laudable Practice

It is not at all original to read Hooker's exposition of the Sacraments in Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity alongside the Consensus Tigurinus (the Consensus of Zurich), the 1549 agreement between the Churches of Zurich and Geneva on the Sacraments. Torrance Kirby , for example, has said that Hooker's teaching on the Sacraments as 'moral instruments' is "demonstrably in agreement with the Consensus Tigurinus". Similarly, Diarmaid MacCulloch regards Hooker's eucharistic views as being at home in "Bullinger's Zurich".  The purpose of this post, therefore, is not to offer any original commentary but to consider how the Consensus Tigurinus is significantly reflected in Hooker. The focus of this post is V.57.3-5 of the Laws . We begin, however, with a passage from the Laws just prior to V.57, as Hooker considers "The union or mutuall participation which is betweene Christ and the Church of Christ in this present worlde". In...

Heare us (O merciful father) we besech thee; and with thy holy spirite and worde, vouchsafe to blesse and sanctifie these thy gyftes, and creatures of bread and wyne, that they maie be unto us the bodye and bloude of thy moste derely beloved sonne Jesus Christe. This invocation from BCP 1549 provided another opportunity for Gardiner to mischievously use the text of Cranmer's liturgy to argue against its author's eucharistic theology. According to Gardiner: The body of Christ is by God's omnipotency, who so worketh in his word, made present unto us at such time as the Church prayeth it may please him so to do, which prayer is ordered to be made in the Book of Common Prayer now set forth. Wherein we require of God the creatures of bread and wine to be sanctified, and to be to us the body and blood of Christ, which they cannot be, unless God worketh it, and make them so to be ... by the conversion of the substance of bread into his precious body. One can imagine Cranmer's...

I am coming to the end of reading G.W. Bromiley's Zwingli and Bullinger (1953) in the 'Library of Christian Classics' collection. Over the past months, a few pages have been read each day, with some extracts shared on 'X'. During the past two years, Zwingli has figured quite a bit in my reading. It began with G.R. Potter's Zwingli (1976), followed by Bruce Gordon's Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (2021). Along the way, I dipped into Gordon's The Swiss Reformation (2002) and the collection of essays edited by Gordon and Emidio Campi, Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger (2004). Should an Old High Churchman have such an interest in Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation? My interest is partly it is a result of the now well-established historical understanding of the influence of the Swiss Reformed theologies on Cranmer and on the Elizabethan Settlement. Ben Crosby on Draw Near With Faith has an excellent article on how recognis...

From Richard Field's Of the Church (1606/10), a refutation of the allegation by a Tridentine apologist that the differences "between the followers of Luther and Zuinglius" were in matters of faith, producing a fundamental division between the two traditions. Mindful that Field was a leading divine in the Jacobean Church of England - described by Paul Avis as "one of the most stupendously learned of Anglican theologians in an age when Anglican clerical scholarship was the wonder of the world" - his insistence (following Jewel and Hooker) that the differences between Lutheran and Swiss Reformed eucharistic theologies were not fundamental is a significant insight into an important and influential stream of thought in the Jacobean Church. What is more, note his defence of the 'Zwinglians'. (While Field does also use the term 'Calvinist' for the Swiss, it is clear throughout that he regards Zwingli as the figure who chiefly shaped the Swiss Reformed ...

In his 1807 Bampton Lectures , Le Mesurier interestingly sides with Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation against Luther on the Eucharist: In particular Luther, from a partial adherence to old ideas, came to entertain the notion of what he termed consubstantiation: he held that the body and blood of Christ substantially existed in the sacrament, though not alone, but united with the bread and wine; so that both the one and the other were taken by the communicants. This approached so near to the popish doctrine, it so naturally led to all the same consequences, that we cannot wonder at its being rejected by Zuinglius, and other eminent Reformers (Sermon VII). This is also very evident in his summary of John 6, "the eating of Christ there mentioned, was only spoken in a spiritual and figurative sense", and his declaration that "our church ... believes a real, but a sacramental presence" (note in Sermon V).  While Le Mesurier's rejection of consubstantiation was a sta...