laudable Practice

These weekly readings from Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner commenced at the beginning of September 2025 . We are now over one-third of our way through the work. This being so, it seems like an appropriate time to take a break from the Answer to Gardiner , before returning later this year. We end this section of readings with Cranmer saying of Gardiner's teaching, "in the sacrament mak[ing] so many divisions": For you divide the substances of bread and wine from their proper accidences, the substances also of Christ's flesh and blood from their own accidences, and Christ's very flesh sacramentally from his very blood, although you join them again, per concomitantiam; and you divide the sacrament so, that the priest receiveth both the sacrament of Christ's body and of his blood; and the laypeople, as you call them, receive no more but the sacrament of his body, as though the sacrament of his blood and of our redemption pertained only to the priests. And the ca...

Our least reading from Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull considered how Bull's 1694 Judicium Ecclesia Catholicae was a response to the use put by English non-Trinitarians of Episcopius' view that the Apostles' Creed did not require the faith of Nicaea. Nelson notes how Bull's work drew on a wider theological tradition to affirm that the Nicene faith was inherent to the Apostles' Creed: he hath given such an Account of the ancient Creeds, and more particularly, of the first and most ancient Creed of all, and the Explications thereof, which are found in Ireneus and Tertullian; as it will be very hard after him to add any further Light to that Matter. For all what the Elder Vossius, with so much Pains and Judgment, had collected up on this Subject, with what our most learned and pious Archbishop Usher had also written hereupon, after mature deliberation upon the whole, will be found applied with great Skill, and set in a very advantageous Light, for removing...

In a number of posts on Peter Lake's On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I (2023), I have been deeply critical of Lake's depiction of the pre-Caroline Church of England , his failure to account for the continuities in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline ceremonial conformity , and his entirely unconvincing depiction of 'Laudianism' as an 'Arminian' movement.  All this said, I do have to credit Lake's book with deeply influencing my thought about the Church of England in the 1630s. Having read and reflected upon Lake's 600 pages, I am now convinced that 'Laudianism' should cease to be used as a meaningful term. Put bluntly, Lakes's work - contrary, of course, to his intention - has led me to the view that there was no such thing as 'Laudianism'.  To begin with, Lake offers a profoundly weak case for describing those who supported the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule as 'Laudi...

I noticed a recent exchange on X between the commentator Peter Hitchens and an Anglo-catholic cleric on the subject of priesthood. It began as a debate on the ordination of women as priests but - perhaps not unsurprisingly - turned to the issue of the nature of this office.  Hitchens stated: my bit of the CofE has ministers, not priests, and tables rather than altars.  As we might expect, the Anglo-catholic cleric responded with this statement: the Church of England has priests, which are a type of minister. The 1662 refers to priests several times and contains a form for ordaining them. The vicar of your parish is, legally, a priest. Hitchens came back: The Prayer Book, which is famously ambiguous on many matters, also uses the term 'minister'. So do some Anglicans, of which I am one ... The exchange demonstrates what I have previously described as the historic Anglican difference between the language of order and the language of pastoral ministry. The language of order - bi...

Our previous reading from the defence given by David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38) - in his 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth - of the provision in the Articles of Perth regarding Confirmation explored how superintendency and episcopacy were a Scottish practice, dependent on a Scottish ecclesiastical order, and an ecclesiastical order found in many Churches throughout Protestant Europe. Today we turn to to the specific issue of the rite of Confirmation, as provided by the fourth Article of Perth: it is thought good, that the minister in every parish, should catechise all young children of eight years of age, and see that they have the knowledge, and be able to make rehearsal of the Lord's Prayer, Belief, and Ten Commandments, with answers to the questions of the small catechism, used in our church, and that every bishop in his visitation, shall censure the minister who shall be found remiss th...

In the exchange between Gardiner and Cranmer, set forth in Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner (1551), there appears to be the possibility of concord as Gardiner accepts that 'corporal' presence has not the meaning often assumed, as Christ is spiritually present in the Sacrament: The word corporally may have an ambiguity and doubleness in respect and relation. One is to the truth of the body present, and so it maybe said, Christ is corporally present in the sacrament; but if the word corporally be referred to the manner of the presence, then we should say, Christ's body were present after a corporal manner, which we say not, but in a spiritual manner, and therefore not locally nor by manner of quantity. Cranmer - rather mischievously - welcomes this agreement, while yet knowing a crucial difference of understanding remains, as pointed to at the conclusion of this extract:  In this comparison I am glad that at the last we be come so near together, for you be almost right hear...