3 The Grammar of Sola Fide in Cranmer
IN THE 
THE GRAMMAR OF SOLA FIDE IN CRANMER’S THEOLOGY AND LITURGY
The grammar in Cranmer’s theological writing. Once the evidence is presented, despite nearly five centuries of wildly disparate biographical sketches and theological interpretations of Thomas Cranmer, it is hard to come away with any other reading of the Archbishop besides one that is fiercely Pauline in his understanding of the Scriptures, and particularly so as Paul is received through the interpretative lineage of Augustine and Luther. The claim we are making is that the English reformer internalized the grammar of sola fide to such an extent that its “rules have become embedded in the speech textures” of his mature theological and liturgical work. The difficulty in evaluating the evidence, however, is that unlike the other Protestant Reformers, as Linebaugh notes,
Cranmer did not write a commentary. He wrote prayer books and sermons, kept extensive notebooks organizing the discoveries unearthed in the books in his famously vast library, offered marginal comments during the formative stages of what would be public documents, penned a preface to the Bible, maintained prolific correspondences with political players at court and religious Reformers on the Continent, . . . and engaged in (transcribed) debates related to the Lord’s Supper and other topics du jour. This means that locating texts or passages that can be called readings of Paul is not as easy as pulling a commentary on Galatians or Romans off the shelf.
Linebaugh goes on to observe the tense political climate under the vicissitudes of King Henry’s theological-political whims, which often drove Cranmer’s evangelical theology underground. It is not an overstatement to say that under Henry, to champion certain articulations of Protestant theology was to flirt with death. Notwithstanding these things, scholars are generally agreed that Cranmer’s three 1547 homilies on salvation, faith, and good works “come closest to a sustained interpretation of Paul.” And if we allow Cranmer at this place to speak for himself, we notice the Pauline grammar clear as day, making distinctions of total exclusion:
The grace of God doth not exclude the justice of God in our justification, but only excludes the justice of man, that is to say, the justice of our works as to be merits of deserving our justification. And therefore Saint Paul declareth here nothing upon the behalf of man concerning his justification, but only a true and lively faith. . . .
If justice come of works, then it cometh not of grace; and if it come of grace, then it commeth not of works. . . .
This proposition—that we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works—is spoken for to take away clearly all merit of our works . . . thereby wholly to ascribe the merit and deserving of our justification unto Christ only. . . .
Justification is not the office of man, but of God. . . . Justification is the office of God only, and is not a thing which we render unto him, but which we receive of him, not which we give to him, but which we take of him by his free mercy and by the only merits of his most dearly beloved Son, our only redeemer, savior and justifier, Jesus Christ. . . .
Only faith doth justify us.
Observe here the terminology of categorical separation—“excludes,” “nothing,” “only,” “without,” “all,” “wholly.” In fact, “only” appears to be a critical word for Cranmer’s understanding of the grammar of justification. Beside the homilies, the next most poignant place to find Cranmer’s understanding of the gospel is in his annotations on Henry’s corrections to the Bishops’ book, officially titled Institution of a Christian Man (1537), where he boldly challenges Henry’s theology chiefly by arguing for the necessity and right placement of that one word, “only.” When presented with the Bishops’ book for review, Henry sought to correct this sentence: “The penitent must conceive certain hope and faith that God will forgive him his sins, and repute him justified, and of the number of his elect children, not for the worthiness of any merit or work done by the penitent, but for the only merits of the blood and passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Henry’s correction included changing the last two phrases: “Not only for the worthiness of any merit or work done by the penitent, but chiefly for the only merits of the blood and passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ.” Cranmer responded to Henry’s correction thus:
“Only, chiefly.” These two words may not be put in this place in any wise for they signify that our election and justification cometh partly of our merits, though chiefly it cometh of the goodness of God. But certain it is, that our election cometh only and wholly of the benefit and grace of God, for the merits of Christ’s passion, and for no part of our merits and good works as St Paul disputeth and proveth at length in the epistle to the Romans and Galatians, and divers other places, saying, Si ex operibus, non ex gratia; si ex gratia, non ex operibus.
Works and faith are distinguished and ordered. Here we see the grammar at work, saying no to the not-gospel of a salvation commingling works and faith, and yes to a gospel “wholly of the benefit and grace of God.”
Even more explicit than this is Cranmer’s exposition of spiritual hunger and thirst in his 1550 Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ. As he begins to lay out his most complete understanding of the Lord’s Supper, he frames spiritual hunger in terms of law and gospel:
This earnest and great desire is called in Scripture the hunger and thirst of the soul. . . . And this hunger the silly, poor, sinful soul is driven unto by means of the law, which showeth unto her the horribleness of sin, the terror of God’s indignation, and the horror of death and everlasting damnation. And when she seeth nothing but damnation for her offences by justice and accusation of the law, and this damnation is ever before her eyes; then, in this great distress, the soul being pressed with heaviness and sorrow seeketh for some comfort, and desireth some remedy for her miserable and sorrowful estate. . . . The meat, drink, food, and refreshing of the soul, is our Saviour Christ; as he said himself: “Come unto me all you that travail and be laden, and I will refresh you.” . . . For there is no other kind of meat that is comfortable to the soul, but only the death of Christ’s blessed body. . . . And as the body liveth by meat and drink, and thereby increaseth and growth from a young babe unto a perfect man, . . . so the soul liveth by Christ himself, by pure faith. . . . And this St. Paul confessed of himself saying, “That I have life, I have it by faith in the Son of God. And now it is not I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”
Here we see all the themes we have been observing gathered in one place: the explicit distinction between law and gospel, the separation out of a “pure faith,” the affective fruit of the grammar in “terror” and “comfort,” and even a concluding summary punctuated with Galatians 2:20.
The grammar in Cranmer’s liturgy as generally observed by scholars. Certain scholars, whether or not they are familiar with terminology and nuances of our articulation of the grammar of the gospel, have observed the grammar at work in Cranmer’s liturgies. For instance, without explicit reference to either Augustine or the Reformers, Stephen Sykes summarizes Cranmer’s liturgies as gathered around the central motif of the “ascent of the heart.” He describes the aim of Cranmer thus: “So we uncover an ambivalence: an ecclesiastical demand for repentance from the bottom of the heart; and a theological and psychological perception that the knowledge of what lies in the depths is possible only to God.” What Sykes is observing in this “ambivalence” is that Cranmer’s liturgy is always speaking two words to worshipers: a word that makes impossible demands; and a word that places the possibility of meeting those demands solely in the hands of God. In Reformation language, Sykes is observing in the effects of the liturgy the distinction between law and gospel, the separation of works and faith—in fact, the grammar of sola fide. Sykes recognizes that at the center of this work in the heart lies the doctrine of repentance. He points out that in the liturgy, Cranmer chooses his scriptural quotations and allusions ultimately “to illustrate and teach the evangelical doctrine of the completeness of divine forgiveness.”
J. I. Packer similarly observes the grammar at work in his summary of Cranmer’s liturgical agenda. He argues that the Archbishop “rooted the doctrine [of justification] in two basic realities. The first is man’s sinfulness and impotence to do God’s will, which brings him into a state of failure, guilt, and condemnation. . . . The second reality is God’s mercy to sinners, the measure of which is his gift of his son to be crucified for them.” Much like Sykes, Packer is observing the work of God’s two words—law and gospel—in the Cranmerian liturgy, even naming those specific categories. Sylvia A. Sweeney and Gavin Dunbar observe and expand upon Packer’s insights, revealing just how pervasive this pattern is in Cranmer’s liturgical work.
The work of Ashley Null is by far the most extensive, both in breadth of sources studied and in depth of theology processed. Null argues, convincingly and systematically, for what we have been stating above: Cranmer’s soteriology was that of Paul in the tradition of Augustine under heavy influence of contemporaneous Lutheran thought. Though Null does not speak in terms of the (Pauline, Augustinian, and Lutheran) grammar of sola fide, what he culls from Cranmer is without a doubt the selfsame outlook. Particularly impressive is the amount of content and intricate organization of thought discovered in Cranmer’s personal notebooks, which Null calls “Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces.” There we discover that not only was Cranmer a serious exegete of Scripture, he was also a dedicated student of the church fathers, East and West.
KEY CONCEPTS FOR THE GRAMMAR OF SOLA FIDE IN CRANMER
“Assisting grace” in Cranmer. It is clear that Cranmer, like Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, heavily favored Augustine among the church fathers: the Archbishop’s writings are liberally littered with references to the Bishop of Hippo; his notebooks are filled with lengthy extracts of Augustine’s works; and his commissioned portrait by Gerlach Flicke testifies to the centrality of Augustine in his thought. Cranmer’s usage of the phrase “assisting grace” very much echoes Augustine, especially when we note the surrounding context: like Augustine, assisting grace is used as a shorthand in conversations surrounding justification by faith alone as a distinction-making grammar. In his Homily on Scripture, the tone is set in the beginning about what Cranmer perceives the thrust of the Bible to be: it is “necessary for our justification” and a “perpetual instrument of salvation.” Shortly after, the Scriptures are said to “have power to convert through God’s promise and they be effectual through God’s assistance.” This assistance, for Cranmer, factors specifically in the work of God’s Word in Holy Communion. At the table, we are edified by the effectual word, says Cranmer, “wherein the ministry of the church travaileth to bring man to perfection in Christ, which Christ himself doth assist, and absolutely perform in his church, his mystical body.”
Liturgically, Ashley Null points out that the idea of assistance is particularly strong in Cranmer when it comes to living the Christian life, as if to say, even good works done after conversion can only be done by Christ’s “assistance,” that is, in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Though this pneumatological theme does not specifically use the term “assist,” Null notes this as a “special grace” of “supernatural assistance” which “runs as a red thread through Cranmer’s collects.” The striking usage of the assistance of grace, however, is chiefly found in one pivotal liturgical moment: the post-Communion prayer. There, having received the bread and wine, the believer prays, “We now most humbly beseech thee, O heavenly father, so to assist us with thy grace that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works, as thou hast prepared for us to walk in: through Jesus Christ our Lord.” At this doxological zenith, we find even here the grammar of sola fide distinguishing faith from works: post-conversion works are works done “through Jesus Christ.” Heralded by the Augustinian construction of assisting grace, we hear quite clearly the grammar at work via the radical disjunctive, “Not I, but Christ.”
That Cranmer’s understanding of assisting grace here in the Communion liturgy is totalizing and disjunctive is evident especially when one juxtaposes this post-Communion statement of “assistance” alongside his most stark statement in the Confession of Morning Prayer: “There is no health in us” (a quotation of Ps 38:3). For Cranmer, grace does not assist an already healthy or partially healthy individual. Grace assists the ungodly—the person with no health.
Promise in Cranmer. We now turn to the strains of promise-language permeating Cranmer’s theological and liturgical work. The centrality of promise very much mirrors Luther and Melanchthon. In the Homily on Salvation, Cranmer speaks of the promises of God in the context of the faith-works distinction: “Because faith doth directly send us to Christ for remission of our sins, and that by faith given us of God, we embrace the promise of God’s mercy and of the remission of our sins, which thing none other of our virtues or works properly doth, therefore Scripture useth to say that faith without works doth justify.”
The Homily on Faith spends its first half distinguishing between faith and works and then moves on to quote Augustine and Chrysostom, after which Cranmer illustrates the doctrine using the language of how Abraham trusted and laid hold of the “promise” of God. In a letter to Henry in 1536, Cranmer refers to the gospel as “promise.” Ashley Null aptly summarizes the evangelical promise-theology of Cranmer in this way: “Cranmer anchored hope for forgiveness in the promise of God’s Word, rather than the depth of human penitence. In Scripture God said he would justify penitent sinners who put their trust in him to forgive their sins for Christ’s sake. Those who pondered the benefits of this promise developed ‘a firm trust and feeling of God’s mercy.’”
Null’s findings in Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces corroborate that this promise-theology stood at the center of the Archbishop’s reflections on Paul, Augustine, and the faith-works distinction. Evidently the third section of the Cranmer’s notes contain heavy “extracts from the anti-Pelagian works of Augustine,” including a grouping of quotations of the church fathers in support of Protestant Reformed interpretation of Augustine’s soteriology, all gathered around the theme of “praising God and praying to him for those things which he has promised.”
It is most telling, however, to observe where the language of promise appears in Cranmer’s liturgies, especially when we recognize that such language was not present in the prior liturgies which made up the source material for the Book of Common Prayer. The language of promise makes its liturgical debut at the high point of the gospel—the confession and words of pardon in both the Holy Communion and Morning Prayer liturgies. We observe in the words of pardon in Holy Communion that Cranmer did not merely translate the Sarum Mass text into English. He added both the language of promise and its content (see 
SARUM (HOLY COMMUNION)
1549 BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Almighty God
Almighty God,
our heavenly father, who of his great mercy hath promised forgiveness of sins to all them, which with hearty repentance and true faith, turn unto him:
have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins.
have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins,
confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and bring you to everlasting life: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Figure 3.1. The Holy Communion words of pardon compared
Similarly, nestled into Cranmer’s original composition of Morning Prayer’s Confession (1552) is an anchoring appeal to the promises of God, said by the “whole congregation”:
Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways, like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us: but thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that be penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind, in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In Cranmer’s principal liturgies, promise takes center stage with (and as) the gospel, heretofore unparalleled in preceding Christian rites. It is also noteworthy that, right out of the gate of Cranmer’s liturgical production, in his first piece of official English liturgy—the 1544 Litany—the opening exhortation announces a God who “hath bounden himself by his own free promise, and certified us by the same, by his own Son, our only Saviour and Lord Christ Jesus.”
Comfort in Cranmer. Even more prominent than the language of promise is the language of comfort in Cranmer’s writings. The term saturates Cranmer’s short Homily on Scripture as a predominant purpose of the Word of God. The Bible “giveth wisdom to the humble and lowly hearts; it comforteth, maketh glad, cheereth, and cherisheth our consciences.” The homily makes clear that comfort is not simply a work of the Bible in general but of the gospel in particular.
Liturgically, that comfort is an important theological concept for Cranmer is revealed in the prevalence of the language of “comfort and console” in the 1544 Litany. There, in the short exhortation before the Litany proper, those words are used three times. Similarly, Cranmer’s freshly composed Collect for the second Sunday in Advent (1549) encourages that as we “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures, we receive the “comfort of thy holy Word.” Yet when the choice is presented, Cranmer appears at times to have deliberately chosen “comfort” even over synonyms like “consolation.” We see this, for instance, when we set side-by-side the preceding source-prayers for Cranmer’s Collect for Whitsunday (
Sacramentally, Cranmer is clear that the purpose of Holy Communion is comfort. In fact, in February 1537, Cranmer delivered a speech to the Assembly of Bishops as they prepared to discuss the sacraments. He set the tone by reminding them of the more “weighty controversies,” which in his mind centered not on the sacraments themselves, but on justification. His articulation there is one of the most powerful summaries of his understanding of the comforting power of Paul’s distinction-making theology:
There be weighty controversies now moved and put forth, not of ceremonies and light things, but of the true understanding of the right difference of the law and the gospel, of the manner and way how sins be forgiven, of comforting doubtful and wavering consciences by what means they may be certified that they please God, seeing they feel the strength of the law accusing them of sin, of the true use of the sacraments, whether the outward work of them doth justify man, or whether we receive our justification through faith.
Following suit with this clear statement, Cranmer’s liturgies speak explicitly and extensively of Holy Communion’s objective of comfort. It is hard to appreciate just how emphatic this objective is for Cranmer until we recognize that the medieval liturgy on which Cranmer’s were based—the Sarum rite—only uses “consolationem” one time throughout the entire service. By contrast, Cranmer’s 1549 liturgy uses the word “comfort” nine times, and “consolation” once. For instance, punctuating the first exhortation of the 1549 eucharistic liturgy is that Communion exists to preach the gospel to us “to our endless comfort and consolation.” The second exhortation reiterates this by calling communion “the most comfortable Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ.”
More centrally, even modern Anglicans still recognize this pillar of the Cranmerian liturgy—the Comfortable Words. The source material for the Comfortable Words is noteworthy as it appears that Cranmer made a decision at this liturgical moment to use explicitly the language of comfort. While it has been shown that the usage of similar groupings of Scripture sentences in the eucharistic liturgies is a Reformation innovation, not all Reformation liturgies before Cranmer introduced those sentences in the same way. Some liturgies introduced the Comfortable Words with the language, “audite evangelium” (“hear the gospel”). Other liturgies were more specific: “höret den Evangelischen Trost” (“hear the gospel comfort”). Our case for a Lutheran-Melanchthonian grammar of sola fide is only bolstered when we add to all these observations that “conscience” appears with similar frequency.
In conclusion, we have sought to establish this critical idea: justification sola fide is not best understood as one of many Pauline soteriological images, nor is it even best described as the center of Paul’s thought. Instead, justification functions criteriologically as a gatekeeper for what passes as gospel against competing non-gospels. In making proper distinctions of an exclusive and categorical nature, sola fide functions as a theological grammar, governing how theology is constructed according to the gospel. And we noted that Paul’s paradigm of “not I, but Christ” will be a uniquely suitable shorthand for investigating the grammar in Cranmer’s liturgy. We traced briefly how this interpretation of the Pauline grammar of sola fide appeared in the Fathers—especially Augustine—and was then received and reiterated by Luther and Melanchthon at the time of the Reformation. This all gave us a lens through which to more clearly observe Cranmer’s own central commitment to this same theological distinctive as he did theology according to the grammatical rules of sola fide generally in his writing. We are moving toward this conclusion: if we are to receive well Cranmer’s work in his day, to be gospel-centered in worship and liturgy in our day is to do in particular this kind of parsing, sifting, and separating. We want the following chapters to observe this five-hundred-year-old work in detail perhaps in order to gain a more timeless model for critiquing worship and liturgy through the grammar of sola fide.
Early in the