laudable Practice

In his attack on Cranmer's Swiss eucharistic theology, Gardiner turns to sources he otherwise definitively rejected: Justus Jonas hath translate a Catechism out of Dutch into Latin, taught in the city of Noremberge in Germany, where Hosiander is chief preacher: in which Catechism, they be accounted for no true Christian men that deny the presence of Christ's body in the sacrament. The words "really" and "substantially" be not expressed, as they be in Bucer, but the word "truly" is there: and as Bucer saith, that is substantially ...  Philip Melancton, no papist nor priest, writeth a very wise Epistle in this matter to Ecolampadius, and signifying soberly his belief of the presence of Christ's very body in the sacrament. Invoking the prominent Lutheran theologians Melanchton and Jonas, and Bucer's eirenic eucharistic theology (a via media between Wittenberg and Zurich), Gardiner followed what is now a common, predictable path amongst papali...

From Richard Field's Of the Church (1606/10), a refutation of the allegation by a Tridentine apologist that the differences "between the followers of Luther and Zuinglius" were in matters of faith, producing a fundamental division between the two traditions. Mindful that Field was a leading divine in the Jacobean Church of England - described by Paul Avis as "one of the most stupendously learned of Anglican theologians in an age when Anglican clerical scholarship was the wonder of the world" - his insistence (following Jewel and Hooker) that the differences between Lutheran and Swiss Reformed eucharistic theologies were not fundamental is a significant insight into an important and influential stream of thought in the Jacobean Church. What is more, note his defence of the 'Zwinglians'. (While Field does also use the term 'Calvinist' for the Swiss, it is clear throughout that he regards Zwingli as the figure who chiefly shaped the Swiss Reformed ...

On the Fridays of Lent, laudable Practice will be posting readings from perhaps one of the more controversial of Jeremy Taylor's Golden Grove sermons, ' The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance '. The accusation that Taylor was here exalting works over faith, and so undoing the Reformation, is significantly flawed. It implies that the Reformation did not take repentance seriously. By contrast, Luther famously proclaimed otherwise in the first of his 95 Theses : When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent", he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. Likewise, Calvin: But lacking any semblance of reason is the madness of those who, that they may begin from repentance, prescribe to their new converts certain days during which they must practice penance, and when these at length are over, admit them into communion of the grace of the gospel. I am speaking of very many of the Anabaptists, especially those who marvelously exult in b...