Sermon Tone Analysis

King Henry

Henry VIII was the first monarch to introduce a new state religion to the English.

In 1532, he wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon.

When Pope Clement VII refused to consent to the divorce, Henry VIII decided to separate the entire country of England from the Roman Catholic Church.

DETAILED:

The English Reformation started in the reign of Henry VIII.

The English Reformation was to have far reaching consequences in Tudor England.

Henry VIII decided to rid himself of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, after she had failed to produce a male heir to the throne.

He had already decided who his next wife would be – Anne Boleyn.

By 1527, Catherine was considered too old to have anymore children.

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However, a divorce was not a simple issue.

In fact, it was a very complicated one.

Henry VIII was a Roman Catholic and the head of this church was the pope based in Rome.

The Roman Catholic faith believed in marriage for life.

It did not recognise, let alone support, divorce.

Those who were widowed were free to re-marry; this was an entirely different issue.

But husbands could not simply decide that their marriage was not working, divorce their wife and re-marry.

The Roman Catholic Church simply did not allow it.

This put Henry VIII in a difficult position.

If he went ahead and announced that as king of England he was allowing himself a divorce, the pope could excommunicate him.

This meant that under Catholic Church law, your soul could never get to Heaven.

To someone living at the time of Henry, this was a very real fear, and a threat which the Catholic Church used to keep people under its control.

Another approach Henry used was to make a special appeal to the pope so that he might get a special “Papal Dispensation”.

This meant that the pope would agree to Henry’s request for a divorce purely because Henry was king of England but that it would not affect the way the Catholic Church banned divorce for others.

The pope refused to grant Henry this and by 1533 his anger was such that he ordered the Archbishop of Canterbury to grant him a divorce so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.

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The Archbishop granted Henry his divorce – against the wishes of the pope.

But what else could the archbishop do if he wanted to remain on good terms with Henry?

This event effectively lead to England breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church based in Rome.

Henry placed himself as head of the church and in that sense, in his eyes, his divorce was perfectly legal.

In 1533, few were brave enough to tell him otherwise!

(source:https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/tudor-england/the-reformation/)

PILGRIMS

The Pilgrims were a group of English people who came to America seeking religious freedom during the reign of King .

After two attempts to leave England and move to Holland, a Separatist group was finally relocated to Amsterdam where they stayed for about one year.

From there the group moved to the town of Leiden, Holland, where they remained for about ten years, able to worship as they wished under lenient Dutch law.

Fearing their children were losing their English heritage and religious beliefs, the resumption of war and their inability as non-citizens to find decent jobs, a small group from the Leiden church made plans to settle in Northern Virginia - as New England was known at the time.

In August 1620 the group sailed for Southampton, England, where other English colonists who hoped to make a new life in America met them.

They planned to make the crossing to America in two ships, the Speedwell and Mayflower.

However, after many problems the Speedwell was forced to return to England where the group was reorganized.

In their second attempt to cross the Atlantic, they boarded the Mayflower in September 1620 bound for the New World.

They arrived as winter was settling in and endured significant hardships as they struggled to establish a successful colony at Plymouth.

In time their colony flourished and lead the way to establishing religious freedom and creating the foundations of the democracy Americans enjoy today.

Their celebration of the first Thanksgiving has grown to become a festive national holiday.

(source:https://www.themayflowersociety.org/the-pilgrims/pilgrim-history)

Many of the Pilgrims were members of a Puritan sect known as the Separatists.

They believed that membership in the Church of England violated the biblical precepts for true Christians, and they had to break away and form independent congregations that adhered more strictly to divine requirements.

Despite their similarities, and the fact that they arrived in America within a decade of each other, there are several differences.

While the Pilgrims were Separatists, the Puritans were non-separating Congregationalists -- they believed the Church of England was the one true church and they were loyal to England, but not in the way they worshipped.

They believed that "New England" worship and practice would be an example for Old England and the world.The Pilgrims were few in number.

102 sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower.

About half died the first winter.

The Puritans came by the thousands, indeed forty to fifty thousand eventually came.

By 1776, 75% of the American population were of Puritan roots.The Pilgrims came earlier in 1620, the Puritans came later in 1629-30.The Pilgrims for the most part were of the poor class.

Not all on the Mayflower came for religious reasons, some came for better economic opportunities in the New World.

The Puritans were primarily upper middle class.The Pilgrims were not terribly well educated, while the Puritans typically were.

Over 100 of the first Puritans to come to America had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge.

Within 6 years of landing, the Puritans founded the first college, Harvard, in Cambridge (Boston).The Pilgrims settled in Plymouth.

The Puritans settled in Salem and Boston.Pilgrims had names like William Bradford and William Brewster, and Myles Standish.

The Puritans had names like John Endicott, John Winthrop.

Ultimately, however, both colonies united to form Massachusetts following the Puritans having their charter revoked in 1689.

“Pilgrims and Puritans were Protestants who differed in degree.

While both followed the teaching of John Calvin, a cardinal difference distinguished one group from the other: Pilgrims were Puritans who had abandoned local parishes and formed small congregations of their own because the Church of England was not holy enough to meet their standards.

They were labeled Separatists.”

See also this online essay writer website to explore the topic in more detail.

The Puritans

The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation.

The name “Puritans” (they were sometimes called “precisionists”) was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies.

Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the movement began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England.

To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.

The Church of England

Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI (1547-1553), who introduced the first vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement–whether tolerated or suppressed–continued to grow.

Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations.

Still others were content to remain within the structure of the national church, but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.

As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed by their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life or hypocrites who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.

Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London.

The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued.

Many men and women were more and more forced to contend with the dislocations–emotional as well as physical–that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy.

Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit.

Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the law) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities.

The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds–a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.

Difference: Puritans vs. Pilgrims

The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists.

They called themselves “nonseparating congregationalists,” by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church.

But in practice they acted–from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home–exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people.

They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

What is Protestantism?

Answer: Protestantism is one of the major divisions of the Christian faith.

Traditionally, Protestantism includes all churches outside of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church traditions.

Protestant churches affirm the principles of the Protestant Reformation set into motion by Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517.

Protestants were first called by that name because they “protested” against the papacy and Roman rule within the Church.

Protestantism itself contains many different denominations.

They include the Lutheran Church (named after Martin Luther), the Presbyterian Church (associated with John Knox), and the Baptists (also called the Free Church movement and associated with churches that baptize only believers).

The Protestant tradition has historically been represented by the five solas: faith alone, Christ alone, grace alone, Scripture alone, and God’s glory alone.

The five solas emphasize the following three doctrinal points:

First, Protestants hold to the Holy Bible as the sole authority regarding matters of faith and practice.

The Orthodox Church, by contrast, recognizes sacred tradition as equally authoritative.

The Roman Catholic Church includes sacred tradition and the authority of the Pope.

The Reformers expressed this distinction with the term sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”).