Thomas More, the Christian Martyr?

hat do we do with Sir Thomas More? Beheaded on 6 July 1535 for defying King Henry VIII, he died a staunch Roman Catholic, rejecting all cries for separation from the holy mother church. Before his execution, he wrote several treatises, like The Sadness of Christ and A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, discussing his own impending martyrdom for his beloved church. Primarily concerning More in his writings while imprisoned was the same concept that separated the RCC from the rapidly germinating protest movement in England and other regions of Europe: right doctrine.

Doctrine has always divided people, especially groups who call themselves Christian. Personally, that gives me all the more reason to study and learn the doctrines taught in Scripture. I seek to unify, but without compromise. Martyrdom is no exception. Doctrine divides claims to martyrdom. In the first few centuries of the Church, if you held to Gnostic teachings and were killed for not confessing the name of the Emperor instead of Christ, the Church (which held to orthodoxy) would reject your death outright. You would not be recognized as a martyr on the basis of your doctrines.

Today we face quite the same dilemma. There are hundreds of millions of Roman Catholics worldwide. There is great controversy over whether or not Protestants can or should consider Roman Catholics brothers and sisters in Christ. I would be in the camp of those who say Roman Catholicism teaches a false gospel, where grace is no longer grace. The legalism and drastically heretical dogma and doctrines (e.g. their teachings of Mary, the mother of Jesus; purgatory; Papal infallibility; the sacraments) diverge from the true evangel, the true Good News. Thomas More did not hold back from calling anyone a heretic who did not believe in the real presence of Christ in the communion elements.

If salvation is not found in the RCC, if the Catholic is not my brother, can I consider a Catholic martyr a Christian martyr? When someone like Thomas More, who vehemently opposed Protestantism and sent quite a few of them to the stake, even considered them false martyrs on the basis of their doctrine, is beheaded or burned for what he declares are his Christian convictions, how do we non-Catholics respond? In his work, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, he wrote "The devil hath also some so obstinate heretics, that endure willingly painful death for vainglory."¹ Historically, Roman Catholicism has rejected Protestantism, and other divergent groups, and declared their claims to salvation as invalid. Contrary to relatively recent sentiments, the RCC has stated that there is no salvation outside of the RCC. They take as their very own Cyprian's dictum, "He cannot be a martyr who is not in the Church."²

So I ask again: what are we to do with Sir Thomas More? More, who had Christians killed, and who was himself killed, as he would have deemed, for Christ's sake. Would you list his name among the great martyrs of the faith? Does doctrine matter?

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¹ Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation [1534-1535], as cited in Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1999), 316.
² Cyprian, Treatise 1: On the Unity of the Church, xiv; found in ANF, vol. v. See a fascinating engraving and short commentary on this dictum (esse martyr non potest qui in Ecclesia non est) in Gregory, Salvation, 316.