'To consecrate the elements': listening to Ussher, not Buchanan, on 'consecration'

There is no concept of "consecration" anywhere in the service at all. The only "moment" is reception—and the only point where the bread and wine signify the body and blood is at reception. If a point of "consecration" has to be sought - then it is at reception.

This, of course, is the famous and influential judgement of Colin Buchanan in What Did Cranmer Think He Was Doing? It is, perhaps, no surprise that laudable Practice rather firmly rejects Buchanan's interpretation. Cranmer, after all, did have a theology of consecration, as set out quite clearly in his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550):

Consecration is the separation of any thing from a profane and worldly use unto a spiritual and godly use.

And therefore when usual and common water is taken from other uses, and put to the use of baptism, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, then it may rightly be called consecrated water, that is to say, water put to an holy use.

Even so when common bread and wine be taken and severed from other bread and wine, to the use of the holy communion, that portion of bread and wine, although it be of the same substance that the other is from the which it is severed, yet it is now called consecrated or holy bread and holy wine.

While the 1552/1559 Communion rite did not describe the prayer with the petition regarding "thy creatures of bread and wyne", followed by the Words of Institution, as a 'prayer of consecration', this is precisely how it was understood by Elizabethan and Jacobean Conformist thought, in continuity with Cranmer's own thinking: it was in this prayer that the bread and wine were "were severed from other bread and wine, to the use of the holy communion". Jewel's teaching is a significant example of such continuity. What he says about Baptism, as with Cranmer, also applies to the Supper:

In baptism, the nature and substance of water doth remain still:  and yet is not it bare water.  It is changed, and made the sacrament of our regeneration.  It is water consecrated, and made holy by the blood of Christ.  They which are washed therein are not washed with water, but in the blood of the unspotted Lamb.  One thing is seen, and another understood. 

It is this understanding which shaped the 1573 decision by the Queen's ecclesiastical commissioners, requiring the Words of Institution to be repeated when the elements were insufficient for the communicants - a requirement also enforced by the Canons of 1604:

Furthermore no Bread or Wine newly brought shall be used: but first the Words of Institution shall be rehearsed when the said Bread and Wine be present upon the Communion Table.

The term 'consecration' is not used here, but this, quite clearly, is the practice of consecration. Crucially, rather than being an innovation, it firmly rooted in the understanding of consecration expounded by Cranmer and Jewel. This continued to be the case with the Reformed Conformist thought of the Jacobean Church.

As has been previously pointed out, Thomas Rogers, a representative of conventional Reformed Conformist thought, was perfectly happy to to declare in 1608 that "The words and prayers uttered do make the bread, & wine, holy, which before were common: This is consecration".  Even more significantly, however, is the thought of the greatest Jacobean Reformed Conformist divine, Ussher. 

In his 1620 sermon to the House of Commons, Ussher explicitly set forth the understanding of consecration seen in Cranmer's True and Catholic Doctrine:

The bread and wine are not changed in substance from being the same with that which is served at ordinary tables: but in respect of the sacred use whereunto they are consecrated, such a change is made, that now they differ as much from common bread and wine, as heaven from earth. Neither are they to be accounted barely significative, but truly exhibitive also of those heavenly things whereto they have relation: as being appointed by God to bee a means of conveying the same unto us, and putting us in actual possession thereof.

A fuller explicit account of consecration is also stated by Ussher in his A Body of Divinity (1645), in the section on the Sacraments:

What is the Ministers office herein? 

To consecrate the elements, and then to distribute them.

Wherein consisteth the consecration of the elements? 

Partly in declaring the institution of the Sacraments, and partly in going before the Congregation in prayer unto God. First in praising God, who hath ordained such means for the relief of our weakness -  then in suing to God, that he would please to make those means effectual to that end, for which they were ordained ...

Are not the bread and wine changed into the Body and Blood of Christ in this sacrament?

... thus we say that these elements are changed in uses: because being separated from a common use, they are consecrate to sign and feal unto us our spiritual nourishment and growth by the body and blood of Christ Jesus ...

What be the sacramental actions of the Minister in the Lord's Supper?

First to take the bread and wine into his hands, and to separate it from ordinary bread and wine ...

What is the second? 

To bless and consecrate the bread and wine, by the Word and Prayer ...

How are the Bread and Wine to he blessed and consecrated?

By doing that which at the first institution Christ did.

It is abundantly clear that Ussher - with his impeccable Reformed Conformist credentials - adhered the same understanding of 'consecration' found in Cranmer and Jewel, and maintained by the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church. 

We can also push this further. The same understanding is also found in the Westminster Directory:

After this exhortation, warning, and invitation, the table being before decently covered, and so conveniently placed, that the communicants may orderly sit about it, or at it, the minister is to begin the action with sanctifying and blessing the elements of bread and wine set before him, (the bread in comely and convenient vessels, so prepared, that, being broken by him, and given, it may be distributed amongst the communicants; the wine also in large cups,) having first, in a few words, shewed that those elements, otherwise common, are now set apart and sanctified to this holy use, by the word of institution and prayer.

As with 1552/1559, note that the term 'consecration' is absent - but this, quite clearly, is consecration: "sanctifying and blessing the elements of bread and wine ... by the word of institution and prayer". It is not necessary for the term to be used in a liturgy for the concept to be present. 

Contrary to Buchanan, therefore, Elizabethan Conformists and Jacobean Reformed Conformists understood that there was an act of consecration in the 1552/1559 Communion rite. It occurred, in Ussher's terms, by "the Word and Prayer", as the priest, "standing up" at the Holy Table, gave praise for the saving death of Christ, petitioned that "wee, receyving these thy creatures of bread and wyne ... maye be partakers of his most blessed body and bloud", and proclaimed the Words of Institution. As Ussher - who administered the Holy Communion according to the 1559 rite - declared regarding the elements in the Sacraments, "they are consecrated".

This is how the 1559 rite (with its lack of any significant change from 1552) was authoritatively understood by Cranmer's successors in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church - thinking surely more significant than Buchanan's attempt to reconstruct the nuances of Cranmer's eucharistic theology. This helps us better understand the 1662 revisions - not least the rubric referring to "the Prayer of Consecration" - as standing firmly within the Reformed eucharistic consensus of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline Church of England. In so doing, it likewise does something, I hope, to restore the 1552 Communion rite - to often dismissed as odd and eccentric, not least because of Buchanan's interpretation - to Anglican affections.