Against those who 'divide Christ, his sacraments, and his people': Cranmer's 'Answer to Gardiner', Chalcedon, and the Holy Supper

These weekly readings from Cranmer's Answer to Gardiner commenced at the beginning of September 2025. We are now over one-third of our way through the work. This being so, it seems like an appropriate time to take a break from the Answer to Gardiner, before returning later this year. We end this section of readings with Cranmer saying of Gardiner's teaching, "in the sacrament mak[ing] so many divisions":

For you divide the substances of bread and wine from their proper accidences, the substances also of Christ's flesh and blood from their own accidences, and Christ's very flesh sacramentally from his very blood, although you join them again, per concomitantiam; and you divide the sacrament so, that the priest receiveth both the sacrament of Christ's body and of his blood; and the laypeople, as you call them, receive no more but the sacrament of his body, as though the sacrament of his blood and of our redemption pertained only to the priests. And the cause of our eternal life and salvation, you divide in such sort between Christ and the priest, that you attribute the beginning thereof to the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, and the continuance thereof you attribute to the sacrifice of the priest in the mass, as you do write plainly in your last book. 

Gardiner, declares Cranmer, divides the sacramental sign, divides the thing signified from Christ Himself, divides clergy from laity in reception of the Sacrament, divides the Holy Supper from the one sacrifice of Christ. 

Reading this passage, what comes to mind is Hooker's later invocation of Chalcedonian Christology in the context of eucharistic theology. Famously, at the heart of Book V of the Lawes, Hooker introduces his sacramental theology with an extended discussion of Chalcedon's confession of the Incarnation, 'without confusion, without change, without division, without separation':

Wee must therefore keepe warilie a middle course shunninge both that distraction of persons wherein Nestorius went awrie, and also this later confusion of natures which deceived Eutyches. 

We see this applied sacramentally as Hooker critiques those who believe Christ's "bodie and bloode be also externallye seated in the verie consecrated elementes them selves":

which opinion, they that defende, are driven either to consubstantiate and incorporate Christe, with elementes sacramentall or to transubstantiate and change theire substance into his, and so the one to hold him really, but invisiblie moulded up withe the substance of those elementes, the other to hide him under the onlye visible show of bread and wine, the substance whereof (as they imagine) is abolished and his succeeded in the same roome (V.67.2).

Hooker's critique, in other words, is that such sacramental theologies are marked by, to use the Chalcedonian terminology, 'confusion'. Against this he opposes an understanding of "the conjunction of his bodie and blood with those elementes" (67.10). Cranmer, by contrast, applies 'division' to Gardiner, describing him as being amongst those who "divide Christ, his sacraments, and his people". Now, it is true that Cranmer does not have in his work a meditation on Chalcedonian Christology, as does Hooker. But note how Cranmer does state that Gardiner's eucharistic theology "divide[s] Christ", a phrase with Chalcedonian resonances of which Cranmer, of course, would have been very much aware. Indeed, later in the Answer to Gardiner, Cranmer invokes the faith of Chalcedon against the Eutychians:

But the catholic faith hath taught from the beginning, according to holy Scripture, that as in the ... sacrament be two divers natures and different, remaining in their properties, that is to say bread and wine, so likewise in the person of Christ remain two natures, his Divinity and his humanity.

Gardiner's sacramental theology, Cranmer asserted, "maketh a plain way for the Nestorians and the Eutychians to defend their errors".

We might also consider how Cranmer's use of 'without division' is applied to the ministration of the Sacrament in its fullness to clergy and laity alike. This, in a way, parallels how Hooker - as Torrance Kirby brilliantly explored - applied Chalcedon's formula to the Royal Supremacy. Both divines, in other words, are conscious of how Chalcedonian Christology has a fundamental significance for wider aspects of the Church's life and order.

It is the case, then, that Chalcedon is clearly evident in Cranmer's thinking as he writes the Answer to Gardiner. This does make it likely that his use of 'division' against Gardiner's eucharistic theology intentionally evoked Chalcedon's formula. As such, it is an anticipation of Hooker's great meditation in Book V of the Lawes. What is more, it also points to Chalcedon's Christological confession richly shaping these two defining statements of Reformed sacramental thought in the Edwardine and Elizabethan Church of England.