7 “Not I, But Christ” Devotionally and Homiletically: Sola Fide in Cranmer’s Liturgical Piety and Preaching
WE HAVE EXAMINED the content of the liturgy thus far by analyzing words and ceremonial acts and tools. It is important to remember, however, that surrounding the worship services of the people of God was a piety, a devotional life, of the people. In a way, this devotional life served as the imaginative universe in which the words and ceremonies of the worship services orbited. Medieval piety created the plausibility structures that allowed liturgical words and actions to hang together. Though less concrete than words and ceremonies, devotional piety was therefore an equally important context for reform for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Let us examine how sola fide would inform this sphere of the liturgical life of sixteenth-century England before looking, finally, at Cranmer’s reform of preaching.
“NOT I, BUT CHRIST” DEVOTIONALLY
When it comes to how the Prayer Book sought to shape the public devotional life of the people of God, few have observed sola fide as a possible unifying factor for much of Cranmer’s decision-making. Why did the Archbishop simplify disparate regional liturgies to “but one use” and the Daily Offices to two? Some say that the motivation was political, congruent with Henry’s agenda of kingdom-wide unity and loyalty. Why was devotion to the saints and praying for the dead eliminated? Some say that it was Cranmer’s dogmatic biblicism or his early modern concern about superstition over against a more rational approach to religion. While, as noted in the introduction, elements of truth reside in all these assessments, less noticed is that justification by faith alone would insist on distinctions that would make such practices of public piety untenable and therefore recast the devotional content of the liturgy in a “not I, but Christ” framework.
Sola fide and liturgical simplification. Marion Hatchett expounds well that the political motivation in Cranmer’s simplification of the liturgy to “but one use” was to establish uniformity with ease and cost-effectiveness. The Prayer Book’s preface more or less testifies to this. Elsewhere Hatchett points out that antiquity was another motivator behind some of the more specific simplification: “Cranmer greatly simplified the Church Year . . . based on a false assumption that days commemorating principal New Testament saints were older than Black Letter Days.” In other words, Cranmer’s simplification was motivated by his favoritism toward older liturgical forms (be they historically accurate or not). From another angle, while some correctly point out that Cranmer’s Erasmian humanist training and medieval English affective piety would prompt the Archbishop to expand Prayer Book language—that is, turn single words into doublets, or pairs into triplets—it would be C. S. Lewis’s eye for medieval Latin that would notice Cranmer’s penchant for linguistic contraction. Cranmer “tended to smooth out what was epigrammatic and to reject whatever might by the severest standards be thought exuberant. . . . Of all things, the Prayer Book dreads excess.”
But for Cranmer, was his work of liturgical contraction even simply an aesthetic conviction expressed through economy of words? We find an interesting note in the Archbishop’s hand that helps here. In his study of Basil of Caesarea, Cranmer appears to have been influenced by the church father’s desire for ordinary workers to attend morning and evening services where there would be Bible exposition. Cranmer’s marginalia reveals him looking favorably on how simplification of the Daily Offices could help make the Bible-based piety of monasticism accessible to the average person’s workday. With this in mind, we can now see Paul Bradshaw’s insight helping us closer to our thesis: “The major problem with the pattern of daily offices imposed on [worshipers] in the course of the Middle Ages was that it was excessively time-consuming and therefore burdensome.” What we want to argue is that, amidst other credible reasons for simplifying many regional liturgies into one, or paring down the Daily Offices from eight to two, or even contracting the “excess” of Latin liturgical phraseology, one very compelling reason for all of these moves is Cranmer’s desire to place less of the burden of the work of faith on the worshiper. In other words, the doctrine of justification by faith alone offers a helpful explanation for Cranmer’s simplification of liturgical devotion for the commoner: that worshipers would be less likely to fashion worship itself into a meritorious work, burdensome not only to the average person’s schedule, but to their conscience.
That the Daily Office routine was tied up with one’s standing before God is evident in Luther’s own testimony:
When I was a monk I was unwilling to omit any of the prayers, but when I was busy with public lecturing and writing I often accumulated my appointed prayers for a whole week, or even two or three weeks. Then I would take a Saturday off, or shut myself in for as long as three days without food and drink, until I had said the prescribed prayers. This made my head split, and as a consequence I couldn’t close my eyes for five nights, lay sick unto death, and went out of my senses.
As Bradshaw analyzed Luther, “This experience must have contributed to his questioning of the idea that such practices were ‘works’ necessary to satisfy God when his reading of St. Paul suggested that Christians were on the contrary justified by faith alone.” It is interesting to note that simplifying the Daily Office from eight to two was something proposed by Luther before it was enacted by Cranmer, and all this compels us toward the conclusion that liturgical simplification was a value of Cranmer’s precisely because the grammar of sola fide would press devotional piety to make less, not more, of the worshiper. Cranmer would agree with Luther’s liturgical outlook that “one must not overload souls or weary them, as was the case until now in monasteries and convents,” for the overloading of souls runs roughshod over the gospel of the finished work of Christ. Excess in worship becomes tantamount to an excess of works. We further see this principle of simplification at play throughout the Prayer Book, beyond Morning and Evening Prayer, in Cranmer’s compression of the pastoral offices of marriage, burial, and visitation of the sick.
In a sense, then, Cranmer’s simplified liturgies were an attempt to enact devotionally what sola fide distinguishes theologically: God is approached by faith, apart from works. Corroborating this understanding of Cranmer’s agenda is a strong clue in his preface to the Prayer Book where, in a list of the vices of medieval worship, he includes “vain repetitions.” This connection to Christ’s criticism of the long-winded prayers of the Pharisees (Mt 6:7)—namely, those in Jesus’ day who preached justification by works—reveals a likely perspective of Cranmer’s: lengthy liturgies tend to aid and abet works-righteousness.
Sola fide and weekly communion. Though weekly communion of the people is largely commonplace in twenty-first-century Anglicanism, it was not in sixteenth-century England. Indeed, back then the mass was performed more often than once a week, but as we have noted it was performed by the priest. It was not a communion of the people. Reception by the laity was rare. We observed above how, in Cranmer’s mature sacramental understanding, the Lord’s Supper paralleled the effect of preaching. What preaching does for our ears, the bread and wine do for “our eyes, mouths, hands, and all our senses.” For Cranmer, the Eucharist is a multi-sensory proclamation and reception of the good news. What other conclusion could such a robust, evangelical theology of the table have but to urge weekly reception by the people of God? And this is precisely the innovation of the first English Prayer Books: Holy Communion was intended to be the principal Sunday service of the people in order that, devotionally, the people of God would experience the gospel in all their senses on a regular basis. Indeed this was the intent, even if it did not achieve reality in Cranmer’s day.
Sola fide and praying to the saints. Cranmer’s duties as Archbishop included visitations of the various dioceses under his watch care. These visitations were often accompanied by injunctions—official written statements and inquiries into the goings on of a given region. Visitations and injunctions were particularly useful for enforcing laws, and certain documents contained within the registers at Lambeth dating to the times in and around the ratification of the Prayer Books are especially telling for the Archbishop’s understanding of the relationship of theology to practice. In line with our discussion, we find a clear connection in Cranmer’s thinking between the practice of praying to saints and the doctrine of sola fide in the 1549 injunctions to the diocese of Norwich: Cranmer desires “that none maintain purgatory, invocation of saints, the six articles, bede-rolls, images, relics, rubric primers, lights, justification by works, holy bells, [etc.].” Though prayer to the saints and justification by works are listed here among many other liturgical and doctrinal vices, even the fact that they exist in a list together should tell us something, especially given the weight of evidence already and still to be argued. We again make the point that it is not mere humanist-modernist allergy to superstition which accounts for Cranmer’s concern over praying to the saints. Nor is it fully satisfactory to say that it was the Archbishop’s biblicism which caused him to eschew the Sanctorale calendar, true as this may be.
Duffy describes the contents of a medieval manual, the Golden Legend, which offers several reasons for the veneration and invocation of the saints. One reason listed is “to procure our own honour, ‘for when we worship our brethren we worship ourselves, for charity maketh all to be common.’” If this indeed was the common sentiment, one can see how the grammar of sola fide steps in to confront this not-gospel which, by “worshiping ourselves” (i.e., “honoring ourselves”) attempts to undermine the negated “I” which the doctrine of justification by faith distinguishes. Put another way, the popular theology clarified by Duffy has far too high a view of the self, a spiritual and devotional outlook at odds with the clear declaration of the law, “No one is righteous.”
Yet praying to the saints posed an even more direct threat to the clarity of the gospel. Popular devotion elevated the saints as moral exemplars (a good and biblical notion), but it was precisely their moral rectitude, according to Roman theology, which would qualify them to be intercessors and mediators for believers yet on earth. The Sarum rite (in line with all other Latin eucharistic liturgies) explicitly connects the saints’ intercession to their virtue in the prayer after the Sanctus which states, “Communicating and venerating the memory . . . of all thy saints: by whose merits and prayers grant that in all things we may be defended.” According to Duffy, popular devotion viewed the prayers of the virtuous saints as “a source of power to be tapped.” Cranmer would no doubt see this in stark contrast to Paul’s articulation of where “power” comes from—namely, in the gospel of Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone (Rom 1:16). That the saints could somehow mediate intercessory power because of their merited status obscured and confused faith’s only rightful object—solus Christus. Cranmer would argue this very point with Henry’s corrections to the Bishops’ book. Whereas the king desired to maintain devotional appeal to the mediation of the saints, Cranmer insisted that while we can still believe that the heavenly saints indeed do offer ongoing prayers (Rev 8:4), we in no way seek them out for mediation because it nullifies the mediation of Christ. Cranmer quotes in particular Paul’s clear word of the sole mediation of Christ in 1 Tim 2:5. It is clear that “rejection . . . of the intercessory power of the saints” was indeed a “consequence of the reformed doctrine on justification.” And so it would be that Cranmer would not only alter the Sanctorale calendar, but he would remove prayers to the saints from their traditional locations within the liturgy, such as in the Great Litany.
Sola fide and prayers for the dead. Similarly, prayers for the dead became untenable for Cranmer ultimately, not only because they were shrouded in superstition or because they had no biblical precedent, but because they undermined the assurance, comfort, and confidence which sola fide provided. Cranmer would no doubt have agreed with Martin Bucer’s argument from the Censura regarding the prayers for the dead which follow the Sanctus in the Communion liturgy:
It is a true word of the Lord which says that they who hear him, and believe in him who sent him, have eternal life, they do not come into judgment but have passed from death into eternal life (John 5). But when prayer is offered for the dead that the Lord will grant them his mercy and everlasting peace, the common man supposes that this implies that the departed still feel the want of that peace and therefore of that full mercy of God by which he pardons their sins, and that the primary purpose of our prayers is to gain these things for them. No occasion must be given for this error.
As Leuenberger comments on this passage, the grammar of sola fide exposes the lack of assurance implicit in prayers which intercede for the salvation of the dead: “Faith must lead to the certainty of salvation.” On this point, Cranmer would be meticulous in filtering out all references to prayers for the dead in the Communion liturgy, even to the point of changing the preface to the Prayers of Intercession from the potentially vague, “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s church,” to the doubly clear, “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth.” Obviously, therefore, not only does this affect the Communion liturgy, but the burial rite. Any prayers for the dead remaining in the 1549 liturgy (“Grant . . . that the sins which he committed in this world be not imputed unto him, but that he . . .”) are removed from 1552, such that the only intercessions remaining are for the living. Even more so, not only are prayers for the dead excluded, but prayers to the dead. Notice the difference (see 
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 1549
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 1552
Then the priest casting earth upon the corpse, shall say:
Then while the earth shall be cast upon the body, by some standing by, the priest shall say:
I commend thy soul to God, the father almighty,
For as much as it hath pleased almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed:
and thy body to the ground,
we therefore commit his body to the ground,
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
in sure and certain hope of resurrection
to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who shall change our vile body,
that it may be like to his glorious body,
according to the mighty working
whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
in sure and certain hope of resurrection
to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who shall change our vile body,
that it may be like to his glorious body,
according to the mighty working
whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.
Figure 7.1. Cranmer’s 1549 and 1552 burial rite compared
Sola fide and biblical characterization in the liturgy. When the devotional piety of the Prayer Book is considered, it is scarcely observed that Cranmer creatively places the worshiper in the skin of various biblical characters, particularly when those characterizations serve to dramatize the distinctions made according to the grammatical rules of sola fide. Two dramatic scenes stand out in Cranmer’s liturgical role-play—the Syrophoenecian woman, and the Pharisee and the Publican. In the former, Cranmer’s original Prayer of Humble Access liturgically dramatizes the scene of the woman who is found answering back Jesus’ testing words by saying, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Mt 15:27; Mk 7:28). And so we pray, “We be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.” That Cranmer sees this as a tangible moment where sola fide makes distinctions is evident in both the context and the words of Jesus in the Gospel accounts. The context emphatically paints a picture of a meritless suppliant: she is a woman; she is not a Jew; she is even less than a child; she even in confession agrees with Jesus that she is a “dog.” In other words, the Syrophoenecian woman finds her own identity completely negated and valueless (“not I”). And yet it is precisely in her “not I”–confession that Jesus by his words commends in particular not her boldness, not her courage, but her faith. The Markan account highlights that it is because of her faith (διὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον; Mk 7:29) that her daughter has been healed. It is highly significant and suggestive of Cranmer’s understanding of sola fide that at one of the most tender and vulnerable moments in the Communion liturgy—the moment after the Sanctus where we are faced with the raw holiness of the living God—we would find ourselves in the character who in the Gospels perhaps represents the most stark distinction between faith and works.
Less obvious, but possibly intentional, is Cranmer’s characterization present in the Morning Prayer Confession. There he alludes to Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in Luke 18, imploring us to approach God as the Publican, rather than the Pharisee. We pray at the center of the Confession, “O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders,” which is the Publican’s very prayer, commended by Jesus, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Lk 18:13). Here, too, is another significant place where our Lord distinguishes faith from works. The Pharisee is found commingling faith and works in their backhanded self-boast, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” (Lk 18:11). And yet Christ commends the Publican not for his feigned righteousness, but for his confession of unrighteousness (“not I”). Luke records these specific (Pauline) words in Jesus’ response, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified (δεδικαιωμένος)” (Lk 18:14). Again, we are caught up in a liturgical role-play that puts us in the Gospels’ characters, who most starkly illustrate the distinctions made by the grammar of justification by faith alone. In these two characterizations, we see the doctrine of sola fide woven into the spirituality of the liturgy. The net effect of all these observations above is a picture of just how thoroughly Cranmer applied the filter of sola fide to the liturgy. Not only would justification govern and guide the theological language of the liturgy; it would decidedly impact the very devotional piety in and around the Book of Common Prayer. And it would go further still.
Sola fide and Scripture words in the Prayer Book. Though a simple observation, we should note that even the Prayer Book’s scripturality is itself a witness to the grammar of sola fide working itself out in devotional form. Many have observed how much of the verbiage of Cranmer’s liturgy is not merely scriptural, but Scripture. This is not to say that preceding liturgies did not also richly weave Scripture into their verbiage (especially in the Daily Office), but it is to point out that in Cranmer’s condensation of the liturgy and introduction of new material, the concentration of Scripture appears to have risen in percentage throughout. The Archbishop was very concerned to put the actual Word(s) of God on the lips of the people of God. If one of Luther’s central cries was that “the whole of Scripture shows that the Word should have free course among Christians,” then Cranmer’s liturgy was very much in line with this commitment to let the Word do its work. In “liturgizing” the Scriptures, Cranmer was offering yet another experiential way to engage a denial of the self. It is as if the liturgy is set up to tell us that not even our prayers and responses to God are of our own doing. The very words we use to speak to God are his own gifts to us. The liturgy then becomes not our words to God, but Christ’s words to the Father through us. This is perhaps a devotional “not I, but Christ” in its most literal sense.
The scripturality of the Prayer Book taps into another vein of Cranmer’s thought mentioned earlier—namely, that the Scriptures are a “reliquary” of the Holy Spirit. In medieval thought, a reliquary was something so filled with the Holy Spirit that it radiated God’s own power and presence wherever it physically went. This is why the bones of saints, for instance, were cherished and sought after as “relics,” for the saints were so filled with the Spirit that their bodies continued to radiate that presence, even after death. It is no small statement, then, when Cranmer claims in his 1540 preface to the Great Bible that the Scripture itself is “the most precious jewel, and most holy relic that remaineth upon earth.” Quoting Gregory of Nazianzus, Cranmer insists that knowing the Scriptures gives us the “illumination of the Holy Ghost.” Just as we cannot speak without breath, so the Word cannot go forth apart from the Spirit. Therefore, in Cranmer’s mind, when he loads the Book of Common Prayer with the Bible, he is opening up for every believer direct access to the powerful presence of God through the Word.
Also, it should not be missed that in the late Middle Ages it was an established idea that the church through the priesthood should be the primary arbiters of the Scriptures. Especially in England after the Lollard movement of the fourteenth century, having the Scriptures in the hands of the people was seen as a dangerous thing which threatened to destabilize not only the church, but society. And so it was that priests and clerics should handle the Word of God on behalf of, even for the safety of, the people. A Prayer Book filled with the Bible, then, would be yet another clear statement from Cranmer that Christ was the only mediator needed between God and humanity. One commentator on Cranmer’s Homily on Scripture would remark, “Clearly Cranmer is angling some of the thrust of this homily against the Roman emphasis on the priest as mediator of what the believer needs to know, and saying instead that it is Scripture that holds this place.” Indeed, the Homily on Scripture could be seen in this regard as Cranmer’s defense for a liturgy filled with the Bible—nothing but faith alone should stand between the Word of Christ and his people.
One example of Cranmer’s ability to load the Bible naturally into the liturgy is found in his newly-composed Morning Prayer Confession. Within this short prayer, Cranmer references fourteen different passages of Scripture (see
GENERAL CONFESSION, MORNING PRAYER, 1552
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
Almighty and most merciful father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways,
like lost sheep.
Isa 53:6; Ps 119:176; 1 Pet 2:25
We have followed too much
the devices and desires of our own hearts.
Prov 19:21; Jer 18:12
We have offended against thy holy laws.
2 Chron 28:13
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
Matt 23:23
and there is no health in us:
Ps 38:3
but thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.
Luke 18:13
Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.
Neh 13:22
Restore thou them that be penitent,
according to thy promises declared unto mankind,
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Rom 15:8
And grant, O most merciful father, for his sake,
1 John 2:12
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
Tit 2:11-12
to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.
John 14:13
Figure 7.2. 1552 Morning Prayer Confession and its Scripture references
The Absolution to follow likewise quotes and alludes to seven different passages of Scripture (Ezek 33:11; Jn 20:22-23; Lk 24:47; Acts 2:38; Mk 1:14-15; Ezek 36:26-27; Lk 11:13). Throughout the liturgy, we find Cranmer’s new compositions following this pattern of Bible-loading. We also see his redactions of other received liturgies attempting to add more Scripture than was there before, such as prescribing all rather than some Comfortable Words, as we noted above, or in his addition of Scripture sentences around the Offertory. It is clear that, for Cranmer, worship is at its best when we fill our prayers not with our words, but God’s.
“NOT I, BUT CHRIST,” HOMILETICALLY
The Reformation affirmation of preaching was not simply the result of humanist emphasis on the rhetorical arts, nor was it just a convenient platform for either political persuasion or the promulgation of the tenets of Protestant teaching. Underneath these real motivations was the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It is most certainly in the 1547 Book of Homilies where we find Cranmer’s vision for the pulpit in England. Cranmer no doubt would have seen the implications of Paul’s theology for preaching, and we can observe in what follows echoes of Paul’s own homiletical method recorded in the book of Acts. For instance, in Acts 13, after preaching through a series of Psalm texts, the apostle’s sermon climaxes with a declaration of full justification by faith through Christ alone, employing an explicit and categorical distinction of law from gospel: “Therefore let it be known to you, brothers, that through [Christ] forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, from everything of which by the law of Moses (ἐν νόμῳ Μωϋσέως) you were unable to be justified (δικαιωθῆναι), by this man, all who have faith (ὁ πιστεύων) are justified (δικαιοῦται) (13:38-39).” Cranmer’s agenda for the Book of Homilies bears this same theological and homiletical imprint.
We can start by observing first what the homilies were attempting to replace, and when we do so, we encounter once again Cranmer’s concern about the priesthood as it was critiqued by the doctrine of sola fide. The priesthood of the Middle Ages was not homiletically oriented. In fact, as Duffy attests, “Everyone agreed that the average priest was by and large ill-equipped for preaching.” Indeed, preaching was unimportant then because the role of the clergy was sacerdotal and mediatorial. A priest’s principal duties were to offer the sacrifice of the mass and to be a confessor. Manuals for priests in this era therefore placed their training emphases upon the words and techniques of procuring confessions and dispensing absolutions. That the Reformation would press these clerical duties more toward the margins and replace preaching at the center would be a sign of sola fide at work. A minister is not a mediator. A minister’s job, through preaching, is to point to the one Mediator, Jesus Christ. Even in sacramental discussions, Cranmer was found promoting proclamation of the gospel as the priest’s most important task:
The priest should declare the death and passion of Christ, and all the people should look upon the cross in the mount of Calvary, and see Christ there hanging, and the blood flowing out of his side into their wounds to heal all their sores; and the priest and people all together should laud and thank instantly the chirurgeon (surgeon) and physician of their souls. And this is the priest’s and people’s sacrifice, not to be propitiators for sin, but . . . to worship continually in mystery that which was but once offered for the price of sin.
It therefore appears to be an outworking of the grammar of sola fide that the first published manual for priests in the Reformation era, the Book of Homilies, is neither about sacramental priestcraft nor how to receive confessions and absolve. Sola fide would insist that ministers were preachers first.
It is telling of the centrality and importance of preaching for Cranmer that of all liturgical reforms to be rolled out in England, preaching reform was first. The Book of Homilies was mandated for English pulpits two years before the first Prayer Book. This very well could signal that, for Cranmer, all true liturgical formation in the gospel cascades down from the pulpit. Even before the Book of Homilies, though, we see Cranmer making room for this rediscovered liturgical function of the minister. Possibly as soon as 1538, Cranmer writes these notes into one of his early unpublished revisions of the Breviary:
Whenever any speech of exhortation is to be made to the people or preaching done, then the incumbent may leave out Te Deum, the Fourth Lesson and the creed Quicunque vult in those public prayers when the people are present, so that the people, kept too long and wearied by too lengthy a reading, should not attend keenly enough, or should not have enough time to hear the preaching of the gospel and clear showing-forth of the Spirit of Christ.
The Archbishop desired to see preaching not draw the short straw amidst liturgical constraints of time and energy. Note, too, that Cranmer clearly understands the homiletical enterprise to be particularly for “the preaching of the gospel.” Compare this with Cranmer’s injunctions to Norwich, over a decade later, which include inquiries to find out whether any priests in the diocese have been preaching “justification by works.” From his earliest liturgical experiments, through the Book of Homilies, and into his Prayer Books, Cranmer has a consistent vision for what the pulpit exists to do. We also learn from his final sentence something of Cranmer’s pneumatology as it relates to preaching and worship. Of the many ways the presence of the Holy Spirit is manifested in a worship service, preaching is one of the liturgy’s primary vehicles—a “clear showing-forth.”
Yet the homilies would go further in not only emphasizing the preaching office of the priest, but even outlining the content of that proclamation. Ashley Null describes how Cranmer would deftly work the politics of including both conservative and Reformation contributions to the Book of Homilies. Conservatives John Harpesfield and Edmund Bonner would write the second Homily on Sin and the sixth Homily on Love, respectively. The remaining homilies, which were most critical for the Reformation distinction of faith and works, were left to the evangelicals. “Cranmer brought theological consistency to the Homilies by carefully structuring the first six dogmatic topics,” Null comments. After the introductory Homily on Scripture, the homily on “the misery of all mankind” by Harpesfield would naturally function as a strong word of condemnation preceding the homilies on Salvation, Faith, and Good Works. Given that the Book of Homilies was intended to be preached in succession in local parishes, it appears that Cranmer intended the ordering of the sermons to proclaim the Word according to the grammar of sola fide. We could say that the first six doctrinal sermons are structured thus (see
(Introduction)
1. A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture (Homily on Scripture)
LAW
(“not I”)
2. Of the Misery of All Mankind (Homily on Sin)
GOSPEL
(“but Christ”)
3. Of the Salvation of All Mankind (Homily on Salvation)
4. Of the True and Lively Faith (Homily on Faith)
5. Of Good Works (Homily on Good Works)
(responding faith)
6. Of Christian Love and Charity (Homily on Love)
Figure 7.3. The law-gospel structure of the Book of Homilies
Homiletically, we observe a clear distinction between law and gospel in order that works might be sifted out so that the gold of solus Christus remains clear and brilliant. Null observes a return to this law-gospel cycle in the eighth and ninth sermons: “Of the Declining from God” preaches the wrath of God only to be followed up by “An Exhortation Against the Fear of Death,” preaching the grace of God. Therefore, even nestled in the remaining six homilies which deal with ethical issues and are exhortative in nature, we find the grammar of sola fide at work. All this points to the conclusion that sola fide governed Cranmer’s homiletical philosophy. The pulpit’s purpose is singular: proclaim Christ and Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone.
This chapter especially drives home what we should have sensed throughout the entirety of part two. For Cranmer, commitment to the centrality of the gospel in worship was not merely a theoretical exercise, but rather it was the heartbeat of the life of faith for believers. The Archbishop would not go to such extreme lengths nor take such painstaking care if he did not think that the kinds of changes instituted actually made a difference to the well-being of a follower of Jesus—their vocation, their relationships, their emotional security. Since the day the gospel grabbed a hold of him, Cranmer always was a theologian of the heart.