Our Anglican Heritage: (5) The first Book of Common Prayer

The death of King Henry VIII in 1547 provided Thomas Cranmer and those who yearned for a genuine reformation of the Church of England with the opportunity they had long awaited. Henry was succeeded on the throne by his son Edward, just nine years of age. Real power lay in the hands of the Royal Protector, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset, and a man with deep Reformed convictions. Within months things began to change. Protestant clergy were free to teach the doctrines of the Reformation, churchwardens empowered to remove images and icons, and printers permitted to publish Protestant tracts. The Epistles and Gospels were required to be read in English and the communion to be administered in both kinds. The clergy were permitted to marry, allowing Cranmer’s own wife to appear publicly at her husband’s table after a dozen years of marriage.

At the same time Cranmer and twelve other bishops proceeded with the task of preparing a Prayer Book entirely in the English language. The first step towards this was the production, in 1548, of what we might now call the “penitential rite” (the Invitation, Confession, Comfortable Words, Absolution and Prayer of Humble Access) which was to be said immediately prior to the reception of the bread and wine at Holy Communion. In addition to this the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer were both to be recited in the English tongue.

The introduction of the first full Book of Common Prayer came the following year and was required to be in use in all parishes in the realm by Pentecost 1549. We shall give more time to the study of the principles represented in this book two weeks hence. Briefly, though, it was remarkable in three ways. First, it offered a single set of services in a single volume for every diocese and parish, thereby eliminating both the profusion of local rites that had grown up and the use of a whole variety of service books—missals, breviaries, primers, ordinals and others. Secondly, it combined the seven daily “offices” into two services—Matins and Evensong, each of which gave primacy to the reading of the Old and New Testaments. Thirdly, the Communion service was transformed from a priestly mass into “the Supper of the Lord” in which the congregation had a full part as participants and not just spectators.

Those familiar with Rite I in the Episcopal Prayer Book of 1979 would have no trouble recognizing the words of this service. The order in which they appear might seem strange to us, however, as they still follow the pattern of the mediæval mass. The service begins with the Lord’s Prayer and Collect for Purity, followed by the nine-fold “Kyrie” or Lesser Litany (“Lord, have mercy upon us…) and then the “Gloria in Excelsis” in its traditional, early position. This is followed by the Mutual Salutation, the Collect of the Day and the Collect for the King, then the Epistle, the Gospel and the Creed. Next comes the sermon or homily, and one of two lengthy Exhortations, setting out the meaning of Holy Communion. Immediately afterwards comes the Offertory, the “Sursum Corda” (“Lift up your hearts…”) and the “Sanctus” (“Holy, holy, holy…”). Next is the Intercession or Prayer for the Church, flowing immediately into the Great Thanksgiving or Eucharistic Prayer. This in turn is followed by the Lord’s Prayer, the Peace and then the Penitential Rite, after which the people would receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion. The service concluded with a post-communion prayer of thanksgiving and the Blessing.

From the beginning the new service book met with mixed reviews. Those who were strongly Reformation-minded complained that it had not moved far enough away from mediæval ritual and doctrine. Martin Bucer, the liberal-minded reformer, who had unsuccessfully attempted to bring together Luther and Zwingli on the Continent and who had come over as Professor of Divinity at Oxford, wrote, at Cranmer’s request, a lengthy theological critique of the book. On the other side of the debate, there were riots in Cornwall, where people refused to use the book because it simply traded one language that they did not understand to another which they not only did not speak but resented having it foisted on them. The final blow to the book was administered by Bishop Stephen Gardiner, a bitter adversary of Cranmer, who claimed that he could use the book without compromising any of his Catholic presuppositions.

Our Anglican Heritage: (4) Thomas Cranmer

 Henry VIII’s quest for power over the church continued, however, with the gradual dissolution of the monasteries between 1535 and 1540, with all their wealth being surrendered to the crown. Paradoxically, through all of this Henry himself remained a convinced Catholic, suspicious of the Reformation that had by now gained hold of much of northern Europe and opposed to its principles. Be that as it may, the social and political revolution which he had instituted could only give encouragement to those who yearned for a deeper change. Both to keep peace within his own realm and to ensure that he retained allies on the European continent, Henry VIII was forced to come to terms with the Reformation. This led in 1536 to the promulgation of the Ten Articles of Religion. While appearing on the surface to accept some of the teachings of Lutheranism, they also contradicted them at some points, upholding traditional Catholic teachings and practices such as auricular confession, prayer for the dead and transubstantiation. A.G. Dickens comments that they “exemplify our English talent for concocting ambiguous and flexible documents”. Behind the scenes, however, more substantial changes were beginning to take place, largely under the direction of the man whom Stephen Neill describes as having “done more than any other one man to make the Church of England what it is today”. That man was Thomas Cranmer, whom Henry had appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532. Of him Neill further observes, Those who have read Cranmer’s writings are unlikely to doubt the splendid integrity of his mind and character—and all this combined with such meekness that it was said of him, “If you do my Lord of Canterbury an injury, you will make him your friend for life.” Cranmer had long been influenced by Lutheran teachings. As early as 1525 he had begun praying that the pope’s influence should be removed from England. He was also a man who thought deeply about every issue he gave his mind to, and laboured long before he came to a conclusion. In contrast to Martin Luther and his sudden conversion to new beliefs, in Thomas Cranmer we can trace a gradual growth in conviction. Above all, he was a man steeped in the knowledge of Scripture, indeed truly in love with the Bible and all that it taught, and fully convinced of its power to transform human lives. In 1538 the government decreed that every parish church should display an English translation of the Bible for public reading. That scarcely a dozen years before Bibles had been burned by church officials in the public squares is a measure of the change that had begun to take hold in England. The translation chosen was largely the work of William Tyndale, completed in the home of Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1524. Tyndale himself had been strangled and his body burned for his work in 1536 (the same year in which John Calvin published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion). Tyndale’s work was revised and supplemented by Miles Coverdale, who had completed his own translation of the Bible from the Latin in 1535. Much of this version survives today in the Psalms, Epistles and Gospels of our Prayer Book. Five years later, in 1543, it was required that in every parish a chapter of the Bible be read in English, morning and evening. It can be seen that the going was slow and there was much opposition, both passive and active, especially from among the bishops and clergy. However, the thirst for the Bible among the common people could not now be quenched. A.G. Dickens illustrates this from the writings of Thomas Malden: … divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford … brought the New Testament of Jesus Christ, and on Sundays did sit reading in [the] lower end of the church, and many would flock about them to hear their reading. [Malden’s father did not approve of his son engaging in this practice. However Malden continues,] … I saw I could not be in rest. Then, thought I, I will learn to read English, and then I will have the New Testament and read thereon myself… The May-tide following, I and my father’s prentice … laid our money together and bought the New Testament in English, and hid it in our bed straw and so exercised it at convenient times. The following year, 1544, saw the introduction of the first service in English: the Litany—that long responsive form of prayer still to be found in our Prayer Book. Here was Cranmer’s first opportunity to introduce worship that the common people could understand and in which they could participate, and in a majestic, eloquent prose that has never been surpassed. Throughout this long period, Cranmer’s slow conversion to Protestant convictions continued, so that by 1546 he could fully embrace the doctrine of justification by faith alone and a Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper. On 28 January 1547 King Henry VIII breathed his last. The stage was now set for further and far-reaching change.

Our Anglican Heritage: (3) The Marital Woes of Henry VIII

At the same time other developments had been taking place within England itself. Henry VIII had been on the throne since 1509. He had inherited a wealthy kingdom blessed with peace and a very stable power base from his father, Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty. However by 1527 he was still without a son to inherit his kingdom and his wife, Catherine of Aragon was beginning to show the signs of premature aging.

Into the scenario steps Anne Boleyn, a young woman who he thought had the potential of making the perfect wife. Only one problem stood in the way: Catherine. Henry, however, was no fool and he thought he had a way around her. Catherine had herself been previously married to Henry’s older brother Arthur, who had died in his teens. This had made her technically ineligible to be Henry’s bride and their marriage was allowed only after papal dispensation on the basis that her former marriage to Arthur had never been consummated. Was it possible, argued Henry, that the series of sickly and stillborn babies born to Catherine were a sign that God’s blessing did not rest on their union after all?

So it was that Henry began a campaign to have the church declare that his marriage to Catherine had never been valid in the first place. He was not seeking a divorce. As a devout Catholic (indeed something of a self-styled theologian), he would not have admitted the legitimacy of remarriage after divorce (nor did the Church of England for more than four and a half centuries). What Henry was seeking was an annulment.

That, however, was no easy matter. For Catherine was well connected internationally. Her nephew was Charles V of Spain, who in 1527 had sacked Rome and kidnapped the pope himself. The memory of that painful episode and the threat of worse if the annulment were granted ruled out any hope of a favorable response from the pope. What was Henry to do?

The answer was to consolidate his power at home, within the borders of his own kingdom. In this Henry had the statute books in his favor. Since 1393 there had been a law called the statute of Præmunire, which restricted papal intervention in the affairs of the English church. Henry had the courts broaden its application to the point where in 1529 he could unseat the powerful Cardinal Wolsey and force the clergy into recognizing the king as “especial Protector, only and supreme Lord, and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even supreme Head” of the church. By 1534 the payment of annates (a levy on diocesan and parish revenues) to Rome had been restricted, appeals to the authority of Rome were abolished, all the legal rights and duties of the pope were transferred to the monarchy and the Act of Supremacy declared the king as head of the church, this time omitting the crucial clause “as far as the law of Christ allows”.

Henry’s control of the church was complete. In fact the rejection of papal authority met with little opposition. And Henry’s goal from the beginning had been achieved, for the newly-appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, had already declared his marriage to Catherine null and Anne Boleyn had been crowned as his queen on the Day of Pentecost, 1533.

Our Anglican Heritage: (2) The Reformation in Europe

Wycliffe’s teachings were not confined to England. The connection between Britain and Bohemia seems distant, but in an era when scholars all wrote in Latin, language was not the barrier that it has been in intervening centuries. There another priest, Jan Hus, espoused and began to preach Wycliffite principles, eventually to be tried as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415. Although the words “Hussite” and “Bohemian” were spattered as insults, Hus remained a popular national hero in the minds of many.

As with Wycliffe’s teachings in England, the doctrines which Hus proclaimed continued to spread. Almost exactly a century later, on 31 October 1517 Martin Luther posted his famous Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral and unleashed a movement which the hierarchy in Rome was unable to suppress. When Luther was accused of being a Hussite, he boldly replied, “Among the condemned beliefs of Jan Hus and his disciples, there are many which are truly Christian and evangelical and which the Catholic Church cannot condemn.”
Of course by the sixteenth century Hus was only one of a number of influences abroad in Europe. The abuses of the church were the cause of widespread discontent among clergy, scholars and laypeople alike. Even Erasmus of Rotterdam, a moderate humanist scholastic who remained within the Catholic Church, writing at about the time of the Reformation, could speak of the church as engulfed in a “sea of superstition”. Of the absurd practices associated with the veneration of saints he remarked,

One gives relief from toothache, another helps in childbirth, another restores things that are stolen, another brings help to the shipwrecked, still another guards the flocks, and so it goes down the line. There are some saints who can do many things, like the Blessed Virgin, whom the common folk honour more than they do her Son.

Erasmus’ withering sarcasm was not confined to popular folk religion. He had as much (if not more) to criticize in the clergy and prelates of the church:

Under the present system what work need be done is handed over to Peter or Paul to do at their leisure, while pomp and pleasure are personally taken care of by the Popes. They believe themselves to be readily acceptable by Christ with a mystical and almost theatrical finery. Thus, they proceed with pomp and with such titles as Beatitude, Reverence, and Holiness—between blessings and curses—to execute the role of a bishop. Miracles are considered to be antiquated and old-fashioned; to educate the people is irritating; to pray is a waste of time; to interpret Sacred Scripture is a mere formality; to weep is distressing and womanish; to live in poverty is ignominious; to be beaten in war is dishonourable and not worthy of one who insists that kings, no matter how great, bend and kiss his sacred foot; and to die is unpleasant, death on a cross—dishonor.

In addition to this there was an increasing sense of nationalism, which resulted in mounting tension between church and state. And thirdly the newly-introduced movable-type printing press was making the written word available to an increasingly wider and better-educated populace. Notions of reformation were able to spread far more quickly and effectively than they had a century before.

The Reformation was not merely a protest against the wrongs of a church rife with corruption. Much more it was a movement to bring back into centrality the core teachings of the gospel: the doctrines of justification by grace through faith, of the unique authority of the Bible in all matters of faith and life, of the priesthood of all believers (that is, that Christians need no other mediator than Christ), and supremely of the all-sufficiency of Christ and of his death on the cross as the one and only sacrifice for the sins of the world.

While popular ideas of the beginnings of Protestantism center on Martin Luther, the Reformation was in fact a complex and widespread movement with a number of leaders. Reformation teachings were being espoused not only in Germany, but in Switzerland and France—even in Italy and Spain. And in England the remaining Lollards discovered that they now had allies across the channel on the continent.

Our Anglican Heritage: (1) John Wycliffe & the English Bible

This is is the first in a series of brief articles on the history of Anglicanism.

One of the challenges of presenting a series on “Our Anglican Heritage” is where to begin. For a start, we need to recognize that the word “Anglican” really means “English”. Thus to speak of “our Anglican heritage” is to a great degree to speak about a tradition which has come to us from England. We could begin, then, by tracing that heritage back to the origins of Christianity on the British Isles, past Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to men like Ninian and Patrick, Aidan and Brendan, intrepid missionaries who brought the good news of Christ to the Celtic people. There are even legends that seek to trace those origins all the way to the Apostle Paul or Joseph of Arimathea.

However, we shall skip over a thousand years or more of history to the fourteenth century, to a priest and scholar named John Wycliffe (d. 1384). Little is known about the man himself. Stephen Neill writes of him as “a bitter, angry and disappointed man, with a harsh and narrow mind”. A.G. Dickens reflects,

The man himself remains in some respects a mystery; we know so much of his thought, so little of his thoughts, so little of the inner sources of his radicalism. An obstinate North-Country mind endowed with the subtleties of the Oxford schools; a combination of disappointed careerist, temperamental rebel, sincere reformer of immense moral courage; all these and yet further complexities seem to dwell side by side.

Wycliffe has been called the “Morning Star of the Reformation”, and for good reason. He is best known for his translation of the Scriptures, although exactly how much Wycliffe himself rendered into the earthy English of his day is not certain. What was for certain was Wycliffe’s recognition of the Bible as the one sure basis for the church’s teaching and of the need to bring it into the hands of the common people. He also rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation (the mediæval teaching that Christ is physically present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion) but spoke of Christ being present “sacramentally, spiritually and virtually”. He also questioned the supremacy of the pope, spoke against the celibacy of clergy and advocated the disendowment of the church, which had become rich and decadent. “Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated was that of Justification by Faith Alone.”

John Wycliffe died in relative obscurity, but his teachings were perpetuated by a group that came to be known as “Lollards”. The word is a derisive Middle Dutch term meaning “mutterer” or “mumbler”. In spite of hot persecution, the Lollard movement grew rapidly through the first quarter of the fifteenth century and seems to have remained a force to be reckoned with, though largely underground, right to the time of the Reformation.

Some thoughts on heaven from Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

Award-winning Christian author Madeleine L’Engle died earlier this year. I came across this quotation as I was preparing for All Saints’ Day.

The Churches have tended to be too literal about heaven and hell, defining what no mortal can possibly know, because only God knows. A young woman came to me, deeply disturbed, because her minister had told her that immortality is not a Christian concept. It is left over from Greek thinking, he said, and Christians are not supposed to believe in it.

This was not what she needed to hear. She had lost a beloved sister, and she needed affirmation, not a lecture. “If there is no immortality, then what about my sister?” she asked the minister.

“We believe in the resurrection of the body,” he said. “What body?” Her sister had died, very slowly, of cancer, looking like a victim from Belsen. Her sister would not want to be resurrected in that emaciated, dying body. Her minister did not have an answer, at least not one that she could remember and tell me.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that the word immortality involves time, involves our going on and on in time, human time. But resurrection is in eternity, and that’s a tough concept for us to understand.”

“Do you understand it?”

“No, but I believe it. I don’t understand it because I am in time right now. I get glimpses of eternity, of kairos, God’s time, which is far more wonderful than ordinary chronos, clock time.”

“What about my sister? She was so alive, so vibrant, until those last months.”

All I could do was repeat my affirmation that God does not create us and then drop us into nothingness. I don’t think her sister is in either the old-fashioned heaven or hell; but I think she is, somehow, somewhere, more truly alive than she was on earth. I don’t know what the resurrection body will be like.

Tommy, my evangelist friend, quoted something to the effect that many Christians are more interested in resuscitation than resurrection.

Ouch.

My grandfather would not have wished to be resuscitated at 101.

But when a child is suddenly killed, don’t we intuitively wish for resuscitation? We want that child back, exactly as before—the same deep gray eyes, the fair hair, the dimples that came and went.

But Jesus was never recognized by sight after the resurrection. So what on earth do we mean by resurrection?

When the people asked St Paul what the resurrection body was going to be like, he snapped out, “Don’t be silly,” one of my favorites of all the sayings of Paul. Don’t be silly. We can’t have back what we have lost. I can’t have my tall, lean husband with his amazing blue eyes, larger and bluer than any other eyes I have seen.
I want him back, and there’s no evading that I want him.

So what do I mean, what do we all mean when we say that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead”?

A friend said to me, “When I die and see Jack again I will recognize him.”
If we didn’t recognize Jesus, can we count on that? Not unless we, too, have been resurrected, not resuscitated.

Once again we are in mystery, outside the realm of provable fact. We are, I believe, given glimpses, and I have had a few. Walking down a dirt road on a shining summer day I moved into a realm of beauty and depth that became indescribable once I had left it, but it gives me a hint that after I die I may say, “Oh, glory! What a thin way of living I have just left!”

Madeleine L’Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1996) 184-186

Thoughts on Marriage

“Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God to witness and to bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony…” The brief exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer (page 423) given by the priest at the beginning of the service offers a succinct outline of the theology that underlies our Christian understanding of marriage. It speaks of what we are witnessing as “holy matrimony”. Underlying that is the conviction that what is taking place is not merely a contractual arrangement between two people, but a covenant, where God is the key player.

The service goes on to inform us that marriage is not a human invention. It was God who established it at the dawn of creation, when he brought together the first man and the first woman in Eden. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” the man cried aloud as he first set eyes on his newly created partner. And the author of Genesis comments, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

So it is that the wedding service begins with the principle that marriage was God’s idea. That point is driven home further by the reminder that our Lord’s first recorded miracle took place in the context of a marriage ceremony. I believe that teaches us the high value that Jesus himself set on marriage.
Thirdly, the exhortation speaks of marriage as signifying “the mystical union between Christ and his Church”. The reference here is to the apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church.

In other words, at its best, marriage is a window that helps reveal the self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ for us, his church.
This theology of marriage was a revolutionary thought in the sixteenth century, when the wedding service was first written. In those days it had been assumed that God’s highest calling to men and women was to be celibate, as a priest or a nun. The reformers turned that around, to affirm that marriage is every bit as much a response to God’s calling, and therefore “is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God”.

This approach to marriage may be equally revolutionary in our society today, when so many see it as a legal agreement, a creation of the state, or a purely human device. May we not be swept along by this tide, but continue to see marriage—and live it out—as a holy gift, a sacred trust, from our gracious and loving God.