'To comfort our feeble and weak faith': giving thanks for Cranmer's eucharistic theology

On this commemoration of the martyrdom of Archbishop Cranmer, we turn to words from his Answer to Gardiner. It is, of course, fashionable - and, in some quarters, de rigueur - to minimise, if not ignore, Cranmer's influence on the Anglican tradition. The extract below, however, captures a pastoral ethos which has profoundly shaped the Anglican experience. 

The words of Cranmer's liturgy - at prayer desk and in the pew, at Font and Table, in matrimony and burial - comfort us; we whose faith is "feeble and weak"(as Cranmer knew of himself); we who err and stray, "like lost sheep"; we who journey through "this transitory life". This flows from and gives expression to Cranmer's robustly Christocentric theological vision, the (comforting) realism of his Augustinian recognition of sin, and the assurance of his Reformed sacramental vision. We need to be comforted, assured of Christ's gracious and loving presence for us and within us, sustained by "meat, drink, and food, of everlasting life". We touch and taste this comfort and assurance in "the bread and wine in the Lord's holy Supper":

But as in baptism we receive the Holy Ghost, and put Christ upon us, as well if we be christened in one dish full of water taken out of the font, as if we were christened in the whole font or river; so we be as truly fed, refreshed, and comforted by Christ, receiving a piece of the bread at the Lord's holy table, as if we did eat an whole loaf. For as in every part of the water in baptism is whole Christ and the Holy Spirit, sacramentally, so be they in every part of the bread broken, but not corporally and naturally ...

The minister of the Church speaketh unto us God's own words, which we must take as spoken from God's own mouth, because that from his mouth it came, and his word it is, and not the minister's. Likewise when he ministereth to our sights Christ's holy sacraments, we must think Christ crucified and presented before our eyes, because the sacraments so represent him, and be his sacraments and not the priest's. As in baptism we must think, that as the priest putteth his hand to the child outwardly, and washeth him with water, so must we think that God putteth to his hand inwardly and washeth the infant with his holy Spirit, and moreover that Christ himself cometh down upon the child, and apparelleth him with his own self. And as at the Lord's holy table the priest distributeth wine and bread to feed the body, so must we think that inwardly by faith we see Christ feeding both body and soul to eternal life. What comfort can be devised any more in this world for a Christian man? ...

What availeth it us that there is no bread, nor wine? or that Christ is really under the forms and figures of bread and wine, and not in us? ... grant that we may come often and worthily to Christ's holy table, to comfort our feeble and weak faith, by remembrance of his death, who only is the satisfaction and propitiation of our sins, and our meat, drink, and food, of everlasting life. Amen.

Cranmer's words in the last paragraph above, "What availeth it us ... that Christ is really under the forms and figures of bread and wine, and not in us?", are a powerful reminder that Hooker's famous dictum summarising the Prayer Book rite's Reformed eucharistic theology - "the real presence of Christ's most blessed body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament" (LEP V.67.6) - does not at all minimise the Sacrament and its role in the Christian life. Rather, here Cranmer and Hooker beautifully proclaim how this Sacrament is for our comfort and assurance, for it is the means whereby "we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us".

Such is the gift bequeathed by Cranmer to Anglicanism in his eucharistic theology and in his Order for the Holy Communion, his theological commitments and liturgical skills knitted together, "to our great and endless comfort". To employ a phrase used elsewhere in the Answer to Gardiner, it is a quietly "cheerful and comfortable" faith and piety, in which our heavenly Father's "infinite goodness and mercy" minister to us - of "feeble and weak faith" - in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, that "he might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life".