Introduction
Katherine Parr,Footnote 1 the sixth wife of Henry VIII, is a figure of some interest as the only wife who evaded an annulment, death prior to Henry in childbirth, or beheading at the king’s whim. Parr was also a committed evangelical Protestant, scholar, translator, and theologian. Parr has garnered recent appeal among contemporary Anglicans, as Micheline White’s work has suggested that Parr’s contributions to advancing the Edwardian reformation through promoting and even authoring prayers and collects have been previously overlooked.Footnote 2 Parr’s third and most original theological work, The Lamentation of a Sinner, was published in 1547—after Henry’s death, but likely written some time prior to this event, given Parr’s references to Henry as the current sovereign.Footnote 3 Past scholarship on Parr has covered several aspects of her works, especially addressing her reformation theology, her sources and influences, her aid in furthering English wartime propaganda, and her voice and restrictions as a female author.Footnote 4 However, other aspects of Parr’s theology, such as her doctrine of the work of Christ and some other theological topics within her Lamentation, have received only brief treatments.
Ronald Bainton is among those who have briefly discussed Parr’s doctrine of the atonement or the work of Christ. He calls her Lamentation of a Sinner ‘one of the gems of Tudor devotional literature’ and briefly argues that ‘the burden of [Parr’s] meditation is the benefit of Christ’s death on the cross’.Footnote 5 Building, then. both on Bainton’s and on Janel Mueller’s scholarship on Parr, I will examine here how the atoning work of Christ on the cross and its relationship to Parr’s Protestant understanding of justification by faith forms the theological center point of her Lamentation. For Parr, as for other Protestant theologians such as Luther and Cranmer, Christ’s work in his crucifixion is inextricably linked to the doctrine of justification by faith. Furthermore, I will posit that in The Lamentation, Parr informs this theology by following the argumentative structure of Paul’s epistle to the Romans. I suggest that this may reflect not only the broadly Pauline pattern of Reformation soteriology but also Parr’s reliance on this biblical text. In unfolding her theology of redemption via the epistle’s structure, I will moreover show that Parr uses several intertwined theological motifs to explicate the doctrine of Christ’s work, including an affective meditation on Christ’s death as hinge for the gospel message of Scripture, a theology of his death as satisfaction, sacrifice, and oblation inherited from Lutheran theology, and especially of Christ’s victorious triumph over the ancient enemies of death, sin, and the devil. In order to address all this, I will move (more or less) chronologically through The Lamentation of a Sinner, looking at Parr’s treatment first of sin, then of the work of Christ, and lastly of its application to the Church, spending the most time on Parr’s central meditation on the work of Christ. A closer examination of Parr’s Lamentation of a Sinner will both reveal a previously overlooked example of a Protestant female theologian’s use of the book of Romans and draw attention to her sophisticated, evangelical doctrine of Christ’s work.
Given ‘to vanities and shadowes of the worlde’: The Lamentation’s Structure and Personalization of Romans’ View of Sin
Parr’s early description of her own purpose and organization in the Lamentation is as follows: ‘firste to set furth my whole stubbernnes, and contempt in wordes, the which is incomprehensible in thought […] next this[,] to declare the excellente beneficence, mercy, and goodnes of god which is infinite, unmeasurable’.Footnote 6 Parr’s structure in her Lamentation of a Sinner has also received scholarly attention by Mueller, who explores possible sources within The Lamentation, including Tyndale, Fisher’s writings and sermons, Coverdale’s translations, Cranmer’s liturgy, and more.Footnote 7 Yet while Mueller establishes Parr’s ‘Scripturalism’ through her frequent use of biblical paraphrases and quotations, especially from the Pauline epistles, she does not claim a wholesale dependence on the theology or structure of the epistle to the Romans in particular.Footnote 8 I think Parr’s reliance on Romans is more extensive than has yet been observed. The structure of The Lamentation, I will show, roughly corresponds to that of the epistle and echoes it at key junctures such that she may be consciously patterning her treatment of sin, the cross, justification, and its application to the Church and the commonwealth after it.
First, Parr engages in a ‘self-examination’Footnote 9 and repentance for her idolatry and sins, using language which mirrors the discussion of sin in the first two chapters of Romans. Second and centrally, Parr turns to the cross of Christ as the source of her and her readers’ salvation, asserting with Romans 5 that Christ saved and loved us while in our sins and using the logic of Romans 4 through 6 to speak of the relationship between the cross and justification. Third, Parr speaks of the outworking of justifying faith amongst England’s church, drawing on Romans 7 and 8 to speak of ongoing sin and suffering and concluding with Romans 13-like appeals to obedience to the monarch. To clarify, I am not claiming that Parr intends her work to be a commentary proper, that she relies solely on Romans, or that she addresses every topic within the epistle, but rather that she loosely follows its overarching argument. Like more explicitly exegetical commentaries of her time, she uses Scripture to comment on Scripture and weaves together complementary ideas from multiple biblical passages and books. Nor am I claiming a strictly sequential rendering of Romans’ subject matter within The Lamentation; as I will describe, Parr glosses on later passages within the epistle from early on in her work.
First, I will describe how Parr’s repentance and self-abasement for her sins is roughly modeled after the beginning of the epistle to the Romans. Parr’s theology early in the work comprehends a thoroughly Pauline understanding of herself as a great sinner and a Romans-1-esque accounting of the nature of her sins as entailing a forsaking of the Creator for created things. In language reminiscent of Romans 1.23-25, Parr claims, ‘I enbraced ignorance, as perfect knowledge, (and knowledge seemed to me superfluous and vayne): I regarded little goddes worde, but gave my selfe to vanities and shadowes of the worlde. I forsooke him, in whom is all truth, and folowed the vayne folishe imaginacions of my hert’.Footnote 10 She adds that she ‘forsoke the spirituall honoring of the true livyng god, and worshipped visible idoles, and ymages made of mennes handes, beleving by them to have gotten heaven[.] [Y]ea to say the truthe, I made a great ydol of my selfe: for I loved my selfe better th[a]n god’.Footnote 11
Thus, Parr personalizes the words of the epistle; her depiction of the idolatry which sin entails is narrated in autobiographical terms. The exchanging of God’s truth for lies and turning aside from the Creator to make idols of creation is not discussed abstractly in its application to all humans but is rather sketched in the behavior of Parr herself. As I have noted, she supplements this portrayal of her sin with framing from elsewhere in the Bible, adding that she ‘loved darkenes better th[a]n light [John 3]’,Footnote 12 that she had violated the first commandment to love God with all of her heart, mind, and strength, and more.Footnote 13 In a possible reframing of the text of Romans 10, Parr relates that she did not answer God’s call to her, saying, ‘what man so called, woulde not heave h[e]arde: or what man hearyng, woulde not have answered’?Footnote 14
Moreover, Parr’s theology and the marginal headings of her text point to a dependence on Romans 2. Mueller suggests a doctrinal parallel between Parr’s opening lamentation and another early Protestant treatment of Romans, writing that Parr’s confession of her own sins ‘resembles the dynamic in chap. 2, verse 15, of Martin Luther’s Lectures on Romans (written 1515–16), where the heart’s severe deploring of its sin and its unfeelingness toward Christ’s love directly precedes the onset of justifying faith with its attendant trust, assurance, and release’.Footnote 15 Romans 2 is also cited in the marginal content descriptors of the published text (though it is uncertain whether Parr or another person was responsible for this insertion) when she speaks of the ‘vayne, blind knowledge’ which she formerly possessed concerning the purpose and effect of Christ’s incarnation and death.Footnote 16 Romans 1-2 then seem to be the pattern for Parr’s opening lamentation over her sins and form the groundwork for her theology of the work of Christ and its relation to justification by faith.
‘[F]or hys ennemyes’: the Work of Christ as Central to Parr’s Reading of Romans
Having thus described her sin along the lines of the beginning of the epistle, the crux of Parr’s Lamentation is then her conversion towards a true knowledge of justifying faith through a realization of her own sin and helplessness, followed by an accurate estimation of the value of Christ’s work on the cross. Claiming that ‘no mortal man’ could rescue her from her miserable state,Footnote 17 Parr goes on to describe the grace of God which enabled her at last to rightly value Christ’s death for her. By this grace she was enabled to ‘see, and beholde with the eye of lively fayth, Christ crucified to be myne only Saviour and rede[e]mer. For then I beganne (and not before) to perceyve and see myne owne Ignoraunce and blindnes’.Footnote 18 From here, Parr espouses a thoroughly sixteenth-century-evangelical reading of justification as generally inferred from Romans, asserting that ‘by fayth only I am sure to be iustified.’Footnote 19 Romans 3 and 5 are recruited to detail this justifying faith, which Mueller argues is also put forth in Tyndale’s terms as a ‘lively faith’ rather than a ‘dead, human, historical faith’.Footnote 20
Justification by faith and Christ’s atoning work are understood by Parr as an ever-reinforcing loop. As she says, drawing on Romans 3, ‘Yet we may not impute to the worthines of fayth or works, our Iustification before god: but ascribe and geve the worthynes of it, wholy to the merites of Christes passion, and referre and attrybute the knowledge and perceyving therof, onely to fayth’.Footnote 21 For Parr, then, to know the true purpose of Christ’s death is to know that one is justified by faith; the two go together. Meditating on this, she says, ‘Let us therfore nowe I pray you, by fayth, beholde and considre the greate charitie, and goodnes of god, in sending hys Sonne to suffer death for our redemcion. when we were his mortal enemies’.Footnote 22
Parr then primarily treats the death of Christ and its effects through the use of several overlapping motifs. First, Christ’s holiness, innocence, self-emptying, and obedience are contrasted with humankind’s sin, emphasizing the exceptionality of Christ’s person and work. Parr holds Christ’s atoning victory to have been precisely because of his exinanition and obedience unto death, writing, ‘he overcame sinne, with his Innocencie: and confounded pride, with his humilitie: Quenched all worldlie love, with hys charitie: appeysed the wrath of his father, with his mekenes: turned hatred into love, with hys so many benyfites, and godlie zele’.Footnote 23 Interestingly, Bainton’s work on Parr suggests that her language here and elsewhere on ‘the benefits of Christ’s death’ may have been inspired by an Italian evangelical work of 1543 which reworked and at times directly cited from Calvin’s Institutes.Footnote 24
Second, Parr adopts the threefold formulation of Christ’s death as satisfaction, oblation, and sacrifice for sins. This tripartite designation was possibly brought to England in the 1536 proposed Wittenberg Articles, which were prepared by Lutheran theologians for perusal by English delegates,Footnote 25 and it then appeared in the Ten Articles of 1536 (and subsequent Articles of Religion)Footnote 26 and at last in Cranmer’s Prayer Books.Footnote 27 In Parr’s appropriation of this theology, Christ ‘hath satisfied for it [that is, sin] him selfe, with the most holy sacrifice and oblacion of hys precious bodye, in suffering most bitter and cruel death’.Footnote 28 Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles of 1553 and the Articles following would emphasize that this theology was partly intended to rebut the conception of the Mass as a re-sacrificing of Christ, by underlining the finality and sufficiency of his sacrifice.Footnote 29 Beyond declaring Christ’s death to have been ‘bitter’, ‘sharpe’, ‘cruel’, and ‘for my redempcion’ or for ‘our sinnes’, Parr does not advance many details as to how exactly Christ’s death made satisfaction.Footnote 30 It may be that she expects her readers to be sufficiently familiar with this notion and to supply the context. It is clear, however, that she views Christ’s death as a sacrificial offering which in some way propitiated the Father’s just wrath against human sin.
Third, Parr assumes an affective image that Mueller shows she likely drew from a Good Friday sermon by Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher:Footnote 31 ‘the booke of the crucifixe’.Footnote 32 It is noteworthy that Parr’s theological sources include Fisher, who was ultimately killed by Henry for his refusal to accept the royal supremacy; however, Parr alters his image in a decidedly Protestant way, as Mueller notes. While for Fisher, to study in the book of the crucifix meant to meditate on the physical realities of Christ’s broken body and his suffering in his death,Footnote 33 Parr reinterprets the image, referring to the Bible itself as the book of the crucifix wherein Christians may learn to rightly estimate their sins, the judgment of hell which would have been theirs without Christ’s work, and the great love of God towards them.Footnote 34 Mueller notes that Parr’s reframing of the ‘booke’ as the Bible, rather than Christ’s wounded body, shows that her ‘book of the crucifix is really a book of the crucifixion, her metaphor for the heart of Scripture, the promises of the Gospel apprehended in Tyndalian fashion as the felt truth of one’s personal salvation, made available to all who can read God’s Word’.Footnote 35 For Parr, the graphic details of Christ’s suffering seem to be less important for the Christian’s meditation than the broader significance of Christ’s death within the context of the entire narrative of redemption. This, I will argue, is particularly clear in how Parr treats Christ’s atoning victory and embeds it within her theology drawn from the book of Romans.
Finally (but not exhaustively), Parr accentuates most often the unparalleled triumph of Christ on the cross, in which he ‘vanquished not onlye the prince of the worlde, but all the enemies of god: triumphing over persecucion, Iniuries, villainies, slaunders, yea death, the worlde, synne, and the devil: and brought to confusion, all carnal prudence’.Footnote 36 Christ achieved this victory, not armed with worldly might, but with the Spirit.Footnote 37 Importantly, Parr does not merely discuss here the benefits of Christ’s triumph with application only to Christ’s exaltation or to a forensic account of justification. Certainly, Christ is victorious over the devil, sin, death, and more, and his victory secures forgiveness for the elect, delivering them from ‘a sharpe miserable captivitie’ to sin.Footnote 38 However, as I will discuss at length, Parr also repeatedly names Christ’s atoning victory to entail a real conquering of the Christian in their present lives over sin and tribulation, using the theology of Romans 6 through 8 to do so.Footnote 39 As I have already observed, these intertwined motifs for the atonement used by Parr do not exhaust her theology of this topic: redemption is also depicted as the healing of sin, which is spiritual sickness, and more.Footnote 40
All ‘worketh to their commoditie’: Parr on Christian Sanctification and Obedience in the Second Half of Romans
Parr’s theology of the cross is then applied to the ongoing life, sanctification, and obedience of the English Christian, roughly following the theology of the second half of the book of Romans. Asserting that Christ has overcome sin, nullifying its force and that of the law, Parr states (paraphrasing Romans 6.12) that believers then need not ‘suffer [sin] to reigne in them’.Footnote 41 Having said this, however, she must then explain why Christians still contend with what she calls ‘the dregges of Adam [that] doe remayne, that is our concupiscences, which in dede be sinnes’.Footnote 42 ‘It is true’, Parr says, ‘that Christe might have taken away all our immoderate affeccions, but he hath left them for the greater glory of hys father, and for his owne greater triumph’.Footnote 43 To illustrate how this is so, she relates the analogy of a prince who has conquered the foes who long oppressed his people, and then forces the oppressors to serve the formerly oppressed. Thus, Christ is a ‘greater conqueror’, and believers are likewise, as Romans 8.37 claims, more than victorious over sin; it must now serve them rather than vice versa. After discoursing at length on Christ’s great victory and its application to his people, Parr then seems to paraphrase Romans 8:
For al maner thinges worketh to [Christians’] commoditie and profite: for they in spirite feele, that god, their father, doth governe theym, and disposeth all thinges for their benefite: therfore they feele theym selves sure. In persecucion, they are quiet, and peacefull: in tyme of trouble, they ar[e] without werynes, feares, anxcieties, suspicions, miseries: and finally all the good, and evil of the world, worketh to their commoditie.Footnote 44
Parr frequently reemphasizes, then, that through Christ’s triumphant death and through the indwelling of the Spirit, the children of God have victory over sin, such that it and all things work together for their good. Her theology of the work of Christ directly reinforces her understanding both of justification by faith and of the relationship between faith and sanctification in the life of the Christian.
Parr also briefly treats election and assurance from Romans 8, 9, and 11. She censures those who would judge God for partiality ‘because he hath elected sum, and sum reproved’, and those who would presume on God’s sovereign election by sinning.Footnote 45 However, the truly repentant elect may nonetheless, in her view, be certain of their salvation and of God’s care. Coverdale’s translation of Romans 8.35-39 is directly inserted at some at length in support of this. The quotation is quite lengthy, and so I won’t read it in full, but Parr begins by saying of the elect that they truly have assurance, ‘for the holy ghooste doeth witnes to their spirite, that they be the children of god, and therfore they beleve god better than man’.Footnote 46 She adds:
They say with Saynt Paule: who shall seperate us from the love of god? Shall tribulation? anguish, persecucion, hunger, nakednes, peryl, or swearde?”Footnote 47 She concludes with, “I am sure, the neyther death, neyther life, neyther aungelles, nor rule, neyther power, neyther thinges present, neyther thinges to cum […] shalbe able to departe us from the love of god, whiche is in Christ Jesu our lord.Footnote 48
Finally, Parr concludes with a number of exhortations for the Christian’s continuance in good works, flowing from her theology of the cross. She prays that ‘this great benefite of Christ crucified, maye be stedfastly fixed and printed in al christian hartes, that they maye be trewe lovers of God, and worke as chyldren, for love: and not as servauntes compelled with threatnynges’.Footnote 49 Her directions for these good works are then drawn from various biblical passages, including exhortations to maintain unity, persevere in tribulation, and bless persecutors from Romans 12 and injunctions to obey earthly rulers from Romans 13. Parr does not rely solely on Romans here, also compiling instructions from 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, 2 Timothy, Galatians, and more. Nevertheless, given the work’s heavy reliance on Romans 1-8, I think it is still reasonable to see Parr as utilizing the overall structure of the epistle in her work, concluding her theology of sin and salvation with reminders to the Church about how this informs rather than negates good works.
Conclusion
Joining the tradition of Protestant theologians, such as Philip Melancthon and others, who derived theological reflection from the epistle to the Romans, Katherine Parr uses her Lamentation of a Sinner to discourse on sin, justifying faith, the cross of Christ, and the Church’s life in the Spirit. I have argued that Parr’s opening lamentation for her own sin casts her transgressions in light of the beginning of Romans, with Parr claiming that she had forsaken God for created idols and God’s truth for lies. From there, the central thrust of her work is a meditation on the cross of Christ. Here, along with Romans 3-5, she speaks of Christ’s great love and death for the redemption of his enemies even while they were sinners, and this work as the cornerstone for justification by faith. I have argued that Parr uses several overlapping motifs to dwell upon Christ’s atoning work. She draws inspiration from other Protestant theologians and preachers, depicting Christ’s sacrificial, satisfaction-making victory and encouraging Christians to rightly estimate Christ’s death by studying Scripture, the book which points to the worth of Christ’s crucifixion for salvation.
Parr’s theology also undercuts the notion that Protestant atonement doctrine focused solely on forensic justification at the expense of any account of sanctification, however. She certainly holds that Christ’s death and justification by faith are inextricably linked, with the first as the basis for the second’s reception by faith. However, Parr uses Romans 6-8 to seamlessly apply Christ’s justifying, atoning victory to the Christian’s continued life in the Spirit. Romans further inspires her reflections on election and contributes to her practical instructions to the ecclesiastical body within England. For Parr, then, the epistle to the Romans drives a theology in which Christ’s work is central. More than just the queen who survived Henry VIII, she joins the Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century who taught that the Christian, simul justus et peccator, may find in Scripture (and perhaps particularly in the epistle to the Romans) a transformative understanding of sin, justification by faith, and life in the Spirit.
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