laudable Practice

In his Answer to Gardiner (1551), Cranmer had to address Gardiner's allegation that his view of the Sacraments of the Old and New Covenants, as both being a participation in Christ, was "a novelty of speech". Cranmer, we should note, entirely rejected what we might term 'Scriptural primitivism' - that is, a belief that a thousand years of erroneous teaching within the Churches was of little concern as that was required was to return to Scripture. Instead, Cranmer invoked the genealogy for Reformed eucharistic teachings that he had previously set out in this work , with particular regard to how it also supported the Reformed emphasis on the sacraments of the New Covenant working as did the sacraments of the Old Covenant.  The last post in this series demonstrated how this understanding of the sacraments was " after the mind of St. Augustine ". Cranmer, however, did not stop with the great Augustine. He then turned to the 9th century Frankish divine Ratra...

Last week, we left Parson Bull and Squire Sheppard in 1685, in the Tory idyll of the Cotswolds' parish of Avening. Perhaps we spoke too soon, for all was not well in the Tory idyll. In the parish, according to Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , "there were ... many more disaffected to the Discipline and Liturgy of the Church of England". Nelson's reference here probably reflects one of the consequences of the 1640s and 50s, when use of the Book of Common Prayer was prohibited. In addition to this, of course, criticism of the Prayer Book had also loomed large in the political controversies of the civil wars, with renewed controversy surrounding the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Indeed, Nelson had referred to this in his description of Bull's ministry at the Restoration. Added to this, Nelson's readers in 1713 would also have recognised the situation, as the Toleration Act of 1689 gave recognition to Dissenting bodies largely defined by a rejection of the Pr...

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...

At the heart of the preparation for the Sacrament urged by Taylor in The Worthy Communicant is the recognition that the Sacrament itself is prayer - and that, therefore, faithful prayer in daily life is necessary if we are to faithfully partake of the Lord's Supper: The holy sacrament is, in its nature and design, a solemn prayer, and the imitation of the intercession, which our glorious High Priest continually makes for us in heaven; and as it is our ministry, and contains our duty, it is nothing else but the solemnity and great economy of prayer, for the whole, and for every member, and for all and every particular necessity of the church; and all the whole conjugation of offices and union of hearts, and conjunction of ministers, is nothing but the advantages, and solemnity, and sanctification of prayer; and, therefore, in order to do this work in solemnity as we ought, it were very fit that we examine ourselves, how we do it in ordinary and daily offices. In other words, if th...

The sixth breach of the Institution made by kneeling, is the taking away of the distribution that ought to be amongst the Communicants. When Christ sayd, Take yee, eate yee, he insinuates, that they should take and diuide amongst themselues. So said an opponent of the Articles of Perth , which had introduced kneeling to receive the Sacrament in the Church of Scotland: kneeling to receive prevented seated communicants from breaking the Bread among themselves. The response of 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 , is significant because he invoked, in support of kneeling to receive, the continental Reformed tradition's emphasis on the Fraction in the Lord's Supper. In Reformed-Lutheran disputes of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the Fraction had become a distinctive Reformed act, the characteristic sign of a Reformed eucharistic understanding. As...

Amongst the points of debate between Gardiner and Cranmer, in Answer to Gardiner (1551), was the nature of the sacraments of the Old Covenant: were they a sign of the people of Israel partaking of Christ? While Gardiner's key point is that the sacraments of the Old Covenant were not a means of partaking of Christ, his position is less than clearly stated as he is forced to admit that "in a sense" that those of the Old Covenant did so partake of Christ: Their sacraments were figures of the things, but ours contain the very things. And therefore albeit in a sense to the learned men, it may be verified, that the fathers did eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, yet there is no such form of words in Scripture, and it is more agreeable to the simplicity of Scripture to say, the fathers before Christ's nativity did not eat the body and blood of Christ, which body and blood Christ himself truly took of the body of the Virgin Mary.  A chief difficulty for Gardiner, of ...