"A Church which Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley, enriched by their blood": the High Church tradition and the Reformation
anything which separates the present church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good.
The contrast with the High Church tradition is starkly highlighted when we consider the words of an exemplar of that tradition - Bishop Henry Hobart, speaking in 1814 on "the origin [and] general character" of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America:
We boast then of our origin from a Church, which, in renouncing the despotic claims of the Church of Rome, tempered, with such singular felicity, zeal and ardour, with prudence and moderation, as to reject the errors, the superstitions, and corruptions of that Church; while she retained the primitive faith, order, and worship which those errors, superstitions, and corruptions had debased and disfigured, but with which they were so intimately mingled as to render the separation a work of extreme difficulty and imminent hazard. We boast of our origin from a Church which, in reference to the soundness of her principles, the talents and piety of her clergy, and her efforts in the cause of the reformation, still maintains the proud title which at the first she acquired, of being the glory of the reformed Churches - a Church which Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley, enriched by their blood.
As Nockles states:
Old High Churchmen had never felt any dichotomy between their respect for antiquity and veneration of the Reformers. The appeal of the pre-Tractarian High Church campaigners was to revive 'the principles of the Reformation'. Cranmer was eulogised as an 'apostle of the reformed Church of England' who could 'truly be ranked with the greatest primitive bishops and the Fathers of the very first class' ... Tractarians railing at the Reformers was deemed a betrayal of the historical perspective of generations of High Churchmen.
The subsequent loss of that "historical perspective" has had a profound impact on wider Anglicanism, resulting in the absence of a unifying, coherent historical narrative, as Anglo-catholics (generally dismissing the Reformation) have confronted Evangelicals (presenting an impoverished account of the Reformation, absent its rich sacramental theology and patristic appeal).
What, then, might be considered as means of reviving and renewing the High Church tradition's understanding of the Reformation? Let me suggest three ideas.
Firstly, challenging what we might term 'the Stripping of the Altars orthodoxy'. Eamon Duffy's 1992 study of traditional religion in England in the century before the Reformation has established a picture of a vibrant, colourful, fulfilling traditional church, uprooted by the imposition of foreign reformed ideology and iconoclasm. Consider, however, what The Stripping of the Altars actually says:
the reception of communion was not the primary mode of lay encounter with the Host ... for most people, most of the time the Host was something to be seen, not consumed ... seeing the Host became the high point of lay experience of the Mass;
It seems clear, then, that the English laity looked to the saints not primarily as exemplars or soul-friends, but as powerful helpers and healers in time of need ... They were dispensers of gifts and miracles;
there was general agreement that, at least as far as its activities and staff were concerned, Purgatory was an out-patient department of Hell, rather than the antechamber of Heaven ... This conviction was given lurid and imaginative expression.
Such a context demanded a robustly patristic ressourcement, a restoration of patristic norms. It demanded and needed Reformation. What is more, it is quite clear from Judith Maltby (Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England) and John Morrill ('The Church in England, 1642-9' in Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649), that within a very short time, the liturgy and piety of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana had caught the popular imagination - a spirituality native and populist, not foreign and imposed.
and the true use of the Lord's Supper is to be restored again, wherein godly people assembled together may receive the sacrament every man for himself, to testify that he is a member of Christ's body, fed with his flesh, and drinking his blood spiritually ... and often come to the holy supper, which our Lord and Saviour Christ hath prepared; and as he there corporally eateth the very bread, and drinketh the very wine; so spiritually he may feed of the very flesh and blood of Jesu Christ his Saviour and Redeemer - Book V.ix & xviii.
Ridley similarly affirms both a sacramental conversion and a "real, effectual" feeding upon the Lord in the Eucharist:
I grant … the bread to be converted and turned into the flesh of Christ; but not by transubstantiation, but by sacramental converting or turning ... I never said that Christ gave only a figure of his body; for indeed he gave himself in a real communication, that is, he gave his flesh after a communication of his flesh ... I say, he gave his own body verily; but he gave it by a real, effectual, and spiritual communication - Works, ed. Christmas, 230 & 234.
Some Anglo-catholic and some Evangelical accounts seem to imply that a rich Eucharistic theology and a deep sacramental piety disappeared between the Reformation and 1833 - whether wonderfully restored or deceptively encouraged by the Oxford Movement. Such was not the case. Rather, a profoundly Augustinian Eucharistic understanding was retrieved by the Reformers, resulting in a Eucharistic teaching and practice more explicitly Augustinian than was found in the non-communicating Mass of either the pre-Reformation or Tridentine churches or is found in very many Evangelical Anglican contexts. This teaching and practice was exemplified in the pre-1833 High Church tradition, consciously in continuity with the English Reformation.
Thirdly, an unembarrassed celebration of the Royal Supremacy. Yes, it is fun for critics of Anglicanism to talk about a Church created to serve the sexual desires of Henry VIII. This has as much meaning as ultra-Protestant fantasies about Pope Joan. The Royal Supremacy recovered an understanding of the relationship between church and culture lost by late medieval accounts of papal authority. As John Milbank has stated in in Beyond Secular Order, the "early Latin sense" of monarchy, shared with Byzantium, was "viewed in Christological terms", "mediating Christological kingship". This understanding experienced "gradual displacement in the west" because of a new account of papal claims. The Royal Supremacy was, then, an act of ressourcement, recovering "a sacramental and Christological sense of a spiritual corporate body".
The ongoing significance of the Royal Supremacy for contemporary Anglicanism was brilliantly summarised by John Hughes as an expression of "integral humanism":
The rediscovery of the dignity of the laity in the Reformation and the suspicion of the clericalism which had developed in the medieval West from the Hildebrandine reforms of the eleventh century onwards, meant a return in the Church of England to the more non-dualist, integralist ecclesiology of the first millennium, combined with a more Byzantine or Carolinian view of the priestly nature of 'secular' authority, which was recovered in the Reformation and remains today in the role of the queen as anointed supreme governor.
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