Thomas Cranmer was a Protestant!

This was the realization I had reading The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer. This probably says more about my ignorance of Anglican history than it does about the essays collected in the book, but it was nonetheless, for me, both helpful and surprising.

I base this on some pretty basic information. First, Cranmer inserted this anti-Catholic “Black Rubric” in the 1552 Prayer Book regarding the reception of communion: “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.” Second, the essay on Cranmer in The Guide ("Cranmer and Common Prayer” by Gordon Jeanes) summarizes his theology by saying, “Probably he was sympathetic to Lutheran views in the later 1530s, but by the time the Prayer Books were published he was closer to the views of the Reformed theologians like Bucer and Bullinger.”

These two quotes are, of course, insufficient for an analysis of Cranmer’s theology, but they are enough to make clear that Cranmer was not an Anglo-Catholic. That burst my bubble. The narrative I had swimming in my silly little head was that Cranmer was an essentially Catholic bishop given license/ordered -- because of Henry the VIII’s political battles -- to renew the prayer life of the Church in England. So imagined, Cranmer set about to bring a measure of Catholic monastic life to all of England, which is why Anglicans claim a Via Media that sympathizes with some reforms without altogether leaving the church Catholic.

Wrong! Cranmer’s sympathies were, as quoted above, exclusively with the Continental Reformers, I discovered. Reading between the lines, the check on Cranmer’s reforms -- which Protestants in the rest of Europe didn’t have – was the fact that, within England, he was not splitting from the established church but leading it. Cranmer had a substantial existing bureaucracy with which to content, so some continuity with Catholicism would be inevitable given all the priests, parishes, coffers and buildings he was trying to change.

This modest bit of history I learned would be bound to the sixteenth century but for one thing: My ignorance about Cranmer was the starting point for my ignorance about the Prayer Book’s past. I had lionized Cranmer as an Anglo-Catholic (probably in the image of my own priest) and then proceeded to assume that Prayer Book revisions had over the centuries drifted towards Protestantism and then liberal Protestantism.

Wrong again!

The most heartening history I learned from The Guide was that of the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Turns out, it does have some flimsy moves toward so-called inclusive language and the addition of the particularly embarrassing Eucharistic Prayer C, but by-in-large it trends in a thoroughly catholic direction with an overall form drawn from ancient liturgies, recovered early Eucharistic prayers, a lectionary based on the Catholic church’s, a more poetic Psalter, and a renewed commitment to the centrality of the Eucharist for Sunday Worship.

Praise God!

Digging more deeply, the essay on the Episcopal Prayer Book (“The Episcopal Chruch in the U.S.A.” by Lesley A. Northup) credits the inspiration for the 1979 revisions to the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement. As told in another essay (“The Liturgical Movement and Its Consequences” by John F. Baldwin, S.J.), this ecumenical trend of liturgical scholarship and renewal is a thing of beauty. At its core is a set of theologians seeking continuity in worship with the ancient church, and the reforms of Vatican II.

With the Liturgical Movement, I see an important avenue for learning what is good and holy in God’s church. In terms of specific books, one title recurs: The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix. Poignantly, Johnson quotes from it about Jesus’ command to celebrate the Lord’s Supper:

Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby ampitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

Amen. It’s time to read Dix.