, especially, did. All in all, it looked to Henry that his relationship with the Pope was a one-way street.
Then, when he attempted to remedy the first problem by appealing to the Pope for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine, the Pope said “no”, and Henry decided to solve both problems at the same time. He divorced both Catherine and the Roman Catholic Church!
It is important to realize, though, that Henry never joined or even agreed with either Luther or Calvin. His plan was for the Church to remain fully Catholic. He just took the Pope out of the chain of command. Under his plan, the King of England would be the head of the Church in England. What he didn’t know was that among his loyal clergy were a great many Churchmen who did have ideas about Luther and Calvin, and who would try very hard to take Henry’s Church in one or both of those directions. Therein lies the story of the English, or Anglican Reformation.