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'Niggardly pinching God's gifts': Cranmer's 'Answer to Gardiner', Jeremy Taylor, and the riches of the Sacraments

Resuming weekly readings from Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner (1551), we turn to Gardiner challenging Cranmer's account of our true feeding on Christ. This account, insists Gardiner, falls far short of catholic teaching:

But the catholic teaching, by the Scriptures, goeth further, confessing Christ to feed such as be regenerate in him, not only by his body and blood, but also with his body and blood delivered in this sacrament by him indeed to us, which the faithful, by his institution and commandment, receive with their faith and with their mouth also, and with those special dainties be fed specially at Christ's table.

Before proceeding to Cranmer's response, we might note how Gardiner uses the phrase "at Christ's table", suggesting that the use of 'table' with reference to the altar was not necessarily an inherently Reformed usage.

In terms of Cranmer's response, he again declares that he does not disagree with Gardiner's statement that Christ's "body and blood [are] delivered in this sacrament by him to us":

And as for your catholic confession, that Christ doth indeed feed such as be regenerated in him, not only by his body and blood, but also with his body and blood at his holy table, this I confess also: but that he feedeth Jews, Turks, and Infidels, if they receive the sacrament, or that he corporally feedeth our mouths with his flesh and blood, this neither I confess, nor any Scripture or ancient writer ever taught, but they teach that he is eaten spiritually in our hearts and by faith, not with mouth and teeth, except our hearts be in our mouths, and our faith in our teeth.

Here we see Cranmer affirming that "Christ doth indeed feed [us] ... with his body and blood at his holy table", and declaring that this catholic confession coheres with two fundamental Reformed assertions: firstly, that it is the faithful who partake of the Lord in the Eucharist, secondly that we do so "spiritually in our hearts and by faith". A little over a century later, Jeremy Taylor, in The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Statement (1654), would echo Cranmer in his summary of the debate between "the doctrine of the Church of England" and that of the Roman Church:

So that now the question is not ... whether Christ be really taken, but whether he be taken in a spiritual, or in a natural manner? ... we affirm, that Christ is really taken by faith, by the Spirit, to all real effects of his passion; they say, he is taken by the mouth.

Not only does this, by the way, demonstrate how Laudians maintained Cranmer's understanding of our partaking of Christ in the Eucharist, it also emphasises, to again quote Taylor, "that the spiritual is also a real presence". The catholic confession that the faithful partake of Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist is indeed robustly affirmed by Cranmer. Contra Gardiner, this was not the debate: the debate was over how the faithful partake of the Lord's Body and Blood in the Eucharist.

Cranmer then goes on to declare that the problem with Gardiner's sacramental teaching is not that it exalts the sacraments but, rather, than it diminishes them:

For you conclude your book with blasphemous words against both the sacrament of baptism and of the Lord's Supper, niggardly pinching God's gifts, and diminishing his liberal promises made unto us in them. For where Christ hath promised in both the sacraments to be assistant with us whole both in body and Spirit, (in the one to be our spiritual regeneration and apparel, and in the other to be our spiritual meat and drink,) you clip his liberal benefits in such sort, that in the one you make him to give but only his Spirit, and in the other but only his body.

Cranmer is returning to a theme he had previously highlighted in his Answer to Gardiner, but now further expands it. By stating that it is the Spirit who is received in Holy Baptism and Christ who is received in the Holy Supper, Gardiner - Cranmer states - is diminishing both Sacraments. Christ and the Spirit are both received in Holy Baptism; Christ and the Spirit are both received in the Holy Supper. Cranmer's critique of Gardiner, therefore, is not that he is too sacramental but, rather, that he is insufficiently sacramental: "niggardly pinching God's gifts". 

In The Worthy Communicant (1660), Taylor echoes Cranmer's emphasis on Christ and Spirit both being received in the two Sacraments:

The word and the Spirit are the flesh and the blood of Christ, that is the ground of all. Now, because there are two great sermons of the Gospel, which are the sum total and abbreviature of the whole word of God, the great messages of the word incarnate, Christ was pleased to invest these two words with two sacraments, and assist those two sacraments, as he did the whole word of God, with the presence of his Spirit, that in them we might do more signally and solemnly what was in the ordinary ministrations done plainly and without extraordinary regards ... in baptism the Spirit operates with the word in the ministry of God. For here God is the preacher, the sacrament is God's sign, and by it he ministers life to us by the flesh and blood of his Son, that is by the death of Christ into which we are baptized. And in the same divine method the word and the Spirit are ministered to us in the sacrament of the Lord's supper.

Cranmer, followed by Taylor the Laudian, sets forth the riches of the Sacraments, diminished in Gardiner's impoverished, "niggardly" account. Denying our true participation in Christ's Body and Blood in the Sacrament of Baptism, and denying our true participation in the Holy Spirit in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, it is Gardiner, not Cranmer, who represents a 'low' understanding of the Sacraments.

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Comments

  1. John the Irish Anglican3 February 2026 at 18:54

    When it comes to communion bread type what was Cranmer’s view, did he prefer leavened or unleavened bread?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. laudable Practice7 February 2026 at 12:09

      In 1552 stated "that the bread bee such, as is usuall to bee eaten at the Table wyth other meates, but the best and purest wheate bread". The Elizabethan Injunctions suggested thicker wafers, but 1559 repeated the 1552 rubric.

      Delete
    2. John the Irish Anglican9 February 2026 at 13:33

      I personally prefer wafer communion bread as they are unleavened and thus hark back to the bread eaten during the last supper.

      Delete

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