Robert Browne (Brownist)

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Robert Browne (* around 1550; † October 7, 1633 in Northampton , Northamptonshire ) was the founder of the English Puritan Separatists or Brownists or English Congregationalism .

Life

Robert Browne came from a wealthy Stamford merchant family that can be traced back to the fourteenth century. Three ancestors were councilors there and two were sheriffs of Rutlandshire. Browne was born in Tolethorpe Hall, Rutland, about 1550, the third of seven children to Anthony Browne and his wife Dorothy, daughter of Sir Philip Boteler. He probably received his education at the Stamford School. There was a distant relationship to William Cecil . Little is known about Browne's childhood. In 1570 (?) He began his studies at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge , where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1572. His college friend at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, Robert Harrison (154? - 1585?), Later pastor in Norwich and Middelburg in the Netherlands , became an important colleague . Both were likely influenced by the neo-Calvinist lectures of Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), a Puritan theologian and professor at Cambridge. After leaving the university, Browne worked as a teacher at Oundle Southwark in Northamptonshire from 1574 to 1577 before being fired. During this time he began to study fundamental questions about the Church and the Bible. He worked intermittently with the Puritan pastor Richard Greenham of Dry Drayton. The office of bishops, which the Anglicans had retained after their separation from the Catholic Church, seemed to Browne increasingly directed against God's will, not derived from the biblical scriptures and therefore unacceptable. Browne expressed his views in public sermons to which he had no permission. During an illness or convalescence, the future Bishop Richard Bancroft visited him , who brought him a letter from the Privy Council prohibiting such sermons. Browne probably came to London around 1580 but returned to Norwich.

In the spring of 1581, Browne and Harrison in Norwich had succeeded in developing enough resistance against the Anglican Church and in organizing a separatist parish that Bishop Freke of Norwich joined in because of this unrest and later because of Browne's refusal to obey his instructions William turned to Cecil for help. Browne was arrested. He was imprisoned a total of 32 times in his life, but was probably released repeatedly through the influence of William Cecil. In August 1582, Browne's first and best-known book, A Book which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true Christians, was published . It contained three different treatises in which he formulated the theory of "Congregational Independency", that is, the independence of the individual parish from higher ecclesiastical authorities. Another book soon followed, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Any and of the Wickedness of those Preachers which will not reform till the Magistrate command or compel them . This work formulated the inalienable right of the church to carry out the necessary reforms without authorization from secular authorities.

To avoid persecution in England, Browne emigrated in 1582 with most of his community to the Dutch town of Middelburg ( Zeeland ). While Browne was largely able to operate freely as a theological writer in the Netherlands, several of his followers in England were convicted and hanged at the same time for selling rebellious writings from an Anglican point of view, such as B. 1583 John Copping and Elias Thacker, members of the Brownian Congregation in Norwich.

In Middleburg there were increasing clashes among the separatists. Especially at the instigation of Robert Harrison, who had become Browne's opponent, this was expelled from the community. He returned with his family to the English state church in 1584 via Scotland, where he found no support for his anti-state work, while the congregation remained under Harrison's direction in the Netherlands. At the instigation of the Bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury often had Browne imprisoned for long periods of time. He probably owed William Cecil to Lord Burgley for his parental home release. In the spring of 1586 he appeared in Norwich and was excommunicated for continuing attacks on the state church. Since Browne finally submitted and reconciled with the Church of England, he was re-admitted to the State Church, which he had previously feuded, and received a teaching post at the Latin School in Southwark in the fall of 1586 and the parish of Achurch in the fall of 1591. Browne died while in custody in Northampton, likely a mentally ill person. He is said to have been mentally changed since the prison time in 1585.

meaning

Browne founded the first separatist movement in England (Norwich) from 1581, the "Brownists" (later "Barrowists"), which separated completely from the Anglican Church (hence "Separatists") and which later had to evade to the Netherlands to avoid persecution to escape. The Brownists developed their own theological principles that were supposed to free their religious convictions and their practice from external constraints. Pastors and laypeople were treated equally. The latter were also allowed to speak at the service. This was a consistent application of Martin Luther's teaching on the priesthood of all believers and Johannes Calvin's church ordinance , which included church elders ( presbyters ) elected by the parishioners on an equal footing in the church leadership ( doctrine of four offices ). Browne discarded any established religious practice or prayer form. Sacraments were only intended for the self-affirmation of the community. Influenced by the Calvinist federal theology , the separatists saw themselves as true believers with whom God had concluded a covenant and brought them together to form individual congregations (congregations, derived from " congregationalism ") that represented the true church of Christ. The individual municipalities were independent from the state and ranked on a par with the other municipalities. They chose and ordained their pastors, church elders, teachers and deacons independently and decided on the admission and exclusion of their members. Thus their church order had a democratic structure, without renouncing church discipline in the spirit of Calvin .

Although Browne turned back to the Anglican Church in later years, the congregational principles developed especially in his main work continued to have an effect. Henry Barrowe and John Greenwood continued Browne's original work until their execution (1593). The separatist congregationalists who founded the Plymouth Colony ( Pilgrim Fathers ) in 1620 organized both life in their parishes and the secular area of ​​their settlements according to the democratic principles developed by Browne, Barrowe, and Greenwood.

Shakespeare and the Brownists

Robert Browne's followers, the " Brownists, " were mentioned in Shakespeare's comedy Was ihr wollt ( Twelfth Night , written with the intention of being performed before the Queen) in about 1601 when Sir Andrew uttered, " I would as ran be a Brownist as a politician ".

Fonts

  • A Trve and Short Declaration . 1581
  • A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for any and of the Wickedness of those Preachers which will not reform till the Magistrate command or compel them . 1582
  • A Book which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true Christians . 1582
  • An answere to master Cartwright his letter for ioyning with the English Church . 1583
  • A true and short declaration, both of the gathering and ioyning together of certaine persons: and also of the lamentable breach and division which fell amongst them . 1583
  • A Reproof of Certain Schismatical Persons . 15 ??
  • A New Year's Guift . 1589

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Heussi : Compendium of Church History. 11th edition (1957), Tübingen, p. 380
  2. ^ Karl Heussi: Compendium of Church History , p. 325
  3. ^ M. Schmidt: Browne, Robert. In Religion in Past and Present , 3rd Edition, Volume I, Tübingen 1957, column 1423
  4. ^ Clifton E. Olmstead: History of Religion in the United States. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1960, p. 18
  5. ^ Nathaniel Philbrick : Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Penguin Group, New York, NY 2006
  6. ↑ Allen Weinstein, David Rubel: The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower. DK Publishing, New York, NY 2002, pp. 60-61
  7. ↑ Clifton E. Olmstead: History of Religion in the United States, pp. 64-69
personal data
SURNAME Browne, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Founder of the English Puritan Separatists
DATE OF BIRTH around 1550
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1633
Place of death Northampton , Northamptonshire