History of the Anglican Church XCI

An Anglican Church in the
Puritan Style

One more posting on the 1552 Prayer Book and this is the story of the “Black Rubric.”  Archbishop Cranmer, as radical as were the reforms he proposed in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, had retained kneeling as the posture for receiving Holy Communion.  Some of the more radical reformers—the precursors of the Puritans of the next generations—objected to this and wanted the English Church to follow the Calvinist practice found in the Reformed Churches of Switzerland and of Strasbourg where the communicants received sitting as a clear indication that the Sacrament was a memorial of Christ but not his physical Body and Blood.   Cranmer refused to consider this change but the Royal Council ordered an addendum to the Prayer Book explaining that kneeling for Holy Communion was not meant to signify adoration of the Sacrament but to signify “a humble and grateful acknowledging of benefits of Christ…”.  Since the Book was already at the printers and the red inking had already be done, the “rubrics”—that is those parts that contain the directives for the service and which are printed in red to distinguish them from the text of the service which is printed in black—had been completed.  Thus the Council’s addendum was added but had to be printed in black ink.  It came to be known as the “Black Rubric.”  Here is the text of Black Rubric—with spelling updated to modern standards:

 Although no order can be so perfectly devised, but it may be of some, either of their ignorance and infirmity or else of malice and obstinacy misconstrued, depraved, and interpreted in a wrong part:  And yet because of brotherly charity willeth, that so much as conveniently may be, offenses should be taken away: therefore we willing to do the same.  Whereas it is ordained in the book of common prayer, in the administration of the Lord’s Supper, that the Communicants kneeling should receive the Holy Communion.  Which thing being well meant, for a signification  of the humble and grateful acknowledging of the benefits of Christ, given unto the worthy receiver, to avoid the profanation and disorder, which about the holy Communion might else ensue, Lest yet the same kneeling might be thought or taken otherwise we do declare that it is not meant thereby that any adoration is done or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental bread or wine there bodily received, or unto any real and essential presence there being of Christ’s natural flesh and blood.  For as concerning the Sacramental bread and wine, they remain still in their very natural substances and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians.  And as concerning the natural body and blood of our savior Christ, they are in heaven and not here.  For it is against the truth of Christ’s true natural body to be in more places than in one at one time. 

Why did Archbishop Cranmer refuse to have the communicants sit for Holy Communion?  Cranmer himself tended to prefer a somewhat ambiguous approach to the nature of Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament.   Though originally Lutheran in theological orientation, and later Calvinist, but this point Archbishop Cramer was basically a follower of the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli who taught that the Sacrament was simply a memorial of the Death of Christ and who rejected any sense of Christ being present except spiritually present in the heart of the believer by the believer’s faith.  But Cranmer also knew that the English—even those who accepted the Protestant faith—had a wide variety of understandings of the Sacrament and he was unwilling to force a uniform doctrine on them, at least in the liturgy.  There were those who, whether of Catholic or Lutheran leanings, still held for a real and corporeal presence of Christ.  There were those who, influenced by Calvin, held that Christ was truly present but not corporeally present in the Sacrament.  And there were those who, like himself, believed that the Sacrament was no more than a memorial that triggered a personal and interior response to Christ.  The Archbishop had worked to create a liturgy in which all could see their faith reflected and find some comfort, in the hopes that over time the single liturgy would solidify a single faith.  It was a vain hope, of course, as doctrinal ambiguity is the hallmark of Anglicanism to this day. 

When Elizabeth came to the Throne she did not have the “Black Rubric” printed in the 1559 Book, which was in several ways a (small) step back from the more radical Protestantism of the 1552 Book.  It did reappear in the 1662 Prayer Book in a futile attempt to keep the nonconformist and Presbyterian elements within the Church of England. 

The Black Rubric is significant because it clearly states, despite Cranmer’s wish for a certain liturgical vagueness, that the Church of England rejects the notion that Christ is present in the Eucharist in any physical sense.  By its naïve assumption that the Resurrected Body of Christ is nothing other than a resuscitated and assumed-into-heaven corpse, it reflects a false dichotomy between the resurrected Body of Christ “in heaven” and his Sacramental Body present not only in the Eucharistic Bread and Wine, but in the Church itself.  It is another indication of how the Church of England crosses over in the 1552 Prayer Book from a “Catholic” (albeit not “Roman”) Church to a Protestant Church.

When I started this series, I was far more positive on the continuity of the Church of England that I am now—having done considerable reading and research.  Yet I do think that it is essential that we always view the Church of England—and our own Church as well—in its historical context and realize that there is a certain evolution of doctrine and even of faith.  And we need to keep in mind that the 1552 Prayer Book has not been the final word in the Anglican theological liturgy.  We will see that the Book did not sit well with many because while it reflected the theology of Archbishop Cranmer and his friends,  it did not adequately capture the faith of the Anglican faithful.   Indeed the attempts to reform and refine it will bring down both the bishops and the Crown in the 17^th century—but that is a bit off in the distance yet.  

Of Cranmer, Eucharistic Sacrifice, Problems in the Mass, and Students Writing Papers cont.

OK—let’s move on to Thomas Cranmer’s theology of the Eucharist—in particular his ideas  of Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  As I mentioned two postings ago, I had several requests from a student who has to do a paper and wanted leads on the topic of Eucharistic Sacrifice.  In my last two postings I gave resources that deal with the Catholic understanding—and misunderstanding—of Eucharistic Sacrifice at the time of the English Reformation.  What help can we give regarding Thomas Cranmer—the Archbishop of Canterbury who moved the Church of England from a Catholic Church to a strongly Protestant Church (I can’t say Calvinist because Cranmer would obviously go much further to the left than Jean Calvin ever went in his Eucharistic theology).   
One problem we have to face is that Cranmer was not an original theologian but more a liturgical composer whose theology moved from a Lutheran position in the 1520’s and early 30’s through Calvin’s theology to a far more Zwinglian position by the time he composed his Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 outlining the Anglican Liturgy.  Cranmer, unlike Calvin, did not leave much in the way of systematic theological works.  His ideas are found primarily in his liturgical writing.  But among his personal papers one would want to check Cranmer’s correspondence with the Strasbourg Reformer, Martin Bucer, who seems to have been the chief channel of continental Protestant thought to Cranmer.  Bucer spent three years in England—1549-1551—the definitive years of the Reformed English Liturgy.  One might also want to take a look at the writings of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester—one of the more extreme reformers of the Church of England, and Nicholas Ridley who replaced Edmund Bonner as Bishop of London when Bonner would not abandon the old liturgy and accept the Prayer Book Liturgy in 1549.  Hooper, in particular, was the theologian among the Anglican Bishops of the reign of King Edward VI and those who went along with the reformed rites did so under his influence.  (Not all Bishops did go along, as we shall see, and those who did not were deprived of their sees and replaced by new bishops who were amenable to the Protestant ideas of Cranmer and his associates. 
As I said in an earlier posting, I won’t do people’s research for them, but I do have a bibliography on Cranmer and his Eucharistic theology and I am happy to pass that on to any who want to do further research—or who, like our student who wrote me—need to do further research, like it or not.  Let me express my regrets that not all entries have their full bibliographical detail, but again any one interested needs do his or her own research and the works are easy enough to track down. 

 

John E. Booty: The Book of Common Prayer, 1559

Frank Edward Brightman, “The English Rite”

P.N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay on Historical Development,” 2^nd Edition (MacMillan, 1992)

C. Buchannan, “What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing?”

W.D. Cargill Thompson, “Who Wrote ‘The Supper of the Lord’,”  Studies in the Reformation, Luther to Hooker 

Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer[1]

Church of England, ‪The First Book of Common Prayer of Edward VI: ‪And, the Ordinal of 1549 Together with The Order of the Communion, 1548 

P. Collinson, “The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian,” Journal of Religious History (6), 1971

Gregory Dix: The Shape of the Liturgy

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580

C.W. Dugmore: The Mass and the English Reformers

A.H. Courtain: The Holy Communion 1549,” Church Quarterly Review 1963

A.H. Courtain: The Service of Holy Communion 1552-1662,” Church Quarterly Review 1962

Francis (Aidan) Gasquet and E. Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer

B.A. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality, The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed confessions,” The Old Protestantism and the New

B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin

B. Hall, “The Colloquies between Catholics and Protestants 1539-1541,” Councils and Assemblies, ed by G.J. Cuming and D. Baker

Joseph Hooper Maude, The History of the Book of Common Prayer

C. Hopf, ‘’Bishop Hookers ‘Notes’ To the King’s Council,” Journal of Theological Studies, 44 (1943)

C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation

G. Jeanes, “A Reformation Treatise on the Sacraments,” Journal of Theological Studies NS  46 (1995)

M. Johnson (ed), Thomas Cranmer: Essays in Commemoration of the 500^th Anniversary of His Birth

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer

J.A. Muller, Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction

W. Page, “The First Book of Common Prayer and the Windsor Commission, Church Quarterly Review 98 (1924)

N. Pocock, “Preparations for the First Book of Edward VI,” Church Quarterly Review 35, (1892-93)

F. Proctor and W.H.Frere, The Book of Common Prayer With a Rationale for its Offices

G.E. Pruett: “Thomas Cranmer’s Progress in the doctrine of the Eucharist, 1535-1548,”  Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 45 (1976)

E.C. Ratcliff, “Liturgical Work of Archbishop Cranmer” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 7 (1976)

E.C. Ratcliff, “The English Usage of Eucharistic Consecration 1548-1662,” Theology, 60 (1957)

G. Redworth, In Defense of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner

R. Rex, “The English Campaign Against Luther in the 1520’s,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 39 (1989)

C.C. Richardson, “Cranmer and the Analysis of Eucharistic Doctrine,” Journal of Theological Studies, 16 (1965)

D.G. Selwyn “A New Version of a Mid-Sixteenth Century Vernacular Tract on the Eucharist,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 39 (1988)

N.S. Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans: A Study in Anglo-Lutheran Relations from 1521 to 1547.

           Let me particularly recommend from the above list, Dix, MacCullocuh, Duffy and Ratcliff.  But I think all the sources will agree that the work of Thomas Cranmer brings the Church of England out of the orbit of the Church Catholic into a definitively Protestant theology modified by a semi-protestant liturgical praxis.  The long term consequence of this will make it difficult to argue for historical continuity within the English Church from pre-Reformation to post-Reformation Ecclesia Anglicana.  I regret saying this as I had always held for continuity until I looked in depth into just how radical a reformer Thomas Cranmer was. 

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[1] This is not the prayer book itself, but a book published by Oxford University Press in 2011

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXII

I mentioned Thomas Cranmer’s elegant phraseology in his composition of prayers for his 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books.  Perhaps no prayer is as beautiful in the elegance of its English as is his “Collect for Purity” which he translated as

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secretes are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy holy spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is not a prayer original in composition to Thomas Cranmer but his translation of the prayer in the Sarum Rite, where it served as part of the priest’s preparation for Mass. The prayer itself stretches  even further back to the Leofric Missal, an eleventh century sacramentary produced in Lotharingia from which it was brought to England  where further additions were made and from which the Sarum Rite of the Church of England was to develop.  Its origins in Lotharingia also allowed this prayer to find its way into the Roman Rite where it appears in the Missa ad postulandam Gratiae Sancti Spiritus.   Moreover it can be found today in many devotional booklets priests, more especially “Traditionalist” priests, use to prepare for Mass.  Its provenance and Cranmer’s faithful translations renders it perfectly Orthodox to the truest believer.  Cranmer moved it from the priest’s private preparatory prayers to the introductory prayers of the Eucharistic liturgy itself.   It is frequently used in Catholic celebrations as well, particularly as the conclusion to the Bidding Prayers, known in the American Church as the Prayers of the Faithful.  Priests today, both in the Catholic and Anglican traditions, tend to update the “thee” to “you.” 

Another prayer of incomparable literary beauty is Cranmer’s “Prayer of Humble Access” said before the reception of Holy Communion. Unlike the Collect for Purity it is not a translation of an earlier source but a new composition—drawn however from the Liturgy of Saint Basil, the Gospels of Mark and John, the Gregorian Sacramentary, and Thomas Aquinas.  The prayer is theologically sound by Catholic Standards

We do not presume to come to this thy Table (O merciful Lord) trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We be not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, in these holy Mysteries, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood. Amen.

Unfortunately Cranmer deserts Catholic theology at this point and offers one of his  most beautiful prayers—but one that shows his Zwinglian Eucharistic theology.

Take this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in your heart with faith with thanksgiving.

Cranmer here makes clear that he believes Christ is present in the Eucharist by the faith of the recipient and not by a gratuitous act of God in which Christ becomes physically present by the sacramental means of bread and wine.  This is inconsistent with the theology of his Prayer of Humble Access but offers sufficient justification to show that Cranmer not only denied Transubstantiation but any formulation of the Real Presence.  He goes far beyond Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharistic Bread and Wine as Sacramental representations and reduces the Presence of Christ to the inner workings of Grace in which Christ becomes spiritually present by faith.  This is a clear break with Catholic doctrine and indeed with the Eucharistic doctrines of Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose followed by the Western Church from Antiquity.