. See, for instance, the Gospel Shaped Church DVD series and book released a few years ago by The Gospel Coalition: Gospel Shaped Living by Vermon Pierre (2015), Gospel Shaped Worship by Jared Wilson (2015), Gospel Shaped Outreach by Erik Raymond (2015), and Gospel Shaped Mercy by Stephen Um (2017), published by the Good Book Company; and the Gospel-Centered book series: The Gospel-Centered Life, The Gospel-Centered Community, and The Gospel-Centered Life for Teens, by Robert H. Thune and Will Walker (2016), The Gospel-Centered Parent by Rose-Marie Miller, Deborah Harrell, and Jack Klumpenhower (2015), published by New Growth Press.
. This conversation for me is twenty years strong. My own awakening to gospel-centrality started back in 2002 with some wonderful bootleg materials handed through what at the time felt like an underground railroad of pathways cut by church planters in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). I am ever indebted to pastors Jim Talarico and Steve Sage for introducing me to those early church planting manuals and manuscripts from Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Those materials, combined with the mentorship of Jim and Steve, effected for me a kind of second conversion from which, thank God, I have yet to recover.
. “Great Tradition” generally means that body of knowledge, wisdom, and practice, chiefly acquired through scriptural reflection, originating out of apostolic and patristic eras, faithfully passed down across regions, cultures, and expressions, with varied continuity and discontinuity throughout the history of the church. From my Protestant perspective, I like to more simply define Great Tradition as how the church wrestled through the meaning and application of Scripture in their time and place. I have heard the term used in places like D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 49; Jim Belcher, Deep Church: A Third Way beyond Emerging and Traditional (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).
. This picture of the solitary Cranmer is admittedly idyllic. Alongside the Archbishop’s own work was a small army of secretaries and researchers who were doing the same thing, which is why it is probably more proper to refer to Cranmer, as many have done, as the architect, rather than the author, of the Book of Common Prayer.
. In those moments Cranmer was not only surrounded by those physical publications and notes but was also encircled by countless friends and colleagues who through correspondence, conversation, and co-labor filled his mind with influential thoughts.
. There is perhaps a no more gripping firsthand account of Cranmer’s apprehension of God’s love in Jesus Christ than in the reports of his principal secretary, Ralph Morice, published in John Gough Nichols, ed., Narratives of the Days of the Reformation (London: Camden Society, 1859), esp. 246-247, where Morice relays how Cranmer’s understanding of the gospel led him to treat his enemies.
. This maps very well onto Diarmaid MacCulloch’s observation that the sixteenth-century movement in England was not necessarily “Protestant” at its inception, perhaps unlike what was taking place on the Continent. Rather, “A description more true to the period would be ‘evangelical.’” Gospel centrality is what united reform in England. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), 2.
. Despite centuries of biographical sketches and theological outlines of the Archbishop which have attempted to cast Cranmer in the molds of wildly disparate theological images (often suspiciously coinciding with whatever vision of Anglicanism was in vogue), the relatively recent work of Diarmaid MacCulloch and Ashley Null has perhaps once for all laid the question of Cranmer’s Protestantism to rest. This book assumes such work, namely, that by the early 1530s, most likely connected with his ambassadorial trip to Germany in 1532, Cranmer’s soteriology was firmly and decidedly Protestant, even as his sacramentology would take longer to arrive at its eventual Reformed resting place. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), esp. 59-78; and Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). A more contested idea, but one that I support, is that while Cranmer’s mature sacramentology was Reformed, his soteriology remained more distinctively Lutheran where such theology diverges from Zurich and Geneva. On this, see the work of Gil Kracke, “Cranmer’s Häuptartikel: Revisiting Thomas Cranmer’s Theology Through a Lutheran Understanding of Justification” (DMin diss., Knox Theological Seminary, 2017).
. To be sure, Reformers like Luther and Calvin were equally committed to a gospel-centric vision for liturgical revision, but there were methods and strategies unique to Cranmer that make him a supreme example for emulation. Forty years ago, Bryan Spinks convincingly argued that because Luther’s “chief article” of justification by faith alone governed his theology, it likewise governed his liturgical reform. Spinks quotes Luther at length, and in particular cites the German reformer’s Taufbüchlein as a case study in how sola fide became Luther’s primary filter for his reform of the baptismal liturgy (Spinks, Luther’s Liturgical Criteria and His Reform of the Canon of the Mass [Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982]). A generation before Spinks, liturgical theologian Vilmos Vajta convincingly critiqued nineteenth-century interpretations of Luther’s liturgical motivations: “They could not grasp Luther’s liturgics adequately because they had lost contact with the center of his theology” (Vajta, Luther On Worship: An Interpretation [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1958], 20). Calvin was no doubt as committed, but he seems simply to have been less interested in the whole project of liturgical revision, as his liturgical work appears to more slavishly republish the liturgical work of Bucer, whereas Cranmer was far more selective and discerning with his employment of Bucer and the other Reformed and Lutheran Kirchenordnungen (see Bryan Spinks, “German Influence on Edwardian Liturgies,” in Sister Reformations [Schwesterreformationen], ed. Dorothea Wendebourg [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010], 186). The Reformed liturgies took less interest in the received liturgical tradition than did Cranmer, and were therefore constructed more simply, with a two-fold objective of emphasizing preaching and reconstructing liturgies from the patristic witness. Spinks observes that Cranmer’s employment of the liturgical tradition was far more rich than that of Luther or Calvin, who, by comparison, were not given to consult material from anything other than their “immediate Catholic antecedents” (see Bryan Spinks, “Renaissance Liturgical Reforms: Reflections on Intentions and Methods,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 7, no. 2–3 [2005]: 275). After comparing Cranmer’s liturgical agenda to that of the Continental Reformers, another scholar concludes that because the latter relied more heavily on the sermon to catechize, they spent less time thinking about how their liturgical revisions would do that same kind of work (see Mark Lindsay, “Thomas Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer: Theological Education, Liturgy, and the Embodiment of Prosper’s Dictum,” Colloquium 47, no. 2 [2015]: 206-7). Still, we should be cautious in too quickly comparing pan-European liturgical reform as a kind of apples-to-apples enterprise. Each region had their own cultural context and their own unique skirmishes and sticking points with Rome and local politics. Even with that caution, however, I do believe that Cranmer among the Reformers stands at the top of successful and thorough application of the doctrine of justification by faith alone to liturgical content and shape. He should therefore be given a much more in-depth hearing. It may be true that, as Diarmaid MacCulloch puts it, Cranmer “was rarely an original thinker” when it came to his theological work (MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 119), but what we hope to show is that when it came to liturgical work, the Archbishop was uniquely creative in editing and placing multitudinous source-fragments into a cruciform mosaic of gospel-proclamation.
. Cranmer, “The Preface,” in Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 17.
. Relatively recent studies have challenged the long-held belief that medieval England was predominantly illiterate (cf. esp. Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008]). Not only do such works urge us to redefine literacy, but they also show how literacy was deeply connected with liturgy. Furthermore, it is true that across late medieval Europe biblical literacy, though limited, was not entirely absent. We have enough evidence of pre-Reformation vernacular Bibles, lay mass books, and other devotional resources in England and on the Continent to demonstrate that especially upper classes had access to the Scriptures in versions beyond the Latin. We know that possessors of such books would invite others to read in small groups, opening up the reality of even the illiterate achieving some measure of biblical knowledge (Wim François, “Vernacular Bible Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The ‘Catholic’ Position Revisited,” The Catholic Historical Review 104, no. 1 [2018], 26). For biblical literacy in England in particular, see Richard Marsden, “The Bible in English in the Middle Ages,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 272-95; and Hilary M. Carey, “Devout Literate Laypeople and the Pursuit of the Mixed Life in Later Medieval England,” Journal of Religious History 14, no. 4 (Dec 1987), 361-81. Still, studies such as these are focused on the nobility and knightly classes. Far less can be certain about the biblical knowledge and literacy of the lower classes.
. Spinks, “Renaissance,” 282. This emphasis on the liturgy’s catechetical power appears to have helped shape a unique feature of American Episcopalianism and Anglicanism—namely, the perspective that Anglican unity is found not in the tradition’s biblical summaries in the creeds, homilies, or doctrinal statements like the Thirty-Nine Articles, but in fidelity to the Prayer Book. This emphasis on unity around the Prayer Book was present in the beginning, as the Articles and homilies never carried the kind of official authority in the US as in England, evidenced in the preamble to the Constitution of the Episcopal Church, which states that it is “upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer” (Constitution and Canons, Together with the Rules of Order [New York: Office of the General Convention, 2018], 1). Often, this is where the lauded and loathed liturgical axiom lex orandi lex credendi (whose historical and theological ambiguities appear to be not surprisingly moldable to the viewpoint of whoever is marshaling it) is summoned (see Maxwell Johnson, “Liturgy and Theology,” in Liturgy in Dialogue, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks [London: SPCK, 1993], 202-25). Leading Episcopalian Prayer Book authority, Leonel Mitchell, expressed this quite clearly when he said in his original preface that there is a “dependence of theology upon worship” (Leonel Mitchell and Ruth Meyers, Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer [New York: Seabury, 2016], xviii). And as another writer says unequivocally, “The Prayer Book serves as our greatest pedagogical source” (J. Barrington Bates, “On the Search for the Authentic Liturgy of the Apostles: The Diversity of the Early Church as Normative for Anglicans,” Journal of Anglican Studies 12, no. 1 [2012]: 46). In some cases, this perspective is expressed even in terms of strict adherence to the rubrics in such a way that, according to some, violation of the rubrics is grounds for ecclesiastical discipline. This is no doubt the fruit of believing that the Prayer Book alone is sufficient to bind Anglicans doctrinally (and that lex orandi lex credendi is a one-way street—our theology never governs or informs our prayer), untethered from the original formularies of the Church of England, and unaccompanied by faithful preaching and teaching of the Scriptures. It makes complete sense, therefore, that the revisers of the 1979 American Prayer Book (The Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church [New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979]; hereafter BCP 1979) would bury the Thirty-Nine Articles deep in the publication, subsumed under the heading, “Historical Documents.”
. See the summary of this in Ashley Null, “The Power of Unconditional Love in the Anglican Reformation,” in Reformation Anglicanism: A Vision for Today’s Global Communion, ed. Ashley Null and John Yates III (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 45-76.
. Cranmer, “Preface,” 17.
. Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3.
. E. C. Ratcliff, “The Liturgical Work of Archbishop Cranmer,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 7, no. 2 (October 1956): 191.
. C. S. Lewis observes other doublets that expanded on single Latin words: peccata is doubled as “sins and wickednesses”; mortifica, “mortify and kill”; videant, “perceive and know,” tradi, “to be betrayed and give up.” He says that doublings like these produce “great rhythmical benefits” that have produced a Prayer Book which is, in Lewis’s estimation, “the one glory of the Drab Age” of English literature. See his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 204, 217-18.
. The prayers from Joye and The King’s Primer are recorded in Geoffrey Cuming, “Thomas Cranmer: Translator and Writer,” in Language and the Worship of the Church, ed. David Jasper and R. C. D. Jasper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 110-11. The Collect from the Prayer Book is from Ketley, Liturgies, 58. The original Latin from the Gregorian Sacramentary reads, “Deus qui hodierna die corda fidelium sancti spiritus illustratione docuisti: da nobis in eodem spiritu recta sapere, et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. Per . . .” (from F. E. Brightman, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, vol. 1 [London: Rivingtons, 1915], 442).
. Cranmer, “A Fruitfull Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” in Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. Roland B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 62, 67. English in this and all subsequent quotations from the Homilies has been modernized. For more on Cranmer’s expansion of words and phrases for the purpose of meditative rumination on Scripture, see Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church Growth,” in Towards a Theology of Church Growth, ed. David Goodhew (New York: Routledge, 2016), 209-10.
. On Cranmer’s liturgy and the heart, see especially Stephen Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 1-20.
. In Morning Prayer (1552) “heart” and its cognates appear eleven times: Opening Sentences (3); exhortation to Confession (2); Confession (1); Venite (3); Benedicite (1); and Suffrages (1). In 1549, Matins only mentions “heart” once. In Holy Communion (1552) “heart” and its cognates appear twenty-eight times: the Collect for Purity (2); Decalogue (10); Prayers for the king and his “heart” (3); Offertory sentences (1); optional Collects for the closing of the service if Communion is not celebrated (2); Prayers of the People (1); second Exhortation to communion (1); third Exhortation (2); Confession (1); Absolution (1); Sursum Corda (1); Words of Administration (1); Post-Communion Prayer (1); Peace (1). An additional mention is in the liturgy’s opening rubrics about a reconciled person who has forgiven “from the bottome of hys hearte” (see Ketley, Liturgies, 265). In 1549, Holy Communion mentions “heart” only thirteen times. Prior to that, corda and its Latin cognates appear only seven times in the Sarum eucharistic rite.
. The term missional is another admitted anachronism. It is a twentieth-century word, and a concerted effort toward what we now call missions and evangelism did not develop until the turn of the eighteenth century. Still, what we are arguing is that some of the emphases of the modern missions movements—emphases such as inculturation, intelligibility, and hospitality to the outsider—are present in Cranmer’s reasoning. As we will see, it is not simply that Cranmer desired a more intelligible liturgy, but intelligible for the sake of reaching more people. See Ketley, Liturgies, 18. Cranmer actually makes this statement three times.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 17.
. Cranmer, “Preface” to the Great Bible (1540, being the second edition of the 1539 Great Bible), in John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 120. One of the great ironies for those still using older forms of the Prayer Books is that properly engaging such liturgies now requires a “master or an expositor.”
. MacCulloch points this out near the 37:30 mark in “The Book of Common Prayer,” In Our Time podcast, produced by the BBC, released October 17, 2013.
. In his annotations on Henry’s corrections of the Bishops’ book, Cranmer squabbles with Henry over the use of the word cure versus the use of charge when referring to pastoral ministry. His stated reason for preferring the latter is thus: “It is a small difference between ‘cure’ and ‘charge,’ but that the one is plain English, and the other is deducted out of the Latin” (Henry Jenkyns, The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 [Oxford: The University Press, 1833], 77; emphasis added). See also Thomas A. Krosnicki, “How Dark the Night: The ‘Inlumina’ Prayer,” Worship 85, no. 5 (September 2011): 449, who points out that in Cranmer’s translation of a particular prayer, “Rather than a verbatim or obsequious Latinized English translation, the Anglican genius took the text and tailored it for the community of his day and the vernacular of his time. In the language of today, we could argue that he worked according to the principle of ‘dynamic equivalence.’”
. Besides the most obvious example of Wycliffe and the Lollards, Eamon Duffy points out that the desire for the vernacular predates the Reformation and was a broadly felt impulse in medieval England generations before Cranmer: “More than a century before Mirk had used parish clergy to encourage their parishioners to say their prayers in English” (Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992], 80).
. See Zieman, Singing the New Song, 86.
. See Paul Ayris, “The Public Career of Thomas Cranmer,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 4 (2000): 124-25.
. Some liturgiologists call this criterion “conformity.” See J. Barrington Bates, “Expressing What Christians Believe: Anglican Principles for Liturgical Revision,” Anglican Theological Review 92, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 458.
. Cranmer, “Preface,” in Ketley, Liturgies, 19.
. See Richard Rex, “The Crisis of Obedience: God’s Word and Henry’s Reformation,” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 863-94.
. David Evett calls this “hegemonic legitimation,” namely that it was Henry’s chief agenda to legitimize his crown and see to it that all of England be his loyal subjects. Interestingly, Evett posits that this is why the language of “servant” and “service” is so strongly featured in the Prayer Book (see Evett, “Luther, Cranmer, Service, and Shakespeare,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher W. Hodgkins [Newark: University of Delaware, 2004], 89).
. Cranmer, of course, did believe in the divine right of kings (i.e., the royal supremacy), which, “from about 1531 until literally the last morning of his life, remained Cranmer’s guiding principle” (MacCulloch, All Things, 120), but the question for the Archbishop here was one of whether a well-ordered society could be produced simply by a forceful submission of the will, or by something else, namely, the gracious, forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ.
. Marion Hatchett, “The Anglican Liturgical Tradition,” in The Anglican Tradition, ed. Richard Holloway (Wilton: Morehouse-Barlow: 1984), 51: “From a practical standpoint this establishment of uniformity was made easier and cheaper by pulling the various rites and directions that had been scattered through a number of volumes . . . into one book which, with the Bible, would provide all the necessary texts and be within financial reach of parishes and of individuals.”
. K. J. Walsh, “Cranmer and the Fathers, especially in the Defense,” Journal of Religious History 11 (1980): 236.
. Krosnicki, “How Dark the Night,” 451-52.
. Cranmer, “Preface,” in Ketley, Liturgies, 17, 18.
. Cranmer, “Preface,” in Ketley, Liturgies, 18.
. What Cranmer would understand as biblical or scriptural certainly needs to be clarified. The Church of England divided along these lines not long after Cranmer’s death in what would eventually be known as the “normative” and “regulative” principles, though the seeds of the debate were sown in Cranmer’s lifetime. The flashpoint that seemed to formalize the debate occurred among the Marian exiles in Frankfurt, between the more normative perspective argued by Richard Cox and the more regulative perspective argued by John Knox. Perhaps anachronistically speaking, Cranmer himself appears to have been more of a normativist (see Null, “Church Growth,” 210-12). Aside from this what we can learn more generally about the Archbishop’s understanding of the Scriptures can be discerned from his behaviors as a Cambridge don prior to his archiepiscopal appointment, where he had a reputation of being unbending in his demands of students’ knowledge and apprehension of the Bible. Once made Archbishop, we also see quite immediately from the records of his visitation injunctions that he “demanded that the text of Holy Scripture should be interpreted according to its literal sense” (Paul Ayris, “Thomas Cranmer and the Metropolitical Visitation of Canterbury Province 1533-4,” in From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Record Society Miscellany, ed. S. Taylor [Woodbridge: Church of England Record Society, 1999], 12). As a humanist, he would have desired the “pure sense” of the text to be exposited, and he would no doubt therefore desire more plain readings, interpretation, and application of the Scriptures in and through the liturgy.
. See above, n36.
. This Article, “Of Traditions of the Church,” parallels Article XXXIV of the Thirty-Nine Articles. To be clear, this article is arguing for diversity between regions or countries, even as the Prayer Book seeks “but one use” within the country of England. But the acknowledgment of even this kind of diversity tempers the absolutism that is sometimes present in some current conversations about liturgical conformity.
. Ratcliff, “Liturgical Work,” 202.
. Ashley Null continues to prepare Cranmer’s notebooks, coined “Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces,” for publication through Oxford University Press, the first volume of which is tentatively titled The Efficacious Word: Thomas Cranmer on Scripture, Vol. 1, Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces. In those notebooks is evidenced not just a haphazard study, but a mastery of patristic sources.
. See e.g., Hatchett, “Anglican Liturgical Tradition”: “We know a lot more about this normative period of church history than Thomas Cranmer could possibly have known” (49); “While Cranmer could pick up from his sources many details about early liturgy, he could not learn about structures and the order of the elements” (50). Hatchett criticizes Cranmer’s simplification of the Church Year, assuming he did so because of antiquity: “Cranmer greatly simplified the Church Year, basically adopting that of the German Church Orders. (These were based on a false assumption that days commemorating principal New Testament saints were older than Black Letter Days)” (53). Even if Cranmer did in fact assume, and assume falsely, the point is that it does not appear to enter consideration that Cranmer might have other, perhaps more fundamental criteria guiding decisions such as these.
. Diarmaid MacCulloch thinks that Cranmer was less committed to antiquity than many assume (All Things, 120-21).
. Spinks, “Renaissance,” 273.
. This is to a certain degree what is argued (admittedly for different reasons than ours) in Edward Lambe Parsons and Bayard Hale Jones, The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 30.
. There is an implicit critique here of the many voices leading liturgical revision in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries which have often claimed fidelity to the work of Cranmer in their own liturgical enterprises. For instance, to cite a most recent example, the Anglican Church in North America’s 2019 Prayer Book states that its liturgy “is indisputably true to Cranmer’s originating vision of a form of prayers and praises that is thoroughly Biblical, catholic in the manner of the early centuries, highly participatory in delivery, peculiarly Anglican and English in its roots, culturally adaptive and missional in a most remarkable way, utterly accessible to the people, and whose repetitions are intended to form the faithful catechetically and to give them doxological voice” (The Book of Common Prayer [2019] [Huntington Beach, CA: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019], 5; hereafter BCP 2019). We notice in this statement nearly all the criteria we have listed above as being that which identifies what is faithful to Cranmer’s “originating vision.” Given how differently the BCP 2019 liturgy looks from Cranmer’s (one need only examine the eucharistic liturgy), and given all that this book will argue, we have reason to find such claims very disputable. But assertions like these have been made for generations. One of the most influential liturgical textbooks in Anglicanism in the first half of the twentieth century, A. G. Hebert’s Liturgy and Society: The Function of the Church in the Modern World (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), would conclude, after articulating theological emphases quite different from those of Cranmer (particularly with regard to Pauline theology), “The Prayer Book needs revision, but a revision in the same faith in which it was compiled, and a revision in the true liturgical spirit” (226). Future liturgical scholarship would take the assumptions much further. As the decades roll on, an increased boldness is notable as there is a move beyond merely believing that they are carrying the Cranmerian mantle. With the spirit of progressivism in the air, we hear talk of how the evolution of theology allows more recent generations to beat Cranmer at his own game. Urban Holmes’s article, “Education for Liturgy: An Unfinished Symphony in Four Movements,” in Worship Points the Way: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Massey Hamilton Shepherd Jr., ed. Malcolm C. Burson (Greenwich: Seabury, 1981), 116-41, recounts the history leading to the triumph of the 1979 American revision. Holmes speaks of “the demise of classical theology” (136), “the growing theological sophistication of the Episcopal Church” (136), and “an awakening, a newly educated theological consciousness” (137). This kind of perspective would lead another prominent American liturgist, Charles Price, to conclude, “It has been said that as assurance of immortality was the acute spiritual need of the early Church, and assurance of forgiveness the acute need in sixteenth century Europe, community is the acute need of our time” (Charles P. Price, Introducing the Proposed Book [New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1976], 29). The idea is that as theology changes, the application of Cranmer’s principles should change. What was not realized is that Cranmer’s theology stood at the head of his principles. In other words, those principles were bound up in his more fundamental theological criterion of the gospel. If this is true, then many modern claims of “being true to Cranmer” must now be reexamined.
. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (New York: Seabury Press, 1945), 672.
. Nathan Jennings measures liturgical theology as “about a half a century old,” its beginning marked by the synthesis of Dom Gregory Dix and Henri de Lubac in the writing of Alexander Schmemann. See Nathan G. Jennings, Liturgy and Theology: Economy and Reality (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 23.
. See Christopher J. Ellis, Gathering: A Theology and Spirituality of Worship in Free Church Tradition (London: SCM Press, 2004), 30.
. Juan M. C. Oliver, “Worship, Forming and Deforming,” in Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, ed. Ruth Meyers and Paul Gibson (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010), 6; emphasis original. Similarly, Stephen Sykes notes, “It is a failure of some consequence when liturgical texts are examined as though they were simply a collection of dogmatic declarations or confessional statements put into the mouths, alternately, of priest and people,” and then advocates that we must give proper attention to the liturgy’s “structure, dramatic actions, rhythms and repetitions as well.” See Stephen Sykes, “‘Baptisme Doth Represente unto Us Oure Profession,’” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 123.
. Though beyond the scope of this present treatment, a further feature complicating analysis is exposed in the work of Katherine Zieman, who ably demonstrates the “salient paradox of medieval Christian liturgy,” namely, “that it participated simultaneously in the worlds of orality and literacy.” Her elucidation of the “hybrid textual practice” of this era shows that there is more work to be done in analyzing the “embodied, communal knowledge” of late medieval England’s long transitional period between oral and literary culture (Zieman, Singing the New Song, x).
. See David W. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013). Though especially Protestants need more critical reflection on liturgically appropriating the idea of theology as askesis. Cf., for instance, Oswald Bayer, “Theology as Askesis: On Struggling Faith,” in Gudstankens aktualitet: Festskrift til Peter Widmann, ed. Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Bo Kristian Holm, and Anders-Christian Jacobsen (Copenhagen: Forlaget Anis, 2010), 35-54.
. On this idea, see Zahl, Holy Spirit, especially .
. David Fagerberg typifies this interpretation when he summarizes the view of the “Schmemann-Kavanagh school of liturgical theology” as “the lex orandi of the Church establishes her lex credendi” (Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism, ix). For an important history and analysis of the misunderstanding of lex orandi lex credendi, see the forthcoming dissertation of Steven Zank, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
. Nathan Jennings affirms the ordering of prayer over believing when he states, “One of the primary gifts of liturgical theology is the reassertion of this hermeneutical claim of a foundational ontology of action over understanding, event over meaning.” Act is foundational, and “understanding [is] impotent until enacted.” See Jennings, Liturgy, 91. I share Bryan Spinks’s perspective: “Although the popular little adage Lex orandi, lex credendi . . . is important, the idea that doctrine only flowed from liturgy and that doctrine never impacted and changed liturgical practice is pious humbug and wishful thinking” (Bryan D. Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day [London: SCM, 2013], xii). For a still useful analysis which offers a lay of the land for possible interpretations of lex orandi lex credendi, see Johnson, “Liturgy,” 202-25.
. Aidan Kavanagh, “Response: Primary Theology and Liturgical Act,” Worship 57 (1983): 324. Kavanagh first formally articulated the distinction between primary theology (theologia prima) and secondary theology (theologia secunda) in the late 1970s, which would be eventually published in his On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press, 1984). Primary theology is that which is enacted before and with God in the liturgy, and secondary theology is what we more often think of when we use the term theology—reflection on the God we encounter. This distinction is akin to Kant’s, between the “world-oriented task” and the “academic/school task” when it comes to learning and being human (see discussion in Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003], 18-19). One helpful summary of the primary-secondary theology distinction is found in Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 48-52.
. Indeed, because of what we just stated above about sola fide being best parsed in experience, I believe there may be some consonance (or at least overlap) between liturgical theology’s prioritized categories here—lex orandi lex credendi, primary and secondary theology (Kavanagh), act founding understanding (Jennings)—and the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, especially as articulated by Luther, Melanchthon, and Cranmer. I detect part of this overlap, for instance, in Oswald Bayer’s treatment of Luther’s theology when he asserts, “Luther holds that the ‘monastic’ aspect of theology with its liturgical spirituality grounded in the divine service is constitutive, in that this provides theology with its content. On the other hand, he says that its ‘scholastic’ academic aspect is purely regulative in that it orders, analyzes, and reflects on the content of theology and makes the necessary distinctions and connections.” Bayer earlier claims, “Contemporary thinkers are scandalized when a study of Luther’s understanding of theology leads to the thesis that theology and faith should not be fundamentally distinguished, let alone separated” (Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007], 83). So it seems that Luther’s “monastic” theology parallels Kavanagh’s primary theology, and Luther’s “scholastic” theology parallel’s Kavanagh’s secondary theology. But given the earlier statement of Bayer, I wonder if these distinctions, though helpful, are artificial. Perhaps there is a deeper unity between primary and monastic or secondary and scholastic theology that precludes too much ontological prioritization, contra Jennings.
. Perhaps this book can offer another central maxim for liturgical theology from the field’s underrepresented Protestant tradition: nullum evangelium, nulla ecclesia (or, an even more creative and chiastic phrase offered me by Samford University Latin scholar, Douglas Clapp, abest evangelium ecclesia abest). Though I wonder if the starting places of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are too different from that of Reformation Christianity, particularly in their anthropological and soteriological assumptions. One can detect the difference in these two definitions of “liturgy.” Fagerberg (Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox): “Liturgy is the Trinity’s perichoresis kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent into deification” (Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism, 9); Leithart (Reformation Protestant): “Liturgy is God speaking to and feeding His people” (Peter J. Leithart, Theopolitan Liturgy [West Monroe, LA: Theopolis Books, 2019], 47).
. Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966), 39.
. Even if we might come to different conclusions, I find that Maxwell Johnson’s articulation of the matter strikes a chord with the project of this book:
If Schmemann is right in noting that the underlying, unchanging, and fundamental principle of the Ordo has been so obscured by a scholastic theology and concomitant mysteriological piety such that it has changed not only the understanding but also the “experience” of the liturgy, then the recovery of this principle might indeed provide the basis of a liturgical reform which would allow the Church’s true lex orandi to function in a clearer fashion as “source” for both theology and piety. (Johnson, “Liturgy,” 208)
. I therefore share Geoffrey Wainwright’s concern for a boundaried, criteriological analysis of the church’s lex orandi: “Worship . . . is a source of doctrine in so far as it is the place in which God makes himself known to humanity in a saving encounter. The human words and acts used in worship are a doctrinal locus in so far as either God makes them the vehicle of his self-communication or they are fitting responses to God’s presence and action” (Doxology [New York: Oxford, 1980], 242-43). Because of this, I admit opening myself up to the same concluding critique Johnson offered Wainwright when he wrote that Wainwright’s “focus on the superiority of the lex credendi over the lex orandi actually inhibits their complementarity in favour of a particular theological and doctrinal orientation to which the lex orandi must conform” (“Liturgy,” 224).
. Though we probably have differing understandings of what the “demands of the Gospel” are, I find in the concluding sentences of Charles Price’s hopeful manifesto for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer a deeply resonant statement: “The value of tradition, though great, is also not ultimate. Both must be brought under the demands of the Gospel as recorded in Scripture” (Price, Introducing the Proposed Book, 18-19).
1. The Position of Sola Fide in Cranmer’s Theology
. Indeed, this idea affirms liturgical theology’s distinction between primary and secondary theology described in the introduction.
. Caroline M. Stacey, “Justification by Faith in the Two Books of Homilies (1547 and 1571),” Anglican Theological Review 83, no. 2 (2001): 260.
. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 8; emphasis original.
. Stephen Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 7.
. Cranmer, “Answers to the Fifteen Articles of the Rebels, Devon” (1549), in The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 181.
. Still, see the new insights emerging from Ashley Null’s forthcoming work on Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces, including this foretaste regarding Cyril of Alexandria and Cranmer’s sacramentology: Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer,” in Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Justin S. Holcomb and David A. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 221-29; and Null, “Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered,” in Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, ed. D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 203-8. From research like this, Null would summarize Cranmer’s mature eucharistic theology as “a supernatural, proleptic, ontological participation in the cosmic Christ” in a lecture given at All Saints Church in Belfast, released on YouTube, January 17, 2017, youtu.be/OUNiLqaHMXU. One of the better surveys and analyses of Cranmer’s sacramentology is Gordon Jeanes, Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London: T&T Clark, 2008). Jeanes’s introduction in particular is a helpful overview of post-Tractarian scholarship on Cranmer’s eucharistic theology, and offers the careful conclusion that Cranmer’s mature sacramentology is indeed “Cranmerian” in that it is too nuanced to be fully aligned with Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin, Martyr, or Łaski (156).
. Notably Jeanes, Signs; Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J. I. Packer, introduction to The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965); and Peter N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (London: MacMillan, 1965).
. It is probably more accurate to say that Cranmer, as a late medieval theologian, did not view soteriology and sacramentology as sharply discrete categories of theology. Nevertheless, for the sake of making certain observations, we are using the language of sacramentology “subsumed under” soteriology.
. Null, “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church Growth,” in Towards a Theology of Church Growth, ed. David Goodhew (New York: Routledge, 2016), 205.
. Gordon Jeanes, noting well the brief discussion of baptism in the Homily on Salvation, probably rightly sees that the relative absence of the sacraments in the homilies is due to the then-present sensitivity of the sacramental debate—such discussions “needed cautious delay,” no doubt (Jeanes, Signs, 98). And as Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, the Book of Homilies offered “a promise that the eucharist would be discussed in a proposed second batch of homilies” (MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation [London: Penguin, 1999], 67). Nevertheless, one could argue that justification by faith alone was no less sensitive or divisive, and Cranmer clearly pulled no punches there, even amidst an unstable and potentially hostile geopolitical climate (MacCulloch, Militant, 66-67).
. See Richard S. Briggs, “The Christian Hermeneutics of Cranmer’s Homilies,” Journal of Anglican Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 173.
. Null, “Cranmer,” in Sacraments, 211.
. Paul Bradshaw, The Anglican Ordinal: Its History and Development from the Reformation to the Present Day (London: SPCK, 1971), 14: “[Cranmer] preferred to reserve the name ‘sacrament’ for rites which signified the remission of sins rather than use it in a more general sense.”
. Cranmer, “The Great Parliamentary Debate” (1548), reproduced in Colin Buchanan, ed., Background Documents to Liturgical Revision 1547–1549 (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1983), 16; spelling and punctuation modernized, and emphasis added.
. Cranmer, “Corrections of the Institution of a Christian Man, by Henry VIII, with Archbishop Cranmer’s Annotations” (ca. 1538), in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 99-100.
. Not to be missed is another important treatise by Cranmer or a close associate, titled De sacramentis dating around 1537–1538, which not only uses this same kind of language but incorporates the explicit distinction between law and gospel: Constat igitur sacramentum omnium consensu duabus rebus, scilicet verbo et elemento, et verbo quidem ipsius Dei, quae non est vox legis tantum praecipientis fieri ceremoniam, sed Evangelii quod pollicetur nobis in ceremonia remissionem peccatorum (By the agreement of all, a sacrament consists of two things, that is the word and the element, and the word is indeed that of God himself, not the voice of the Law which ordains only the performance of a ceremony, but of the Gospel which in the ceremony promises to us the remission of sins). This transcription and translation are provided by Gordon Jeanes, “A Reformation Treatise on the Sacraments,” Journal of Theological Studies 46, no. 1 (1995): 168, 182, respectively. Jeanes argues for Cranmerian authorship, whereas Null believes it to be by a close associate (Null, Repentance, 269-76). See the former’s subsequent treatment of De Sacramentis in his Signs, 67-75.
. Cranmer’s 1537 speech to a small convocation of bishops, recorded in Alexander Alesius, De authoritate verbi dei liber Alexander Alesij, contra Episcopum Lundensem (Strassburg, 1542), 23. The quoted translation comes from what Ashley Null calls the “less learned abridgement” in English, titled, Of the auctorite of the word of God agannst the bisshop of london (1537), sig. A9. See Null, “The Authority of Scripture in Reformation Anglicanism: Then and Now,” in Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity: Essays in Honour of Diarmaid MacCulloch, ed. Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer, Ashley Null, and Alec Ryrie (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), 82n28. Though in what follows we will focus on the Lord’s Supper, Gordon Jeanes has shown Cranmer’s parallel development in his understanding of baptism. Particularly in of his Signs, Jeanes traces Cranmer’s evolution, with special attention to his commonplace notebooks, away from baptismal regeneration, concluding that “in order to achieve consistency in his theology of justification, he is forced logically to break the strict link between the sacrament of baptism and the salvation which it signifies . . . the principle has been established in his mind, and it will gradually work its way through his whole theological understanding” (Signs, 92; emphasis added).
. For “promise” (promissio) as the center of Luther’s understanding, see in particular Oswald Bayer’s Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 44-67.
. Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull and William F. Russell, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 212. A few months prior to Babylonian Captivity, Luther had penned “A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass,” which outlines a theology of promise from Adam to Christ in a similar fashion. See Luther’s Works (American Edition, vol. 35 of 55 vols.), ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–1986), 82-87. Hereafter, references to this series will be abbreviated as “LW.”
. Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, trans. Christian Preus (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2014), 94; emphasis added.
. Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531), in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 107-294.
. Cranmer, “A Fruitfull Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” in Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. Roland B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 62.
. Cranmer, “An Homily of the Salvation of Mankind, by Only Christ Our Savior from Sin and Death Everlasting,” in Bond, Sermons, 85.
. Cranmer, “Corrections” (1538), in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 113.
. Cranmer, Exhortation before the 1544 English Litany, in J. Eric Hunt, Cranmer’s First Litany, 1544 and Merbecke’s Book of Common Prayer Noted, 1550 (London: SPCK, 1939), 77; English modernized.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 147.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 147.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 167.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 170.
. Melanchthon, Apology IV.210, 152.
. Martin Luther, “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics” (1526), in LW 36, 348; emphasis added. See also the passages in Babylonian Captivity, in Lull and Russell, Writings, 211-15.
. Bryan Spinks, Luther’s Liturgical Criteria and His Reform of the Canon of the Mass (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982), 30-31.
. See Null, “Cranmer,” in Sacraments, 215ff.
. Cranmer, The Ten Articles (1536), in Charles Lloyd, ed., Formularies of Faith Put Forth By Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford: Clarendon, 1825), xx. See also Gordon Jeanes, who demonstrates the substantial linkage between Cranmer’s baptismal liturgies and those of Luther: “Liturgy and Ceremonial,” in Liturgy in Dialogue, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks (London: SPCK, 1993), 22ff.
. Cranmer, “Defense of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ” (1550); quoted in Null, “Cranmer,” in Sacraments, 217.
. Cranmer, “An Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation devised by Steven Gardiner” (1551), in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 52.
. Stacey, “Justification,” 265. Sumner speaks similarly of the unity underlying preaching and sacraments when in the context of a discussion on Cranmer he states, “The Word is better understood if the sermon is its sacrament in airwaves, and the latter is the Word affixed to the elements so as to make His presence bodily immediate” (George R. Sumner, Being Salt: A Theology of an Ordered Church [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007], 37).
. Stephen Sykes, “‘Baptisme Doth Represente unto Us Oure Profession,’” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 133.
. And we should note well that while the Reformed liturgies which predated Cranmer had their own versions of “Comfortable Words” in eucharistic liturgies (Bucer’s Strassburg liturgy of 1537, and Hermann’s Cologne liturgy of 1544–1546), Cranmer’s liturgy was the only one to make the Comfortable Words mandatory alongside absolution, as opposed to interchangeable with absolution. This may perhaps be a sign that Cranmer’s soteriological understanding was more Lutheran than Reformed.
. Null, Repentance, 3.
. Packer, “Introduction,” xv.
. See Sykes, “Open Heart,” 8.
. Cranmer, “Disputations at Oxford” (1554), in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 399; emphasis added.
. Cranmer, “Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ” (1550), in Henry Jenkyns, The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 [Oxford: The University Press, 1833], 356: “[The papists] say, that Christ is received in the mouth, and entereth in with the bread and wine: we say, that he is received in the heart, and entereth in by faith.”
. Cranmer, “Debate” (1548), in Buchanan, Documents, 17.
. Cranmer, “Disputations” (1554), in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 398.
. For additional insights on this, see the end of , under “Sola Fide and Consecration, Reception, and Blessing of the Elements.”
. Cranmer, “Defence” (1550), in Jenkyns, Remains, vol. 2, 447.
. See Null, “Cranmer,” in Sacraments, 215.
. Cranmer, “Answer,” 348: “But all such priests as pretend to be Christ’s successors in making a sacrifice of him, they be his most heinous and horrible adversaries. For never no person made a sacrifice of Christ, but he himself only.”
. Cranmer, “Defence,” 452. Not surprisingly, we once again find a forerunner of this argumentation in Luther himself: “You will ask, ‘If all who are in the church are priests, how do these whom we now call priests differ from lay men?’ I answer: Injustice is done those words ‘priest,’ ‘cleric,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘ecclesiastic,’ when they are transferred from all Christians to those few who are now by mischievous usage called ‘ecclesiastics.’ Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, although it gives the name ‘ministers,’ ‘servants,’ ‘stewards’ to those who are now proudly called popes, bishops, and lords and who should according to the ministry of the Word serve others and teach them the faith of Christ and the freedom of believers. . . . That stewardship, however, has now been developed into so great a display of power and so terrible a tyranny that no heathen empire or other earthly power can be compared with it” (Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” [1520], in Three Treatises [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990], 291-92).
2. The Grammar of Sola Fide Defined
. Indeed, “intertextuality” pervades the writing of Paul. One could say that his epistles are works of interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Furthermore, the scriptural themes and controversies of Paul’s day—for instance, the relationship between faith and works—run through the other books of the New Testament, such as in the epistle of James and the Gospel of John. With regard to the latter, David Ford sees the apostle John as acquainted with the writings of Paul and his “school,” to the point that his gospel could be said to combine “the Synoptic narrative approach with some of the main pillars of Pauline theology” and to utilize the letter of the Ephesians as “one of the most fruitful intertexts” in John (David Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2021], 4n3). All this is to say that the rich intertextuality between Paul, the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other New Testament writers suggests that to read Paul is, in fact, to enter through him into the entire Bible.
. It is beyond the scope of this work to fully rehearse the topic of justification in modern Pauline scholarship. What follows is admittedly brief and focused, relying heavily on the work of Jonathan A. Linebaugh, whose scholarship stands among the most vital and authoritative for processing this complex conversation.
. And Anglican liturgics would follow suit. A classic example is A. G. Hebert’s Liturgy and Society: The Function of the Church in the Modern World (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), which was highly influential in the US and the UK over an entire generation of priests and liturgists. Though Hebert decries the wasteland of theological liberalism and articulates a commitment to Christian orthodoxy, his emphasis is much less on the gospel of Christ crucified and much more on what he calls “the Gospel of the Incarnation” (114). Hebert critiques Luther for being too individualistic in his theological approach and overly focused on “tender personal piety mixed with an anxious self-scrutiny” (163) over against a more communal vision for faith, liturgy, and society. Hebert ultimately interprets Paul, contra Luther, as supporting his premise that justification serves the more central doctrine of the church as the mystical body of Christ. Similarly we find a decade later the influential Anglo-Catholic theological work of E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences (originally published by Longman, Greens and Co Ltd. in 1946, but here referenced in the recent reprint by Hendrickson in 2017), redefining justification along more Roman or Thomist lines as “a real impartation of Christ’s life to us and a real elevation of us to him” (88), to the end that justification would be subsumed under the incarnation and its “doctrine of the permanence of Christ’s manhood” (xix), which Mascall defines as the “unifying principle” of the church (xvii) and “central principle of Christian theology” (xix).
. Jonathan A. Linebaugh, “The Grammar of the Gospel: Justification as a Theological Criterion in the Reformation and in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71, no. 3 (2018): 288. This article also appears in Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022), and contains all pertinent references to Wrede, Schweitzer, Stendahl, Sanders, and others.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 289.
. German Zentrum and Mitte (along with the Latin radix), perhaps coined or at least codified by Hans Iwand, Glaubensgerechtigkeit nach Luthers Lehre (1941); see Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 291-92.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 296n43: “The identification of justification as the ‘centre’ of Paul’s theology is imprecise: ‘the gospel of Christ’ is the theological radix; justification relates to that gospel both critically and hermeneutically, naming not-gospels and norming the articulation of the gospel.”
. Frederick W. Norris, “Theology as Grammar: Nazianzen and Wittgenstein,” in Arianism After Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts, ed. Michael R. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 237-49. In particular, Wittgenstein said, “Essence is expressed by grammar. . . . Grammar tells what kind of object anything is (Theology as grammar)” (§371, §373, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [New York: MacMillan, 1953], 116). Two other significant voices have shaped modern conversations of theology as grammar: John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845) and An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Burns, Oates, & Co., 1870); and George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984).
. Paul L. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 18. The connection between theology as a grammar and liturgical theology’s concepts of primary theology and secondary theology (discussed in the introduction) should be apparent.
. Lindbeck, Doctrine, 74.
. Lindbeck, Doctrine, 84.
. It should be clear, therefore, that as we discuss justification as a grammar, there will be points of continuity and discontinuity between what we are referring to and what these broader conversations around postliberalism (especially stemming from Lindbeck) mean by the term.
. Johann Georg Hamann reports encountering Luther’s words: “Theology is nothing but a grammar of the words of the Holy Spirit.” See Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 289n16.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 290.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 292.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 294.
. Linebaugh, “Grammar,” 294.
. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 566: “Grace is discovered in an event . . . in the gift of Christ, which constitutes for Paul the Gift. This gift is experienced and interpreted as an incongruous gift”; Jonathan A. Linebaugh, “The Uglier Ditch: First-Century Grace in the Present Tense,” in The New Perspective on Grace: Paul and the Gospel after Paul and the Gift, ed. Edward Adams, Dorothea H. Bertschmann, Stephen J. Chester, Jonathan A. Linebaugh, and Todd D. Still (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022, forthcoming).
. Though we will not entertain this important angle for our present discussion, this idea of radical disjunction and categorical exclusivity as inherent to the nature of justification and salvation is bound up in the eschatological character of Paul’s soteriology. In this reading, “eschatological dogmatics” frames justification, with the cross as the hinge on which time bent over on itself. It is precisely in the radically disjunctive events of Christ’s death and resurrection where the old aeon died, where the “I” died, and where the new aeon broke in. This sharp discontinuity (as sharply distinguished as death is to life) shapes the character of justification in that its business is to (a) make categorically exclusive distinctions and (b) summarize itself in the disjunctive Pauline language of “not I, but Christ,” both of which we will outline in what follows. On the eschatological character of justification, see Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018), esp. 3-15.
. Latin: opus alienum Dei and opus proprium Dei. These two, in particular, are Reformation formulations of Paul.
. I am at least somewhat taking a cue from Stephen Westerholm who discusses the difficulty of using English equivalents of the flexibly declined δικαιο- word-group. He anglicizes and then declines dikaios as an adjective (dikaiosness) and a verb (dikaiosify). I’m attempting to do something similar by retaining justification language while turning it into an adverb. See Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 262-63.
. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 60: “The subject matter of theology is conceptualized as a dynamic event, which can be described only by making distinctions.”
. That this radical distinction can be felt is a particularly important category for a study such as this, which seeks to connect doctrine to embodied liturgical practice and experience. See Simeon Zahl’s notable treatment of the affective power of incongruous grace and how it is tangibly experienced in bodies and across time, where in particular he interacts with and expands on Barclay’s work (Simeon Zahl, “Incongruous Grace as Patterns of Experience,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 22, no. 1 [2020]: 60-76).
. David Lincicum, “Philo of Alexandria and Romans 9:30-10:21: The Commandment and the Quest for the Good Life,” in Reading Romans in Context: Paul and Second Temple Judaism, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 122-28.
. Quoted in Lincicum, “Philo,” 124.
. Lincicum, “Philo,” 125-26. The table is adapted from Lincicum.
. Lincicum, “Philo,” 127.
. Jonathan Linebaugh, “‘The Speech of the Dead’: Identifying the No Longer and Now Living ‘I’ of Galatians 2:20,” New Testament Studies 66, no. 1 (January 2020): 87-105. This article will appear in Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022).
. Linebaugh answers these questions well in the essay.
. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 583n60: “Paul’s exclusion of ‘works’ from God’s election is probably directed against a certain segment of early Jewish theology.” Moo goes on to cite Philo’s contrasting interpretation in Allegorical Interpretation of the Laws, 3.88.
. These insights are drawn from Barclay, Gift, 520-61. See also Orrey McFarland, “Philo of Alexandria and Romans 9:1-29: Grace, Mercy, and Reason,” in Reading Romans in Context: Paul and Second Temple Judaism, ed. Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 115-21.
. Indeed, Ambrose is bountifully appealed to as Augustine interprets Paul in conjunction with refuting the theology of Pelagius, which is of keen interest to us precisely because it is in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings where we see the Pauline grammar most obviously at work. See esp. Augustine, “A Treatise on the Grace of Christ, and on Original Sin,” I.47-55, in Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume V—St. Augustine: Anti-Pelagian Writings (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1887), 233-36.
. Ambrose, Flight from the World (De fuga saeculi), 3, 15 and 7, 39: CSEL 32/2, 175 and 194. Quoted by Augustine, “Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians,” IV.30, in Answer to the Pelagians, II, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1998), 212.
. Ambrose, Concerning the Resurrection, ii.6, quoted in Augustine, “On Original Sin,” II.47, in Answer to the Pelagians, 254.
. This is Cranmer’s own quotation of Ambrose in his Homily on Salvation from Roland B. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 82; emphasis added.
. While Ambrose and Chrysostom serve here as illustrative exemplars, more work could be done in outlining how the grammar worked throughout and beyond the patristic period, and it certainly would be fruitful for our purposes, given the findings of Ashley Null in Cranmer’s notebooks. Evidently, Cranmer gathered extensive quotations of the Fathers around certain soteriological loci such as “sola fides,” “ex sola fide iustificamur,” and “contra merita humana.” The breadth of the Fathers (and beyond) included Ambrose, Chrysostom, Origen, Jerome, Bede, Gregory, Bernard, Thomas Netter, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Athanasius, Prosper, and Cassiodorus. The evidence is clear: Cranmer had a keen interest in how sola fide was engaged by the early and late church fathers. See Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J. I. Packer, introduction to The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965); 264. Null’s more recent research (“Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered,” in Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, ed. D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021], 201-3, 215-16) shows even more patristic sources with lengthier texts analyzed than previously realized, including Cranmer’s substantial study of Chrysostom.
. Quoted in Cranmer, “Scripture,” in Bond, Sermons, 62. Cranmer goes on in this homily to return, again and again, to that particular favorite term, “comfort.”
. If one is rightly reading the directionality, one might be able to say that as Cranmer articulated a very Luther-like approach to hermeneutics (i.e., the law-gospel distinction) in his Homily on Scripture, the Archbishop sought patristic corroboration in the likes of Chrysostom rather than mere allegiance to one of Cranmer’s contemporaries. In other words, Cranmer defended his Lutheran interpretation of Paul by mining the Fathers (as Luther himself did). However, we acknowledge important differences between Cranmer and the Fathers around these theological matters, for example: Chrysostom denies unconditional election—a contrast with Cranmer and the Reformers.
. Augustine, “Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians,” II.18, in Pelagians, II, 155; emphasis original.
. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, chap. 13 (Lexington: Beloved Publishing, 2014), 12. I should note that in this particular discussion this translation and those of Schaff are at times more useful than the more critical New City Press editions, because those editions repeatedly translate Augustine here as “help.”
. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 16.
. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 20.
. Augustine, “A Treatise on the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants,” II.33, in Schaff, Writings, 57; emphasis added. Again, the more critical New City Press edition translates the word here as “help.”
. Augustine, “A Treatise on Nature and Grace, Against Pelagius,” I.46, in Schaff, Writings, 137.
. Augustine, “A Treatise on Grace and Free Will,” I.9, in Schaff, Writings, 447. Though we will not make mention of it beyond this note, we see here a doctrine worth tracing from Augustine, through Luther, to Cranmer, as it bolsters the argument in favor of the grammar of sola fide—namely, the bondage of the will. It would be worth further study to explore more thoroughly this doctrine through the liturgy of Cranmer.
. Augustine, “Two Letters,” III.2, in Schaff, Writings, 403.
. Augustine, “Two Letters,” III.20, in Schaff, Writings, 412.
. Augustine, “Faith and Works,” in On Christian Belief, trans. Ray Kearney (New York: New City Press, 2005), 254.
. Augustine, “Two Letters,” I.36, in Schaff, Writings, 388.
. Augustine, “Nature and Grace,” I.13, in Schaff, Writings, 125: “Not again to be committed, by God’s assisting grace.”
. Augustine, “Nature and Grace,” I.79, in Schaff, Writings, 149.
. Augustine, “Nature and Grace,” I.70, in Schaff, Writings, 146.
. We have leaped over significant spans of time and thought from Augustine to the Reformation—most notably Aquinas—when it comes to justification and other aspects of soteriology. In the interest of brevity and clarity of thought (the Reformers would take significant issue with late medieval scholasticism’s soteriology in particular, and would often appeal to Augustine to do so), we move on to the sixteenth century. We should also note with respect to Melanchthon that for our purposes, we are interested in what later scholarship would identify as the “early Melanchthon,” especially as understood from his Loci Communes (1521) and his Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531). In this period of Melanchthon’s thought, his soteriology was more closely aligned with that of Luther, which is why we treat them together in this section.
. On the reception of Augustine by Luther and Melanchthon, see especially the treatment of those Reformers’ “affective Augustinianism” in Simeon Zahl, “The Bondage of the Affections: Willing, Feeling, and Desiring in Luther’s Theology, 1513-25,” in The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition, ed. Dale M. Coulter and Amos Yong (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 181-206; and Zahl, “Bondage of the Affections,” 183-231.
. Luther: “After I discovered the difference, that the law is one thing and the gospel is another, then I broke through.” Quoted in Bayer, Luther’s Theology, 58.
. Martin Luther, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, theses 72 and 79, in Timothy F. Lull and William F. Russell, eds., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 6.
. Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, theses 1 and 23, in Lull and Russell, Writings, 15.
. Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, thesis 26, in Lull and Russell, Writings, 16.
. See esp. Simeon Zahl, “On the Affective Salience of Doctrines,” Modern Theology 31, no. 3 (July 2015): 438-44. And notice here the echoes of Chrysostom, quoted above.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 91.
. Augustine, Spirit, 39 (chap. 40).
. Quoted in Bayer, Luther’s Theology, 59-60; emphasis added; n.b. the affective language. Not only does justification make us righteous, it makes us “free, and joyful.”
. For promise (promissio) as central in Luther, see especially Bayer, Luther’s Theology, 44-67.
. See, for instance, Melanchthon’s interpretation of Genesis: “This is the first promise, the first Gospel. By it Adam was consoled, and by it he conceived a sure hope of his salvation. Therefore, he was also justified. And then the promise was made to Abraham that his seed and all the nations would be blessed. Surely this promise could not be understood except concerning Christ. . . . These promises are clearly nothing other than the Gospel itself” (Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 93).
. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 313-14.
. Latin: “Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis conclusiones,” Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–2009), I.631, 33-34.
. See, for example, the employment of the term in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession throughout Article IV on justification; cf. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 121, 127, 130, 139, 141, 149, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173.
3. The Grammar of Sola Fide in Cranmer
. Below, we are arguing for a very “Lutheran” Cranmer. This discussion focuses its arguments on the framework established, but there exist far more thorough treatments of the “Lutheran” Cranmer worth noting. Chiefly, Gil Kracke’s dissertation (“Häuptartikel”) most exhaustively outlines Cranmer’s soteriology as Lutheran, and he has built on the work of Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). If Cranmer indeed was soteriologically Lutheran, we are forced to reevaluate much of Anglicanism’s current self-understanding as a via media between Rome and the Reformation. While by evolution this is now true of modern Anglicanism (for the Laudian, Tractarian, and Anglo-Catholic movements have decidedly had their impact), it at least cannot be claimed that such a notion was in the minds and hearts of Cranmer and the founders of the Church of England in the sixteenth century. Rather, at its founding, the Church of England might best be understood historically as a via media not between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism but between the Lutheran reformation (soteriology) and the Reformed reformation (sacramentology).
. See especially the history traced by Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Thomas Cranmer’s Biographers,” in All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 256-78.
. There is perhaps no better proof of this claim than Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer (originally intended to be set in side-by-side contrast with his predecessor, William Warham), where the reformer is depicted with the Pauline epistles in hand and Augustine’s De fide et operibus laid on the desk in front of him. See especially Ashley Null’s expositions of this painting in Repentance, 84-85, 96-97, 102-3, 109-10; “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Evangelicalism,” in The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities, ed. Kenneth J. Stewart and Michael A. G. Haykin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 236-38; “Thomas Cranmer’s Reading of Paul’s Letters,” in Reformation Readings of Paul, ed. Michael Allen and Jonathan A. Linebaugh (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 211-13; and Null, “Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered,” in Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, ed. D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 189-94.
. See
. Jonathan Linebaugh, “The Texts of Paul and the Theology of Cranmer,” in Reformation Readings of Paul: Explorations in History and Exegesis, ed. Michael Allen and Jonathan A. Linebaugh (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 237.
. Linebaugh, “Texts,” 238. See also Packer, introduction to The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), xxiii, and Ashley Null, “Salvation and Sanctification in the Book of Homilies,” The Reformed Theological Review 62, no. 1 (April 2003): 14-28.
. Cranmer, “Of the Salvation of All Mankind,” in Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. Roland B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 81-85; emphasis added.
. It is telling of the Reformation grammar that the single most important word to summarize its theological emphasis is sola.
. Indeed, scholarly consensus generally agrees that these 1537 annotations are the earliest record of Cranmer’s mature understanding of justification; cf. e.g., Null, Repentance, 121; Gordon Jeanes, Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 63.
. John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 95.
. Cranmer brilliantly ties together Ps 42; Mt 5:6; Lk 1:53; Jn 4; Jn 6; Mt 11:28; Jn 7; and Gal 2:20.
. Cox, Works, vol. 1, 38-40. Notice here the connection between a very Pauline-Augustinian-Lutheran soteriology and a scriptural passage which would become Cranmer’s unique contribution to the Reformation liturgies’ newly minted “Comfortable Words.” Though the usage of Comfortable Words in the Communion liturgy predates Cranmer, the Archbishop appears to be one of the first to employ Mt 11:28, but see comments below on Zwingli’s earlier use in , under “‘Not I, But Christ Structurally: Holy Communion (1552),” in the section titled, “On the positioning and use of the Comfortable Words and Absolution.”
. All this calls into question the conclusion of Basil Hall who criticized Peter Brooks’s assessment of Cranmer’s theology by arguing that Brooks confused the locus “faith” with the locus of “justification by faith.” In Hall’s words, “Cranmer wrote that our justification could be confirmed and enlarged through the renewal of the knowledge of forgiveness of sins at the Eucharist, as did Luther, but not that justification sola fide was the means to this nor was it the basic principle of the sacrament” (Basil Hall, “Cranmer, the Eucharist and the Foreign Divines in the Reign of Edward VI,” in Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar, ed. Paul Ayris and David Selwyn [Woodbridge: The Boydle Press, 1993], 257). If what we have argued and will argue is true, then the distinction Hall makes between “faith” and “justification by faith” (not only in Cranmer, but in Luther, Melanchthon, Augustine, and Paul) does not hold. Against Hall, we are arguing that justification sola fide actually is “the basic principle of the sacrament.”
. Stephen Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 1-20.
. Sykes, “Open Heart,” 7.
. Sykes, “Open Heart,” 7.
. Packer, “Introduction,” xxiv.
. Ibid., xxvi. Though Packer’s preferred paradigm is to speak of cycles of “sin-grace-faith.” See also J. I. Packer, The Gospel in the Prayer Book (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 4-11: Samuel Leuenberger analyzes Cranmer according to Packer’s themes, as well in Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest: The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: An Evangelistic Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), 105-19. These cycles, as we will observe later, are quite compatible with a law-gospel framework, and Leuenberger does specifically mention law and gospel in relation to Peter Martyr’s (Reformed) influence (see 24-25). But very little attention or connection is drawn to Augustine or Luther (much more to Calvin and Peter Martyr), and none is given to Melanchthon.
. Sylvia A. Sweeney, An Ecofeminist Perspective on Ash Wednesday and Lent (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010), 107-121, observes the sin-grace-faith structure permeating Cranmer’s reformed Ash Wednesday liturgy, which by 1552 he calls “A Commination Against Sinners” (Ketley, Liturgies, 323-327).
. Gavin Dunbar, “Like Eagles in this Life: A Theological Reflection on ‘The Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion’ in the Prayer Books of 1559 and 1662,” in The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future, ed. Prudence Dailey (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011), 86-89. Dunbar uses the language of “repentance, faith, and works” (87), referencing a 2006 sermon of Rowan Williams which notes how this triad cycles in a “spiral movement” (88). Special thanks to Samuel L. Bray, whose article, “Ashes in a Time of Plague,” The North American Anglican, January 6, 2021, accessed July 9, 2022, https://northamanglican.com/ashes-in-a-time-of-plague/, pointed me to the work of Sweeney and Dunbar.
. Null, Repentance.
. See esp. the appendix in Null, Repentance, 254-78. Null’s conclusion, refuting K. J. Walsh whose article (“Cranmer and the Fathers”), which argued for a Cranmer who rather carelessly prooftexted patristic sources to bolster his Protestant positions, appears to have held sway for around two decades: “The suggestion [by Walsh] that Cranmer’s scholarly method relied on patristic gobbets for proof-texting rather than undertaking systematic study of the fathers must be revised” (Null, Repentance, 268). Null’s more recent study of the notebooks of Cranmer’s secretary, Pierre Alexandre, who was tasked with creating massive, indexed epitomes of the works of the major early church theologians, reveals that Cranmer’s study of the Fathers was even more comprehensive than we realized. Those manuscripts are Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin MSS 3396, 624, and 1647. Null describes the contents of these manuscripts in his lecture, “Cranmer in Context: The Patristic Sources for his Theology under Henry VIII,” given at Nashotah House Theological Seminary on October 2, 2019. The lecture is found here: www.youtube.com /watch?v=Eta5hHZSNQs&t=828s.
. See .
. Cranmer, “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” in Bond, Sermons, 62; English modernized. Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that, though we do not know for certain, Cranmer’s composition of this homily is probable. See MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 372.
. Cranmer, “An Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner,” in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 83.
. This is where the soteriology of Cranmer and the Reformers departs from Augustine. For the Reformers, even good works done after initial justification are still the work of God through faith, because in their understanding of Paul, initial and final justification are wrapped up in the same event—the entire justification secured at the cross of Christ. For Augustine, assisting grace works with the believer after initial justification such that one’s future final justification, which as yet remains to be rendered, will be secured.
. Null, “Thomas Cranmer and the Anglican Way of Reading Scripture,” Anglican and Episcopal History 75, no. 4 (2006): 510-11. In an email to the author on December 28, 2021, Null summarized Cranmer’s medieval context which elucidates how “pneumatologically-loaded” the grace-centered collects are, even as they do not mention the Spirit by name: “From a Protestant view, Grace is an attribute of God’s character. From a traditionalist, liturgical point-of-view, grace is the function of the Holy Spirit at work in the individual. . . . In scholastic theology, there are two kinds of graces, Uncreated Grace, i.e., the Holy Spirit, and Created graces, e.g., sanctifying grace, which is the power of God at work in an individual.” (Logically the scholastics could not accept that the infinite, i.e., the Holy Spirit, could be confined in the finite, i.e., a human being, so a theory of a form of the Holy Spirit that could be within a human being was developed, i.e., sanctifying grace.) So if you read grace as the power of the Holy Spirit at work in human beings, you find the Holy Spirit throughout Cranmer’s Collects. This will be an important insight given what we will argue below, esp. in .
. Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 280.
. For an excellent treatment of pneumatology, Christian experience, transformation, and how justifying grace operates in them with a “strongly disjunctive character”—a discussion which I believe fleshes out, in modern theological conversation, Cranmer’s own Augustinian perspective here—see Simeon Zahl, “The Bondage of the Affections: Willing, Feeling, and Desiring in Luther’s Theology, 1513-25,” in The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition, ed. Dale M. Coulter and Amos Yong (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 183-231.
. Cranmer, “Salvation,” 85; English modernized.
. Cranmer, “A Short Declaration of the True, Lively, and Christian Faith,” in Bond, Sermons, 94.
. Cox, Works, vol. 2, 324.
. Null, Repentance, 125; emphasis added.
. Null, Repentance, 262, 264-65; emphasis added.
. See the comments on the connection between the Holy Communion Absolution and “promise” in Stephen Sykes, “Baptisme Doth Represente unto Us Oure Profession,” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 140. This comparison, including the translation of the Latin, is made in Andrew Atherstone, “The Lord’s Supper and the Gospel of Salvation: Grace Alone and Faith Alone in the Book of Common Prayer,” in Feed My Sheep: The Anglican Ministry of Word and Sacrament, ed. Lee Gatiss (Watford: Lost Coin Books, 2016): 93.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 218, 219; emphasis added.
. J. Eric Hunt, Cranmer’s First Litany, 1544 and Merbecke’s Book of Common Prayer Noted, 1550 (London: SPCK, 1939), 68.
. This will be the final terminological and conceptual connection drawn in tracing the Pauline grammar from the apostle, through the Fathers and Reformers, to Cranmer. Space does not here permit some other possible avenues of research, but in my studies I found the concepts of will-heart and service-freedom to be two additional points of connection between Cranmer and his predecessors. On the former, I found significant Ashley Null’s article, “Thomas Cranmer’s Theology of the Heart,” Anvil 23, no. 2 (2006): 207-17. On the latter, insights can be culled from David Evett, “Luther, Cranmer, Service, and Shakespeare,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher W. Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware, 2004), 87-109.
. Cranmer, “Scripture,” in Bond, Sermons, 62.
. “Comfort” by itself is used once. “Comfort and consolation,” as a pair, is used twice.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 42.
. Alesius, Auctorite, sig. A8; De authoritate, 21-22. The speech is also recorded in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 79. For a good summary of this event, see Null, “The Authority of Scripture in Reformation Anglicanism: Then and Now,” in Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity: Essays in Honour of Diarmaid MacCulloch, ed. Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer, Ashley Null, and Alec Ryrie (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), 82-83; for context and dating, see also Null, Repentance, 133 (esp. n52); and MacCulloch, Cranmer, 188ff.
. It is used at the moment of Absolution: “Absolutionem et remissionem omnium peccatorum vestrorum, spatium verae poenitentiae et emendationem vitae, gratiam et consolationem sancti Spiritus, tribuat vobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus” (Absolution and remission of all your sins, space for true repentance, amendment of life, grace, and the consolation of the Holy Spirit, the Almighty and merciful God grant to you). From William Maskell, The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1882), 18.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 80.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 216.
. This observation of John Dowden was rearticulated and clarified in Geoffrey Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer (London: SPCK, 1983), 80. NB that Cranmer’s source liturgies were both Latin and German. For more on the background of the Comfortable Words, see below , under “‘Not I, But Christ Structurally: Holy Communion (1552),” in the section titled, “On the positioning and use of the Comfortable Words and Absolution.”
. Perhaps speculative, it is interesting that Cranmer’s novel addition to the marriage service includes a listing of the benefits of marriage, one of which was comfort. It is as though Cranmer was saying, among other things, that marriage becomes for us a picture of the gospel itself. In his liturgical work, Cranmer often appears to liberally expand on received liturgies where there might be a chance to expound the gospel. Cranmer’s addition here also makes sense of his own appropriation of Erasmus’s positive view of the affective benefits of marriage toward godliness against the more negative perspective (in tandem with clerical celibacy) that had dominated medieval thought for at least a thousand years prior. On this, see relevant passages in Ashley Null, The Word of God and its Efficacy in Thomas Cranmer: New Insights into his Sources and Mature Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Worth noting at the end of this section is the theological connection between comfort and pneumatology. Not a few modern liturgiologists have criticized Cranmer and the other Reformation liturgies for being devoid of the Holy Spirit (and therefore functionally binitarian). For instance, in a paper delivered to the Evangelical Theological Society in 2014, Frank Lyons charged, “Where does the Spirit go? He is mentioned only infrequently and as such is very much in the background. . . . The lack of reference to the Spirit is because the Reformers are wont to remove any attention from Jesus and his effective sacrifice, and they value a direct encounter with God without magical or mystical properties that can be misunderstood” (“Critiquing Cranmer: Ordo and Ecclesial Identity,” Evangelical Theological Society 66 [November 2014]: 5). Similarly, Paul Bradshaw heralds the “rediscovery of the Holy Spirit” in modern liturgical work (“The Rediscovery of the Holy Spirit in Modern Eucharistic Theology and Practice,” in The Spirit in Worship—Worship in the Spirit, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks [Collegeville, MN: Pueblo, 2009], 79-98). Additionally, in speaking of the Spirit in Cranmer’s sacramental theology, Gordon Jeanes laments that “the Spirit is so totally subsumed to [Cranmer’s] Christocentric emphasis” (Signs, 156). And yet, Cranmer seems to have understood biblically that comfort was a particular function of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 9:31). In Cranmer’s day, the common English translation of John 15:26’s παράκλητος was “comforter” (1537 Matthew Bible). Cranmer’s Confirmation rite acknowledges the “Holy Ghost the Comforter.” Cuming observes this when he says that “the substitution of ‘comfort’ for ‘consolation’ provides both a stronger word and a link with ‘the Holy Ghost,’ the ‘Comforter’” (Geoffrey Cuming, “Thomas Cranmer: Translator and Writer,” in Language and the Worship of the Church, ed. David Jasper and R. C. D. Jasper [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990], 111). All these observations and more lead us more readily to the conclusion offered by Packer, namely that one of Cranmer’s top concerns in the liturgy “was to do justice to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, as the one who mediates experimental knowledge of the presence, power, and grace of Jesus Christ to the people of God. The Institution, the Prayer Book, and Cranmer’s weighty and glowing expositions of Christ’s spiritual presence at the sacrament . . . all testify to this concern” (“Introduction,” xxxiv). In light of this, I appreciate BCP 2019 for its slight but (in light of this discussion) significant shift in the language of the vows made by parents and Godparents at baptism. Whereas the BCP 1979 responds, “I will, with God’s help” (BCP 1979, 302, 304-305), BCP 2019 more clearly alludes to (if not names, though the word isn’t capitalized) the Holy Spirit: “I am, the Lord being my helper” (BCP 2019, 163, 165). Apparently, this shift toward greater pneumatological clarity was accidental, as I directly asked the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan (who oversaw the formulation and publishing of BCP 2019) about the change in a class on the Prayer Book through Trinity School for Ministry (June 7-8, 2021).
4. “Not I, But Christ” Structurally
. Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer’s Theology of the Heart,” Anvil 23, no. 2 (2006): 210: “The 1549 Prayer Book insisted on English as the language of the liturgy, institutionalized the systematic reading of Scripture, removed all references to personal merit and emphasized a eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”; emphasis added.
. Null, “Thomas Cranmer,” in Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Justin S. Holcomb and David A. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 227: “The 1549 Book of Common Prayer removed all references to personal merit and emphasized a eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving only. The 1552 Prayer Book, however, broke up the traditional order of the prayers in the Canon of the Mass so that the thanksgiving of the people was now their response to the grace received with the elements, not its grounds.”
. Packer, introduction to The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), xxvi; emphasis added.
. We take for granted what is unfortunately still contested in some conversations, namely, that the 1552 Prayer Book best represents Cranmer’s mature Protestant theology, and that the 1549 Prayer Book was a pastorally-motivated mid-point between the medieval Roman liturgies and the more thoroughgoing Reformation liturgy of 1552.
. “Sarum” refers to the medieval liturgical rites originating out of Salisbury, whose use was perhaps more widespread in England than any other region’s liturgies (e.g., York, Hereford). A “breviary” is a book containing services for each day (i.e., Daily Office). Matins, Lauds, and Prime were condensed into Morning Prayer, and Vespers and Prime were condensed into Evening Prayer, while Terce, Sext, and None (the shorter midday offices) were left out altogether. See Anthony Gelston, “Cranmer and the Daily Services,” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 61.
. This order is reproduced from Charles Neil and J. M. Willoughby, The Tutorial Prayer Book: For the Teacher, the Student, and the General Reader (London: The Harrison Trust, 1913), 90-91. It is taken from the first, second, and third editions of the Sarum Breviary, printed in 1516, 1531, and 1541, respectively.
. It is worth noting that one of the earliest commentators on the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Comber, in his 1670s A Companion to the Temple; or, A Help to Devotion in the Use of the Common Prayer, identified five groupings of the sentences, each addressed to different kinds of hearers: “support to the fearful” (Ps 51:9; 143:2; Jer 10:24); “comfort to the doubtful” (Ps 51:17; Dan 9:9-10; Luke 15:18-19); “instruction to the ignorant” (1 John 1:8-19; Ezek 18:27); “admonition to the negligent” (Ps 51:3; Matt 3:3); “caution to the formal” (Joel 2:13). This is outlined in Bray, “Sentences.”
. Sykes well observes: “All these scriptural verses are chosen to illustrate and teach the evangelical doctrine of the completeness of divine forgiveness” (Stephen Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout [Cambridge: Cowley, 1990], 7).
. Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 218.
. It is noteworthy that the Exhortation is opened with the congregation addressed as “Dearly beloved.” In these first two words, sinners are addressed as insiders, God’s children. Even the call to confession is done in a context of grace. This move appears to be original to the Reformation. Osiander’s 1533 Brandenburg-Nürnberg liturgy for the Lord’s Supper begins with a similar address, “Beloved in God,” which Cuming notes was lifted from Wolfgang Volprecht’s Mass of 1524 (A History of Anglican Liturgy [London: MacMillan, 1969], 328n1). Cranmer has followed suit with his Morning Prayer liturgy and elsewhere.
. The English translation is from Augustine, Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 25. The Latin is from Augustine, Confessions I: Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 16.
. As early as 1517, in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, Luther was arguing that concupiscence “is evil and a fornication of the spirit” (thesis 22). Melanchthon likewise includes all sinful desire under concupiscere (Commonplaces, 71, see esp. n22), and his Apology denies the medieval notion that concupiscence is merely a “weakness” or “inclination” to sin (à la Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas; see references in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000], 113n13). Calvin likewise says that because our flesh “has been defiled and crammed with this concupiscence,” the result is that “by this great corruption we stand justly condemned and convicted before God” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.1.8, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960], 251-52. Hereafter “Institutes.”)
. Charles Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, & Co., 1859), 288. In 1571, this would become Article IX in the Thirty-Nine Articles (Hardwick, History of the Articles, 289).
. This categorization here is admittedly more ambiguous. Still, what we observe is that Cranmer grouped the Scripture together and separated out the acts of response—the “I believe” of the Creed and the following prayers. The Word stands alone. Given that the Reformation hermeneutic was that “there are two parts of Scripture . . . Law and Gospel” (Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 91), it seems plausible that Cranmer would have understood that as the Word was read, it would be doing its work in this fashion. The grammar of sola fide trusts the Word to be heard the way the hearer needs to hear it—terror for some, or the comfort it leads to for others. Even if this is an overinterpretive reach into Cranmer’s thinking, what is clear is the separation of the work of the Word (Scripture reading) from its effects (works of prayer and praise).
. Oswald Bayer observes Luther, in the reformer’s sermons and more formally in the 1520 catechism, similarly parsing the distinction between law and gospel in his treatments of the Decalogue (law) and the Creed and Lord’s Prayer (gospel). As Bayer notes, “Prayer belongs to the gospel, not the law, because it is a gift, not a work.” One sees the echoes of Luther’s distinctions in Cranmer’s structure. See Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 71.
. Such a comparison exists in Charles Neil and J. M. Willoughby, The Tutorial Prayer Book: For the Teacher, the Student, and the General Reader (London: The Harrison Trust, 1913), 256-59 (a more detailed synopsis of Sarum and the 1549 rite), and 281 (an abridged synopsis of Sarum, 1549, 1552, and 1662). A full-text comparison (in English) of Sarum and 1549 is set forth in E. E. Estcourt, The Dogmatic Teaching of the Book of Common Prayer on the Subject of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), 17-39.
. Walter Howard Frere, Some Principles of Liturgical Reform: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer (London: John Murray, 1911), 191-93. We hear inklings of this critique, too, in James F. White’s comments about Cranmer’s “drastic restructuring” of the liturgy when “the canon was cut in two.” He seems to offer at least subtle praise of the American tradition when he says that those “prayer books utilized a much richer Scottish eucharistic prayer.” He does not pause, however, to ask the question of why Cranmer restructured or abandoned the “richer” eucharistic prayer. See James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 246.
. Samuel Leuenberger, Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest: The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: An Evangelistic Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), 24.
. Packer, “Introduction,” xxvi.
. These insights from Leuenberger recast in a law-gospel framework were introduced to me by Ashley Null in a doctoral course at Knox Theological Seminary, “DM826: The Theology of Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer,” January 12-16, 2015. They are presented here with only slight modification.
. Packer, “Introduction,” xxvi.
. The sermon and homily were discrete options in 1552. The homily would have been the prescribed text from the 1547 Book of Homilies to be read by the priest. As we will expand on in , not every priest in Cranmer’s day was capable of preparing and delivering a sermon, which is most likely why the rubric reads “After the Creed, if there be no sermon, shall follow one of the homilies already set forth,” and then, “After such sermon, homily, or exhortation . . .” (Ketley, Liturgies, 268).
. Ketley, Liturgies, 77; emphasis added.
. As Oberman points out, the Decalogue does appear in pre-Reformation liturgies, but nearly always in the form of the private devotional prayers of the priest as opposed to the public rite. He notes well that there were in fact pre-Reformation liturgies, such as Surgant’s Manuale Curatorum (1502), which paved the way for making the Decalogue and other such priestly prayers public. See Heiko Oberman, “Preaching and the Word in the Reformation,” Theology Today 18, no. 1 (1961): 20.
. Null indicates that Martin Bucer’s 1537 Strassburg rite for Communion included at the front of the service “three possible confessions from which to choose, the last being based on the Ten Commandments,” but that appears to be about as close as we get to a parallel. See Ashley Null, Divine Allurement: Cranmer’s Comfortable Words (London: The Latimer Trust, 2014), 228.
. John Dowden, Further Studies in the Prayer Book (London: Meuthen & Co., 1908), 171.
. Calvin brought back his Strassburg liturgy, originally printed in 1540, to Geneva in 1541. This liturgy, derived from Bucer (according to Calvin’s farewell address on his deathbed), was put together by Calvin to lead his French-speaking congregation in Strassburg. There are no extant copies of this 1541 liturgy, but we do have an edition from 1545, indicating that even after Calvin left, the Strassburg congregation continued using Calvin’s rite. Poullain himself followed Calvin as pastor to Strassburg’s French-speaking congregation (see Jonathan Gibson and Mark Earngey, Reformation Worship: Liturgies from the Past for the Present [Greensboro: New Growth Press, 2018], 304). It is notable that Calvin himself apparently added the use of the Decalogue into the liturgy (it does not appear in Bucer), including splitting the first and second table, with the second clearly following all prayers of Confession. See Bard Thompson, Liturgies of the Western Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1961), 188-89, 198, and also Gibson and Earngey, Worship, 309-10.
. Perhaps unaware of Reformed perspectives on the law and law-keeping (see the next note), Dowden considered Poullain’s division of the Decalogue “grotesque” (Further Studies, 171).
. While the distinction between law and gospel finds much common ground between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, it is the Reformed tradition which has been historically more willing to speak of how the law functions for the regenerate Christian after grace and forgiveness. At that point, it is grace-enabled “delight in God’s gift of the law without being condemned by it.” It becomes a “living under the blessings of divine favor” (see Kelly M. Kapic, “The Law-Gospel Distinction in Reformed Theology and Ministry,” in God’s Two Words: Law and Gospel in the Lutheran and Reformed Traditions, ed. Jonathan A. Linebaugh [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018], 136-37). The Reformed tradition stresses how the preface to the Ten Commandments indicates the law’s function after grace: because the believer has been redeemed out of slavery, the law is heard not as condemnation but something positive—the fruit and calling of the redeemed life (cf. e.g., the Westminster Larger Catechism question and answer 101). In this sense, Poullain’s reservation of the second table of the Decalogue for after Absolution is a very Reformed move. A good brief summary of the nuances of difference between the Reformed and Lutheran traditions on the law can be found in Jonathan A. Linebaugh, introduction to God’s Two Words: Law and Gospel in the Lutheran and Reformed Traditions, ed. Jonathan A. Linebaugh (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 1-11.
. Jan Łaski’s Reformed Forma ac ratio (1555), which had an influence on Cranmer, keeps the Decalogue all together (albeit after the sermon), after which immediately follows an admonishment of the minister “to acknowledge those sins, to bring an accusation against themselves on that basis, and to implore Divine Mercy” through a confession of sin which prays, “we are convicted of seeking all these things and of being liable to all these troubles by the testimony of this divine law” (see Gibson and Earngey, Worship, 464-65). We should note here the fifth homily of 1547, probably by Cranmer, on “Good Works, Annexed unto Faith.” In it the Archbishop identifies the Ten Commandments as the fruit of the justified, faith-filled life: “The works of the moral commandments of God be the very true works of faith, which lead to the blessed life to come” (Bond, Sermons, 106). But even while Cranmer identifies law-keeping as the fruit of faith, it appears that in his liturgy, in contrast to Poullain, he still recognizes that the function of the law—both liturgically and in life—is properly to kill, to terrorize, and to prepare the heart for the (fruit-bearing) gospel. This is furthermore where Cranmer stands in contrast to two of his influential colleagues, Bullinger and Hooper, and the burgeoning Zurich “covenant theology.” This emerging perspective taught that the Decalogue was “an expression of the covenant relationship between God and man. Decalogue and covenant have a pronounced soteriological meaning. The covenant relationship implies that the partner in the covenant holds himself bound by the conditions of the covenant.” In this scheme, “the absolute requirement for remaining now in the relationship is the keeping of the Ten Commandments, or, to say it in other words, sanctification in one’s daily life” (Leuenberger, Bequest, 51). W. M. S. West summarizes Hooper’s understanding: “The way into the covenant is that of repentance and faith and the way to remain within it is to live the Christian life” (quoted in Leuenberger, Bequest, 51).
. Admittedly, whether one hears gospel here depends, first, on what readings are utilized from the lectionary and, second, on what the hearer hears in those readings. This second idea gets at the subjective nature of hearing and receiving the objective Word we explored above, in fig. 4.2. The ambiguity of this subjectivity is most likely why Packer would see my first two cycles as one cycle together—the sermon itself would bear the burden of preaching the gospel. This is therefore the weakest point in the argument for the flow of continuity of law→gospel→faith. Still, because the Creed functions so strongly as a faith-response, it seems more clear to me that if the grammar truly is at work, Cranmer would understand the readings as functioning as gospel-words.
. Colin Buchanan traces the development of the “Offertory,” noting that up to the fourth century, “In no instance is the ‘bringing in’ given any greater significance than that, though it was usual to describe the gifts as ‘oblations’ or ‘offerings,’ and even to say that they were ‘presented’ or ‘offered’ to the president—though this was an untechnical use of the same word in slightly different contexts. The eucharistic action itself had not begun” (The End of the Offertory—An Anglican Study [Bramcote: Grove Books, 1978], 12). Once Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book arrived, “The title ‘offertory’ is not used here, but is still introducing ‘Collects to be said after the Offertory, when there is no Communion’ at the end of the service. . . . Thus there is a difference of presentation, in that the wardens gather the money, and take it to the ‘poormen’s box’ which is now standing isolated at the East end, as the high altar itself has gone. The people have no need to go from the nave to the chancel, and the ante-communion continues after the offertory, so the people stay where they are in order to give” (21).
. Buchanan, Offertory, 22.
. This quote from Michael Ramsey is found in Bryan D. Spinks, “Mis-Shapen: Gregory Dix and the Four-Action Shape of the Liturgy,” Lutheran Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1990): 166.
. Granted, Roman Catholic theologians would point out that a proper theology of sacrifice does not entail that we offer something of our own but rather that we liturgically and mystically share and participate in the sufficient offering of Christ’s own sacrifice. In this sense, Cranmer was indeed responding to something different from Ramsey (who was concerned with erroneous interpretations initiated by Dom Gregory Dix and perpetuated by others in his wake [see Spinks, “Mis-Shapen,” 166-67]). Nevertheless, given what we are arguing, it does appear that Cranmer had a concern for a kind of Pelagianism present both in the Offertory rituals of his day and in the theology of sacrifice that gave it context.
. This two-part division of the liturgy is evidenced as early as the second century, detectible in Justin’s First Apology, chap. 65 (c. 150 AD); see Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (London: SCM, 2013), 31. The particular nomenclature used here appears to have been coined by William D. Maxwell, An Outline of Christian Worship: Its Developments and Forms (London: Oxford, 1936), 13n1, though I have not done extensive research into the origin of this language. As Maxwell indicates, dipartite designation in the East has traditionally been Proanaphora and Anaphora, while in the West Missa catechumenorum and Missa fidelium.
. Calvin seems to have shared this perspective. In his 1545 Preface to his own rite, he links the prayers after the sermon (which in the historic liturgy would follow the post-sermon Offertory as it does in Cranmer) to the sermon itself, indicating it as a response and outflow of the sermon’s gospel proclamation: “Quickened and stirred by the reading and preaching of the Gospel and the confession of our faith, . . . it follows that we must pray for the salvation of all men, for the life of Christ should be greatly enkindled within us” (quoted in Maxwell, Worship, 116).
. Neil and Willoughby, Tutorial, 257.
. Indeed, in medieval corporate worship, “oblations” were given to the priest by some of the devout, and four times a year on “offering days” a “Mass-penny” was obligatory, but, as John Dowden observes: “The prominent place given in our Service to a collection of money for the poor in the Service for the Holy Communion was a novelty in England. . . . That the ordinary rule should be that a collection for the poor was to form the normal order on every Sunday and holy day was quite a new thing” (Further Studies, 174-75). While Dowden observes that Cranmer may have taken a cue from the German Kirchenordnungen, he does not proffer any explanation (as we are attempting) as to why Cranmer may have introduced this novelty.
. Cox, Works, vol. 2, 503:
[The parish] shall provide . . . a strong chest, with a hole in the upper part thereof, to be provided at the cost and charge of the parish . . . , which chest you shall set and fasten near unto the high altar, to the intent the parishioners should put into it their oblation and alms for their poor neighbours. And the parson, vicar, or curate, shall diligently from time to time, and specially when men take their testaments, call upon, exhort, and move their neighbours, to confer and give, as they may well spare, to the said chest, declaring unto them, whereas heretofore they have been diligent to bestow much substance otherwise than God commanded, upon pardons, pilgrimages, trentals, docking of images, offering of candles, giving to friars, and upon other like blind devotions, they ought at this time to be much more ready to help the poor and needy, knowing that to relieve the poor is a true worshipping of God.
Note in this injunction the similarity to 2 Kings 12:9-10, which describes some of the reforms of King Joash of Judah: “Then Jehoiada the priest took a chest and bored a hole in its lid. He placed it beside the altar.” Perhaps, given Cranmer’s commitment to reform according to biblical practice, this too was a move of his “scripturality.”
. Cf. comments by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), 125. For some of the complexities (and, in my opinion, atrocities) of these late medieval “clerical economics,” see esp. Zieman’s explanation of what she calls “contractual” liturgy in Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 73-113.
. MacCulloch, Militant, 160.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 269.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 84.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 84.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 383.
. Matthew S. C. Olver understandably questions the wisdom of labeling this liturgical moment “absolution,” at least in reference to the Roman rite, given that absolution in Roman theology more specifically pertains to the sacrament of Reconciliation. From about the eleventh century, the mass contained a kind of confession—the Confiteor—said by the priest, followed by prayers requesting forgiveness (see Matthew S. C. Olver, “Confessions of a Penitential Orderer,” Covenant [May 10, 2022], https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2022/05/10/confessions-of-a-penitential -orderer/). Nevertheless, the Reformers appear to have understood this public moment of declaration of forgiveness as an instance of (effectual but non-sacramental) absolution (see, for instance, Bucer’s rubrics in n54 below). Though Olver’s point is well taken, given the Reformation perspective, we have chosen especially for comparison’s sake to refer to the declaration in Sarum as an absolution.
. To be clear, the Absolution of Sarum likewise offered forgiveness of “omnium peccatorum,” but the absence of a structure governed by the grammar of sola fide, combined with an entire context of medieval piety emphasizing personal penance, would have muted the clarity of the totalizing “all.” In fact, the “all” is voided in such a scenario, because what the liturgy gives verbally with the left hand it takes away structurally with the right.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 277.
. See references in and .
. An English translation of the Cologne liturgy is available in Geoffrey Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (London: MacMillan, 1969), 334-57.
. I am intentionally avoiding calling Hermann’s sentences “Comfortable Words” because it appears that his liturgy sometimes did and sometimes did not include “comfort” in the announced heading. The 1543 German version of Hermann’s liturgy (Einfältiges Bedenken) does announce, “Höret den Evangelischen Trost” (hear the gospel’s comfort), but the 1545 Latin version (Simplex ac pia Deliberatio) announces, “Audite Evangelium” (hear the gospel). See Cuming, History, 343; Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer (London: SPCK, 1983), 80; and Null, “Comfortable Words,” 228.
. Ashley Null has pointed out that it was Katherine Parr, the last of Henry’s queens, who had recorded Mt 11:28 as being instrumental in her conversion experience, and that Cranmer’s knowledge of Parr’s testimony is likely. I first heard Dr. Null make these observations in the doctoral course mentioned above (), but he also discusses Parr’s testimony in: “Comfortable Words: Thomas Cranmer’s Gospel Falconry,” in Comfortable Words: Essays in Honor of Paul F. M. Zahl, ed. John D. Koch, Jr. and Todd H. W. Brewer (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 220-21, 232; and “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church Growth,” in Towards a Theology of Church Growth, ed. David Goodhew (New York: Routledge, 2016), 197-98.
. Bucer’s 1537 liturgy flows in this way: A rubric that begins this section reads, “ein absolution oder trotspruch” (an absolution or comfortable word), followed by 1 Tim 1:15, then an Absolution, then a rubric (“Etwann nimmet er andere sprüch, die uns der verzeihung der sünden und bezalung Christi für unsere sünd getrosten”), and then four alternative verses are listed (Jn 3:16, 35-36; Acts 10:43; and 1 Jn 2:1-2). See Friedrich Hubert, Die Straßburger Liturgischen Ordnungen Im Zeitalter Der Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1900), 94-95. For more on the sources of the Comfortable Words, see Null, “Comfortable Words,” 227-28. See also Cuming, Godly Order, 80-81.
. From a personal conversation with Dr. Null on November 10, 2017, in Birmingham, Alabama.
. “In his revisions for the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, he decided to insert the Comfortable Words immediately before the Sursum corda. Thus, he put his twin means of moving human affections heavenward—scriptural rumination and cultural contextualization” (Null, “Church Growth,” 215). For an extended treatment of the “wooing” power of the Comfortable Words, see Ashley Null, Divine Allurement: Cranmer’s Comfortable Words (London: The Latimer Trust, 2014).
. See R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), 186. As Ashley Null points out, “Two years later, Zwingli deleted the biblical text from the new German communion service, but retained the verse on the cover of the book” (“Comfortable Words,” 227).
. Particularly in the last two centuries, largely because of the emergence and establishment of the ideals of the Oxford/Tractarian Movement (nineteenth century) and then again because of the ecumenically-oriented Liturgical Movement (twentieth century), Cranmer’s Communion structure came under intense criticism, particularly by Protestant scholars, precisely because of its deviation from the architecture of the historic Canon of the Mass and its abandonment of the historic prayers of older Christian rites. This criticism was especially effectual in the United States, yielding successive step after step away from Cranmer’s intention, particularly discernible in the 1928 and 1979 Prayer Book revisions. That said, the die was cast with the formulation of the first American Prayer Book back in 1789. Charles P. Price (The Prayer Book in the Church [Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1997], 11-12) notes the political nature of the move to include in the 1789 American Prayer Book what Cranmer had excised—namely, the anamnesis and epiclesis. Evidently, when Samuel Seabury, a minister in Connecticut, sought consecration as a bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church, one of the stipulations of his ascendancy was that he would ensure the inclusion of those prayers in the American book as the Episcopal Church was forming.
. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this book who significantly helped me in properly laying out this section of the Sarum Mass.
. For more on this change, see , under “Sola Fide and Consecration, Reception, and Blessing of the Elements.”
. Sarum: dona, munera, sacrificia illibata, and sacrificium laudis.
. Granted, in the Sarum Mass there are four references to being “unworthy” (indignus), but due to the mixture of merit and self-offering throughout the liturgy, such expressions of unworthiness are not as sharp and unequivocal as in Cranmer.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 7. The parallelism of “bodies” and “souls” implies that the adjective “sinful,” which modifies “bodies,” also modifies “souls.”
. English translation taken from R. P. Blakeney, The Book of Common Prayer in Its History and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (London: Miller, 1866), 398; emphasis added.
. Blakeney, Book, 399. There is controversy in Roman Catholicism surrounding the translation of placatus as “appeased.” An alternate translation of the same year as Blakeney’s renders the phrase, “graciously to accept this oblation of our service” (Charles Walker, The Liturgy of the Church of Sarum [London: Hayes, 1866], 65). The concern is over misrepresentation of Roman Catholic theology in the former translation. Roman Catholic scholar David Power has shown, however, that “graciously accept” is ultimately a mistranslation as a result of the unfortunate, even “elementary,” confusion of placare for placere, and that “being appeased” is integral as a part of the appropriate sphere of meaning of placare in both the Vulgate and the Roman Liturgy. Power therefore concludes, “The Latin tendency in medieval and pre-Reformation times was to reduce the offering of the Mass to this aspect of satisfaction or appeasement, but dissatisfaction with this should not lead to an annulment of this idea when it is kept alongside others” (David Power, “Theology of the Latin Text and Rite,” in A Commentary on the Order of the Mass of the Roman Missal: A New English Translation, Developed Under the Auspices of the Catholic Academy of Liturgy, ed. Edward Foley, John F. Baldovin, Mary Collins, and Joanne M. Pierce [Collegeville, MN: Pueblo, 2011], 276n47, 277). If Power is correct, then not only is “being appeased” an acceptable translation of placatus, but given its medieval setting in Sarum, it is the more accurate translation.
. The absence of the “Amen” is significant. Institution, Reception, and the Post-Communion Prayer (after which there is an “Amen”) are one fluid act of prayerful encounter with Christ through the Word of God.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 279; emphasis added.
. From justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/English.htm, accessed September 7, 2019. Note here, too, an instance where Cranmer’s liturgical criterion of scripturality is trumped by his commitment to the clarity of the gospel. Cranmer eliminates Scripture quotation—the Agnus Dei from Jn 1:29—because, while it may be straight biblical verbiage, its liturgical use (to encourage believers to adore the elements as Christ himself) is contrary to the scriptural gospel. For more on what we mean by this, see below on Cranmer’s application of sola fide to liturgical ceremonies.
. We will return to this idea in further detail in .
. Ketley, Liturgies, 94.
. I received this insight from Dr. Null in the aforementioned personal conversation (see ). But Leuenberger gets close when he says, “This great hymn at the close of the service is intended just by its placement to indicate in connexion with all of the liturgy that the most noble activity and indeed the acme of faith consists of laud and praise” (Leuenberger, Bequest, 111).
. Spinks, Luther’s Liturgical Criteria and His Reform of the Canon of the Mass (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982), 29.
. See references in Spinks, Criteria, 29.
. Vilmos Vajta, Luther On Worship: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1958), 27-63.
. Spinks, Criteria, 15. See also the brief discussion in Andrew Atherstone, “Reforming Worship: Lessons from Luther and Cranmer,” Churchman 132, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 106.
. Donald Fuller, “Sacrifice and Sacrament: Another Eucharistic Contribution from Peter Martyr Vermigli,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli and the European Reformations: Semper Reformanda, ed. Frank A. James III (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 236.
. Adapted from a chart in Fuller, “Sacrifice,” 234.
. Cranmer, “Defence,” 449.
. Cranmer, “An Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation Devised by Stephen Gardiner” (1551) in Cox, Works, vol 1., 359.
. Atherstone, “The Lord’s Supper and the Gospel of Salvation: Grace Alone and Faith Alone in the Book of Common Prayer,” in Feed My Sheep: The Anglican Ministry of Word and Sacrament, ed. Lee Gatiss (Watford: Lost Coin Books, 2016), 83. It is at least a little misleading for Nathan Jennings to contrast Luther’s total rejection of sacrificial language around the communion service with “the Anglican tradition within Protestantism” which, according to him, “never rejected the language of sacrifice with regard to the divine service” (Liturgy and Theology: Economy and Reality [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017], 72n64). Based on what we have here observed, at least these members of the Anglican tradition did in fact reject such language, evidenced by its inclusion only after the completion of the rite. While subsequent Anglicans (such as Jeremy Taylor) would indeed not reject sacrificial language around the Eucharist, there is still a strong witness in the tradition that follows in Cranmer’s footsteps.
. Despite the clarity of teaching on sacrifice offered by Cranmer and the English Reformers here outlined, Anglicanism’s post-Reformation history has fostered ambiguity. For a brief treatment of this history, see Colin Buchanan, An Evangelical Among the Anglican Liturgists (London: SPCK, 2009), 152-57. We should point out that many modern Anglican treatments of eucharistic sacrifice are more nuanced than the more flattened presentations offered here of what Cranmer is responding to in his day. Cf. e.g., Colin Dunlop, Anglican Public Worship (London: SCM, 1953), 77-87, and Jennings, Liturgy, 48-73.
. Stephen Sykes, “‘Baptisme Doth Represente unto Us Oure Profession,’” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 129-30.
5. “Not I, But Christ” Theologically
. Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 18.
. Translated by Geoffrey Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer (London: SPCK, 1983), 2. Original Latin: “Nihil enim humano elaboratum ingenio tam exactum initio unquam fuit quin postea multorum accedente iudicio perfectius reddi possit.” See J. Wickham Legg, ed., The Second Recension of the Quignon Breviary, vol. 1 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1908), xxiii.
. Luther, “Lectures on Romans,” (LW 25, 144).
. Cranmer, “Corrections,” in John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 86.
. Cranmer, “Corrections,” in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 86.
. Martin Luther, “Concerning the Order of Public Worship,” (LW 53, 14).
. James A. Devereux, “Reformed Doctrine in the Collects of the First Book of Common Prayer,” Harvard Theological Review 28, no. 1 (January 1965): 49-50: “The doctrine of justification was, genetically at least, the principal theological issue of the Reformation; yet its effects on the translation of the collects, though clearly discernible, were not revolutionary. This was chiefly because the notion of grace implied in them was, on the whole quite acceptable to the English Reformers.”
. See L. E. H. Stephens-Hodge, The Collects: An Introduction and Exposition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1961), 26-27. However, for more accurate dating and the complex history of authorship, composition, and use of the Gelasian Sacramentary, see Cyril Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, trans. and rev. William Storey and Niels Rasmussen (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 1986), 64-70.
. Devereux, “Collects,” 49.
. This translation, along with all subsequent translations, are the author’s unless otherwise noted. Note that the translations favor paralleling Cranmer for the ease of analysis. Latin: “Deus, qui humano generi ad imitandum humilitatis exemplum, Salvatorem nostrum carnem sumere et crucem subire fecisti: concede propitius, ut et pacientiae eius habere documentum et resurrectionis eius consortia mereamur,” taken from Leo Cunibert Mohlberg (ed.), Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Aeclesiae Ordinis Anni Circuli (Cod. Vat. Reg. lat. 316/Paris bibl. Nat. 7193, 41/56) (Sacramentarium Gelasianum) (Rome: Herder, 1960), 53 (no. 329).
. Ketley, Liturgies, 51.
. Devereux, “Collects,” 50.
. Latin: “Deus cui omne cor patet et omnis voluntas loquitur, et quem nullum latet secretum; purifica per infusionem sancti spiritus cogitationes cordis nostri, ut te perfecte diligere et digne laudare mereamur,” taken from F. E. Brightman, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, vol. 2 (London: Rivingtons, 1915), 640.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 77.
. Latin: “Omnipotens sempiterne deus, da nobis fidei spei & charitatis augmentum: et ut mereamur assequi quod promittis: fac nos amare quod precipis,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 2, 510.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 64.
. Latin: “Omnipotens et misericors deus, de cuius munere venit ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne & laudabiliter serviatur: tribue nobis quesumus, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus. Per dominum,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 2, 504.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 64.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 37-38.
. The following excerpts from Redman’s Primer and the King’s Primer are taken from Cuming, Godly Order, 51. It is interesting that though Cuming sets these prayers in juxtaposition, he makes no mention or analysis of Cranmer’s distinctive redactions.
. Cranmer adds the “merits of Jesus Christ” to one other collect (Whitsunday), a double-dose in the 1549 Communion liturgy’s Prayer of Oblation (“not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses”; “that by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ”) (Ketley, Liturgies, 89), and a retaining of the phrase in the re-placed post-Communion prayer of 1552 (“that by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ”) (Ketley, Liturgies, 280). Based on sola fide, for Cranmer, “merit” seems to be a word wholly inappropriate for self-attribution, except in our failure.
. See Devereux, “Collects,” 56-57.
. Latin: “Excita quaesumus domine potentiam tuam et veni, & magna nobis virtute succurre: ut per auxilium gratie tue quod nostra peccata prepediunt: indulgentia tue propitiationis acceleret,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 1, 213-14.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 42.
. Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55.
. Latin: “Vota quesumus domine supplicantis populi celesti pietate prosequere: ut & que agenda sunt videant: et ad implenda que viderint convalescant,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 1, 252.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 46.
. In the 1539 Great Bible, “call upon” is present fifteen times (Ps 14:4; 17:6; 18:2 [18:3]; 31:19 [31:17]; 50:15; 53:4; 79:6; 80:18; 86:5, 7; 88:9; 99:6 [twice]; 105:1; 141:1). (Brackets refer to references in modern translations.)
. Thomas A. Krosnicki, “How Dark the Night: The ‘Inlumina’ Prayer,” Worship 85, no. 5 (September 2011): 447, indicates that the prayer, though found in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries, predates those collections and is of obscure origin. This English translation is Krosnicki’s, with altered word order to parallel Cranmer for ease of reading. Krosnicki provides the original Latin: “Inlumina, quaesumus, domine, tenebras nostras et tocius noctis insidiis repelle propicius: per.”
. Ketley, Liturgies, 38.
. Translation is a combination of mine and that of Cuming, Godly Order, 59. Latin: “Omnipotens sempiterne deus: qui abundantia pietatis tue et merita supplicum excedis et vota, effunde super nos misericordiam tuam: ut dimittas que conscientia metuit: et adijcias quod oratio non presumit. Per,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 2, 502.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 63.
. The translation is admittedly a bit wooden for the sake of bringing out some of the terminology. Latin: “Deus qui ecclesiam tuam annua quadragesimali observatione purificas: presta familie tue ut quod a te obtinere abstinendo nititur: hoc bonis operibus exequatur,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 1, 294.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 49.
. Ketley notes the variant, “monitions” (Liturgies, 49n7).
. Latin: “Deus in te sperantium fortitudo, adesto propitius invocationibus nostris: & quia sine te nichil potest mortalis infirmitas: presta auxilium gratie tue: ut in exequendis mandatis tuis, et voluntate tibi & actione placeamus,” taken from Brightman, English Rite, vol. 2, 462.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 60.
. Roland B. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 92.
. Devereux, “Collects,” 55.
. There are more Collects to observe and dissect: (a) Epiphany 1’s expansion of convalescent to “have grace and power”; (b) Septuagesima’s added phrase, “by thy goodness”; (c) Trinity 7’s translation of que sunt bona nutrias as “nourish us with all goodness,” in order to avoid any idea of “congruent merit” as articulated by Ockham and Biel. See comments on these in Devereux, “Collects,” 51. We also observe (d) Trinity 19’s reversal of the Gelasian Collect’s ordering so that the acknowledgment of our inability precedes the mention of God’s mercy directing and ruling our hearts. See brief comments in C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 106.
. Cuming, Godly Order, 93-94.
. See Andrew Atherstone, “The Lord’s Supper and the Gospel of Salvation: Grace Alone and Faith Alone in the Book of Common Prayer,” in Feed My Sheep: The Anglican Ministry of Word and Sacrament, ed. Lee Gatiss (Watford: Lost Coin Books, 2016), 82.
. The argumentation just offered is why I have a hard time supporting George Sumner’s noble efforts to help modern American priests understand the tensions exposed in the current liturgies regarding priesthood and sacrifice. Emphasizing Victor Turner’s contrast between structure and anti-structure, Sumner quite thought-provokingly proposes that Cranmer’s liturgy places the priest in the ironic situation of undermining their own mediatorial role and pointing to Christ. In this instance of “ritual evisceration of meaning,” Cranmer’s priest “proceeds . . . to deny that any offering or sacrifice is being made, that in fact the one, true, only ‘sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction’ has already been accomplished on the cross of Christ. Having made this abundantly and repeatedly clear, the priest confirms that the people are making a sacrifice, one of responding praise and thanksgiving” (Sumner, Being Salt: A Theology of an Ordered Church [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007], 23-24). Sumner goes on to describe the priest’s continuing consecration prayer (of 1549, not 1552) in a similar manner, concluding that the priest’s prayer “plays a kind of spiritual shell-game, giving and taking away the language of sacrifice and offering. The person at the table looks and acts priestly, and does seemingly priestly things (e.g., spreading hands over the gifts) even as he or she reiterates its denial” (Sumner, Salt, 24). What Sumner does not make clear, though, is that Cranmer’s priest is not using Cranmer’s (1552) liturgy, but the American liturgy, drawn ultimately from the 1549 rite which Cranmer saw fit to revise. In fact, it is precisely this “spiritual shell-game,” this “giving and taking away the language of sacrifice and offering” of 1549 that Cranmer attempted to rectify and disambiguate in 1552. So while this construction of Cranmer’s vision of the priesthood is intriguing, and may even be a satisfying workaround for many American priests who feel the tension of their current liturgy, we cannot say that this vision is of a “Cranmerian priest.” Rather, it is of a Protestant priest attempting to be faithful with an ultimately non-Cranmerian liturgy.
. Bryan Spinks, “German Influence on Edwardian Liturgies,” in Sister Reformations [Schwesterreformationen], ed. Dorothea Wendebourg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 186. See also Paul Bradshaw, The Anglican Ordinal: Its History and Development from the Reformation to the Present Day (London: SPCK, 1971), 24.
. Cranmer, “Corrections,” in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 93. A “trental” is a mass for the dead on the thirtieth day after burial. Scala coeli (“ladder to heaven”) was the name for a vision of St. Bernard’s at the Santa Maria (Scala Coeli) church in Rome where he saw the souls of those he prayed for, ascending to heaven. “This legend was the basis for an indulgence, applicable to the dead, attached to requiem Masses celebrated in the church. In due course this indulgence was made available in specially nominated churches outside Rome. In May 1500 Henry VII secured the “Scala Coeli” indulgence for requiem masses celebrated in his new chapel in Westminster Abbey” (Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992], 375-76).
. Note carefully that “satisfaction” is used in one other place in the Communion liturgy, and it is indeed used with humanity as the subject. However, the recipient of that satisfaction is not God, but other people. In preparation for Communion, the second exhortation urges believers to deal with their grievances with others: “Ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them, ready to make restitution and satisfaction, according to the uttermost of your powers.”
. Spinks makes this observation when comparing Cranmer’s liturgical creativity to Calvin’s more slavish usage of previous rites. See Spinks, “German Influence,” 186.
. Bucer was significantly behind Hermann’s liturgy, and while we here call it Hermann’s work as overseer and patron, we are reminded that these prayers are most likely composed by Bucer. For instance, language from Bucer’s 1537 Strassburg liturgy appears in this Confession.
. Taken from Geoffrey Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (London: MacMillan, 1969), 342.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 90-91.
. It is also interesting to note that Cranmer does not keep Hermann’s duo of those sinned against—namely, “thy majesty” and “our neighbors”—opting for the singular offense “against thy divine majesty.” Though Cranmer would have no doubt agreed with Hermann’s hamartiology, he seems to choose a more deliberate echo of Ps 51:4: “Against you, you only, have I sinned.” Lending credence to the idea that Cranmer’s choice was purposeful is that in Hermann’s litany of sins there are several echoes of the same psalm (e.g., “conceived and born in sins” and “prone to all evils” [51:5]), which may have kept David’s great confession psalm at the front of Cranmer’s mind.
. We see Cranmer’s understanding of the bondage of the will in action in one of Cranmer’s annotations to Henry’s corrections to the Institution, where the Archbishop challenges the king’s desire to insert “applying our will to his motions” in order to qualify how it is that “we be in the favor of God.” Cranmer’s bold response to Henry’s proposal was that such an action “were the ready way unto desperation,” not God’s favor. Cranmer then proposed an alternate correction that made clear who does the willing in the divine-human economy: “That we, which be renovate by the same Spirit, and do convert our lives from following our own carnal wills and pleasures, and repenting us that we have followed the same, and now apply our minds to follow the will of that Holy Spirit, be in the favour of God.” See Cranmer, “Corrections,” in Cox, Works, vol. 2, 94; emphasis added.
. This English translation of Luther’s Second Taufbüchlein (1526) is taken from Gordon Jeanes, Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 252.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 108.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 285.
. It is interesting that of the observations made by Bryan Spinks in comparing the Flood Prayers of 1549 and 1552 (and how, in his words, 1552 had been “Cranmerized”), he does not note this difference but instead focuses on how Cranmer responds to Bucer’s critique in the Censura and expands with “kindred imagery” the oceanic metaphor. See Bryan Spinks, “Treasures Old and New: A Look at Some of Thomas Cranmer’s Methods of Liturgical Compilation,” in Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar, ed. Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), 184.
. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 43.
. I ask this question modestly: Could it be that Cranmer was more intentional about applying the doctrine of sola fide to liturgical reform than Luther himself? Perhaps intentionality is too strong an idea. The German reformer and the Archbishop of Canterbury were serving different contexts which in various seasons were more and less ripe for quick change. Between this and probably slightly different pastoral views on change and its pace, it may be a bit unfair to so easily compare Cranmer and Luther. Still, I find the question fascinating, and it keeps coming around to me in comparative research such as this.
. We might, with Devereux, add to this list praevenire. See Devereux, “Collects,” 53-54.
. Geoffrey Cuming, “Thomas Cranmer: Translator and Writer,” in Language and the Worship of the Church, ed. David Jasper and R. C. D. Jasper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 113.
. A large concentration of “mercy” and its cognates (eleven out of the total sixteen) are located in Epiphany through Lent.
. Stephen Sykes, “Baptisme Doth Represente unto Us Oure Profession,” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 130. Sykes counts ten uses of “receive” and its cognates in the 1552 baptism liturgy, excluding rubrics (132).
. Sykes, “Baptisme,” 132.
. On the idea of “one way love” as an explication of the gospel of justification by faith alone, see Paul F. M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007) and Tullian Tchividjian, One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2012).
. Ketley, Liturgies, 239.
. See Cuming, Godly Order, 65, though Cuming does not make the theological observation we have made.
. Cuming, Godly Order, 65.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 261.
. From The Byble in Englyshe (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1540), accessed November 28, 2021, archive.org/details/GreatBible1540/page/n269/mode/2up?view=theater. Spelling modernized, and emphasis added.
. Duffy, Altars, 92-93.
. This prayer is different from the Aquinas hymn by the same title, often translated “O Saving Victim, Open Wide.” It is found in Horae Eboracenses: the Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of York, ed. C. Wordsworth (Durham: Andrews & Co.; London: Bernard Quaritch, 1920), 73. This translation is from Duffy, Altars, 93.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 92, 278.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 280.
. Latin: Fac me, Domine, ita ea ore et corde precipere, atque fide et affectu sentire: ut [per] eorum virtutem merear confirmari similitudini mortis et resurrectionis tue (Horae, 73).
. It is important to point out here that, like “merit,” the terminology around “worth” and “worthiness” was a point of debate in the Reformation, particularly with respect to the sacraments. See Bayer, Luther’s Theology, 96.
. Duffy, Altars, 334-35.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 147.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 167.
6. “Not I, But Christ” Ceremonially
. The phrase “assisting tools” as opposed to merely “tools” is deliberate and owes its specificity to Juan Oliver’s important observation that people, not items, are in fact the chief instruments being used by God in the rituals of the liturgy. In this sense, the worshipers themselves are the primary “tools” of worship, while “our texts, music, décor, ceremonial, sacred objects, etc., all assist us as an assembly in our work of embodying and rehearsing life in the Reign of God” (Juan M. C. Oliver, “Worship, Forming and Deforming,” in Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, ed. Ruth Meyers and Paul Gibson [Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010], 9; emphasis original).
. Gordon Jeanes, “Liturgy and Ceremonial,” in Liturgy in Dialogue, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks (London: SPCK, 1993), 26-27.
. This certainly connected with the idea that ritual is a means through which human beings are shaped and interpellated. Cf. e.g., Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19-29.
. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7.
. Melanchthon, Commonplaces, 85. In this instance, he cites the traditions of penance and satisfaction, which appear to have been birthed out of the Council of Nicaea. Even that council, according to Melanchthon, is subject to Scripture. The cutting edge of Melanchthon’s criticism is that “the very power of the Gospel has been obscured by this tradition” (Commonplaces, 86).
. Vilmos Vajta, Luther On Worship: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1958), 29.
. Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 157, 156, respectively.
. Henry Ellis, Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Series III, vol. 3 (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), 26; English modernized.
. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), 96-99.
. “[Inquire] whether they have counseled or moved their parishioners rather to pray in a tongue not known, then in English, or to put their trust in any prescribed number of prayers, as in saying over a number of beads, or other like” (quoted in Paul Ayris, “The Public Career of Thomas Cranmer,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 4 [2000]: 121; English modernized). Recall our earlier discussion on the significance of the word trust in Cranmer’s thought. See .
. It should be noted that for the upper classes of the laity, a version of this prayer would have been available in English by the mid-fourteenth century to readers of the popular devotional book of mystical piety, The Cloud of Unknowing. See Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 2.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 266.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 217.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 219, 220, 224, 225.
. There is only one reference to music in the 1552 Holy Communion liturgy, just before the ending Gloria, which “shall be said or sung” (Ketley, Liturgies, 280). Likewise, in Morning and Evening Prayer, from 1549 to 1552, we see a significant decrease of musical references in the rubrics.
. In a brief letter to Henry in 1544, Cranmer describes some of the editorial reasoning behind his translation and redaction of the Great Litany. There he takes time to suggest that “in mine opinion, the song that shall be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but as near as may be, for every syllable a note; so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly” (Henry Jenkyns, The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 1 [Oxford: The University Press, 1833], 315-16).
. Hearing aids for the gospel is a metaphor I first heard in the teaching of Jonathan Linebaugh.
. Jennings, Liturgy, 44.
. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 4.
. Duffy, Altars, 187.
. Duffy, Altars, 157.
. Duffy, Altars, 309.
. Martin Luther, “Concerning the Order of Public Worship”: “Such divine service was performed as a work whereby God’s grace and salvation might be won. As a result, faith disappeared, and everyone pressed to enter the priesthood, convents, and monasteries, and to build churches and endow them” (LW 53, 11).
. Ketley, Liturgies, 265.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 265.
. See Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.
. See John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 498-99.
. MacCulloch, Militant, 69-76.
. Interestingly, in addition to the more well-known displays of the Decalogue, evidently 1 Tim 4:3-5 was a common text painted on church walls in Edwardian England. The text served as a call sign for evangelical liberty, particularly as it pertained to clerical marriage (see MacCulloch, Militant, 133). Not to be missed at the end of that passage is one of the chief appeals for a Reformation understanding of consecration—namely, “made holy by the word of God and prayer” (rather than the hands of the priest or a series of extrabiblical “incantations”).
. Duffy, Altars, 302; emphasis added.
. See H. C. G. Moule, Our Prayer Book: Short Chapters on the History and Contents of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Seeley and Co., 1898), 43.
. In 1 Pet 2:5-9, the apostle describes the entire church as a “holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ,” and a “royal priesthood.”
. Understandably, Colin Buchanan therefore considers this move a “half-reform . . . a reform of substance, unmatched by a reform of terminology” (An Evangelical Among the Anglican Liturgists [London: SPCK, 2009], 151).
. Ketley, Liturgies, 92 (1549), 279 (1552).
. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retractation and Additions,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58, no. 2 (April 2007): 281-86.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 76.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 265.
. As Moule points out, the chalice would have been a very small cup which would have only been able to serve the priest, as opposed to a congregation. See Moule, Prayer Book, 78n2.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 92. Interestingly, in one of our earliest eucharistic church orders, The Apostolic Tradition, one observes the shift from “cup” to “chalice” in some of its manuscript discrepancies. For example, in chap. 38, the earlier Sahidic text uses “cup” while the later Arabic text uses “chalice.” See Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 184.
. Bradshaw, Johnson, and Phillips, Tradition, 279.
. Except in directly quoting 1 Cor 9:13 for one of the several options for Offertory sentences.
. From a word search of altare and its cognates online for the Sarum Ordinary of the Mass (justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/Ordinary.htm) and the Sarum Canon of the Mass (justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/Canon.htm), accessed October 5, 2019.
. Nicolas Ridley, “Reasons Why the Lord’s Board Should Rather Be After the Form of a Table, Than an Altar,” in The Works of Nicholas Ridley, ed. Henry Christmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1841), 322.
. One hears this line of thinking especially in twentieth-century Anglican liturgical scholarship. Their argument was that subsequent generations had access to more resources from antiquity and therefore were able to more precisely repristinate the past. The classic example of this is The Lambeth Conference 1958: The Encyclical Letter from the Bishops together with the Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK, 1958), 2.80: “It was Cranmer’s aim to lift worship in England out of the liturgical decadence of the late medieval Church in western Christendom, and to recover as much as possible of the character of the worship of what he called the ‘Primitive Church.’ In this he achieved notable success, but there was not available in his day the historical material necessary for the full accomplishment of his aim.”
. Targoff, Common Prayer, 10. The relevant passage in Aristotle is found in his Ethics, II.1-9. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 18-30.
. For an account of the fundamentally different understandings of moral and ethical change between Aristotle and Augustine, see Simeon Zahl, “The Bondage of the Affections: Willing, Feeling, and Desiring in Luther’s Theology, 1513-25,” in The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition, ed. Dale M. Coulter and Amos Yong (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), , esp. 213-15.
. This is what Luther meant in his “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology” (1518) when he said, “Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace” (Timothy F. Lull and William F. Russell, eds., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 3rd ed. [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012], 5). See Melanchthon’s fuller development in Commonplaces, 26-36.
. Vajta, Worship, 17: “It is therefore not correct to speak of a ‘dissolution of formal worship,’ of ‘noncultic’ worship, or of a ‘de-culting’ (Entkultung) of worship with reference to Luther. The true worship of faith is by no means incompatible with the ‘external things’ of the cult.”
. Duffy, Altars, 279.
. As a sidenote, it may have been the incantatory nature of some liturgical prayer that caused Cranmer to be leery of choirs, organs, and sung liturgies. Cranmer’s oft-noted minimization of the choral tradition probably has less to do with an iconoclastic disdain for musical art in and of itself and more to do with concern that no part of the liturgy be perceived as granting human agency to eliciting favorable responses from God (which is precisely what incantations are). On the destruction of organs in the Edwardian era, see MacCulloch, Militant, 82.
. Duffy, Altars, 452.
. This translation is from Jeanes, “Liturgy,” 20.
. Sykes notes that in 1552 “the demonology of [Cranmer’s] service is muted” precisely because Cranmer sought to emphasize that the most significant message conveyed in baptism was cleansing from sin, not exorcism from demonic possession, as was emphasized in medieval rites. Instead, the gospel of “delivery from sin through the atoning death of Christ” is what is foregrounded in the rite (Sykes, “Baptisme,” 134).
. This is a reproduction from Gordon Jeanes, “Cranmer and Common Prayer,” in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35.
. Cranmer, “Of Ceremonies,” in Ketley, Liturgies, 155.
. Cranmer, “Of Ceremonies,” in Ketley, Liturgies, 156.
. See George Sumner’s wonderful description of the minister as “counter-sign . . . by becoming a great finger stretched away from oneself and toward the dying Jesus at the center of the Church’s life” (Sumner, Being Salt: A Theology of an Ordered Church [Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007], 25). He goes on to helpfully proffer a “semiotic understanding of the priesthood” (55), where the priest does not function as an icon of Christ to the Church, but rather an icon of the Church back to herself (35). This helps preserve the proper division of labor, such that “The promise is something Christ does, expressed characteristically in acts that the Church does” (84; emphasis added).
. Sumner, Salt, 265.
. Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church Growth,” in Towards a Theology of Church Growth, ed. David Goodhew (New York: Routledge, 2016), 208.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 138; emphasis added.
. This translation taken from justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/English.htm, accessed October 5, 2019.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 91, 276.
. This comparison is made in Andrew Atherstone, “The Lord’s Supper and the Gospel of Salvation: Grace Alone and Faith Alone in the Book of Common Prayer,” in Feed My Sheep: The Anglican Ministry of Word and Sacrament, ed. Lee Gatiss (Watford: Lost Coin Books, 2016), 93.
. Atherstone, “Supper,” 145.
. Atherstone, “Supper,” 319.
. This ordering, to my eye, is a little more apparent in the public baptism of 1549 than in that of 1552, if we take the correspondence as follows: bringing of the children (“the Priest take one of the children by the hand . . . and coming into the church toward the font”); embracing (“Then the Priest shall take the child in his hands”); laying on of hands (“Then the Godfathers and Godmothers shall take and lay their hands upon the child, and the minister shall put upon him his white vesture”); the blessing (“Then the Priest shall anoint the infant”). See Ketley, Liturgies, 110, 111, 112, and 113, respectively.
. Gratefully, I owe this insight to Bryan Spinks, who in personal correspondence over email on March 1, 2021, pointed me to Gordon Jeanes’s important article, “Reformation Treatise,” where Jeanes argues for the Cranmerian authorship of an (unintentionally?) anonymous document probably from 1537–1538, titled De Sacramentis, currently housed in Lambeth Palace, London (ms. 1107, fos. 84-93). In this document, under “De Baptismo,” we find these four sequential steps outlined and numbered: the prologue of Jesus demanding the children to come to him, then (1) accepting them into his arms; (2) laying his hands on them; and (3) blessing them (Jeanes, “A Reformation Treatise on the Sacraments,” Journal of Theological Studies 46, no. 1 [1995]: 171). Jeanes suggests of this outline that present here is “the basic principle which will underlie the liturgical use of the story in 1549 and 1552” (Jeanes, “Treatise,” 161) and then expounds on the significance and background of the ordering in much greater detail in Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 261-68. It seems apparent therefore that the Mark 10 story is purposefully replicated ceremonially in the priest’s actions in the liturgy. Sykes also has made this observation about how the priest “dramatically represents” Jesus in the “receiving and embracing of children in the arms of his mercy” (Sykes, “Open Heart,” 15). See also Sykes’s earlier more detailed exposition of the baptismal liturgy in his “Baptisme,” 122-43.
. For a helpful discussion of the priest’s operation in the mass in persona Christi and in persona ecclesiae, including a discussion of the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, see Dominic E. Serra, “The Roman Canon: The Theological Significance of Its Structure and Syntax,” Ecclesia Orans 20 (2003): 121-26.
. J. I. Packer, introduction to The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), xxvi.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 179 (1550), 349 (1552).
. Moule, Prayer Book, 78: “In the Second Book the Bible only was given; no doubt to shut out as much as possible the thought of a sacrificing communion.”
. Ketley, Liturgies, 179, 349.
. Paul F. Bradshaw, The Anglican Ordinal: Its History and Development from the Reformation to the Present Day (London: SPCK, 1971), 24.
. Bradshaw, Ordinal, 212.
. See Bradshaw, Ordinal, 18-19. Minor orders included the Sub-deacon, the Benet (an exorcist), and the Colet (an acolyte). When Bishop Stephen Gardiner was tried in 1550, he was required by the Privy Council to subscribe to a statement which acknowledged that “Sub-deacons, Benet and Colet, and such others as were commonly called minores ordines, be not necessarie by the Worde of God to be reteigned in the Churche, and be justly lefte out in the said Boke of Ordres” (Bradshaw, Ordinal, 19n4).
. Aude de Mézerac-Zanetti, “A Reappraisal of Liturgical Continuity in the Mid-Sixteenth Century: Henrician Innovations and the First Books of Common Prayer,” Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 22, no. 1 (2017): 6.
. Article IX, “Of rites and ceremonies,” from the Ten Articles of 1536. See Lloyd, ed., Formularies, xxxi.
. Spinks, Luther’s Liturgical Criteria and His Reform of the Canon of the Mass (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982), 24.
. Samuel Leuenberger, Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest: The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: An Evangelistic Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), 37.
. Cranmer, “An Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner,” in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 131.
. Bradshaw, Ordinal, 28. Bradshaw notes what may be Cranmer creating deliberate ambiguity (a la the 1549 Prayer Book) around whether the laying on of hands confers grace because it was a sticking point in his debates with more Roman-leaning bishops and priests (33).
. Bradshaw, Ordinal, 30. We note, though, that Bradshaw himself doubts any significant difference in Cranmer’s mind between “authority” and “power.”
. So Luther: “Where there is no clear distinction [between the essence of the gospel and the additions of ceremony], the eyes and the heart are easily misled by such sham into a false impression and delusion” (“A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass,” [LW 35, 81]).
. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315–386 AD) is considered among the earliest of patristic attestation to consecratory change (via epiclesis) in the elements. It is interesting to note how clearly his teaching contrasts with Paul’s. In his Mystagogical Catechesis 1.7, Cyril draws a parallel between the change which has taken place in bread and wine during the “holy invocation” (τῆςἁγίαςἐπικλήσεως) with the change which takes place in food sacrificed to idols, which is “polluted by the invocation (ἐπικλήσει) of the unclean spirits.” Cyril cites this epicletic event, even while the idol-foods remain “in their own nature plain and simple,” as the reason it cannot be eaten (See F. L. Cross, ed., St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catechesis [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995], 15, 56). Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 8 is very different. The food and its associations with idolatry are neither here nor there (v. 8); what matters is people and how they are loved (vv. 9-13). For Paul, the food is simply food, and no amount of pagan prayer effects a substantive change (either spiritual or physical) that would demand treating the food differently, but love of neighbor does require a different action.
. Though he would not come to our same conclusions, Roman Catholic liturgical theologian J. A. Jungmann exposes this obscuring (he calls it “disintegration”) in his discussion of medieval worship: “It is no longer the Anamnesis of the work of Redemption as such, of the mystery of salvation which is in mind: a disintegration has taken place . . . the sacramental making present of the work of salvation, the Mysterium Christi which ought to enfold us, and into which we ought to enter deeper and deeper, is decidedly too little grasped” (Pastoral Liturgy [New York: Herder & Herder, 1962], 72-73). Jungmann later describes how the work of Christ was no longer seen as something present to the believer, but simply a past event which must be meditated on “by means of some such laudable devotion as the Way of the Cross or the Rosary” (78).
. Luther, “A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass” (LW 35, 81).
. An unceremonious fraction was discussed in the final rubrics of 1549:
For avoiding of all matters and occasion of dissension, it is meet that the bread prepared for the Communion be made, through all this realm, after one sort and fashion: that is to say, unleavened, and round, as it was afore, but without all manner of print, and something more larger and thicker than it was, so that it may be aptly divided in divers pieces: and every one shall be divided in two pieces, at the least, or more, by the discretion of the minister, and so distributed. (Ketley, Liturgies, 97)
By 1552, no mention of breaking the bread remained in the rite.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 283. It is noteworthy that this practice is not completely without early Christian warrant, whether or not Cranmer was aware of it. One of the earliest liturgical orders, the so-called Apostolic Tradition 38.1-2 (third to fifth century AD) makes provision for what Paul Bradshaw calls “the less common custom of taking consecrated wine home to be consumed daily there” (Bradshaw, The Apostolic Tradition Reconstructed: A Text for Students [Norwich: Hymns Ancient and Modern, 2021], 34n63). Almost certainly, the theology of consecration in the Apostolic Tradition is different from Cranmer’s, and it is ambiguous whether this practice is tied to an at-home blessing of the cup of the faithful or of the catechumens (Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002], 184-85), but it is an interesting parallel which may indicate that the practice does not lack at least some precedent in the tradition.
. Andrew Atherstone (“The Lord’s Supper and the Gospel of Salvation: Grace Alone and Faith Alone in the Book of Common Prayer,” in Feed My Sheep: The Anglican Ministry of Word and Sacrament, ed. Lee Gatiss [Watford: Lost Coin Books, 2016], 97) notes the irony of this in the 1662 Prayer Book:
The rubrics of the 1552 Prayer Book directed that if any bread and wine was left over, “the Curate shall have it to his own use”—that is, he could take it home to consume with his family for lunch. This was the natural corollary of Cranmer’s theological principle that no eucharistic consecration had taken place. However, the 1662 Prayer book again took a step back from this bold position, not in its liturgy, but in its rubrics. The institution narrative is now titled “The Prayer of Consecration” and only “unconsecrated” bread and wine is given to the curate to take home. All the consecrated elements are to be “reverently consumed” immediately after the service.
It appears that the seeds were sown for this as early as 1604 when supplementary consecration was codified in the canons of that year (Atherstone, “Supper,” 96).
. Colin Buchanan, What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing?, 2nd ed. (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1982), 23. These diagrams are reproduced here with the permission of the author.
. J. A. Jungmann describes how medieval liturgical life centered its piety around the moment of consecration, which often became “the very reason that people did not want or did not dare to communicate—and the pastoral attitude put people off rather than encouraged them” (Liturgy, 70).
. Katherin Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 86.
. “Levation prayers were thus an act of subjection in which one acknowledged and submitted oneself to God’s authoritative power” (Zieman, Song, 86). Thinking further through the Pauline and Reformation filter, awe-filled adoration is ultimately indicative of encounter with the law, while thankful reception is ultimately indicative of encounter with the gospel. This exposes another reason why transubstantiation was a “gospel-issue” for Cranmer—it elevated encounter with the law over reception of the gospel. As with the Old Testament title “Immanuel” (cf. Is 7:14; 8:8), Christ present among us is by no means a comfort until we know and hear clearly what he is present to do and to give. “God with us” is only good news when it is spoken alongside a clear gospel (Mt 1:22-23).
. Duffy, Altars, 125.
. Cranmer, “Defense,” in Henry Jenkyns, The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Oxford: The University Press, 1833), 302.
. Which, again, confirms the point made earlier, that Cranmer’s placement of the Gloria after Communion was not haphazard or expedient.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 92.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 279; emphasis added. Calvin too emphasized, “And, indeed, we must carefully observe that the very powerful and almost entire force of the Sacrament lies in these words: ‘which is given for you,’ ‘which is shed for you’” (Institutes, 1362 [IV.17.3]).
. Though he would not see it as “misuse,” Matthew S. C. Olver observes how “juxtaposition” of biblical texts to liturgical moments serves as interpretation and then notes, “The use of the Benedictus qui venit just before the Te igitur in the Roman Rite (and many other rites) may be interpreted as an allusion to the sacramental manner in which Christ will soon come to the gathered assembly, despite its non-eucharistic scriptural source” (Matthew S. C. Olver, “A Classification of a Liturgy’s Use of Scripture: A Proposal,” Studia Liturgica 49, no. 2 [2019]: 244.)
. Geoffrey Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (London: MacMillan, 1969), 108: “The Benedictus was removed from the Sanctus, presumably because it might suggest corporal presence.” Again, on our reading it is a little too simplistic to say that Cranmer’s disagreement with transubstantiation was the reason for the removal of the Benedictus. His concern would have (at least) equally been for the way adoration of the host would have taken the spotlight off the “for you” character present in the moment of reception. Additionally, I am indebted to a reviewer of this manuscript who pointed out that during the singing of the Sanctus and Benedictus in some sung masses, the canon would have been said silently by the priest, along with accompanying actions of elevation of the host. Cranmer may have been trying to avoid this scenario, as well.
. Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer,” in Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Justin S. Holcomb and David A. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 227. This is similar to Gordon Jeanes’s conclusion about Cranmer’s mature sacramentology, namely, that “[Cranmer] seems genuinely to believe that he has preserved a sound notion of sacramental instrumentality. However, as we look more closely at his theology, symbolic parallelism rings more true” (Gordon Jeanes, Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer [London: T&T Clark, 2008], 186). Andrew Atherstone says, similarly, “The Roman church teaches that change takes place at the eucharist, by the power of the Holy Spirit transforming the bread and wine. The Prayer Book agrees that change does indeed take place, but by the power of the Holy Spirit transforming the hearts of communicants as they put their faith in Jesus Christ” (“Supper,” 86).
. This most certainly means that despite the apparent East-West “ecumenical consensus” around the invocation of Word and Spirit, even this widespread agreement and attestation in Cranmer’s mind was still subordinate to his more basic gospel-criterion we are observing at work. This further corroborates the argument made in the introduction about Cranmer’s liturgical criteria and also questions further whether BCP 2019 can unequivocally claim to be faithful to Cranmer, as we noted above in n55 of the introduction.
. See discussion, which includes this quote from the Defence, in Jeanes, Signs, 212-213.
. Though not recorded verbatim in my notes, I believe I heard Dr. Null say something quite similar in class (Knox Theological Seminary, “DM826: The Theology of Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer,” January 12-16, 2015). Null does publish this statement: “The sacrament’s proper focus was not the transformation of the elements, but of the human will, by means of union with Christ through spirit-empowered faith” (“Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered,” in Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, ed. D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021], 208). Interestingly enough, Heiko Oberman observes this doctrine of the “transubstantiation of the people” as a feature of Zwingli’s sacramentology, as well: “It may surprise us that Huldrich Zwingli . . . formulated this operation of the Holy Spirit so succinctly that there is reason to say that he taught a doctrine of transubstantiation—not the medieval doctrine of transubstantiation of the elements, but the Apostolic doctrine, mentioned in the Didache of the Twelve Apostles—according to which the dispersed congregation is assembled and changed into the Body of Christ” (Oberman, “Preaching and the Word in the Reformation,” Theology Today 18, no. 1 [1961]: 21). Even Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann attests to this idea at the conclusion of his investigation of the origins and eschatological nature of the eucharistic liturgy, when he says; “It is precisely to this mission ‘to proclaim the Lord’s death and confess His resurrection’ that the Sacrament of the Church bears witness. This Sacrament ‘consecrates’ Christians to this mission” (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966], 74).
. Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer’s Theology of the Heart,” Anvil 23, no. 2 (2006): 216.
7. “Not I, But Christ” Devotionally and Homiletically
. Marion Hatchett, “The Anglican Liturgical Tradition,” in The Anglican Tradition, ed. Richard Holloway (Wilton: Morehouse-Barlow: 1984), 51. See n37 in the introduction for the quotation.
. Hatchett, “Tradition,” 53.
. Hatchett does not there entertain the idea that another criterion of scripturality (i.e., fidelity to the Bible) could be at play, as well.
. Bryan Spinks, “Renaissance Liturgical Reforms: Reflections on Intentions and Methods,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 7, no. 2–3 [2005]: 268-82; Ashley Null, “Comfortable Words: Thomas Cranmer’s Gospel Falconry,” in Comfortable Words: Essays in Honor of Paul F. M. Zahl, ed. John D. Koch, Jr. and Todd H. W. Brewer (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 228-29; Null, “Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Church Growth,” in Towards a Theology of Church Growth, ed. David Goodhew (New York: Routledge, 2016), 206-7.
. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 220.
. Cranmer’s note, “Horatur opifices ut cotidie sacris adsint contionibus” was made in his copy of D. Erasmus, ed., En amice lector thesaurum damus D. Basilium sua lingua loquentem (Basel: H. Froben, 1532): 18, now held in the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, catalog number 18173. See Null, “Church Growth,” 208 (including K. J. Walsh, “Cranmer and the Fathers, especially in the Defense,” Journal of Religious History 11 (1980): 236, where this reference is originally noted).
. Paul F. Bradshaw, “The Daily Offices in the Prayer Book Tradition,” Anglican Theological Review 95, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 447; emphasis added.
. Quoted in Bradshaw, “Daily Offices,” 448.
. Bradshaw, “Daily Offices,” 448.
. Andrew Atherstone, “Reforming Worship: Lessons from Luther and Cranmer,” Churchman 132, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 117: “[Luther] proposed to reduce the monastic hours in Wittenberg to two daily services—a morning assembly at 4 or 5am, and an evening assembly at 5 or 6pm—plus a midday service if desired.”
. Luther, “Concerning the Order of Public Worship” (LW 53, 12).
. See Kenneth W. Stevenson, “Cranmer’s Pastoral Offices: Origin and Development,” in Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham: Turnstone, 1990), 83-86.
. It is also worth noting that at the time of the Reformation, the simplification of the Daily Office offered a critique of another important issue of the gospel we argued in the —the intercession of priests. It was understood in medieval piety that priests and monks who prayed the eight offices of the breviary did so on behalf of others, “that the clergy might make propitiation to God for the people through their prayers” (Bradshaw, “Daily Offices,” 449). If this is true, then Cranmer’s simplification of the breviary was an attempt to take out the middleman, so to speak. Justification by faith alone grants direct access to God through Christ’s propitiation and mediation.
. Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 18.
. Note even further corroboration of this point below under sec. 5, where Cranmer’s Morning Prayer confession places those confessing in the “character” of the Publican, who simply says, “Have mercy on me,” over against the Pharisee, who prays in prolix eloquence (Lk 18:9-14).
. Unfortunately, the wonderful recovery of the centrality of the Eucharist in Christian worship, largely realized by the twentieth-century ecumenical and liturgical movements, has apparently come at the expense of the centrality of preaching. Even if not in intention, in effect, this emphasis on Holy Communion as “the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts” (the language of the BCP 1979 opening preface, “Concerning the Service of the Church” [13]) has largely supplanted the preaching of the Word in some, if not many, Anglican and mainline contexts in North America. As we will see below, Cranmer never viewed preaching and sacraments at odds but instead insisted that both were necessary to faithfully minister the one Word of the gospel.
. Perhaps surprising to us, many English worshipers voted with their feet, and royal injunctions like those from Cranmer to the diocese of Norwich (explored more fully in our next section), called them out, inquiring “whether every Sunday at the least, you have a communion in your parish church” (Injunction xxxvi, recorded in Paul Ayris, “The Public Career of Thomas Cranmer,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 4 [2000]: 123). MacCulloch interestingly notes the reasoning of the people: “The Edwardian Church failed as badly as John Calvin in Geneva in its efforts to establish the eucharist as the community’s chief weekly service. The royal letter to the bishops on Christmas Day 1549 already complained about this, and admitted that one of the main problems was widespread resentment at the requirement that householders should provide bread and wine for the whole parish on a rotating basis” (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation [London: Penguin, 1999], 107).
. Cranmer, “Articles to be Inquired of in the Visitation to be had in the Bishopric of Norwich” (1549), printed in Ayris, “Career,” 124. English modernized, and emphasis added.
. For this line of argumentation, see especially Shawn Strout, “Thomas Cranmer’s Reform of the Sanctorale Calendar,” Anglican and Episcopal History 87, no. 3 (September 2018): 307-24; see also James A. Devereux, “Reformed Doctrine in the Collects of the First Book of Common Prayer,” Harvard Theological Review 28, no. 1 (January 1965): 64-65.
. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 170.
. “By whose merits and prayers” (Latin: quorum meritis precibusque concedas). English translation from justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/English.htm, accessed September 30, 2019. Latin from Maskell, Liturgy, 130.
. Duffy, Altars, 175.
. Cranmer, “Corrections,” in John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 93.
. Devereux, “Collects,” 55.
. Though present in shortened form in the English litany of 1544, prayers to the saints disappeared entirely in the litany reproduced in 1549. See H. C. G. Moule, Our Prayer Book: Short Chapters on the History and Contents of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Seeley and Co., 1898), 71.
. E. C. Whitaker, Martin Bucer and the Book of Common Prayer (Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1974), 52.
. Samuel Leuenberger, Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest: The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: An Evangelistic Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), 36.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 87 and 270, respectively; emphasis added.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 147.
. Ketley, Liturgies, 145 (1549), 319 (1552).
. This dramatization usage of Scripture may be categorized most closely in Matthew Olver’s taxonomy under “allusion” and further subcategory of “imitation” (Olver, “A Classification of a Liturgy’s Use of Scripture: A Proposal,” Studia Liturgica 49, no. 2 [2019]: 229, 234). However, this kind of dramatization does not seem to fit cleanly there, which makes me wonder, if I understand Olver correctly, whether there is not another category of biblical usage in the liturgy for us to explore.
. Olver, “Classification,” 92, 278.
. Massey Shepherd recognizes the Lk 18 reference in the Morning Prayer Confession (The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary [New York: Oxford, 1950], 5-6). Interestingly Marion Hatchett does not follow suit (Commentary on the American Prayer Book [New York: HarperCollins, 1979], 101). Preceding both of them, F. E. Brightman, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, vol. 1 (London: Rivingtons, 1915), 130, does not recognize Lk 18 as source material for this original prayer of Cranmer’s.
. Before departing from the theme of biblical characterization, worthy of mention are the Opening Sentences of Morning Prayer (see Ketley, Liturgies, 217-218), three of which place the worshiper in the skin of adulterous David (Psalm 51:3, 9, 17), one places the Prodigal Son’s confession on our lips (Luke 15:18-19), and one places us in the shoes of Daniel confessing on behalf of Israel (Dan 9:9-10). See Samuel L. Bray, “The Prayer Book Sentences, Pt. 2: Commonplaces of Contrition,” Ad Fontes Journal online, accessed June 17, 2022, https://adfontesjournal.com/liturgy/the-prayer -book-sentences-pt-2-commonplaces-of-contrition/.
. Here is a good place to point out Olver’s observations regarding just how rich the “scripturality” of historic liturgies actually is (“Classification,” 220-45). His taxonomy reveals that historic liturgies’ scriptural expression transcends mere quotation and allusion, and to his concluding point, this may mean that further study of liturgies Western and Eastern (not merely the English Prayer Books, as we are doing here) will yield more scripturality to appreciate and analyze.
. Luther, “Concerning the Order of Public Worship” (LW 53, 14).
. Cox, Works, vol. 2, 122; emphasis added.
. Cox, Works, vol. 2, 124.
. This adds further weight to our earlier defense against accusations that Cranmer’s liturgies are devoid of the Holy Spirit (see ). In Cranmer’s mind, a scriptural Prayer Book is a Spirit-filled Prayer Book.
. Richard S. Briggs, “The Christian Hermeneutics of Cranmer’s Homilies,” Journal of Anglican Studies 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 177. Again, we see how the solas of the Reformation hang together. Especially in its original context, sola scriptura, properly understood, is a way of saying solus Christus, sola gratia, and sola fide.
. See Shepherd, Commentary, 5-6; and Hatchett, Commentary, 101. Note that with these Scripture references, it is especially helpful to read them in the English versions that Thomas Cranmer employed (the Matthew Bible of 1537 and the Great Bible of 1539), as subsequent English translations obscure the obvious nature of the allusion and/or quotation.
. With regard to the English Reformation, Ashley Null outlines these motivations well in “Official Tudor Homilies,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough and Hugh Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 348-63.
. Author’s translation. Two things make the translation of this awkward Greek sentence difficult. First, the language surrounding the verbs (such as the presence of the preposition άπὸ) press the translation of δικαιόω toward “free” rather than “justify” (so ESV, NIV, NASB, NRSV). Second, translating the wording fluidly often obscures the ordering and parallelism of the sentence (law of Moses // [unable to be] justified . . . faith // justified). While a more pleasing syntax results in more fluid English translations, in my opinion the theological force and rhetorical punch are lost.
. Duffy, Altars, 58.
. Duffy, Altars, 58-63.
. Cranmer, “Answer,” in Cox, Works, vol. 1, 359.
. Corroborating this is the discussion on fig. 6.7 above regarding the giving of the Bible at ordination and the words of the bishop to the priest: “Take thou authority to preach the word of God.”
. This document is known, among Cranmer’s two early Breviary revisions, as “Scheme A.” The dating of these revisions has been contested, but the most recent scholarship has as our best conjecture 1538 for “Scheme A” and 1543 for “Scheme B.” For a good summary of the evolution of dating these documents, see Geoffrey Cuming, The Godly Order: Texts and Studies Relating to the Book of Common Prayer (London: SPCK, 1983), 1. The study of these schemes owes a great debt to the painstaking work of J. Wickham Legg, Cranmer’s Liturgical Projects (London: Harrison & Sons, 1915), which enabled a much wider readership and analysis.
. Published in Cuming, Godly Order, 18.
. This stands in contrast to Richard Hooker, the so-called father of Anglicanism, for whom it appears that preaching was a somewhat dispensable function of the priest’s ministry of the Word. Hooker said, “The external administration of his word is as well by reading barely the Scripture, as by explaining the same when sermons thereon be made” (Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. 2 [London: J. M. Dent, 1907], 80 [5:21.5]). In fact, Hooker equates Scripture reading and preaching in effect: “Our usual public reading of the word of God for the people’s instruction is Preaching” (5:21.4). Apparently not taking Cranmer and the other English Reformers into account, Leonel Mitchell and Ruth Meyers insist that “the whole Anglican tradition” shares Hooker’s perspective (Mitchell and Meyers, Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer [New York: Seabury, 2016], 389n14). To be fair to Hooker, in context, the thrust of his argument seems to be directed more toward the idea that bare reading of the Scriptures can also be a form of “preaching,” but his statements nevertheless seem clear enough of his view.
. See Ayris, “Career,” 124.
. Cranmer’s pneumatological understanding of preaching further corroborates our defense above in against those who argue that Cranmer’s liturgies downplay the Holy Spirit. To the contrary, for Cranmer preaching is a charismatic event.
. Ashley Null, “Official Tudor Homilies,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough and Hugh Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 354.
. Null, “Homilies,” 355.
. Null (“Homilies,” 355):
According to Melanchthon, to preach the law meant to point out “sin and its penalty” which included corruption and death. Thus, Harpesfield’s erudite Erasmian, but still thoroughly traditional Catholic, homily became through Cranmer’s placement of it in the book a Protestant proclamation of the law immediately preceding his own three sermons expounding the gospel. According to Melanchthon, preaching the gospel meant presenting the benefits of Christ and clarifying that they were received by faith. Such was the message of Cranmer’s next three homilies.
. Null, “Homilies,” 357.
Conclusion
. It is ironic that one of the Reformation’s best expressions of gospel-centered worship, the English Book of Common Prayer, has been one of the least culturally flexible liturgies as it traveled the globe and embedded itself into nonwhite, non-Western cultures. It is doubly ironic that as twentieth-century liturgical leadership attempted to undo this cultural rigidity by creating contextualized forms of the Book of Common Prayer, very little attention was paid to preserving the grammar of sola fide. I am certainly grateful, in this regard, that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which bears close resemblance to 1552, has been freshly platformed by InterVarsity Press with their recent International Edition edited by Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane. One can only hope that this new exposure might have an effect on worshipers and liturgical revisers alike.
. I heard Glenn Packiam make this observation, paraphrased, “We can employ the logic of the liturgy even if we don’t use the language of the liturgy” (Samford Worship Exchange, Samford University, October 22, 2019).
. See especially Juan Oliver’s heartening discussion of inculturation and particularly his interaction with the “York Statement” of 2009 (Oliver, “Worship, Forming and Deforming,” in Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, ed. Ruth Meyers and Paul Gibson [Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010], 12-15).
. Oliver, “Worship,” 22, 24.
. Of course, not all agree on this, at least in the sense of “gospel” as we have defined it throughout this book. It is not uncommon to hear argumentation that some aspects of biblical soteriology fundamental to our understanding of gospel, such as substitutionary atonement, are decidedly not transcultural but occasional to premodern times and places, such as first-century Palestine or the ancient Near East. This line of thinking often leads to radically different understandings of what the gospel is. For a helpful and comprehensive survey and analysis of the theme of substitution, see Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 462-535.
. This is my concern with well-meaning and passionate pleas for more “purity,” “surrender,” and “wholeheartedness” for worshipers and worship leaders, recently typified in a book like former Bethel worship leader Jeremy Riddle’s The Reset: Returning to the Heart of Worship and a Life of Undivided Devotion (Anaheim, CA: Wholehearted Publishing, 2020). Again and again throughout the book, Riddle punctuates that God and heaven are “waiting” for our wholehearted devotion to be manifested in purity: “There is a spiritual authority waiting to be released on earth . . . but it waits for the wholehearted ones to rise . . . heaven will begin to respond to you . . . heaven has taken notice of your life, decision and consecration. . . . Don’t hold anything back. Place it all on the altar. And watch. Fire will begin to fall” (48-49, cf. iii, 9, 39, 55, 66).
. Recent research bears out that the critique of evangelical worship here is not of something aberrant or on the fringes of the modern worship movement. In fact, this mode of liturgical theology—the dependence of God’s actions based on our prior action—is embedded in the historical and theological origins of what historians Lim Swee Hong and Lester Ruth call the “contemporary praise and worship movement.” They trace in particular the theology and teaching of 1940s and 50s Latter Rain movement leader, Reg Layzell, who “saw the sacrifice of obedient praise as the key to maintaining revival.” With Ps 22:3 and Heb 13:15 as the centerpiece texts for his liturgical theology, Layzell taught that when we have “high praises in our mouths,” we are able to “produce or release the presence of the captain of the Lord’s army.” In other words, God’s blessing and presence rely upon our prior fervent acts of praise. This teaching would be a constant thread woven into the growing tapestry that has become the twenty-first-century modern worship movement. See Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 18, 22. More on this below.
. E.g., Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009); Mike Cosper, Rhythms of Grace: How the Church’s Worship Tells the Story of the Gospel (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), esp. 117-50; Constance M. Cherry, The Worship Architect: A Blueprint for Designing Culturally Relevant and Biblically Faithful Services (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010), esp. 19-122; Robbie F. Castleman, Story-Shaped Worship: Following Patterns from the Bible and History (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), esp. 77-94.
. See Zac Hicks, The Worship Pastor: A Call to Ministry for Worship Leaders and Teams (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 143-72.
. For more on theology as retrieval particularly with reference to worship, see W. David Buschart and Kent D. Eilers, Theology as Retrieval: Receiving the Past, Renewing the Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 117-54.
. See summary and references in Bryan D. Spinks, “Mis-Shapen: Gregory Dix and the Four-Action Shape of the Liturgy,” Lutheran Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1990), and Leonel Mitchell and Ruth Meyers, Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury, 2016), 148-50.
. That antiquity takes precedence over gospel-logic is betrayed in comments such as these (plentiful in modern liturgics), regarding the 1979 Prayer Book’s option of front-ending the general confession: “Many feel that the general confession should regularly be included in the service at this point [i.e., the beginning of the service], although there is no ancient precedent for a general confession of sin at any point in the eucharistic liturgy” (Mitchell and Meyers, Praying, 152).
. Prayer Book commentators Leonel Mitchell and Ruth Meyers get close to this vision when they identify, along with the 1995 International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, that there is something fundamental to the structure of the eucharistic rite which is the baseline for Anglican unity (Mitchell and Meyers, Praying, 150). However, Mitchell and Meyers do not see what we are seeing—that the structure of the liturgy must be most fundamentally architected according to the logic of the gospel.
. Classic examples include BCP 1979’s edits to the Morning Prayer: the elimination of the original sentences to the call to confession, and the removal of the phrases “miserable offenders” and “there is no health in us” in the following general confession. BCP 2019 also eliminates “miserable offenders” and blunts Cranmer’s sharp edge with the appendage, “apart from your grace, there is no health in us” (12).
. We will not here get into the subject of intellectual property and copyright infringement for songs not in the public domain, but such considerations must of course factor into this kind of work.
. This, in conjunction with our first point above about the language of conditionality, poses a lingering question I have for Cranmer about the language of the Morning Prayer Absolution. It avoids direct address and can be conceived as conditional: “He pardoneth and absolveth all them [third personal address] which truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel [could be perceived as a conditionality]” (Joseph Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552 [Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844], 219). Given how sensitive Cranmer was to conditionality and direct address elsewhere, the only conclusion I have is that the Archbishop, as we have well noted, was avoiding the confusion which could be created by priestly absolution. Even though Cranmer makes clear that “Almighty God” is here doing the absolving, perhaps Cranmer wanted to be one step removed from any perception that the priest stood in the way of the mediatorial work of Christ. We also note that the latter half of the Absolution doubles back on what might be perceived as conditions by beseeching God to “grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit” in order that the repentance might be real and fruit might be borne.
. Ruth and Lim, History, 22, 26. Lim and Ruth characterize this emphasis as “the causal instrumentality of praise” (Ruth and Lim, History, 93, 94). On the movement’s Old Testament typology, see esp. 37-42, 46-73. Early teachers would emphasize “‘praising-through for victories’ (i.e., engaging in praise long enough until some sort of spiritual ‘victory’ was experienced)” (Ruth and Lim, History, 37).
. Ruth and Lim, History, 41, 57. Ruth and Lim describe this order’s eventual codification as a “God-given pattern for worship” (Ruth and Lim, History, 127).
. This stands despite the kind of teaching in the contemporary praise and worship movement which describes praise as “an act of faith creating the atmosphere for the presence of God” in contrast to worship as “the expression of our response to his presence” (Charlotte Baker in 1979, quoted in Ruth and Lim, History, 43; see a similar quote on 56). As we have established, faith by biblical definition is that which trusts God’s work solely, to the exclusion of our work. Manifestations of God’s presence, according to sola fide, cannot be bound by or based on our previous action, and therefore the idea of “activating,” “creating,” or “releasing” God’s presence is simply not the right way of describing what is taking place, as though the blessings and benefits of Christ and the Holy Spirit were locked until we ourselves opened the door. However we might describe manifestations of the presence of God during singing, justification boundaries such descriptions to exclude language which promotes human causality of divine blessing.
. In using the imagery of a river, I am borrowing Ruth and Lim’s apt metaphor that pervades the structure and language of their History.
. This is a major concern I have for much of even conservative Anglicanism in North America. The fact that many modern Anglicans can simultaneously claim fidelity to the gospel and yet engage in liturgical practices which serve to undermine, if not directly contradict, what we have outlined from Cranmer’s work (see and Introduction, n14 in the conclusion for concrete examples) exposes considerable blind spots. It is my hope that this study of Cranmer might be some small contribution toward an awakening of this incongruity.
. W. David. O. Taylor, Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019), 113.
. Taylor, Glimpses, 106-7.
. On the connection between the modern worship leader and the priestly office in the history of teaching in the contemporary praise and worship movement, see Ruth and Lim, History, 126-27, 133-34.
. The idea underneath this understanding—namely, that the worship leader, while leading, might prioritize their own intimate encounter with God—is not part of the ethos of modern worship by happenstance. Along with the idea of “anointing,” it is embedded into the liturgical theology and biblical teaching of the forerunners of the modern worship movement. See, for instance Ruth and Lim’s outline of Charlotte Baker’s 1981 conference talk later called, “The Eye of the Needle,” where, upon receiving “a special anointing of the Holy Spirit,” she urged worship leaders to abandon “ministering to men” in exchange for ministering to God alone in the act of worship. This ministry to God alone through music is the “gate” of true worship, “the eye of the needle” (Ruth and Lim, History, 117).
. Riddle, Reset, 30.
. I attempt to tease out what I mean by “emotional shepherding” in Hicks, Pastor, 143-55, 183-92.
. Hicks, Pastor, 37-38.
. Satirical Christian website, The Babylon Bee, certainly points to this liability in its article, “‘Outpouring of the Holy Spirit’ Coincides with Key Change,” accessed November 22, 2019, babylonbee .com/news/outpouring-of-holy-spirit-coincides-with-key-change.
. This observation is made by two leading contemporary worship historians: “Understanding that sacramental notions have been attached to music helps us understand why baptism and the Lord’s Supper have been relatively unimportant aspects of most forms of contemporary worship. If God was encountered in the music, they were not needed” (Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong, Lovin’ on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship [Nashville: Abingdon, 2017], 123).
. See Hicks, Pastor, 35-36, for a brief scriptural defense.
. Though, oddly, this practice currently seems to be experiencing an unchecked renaissance in some sectors of Anglicanism.
. Again, see n7
above for how this theological outlook is deeply interwoven into the fabric of modern worship.
. E.g., prayers of confession informed by Ps 51 or Neh 1; prayers of sending informed by Lk 2:29-32; prayers of thanksgiving informed by Lk 1:67-79; or prayers of praise informed by Rom 11:33-36.
. Cranmer, “Corrections” (1538), in John Edmund Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1846), 86.
. Oliver, “Worship,” 2, 13.
. See Stephen Sykes, “Cranmer on the Open Heart,” in This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty, ed. Donald S. Armentrout (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 1-20.
