Contents
page 3
EDITORIAL
WHO’S COMING FROM WHERE?
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
5
Eric Woods
TWO ADDRESSES FROM THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2014
EROS TRANSFIGURED: MARRIAGE IN THE BOOK
OF COMMON PRAYER
22
David Harris
WHAT DOES THE PRAYER BOOK HAVE TO SAY
ABOUT SIN AND REDEMPTION?
32
Daniel Newman
‘...SWEET, PLEASANT, AND UNSPEAKABLE COMFORT’:
PREDESTINATION IN THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES
46
Christopher KW Moore
THE PEOPLE’S BOOK: THE PRAYER BOOK AND POLITICS 1590-1660 54
Jason Frost
60
REVIEW
John Scrivener
BRANCHES AND BRANCH CONTACTS
1
62
Editorial
D
avid Martin, former Professor of Sociology at the London School
of Economics, became a well-known spokesman in defence of
the Book of Common Prayer in the late nineteen-seventies and
early eighties, and his recent autobiography1 contains a very interesting
chapter on the episode. It was, he says, ‘painful at the time and painful
to recall’:
No one wants to argue about prayer, and those most concerned for
the Prayer Book and the KJV were less inclined than most to argue
about prayer. They were not a flash-mob in the making. It was their
sense of being taken for granted to appeal to less automatically loyal
constituencies that made them angry, and now I have found irenic
distance I want to keep anger out of it.
For Martin the question had urgent personal importance—‘everything
about my education came to a focus in my attempt to save the Book of
Common Prayer and the King James Bible’—and was continuous with
equally charged concerns about the drift in education and troubles on
university campuses. So what he offers here is ‘not a history of the Prayer
Book controversy with all the main players on stage, but my response to
the planned ruination of my inner imagined landscape’. Nevertheless,
vivid sketches are given of some of those the campaign brought him in
touch with—including the poet C.H. Sisson (‘a man of curmudgeonly
kindness’), Enoch Powell (‘surprisingly pleasant apart from assuming I
knew Greek’) and William Deedes (‘Once in his office I was plied with
whisky until he was free. When he came in I had a confused impression
of someone who might well have consumed much more whiskey than
I had’). And then there was Lord Waldegrave, who offered, when the
petition to the General Synod was being organised, to sign up ‘all the
Knights of the Garter minus foreign royalty like the Shah of Iran’. On the
other hand there was Bishop Bill Westwood:
...he told me with some vehemence that ‘In a clerically-led church we
decide’. When I mentioned the supposed role of the laos under the new
1 David Martin, The Education of David Martin:The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist (2013).
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dispensation he added, ‘That’s all eyewash—and anyway the Prayer
Book has had its chance and we now have to try something else’.
But Martin is a leading sociologist of religion, and was convinced that
‘the decline in churchgoing had little to do with linguistic registers,
and equally sure linguistic changes would not increase the appeal of
the Church to young people’ His personal memoir in this book should
be read alongside the more impersonal account he wrote a few years
ago2 in which he gives a clear account of what was at issue, and of
the difficulty of ‘joining serious debate in a common forum on shared
ground because the potential parties to discussion had incommensurate
frames of reference’.3
One thing that strikes the reader in retrospect is the near-unanimity
with which the educated public rallied to the cause. As a rather reluctant
organiser Martin found himself ‘in correspondence with the intelligence
and imagination of England’. It is hard to believe there would be a similar
response today on a comparable question. Even then though there were
exceptions:
On the other hand some surprising people and institutions were
unsympathetic, like the BBC, especially its department of religious
broadcasting. I recollect a bruising radio interview about our Gallup
poll with Rosemary Harthill. The BBC that had been so important for
my education was fast disappearing.
A transition, perhaps, from an older to a newer consensus or
‘establishment’.
But the whole account should be read—not least for aperçus such as
the following, which compacts a whole history into a sentence or two:
Of course the Church picks up and even anticipates social change.
If the universities were affected by antinomian and anti-structural
cults and later succumbed to bureaucracy and utilitarian criteria of
impact, the Church was unlikely to stay immune.
This was written before the appearance of the Green Report, of course.
John Scrivener
2 David Martin, ‘Retrospective Reflections on the Sacred and the Prayer Book’ in Christian Language and its
Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding (Aldershot 2002), pp. 127-134.
3 Loc. cit., pp. 131-2.
4
Whose Coming From Where?
Different Perspectives on the
English Reformation
E R I C WO O D S
O
n Friday 27 July 2012 the Guardian published a review of a new
book by Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity
at the University of Cambridge. The book was Saints, Sacrilege &
Sedition1; the reviewer was the Professor of the History of the Church in
the University of Oxford, Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch. It was an incendiary
review. You will forgive me if I quote it at some length – remembering
what Tertullian wrote at the end of the second Christian century: ‘“Look,”
they say, “how [the Christians] love one another” (for they themselves
hate one another); “and how they are ready to die for each other” (for
they themselves are readier to kill each other)’—usually misquoted as
‘See how the Christians love one another’!
MacCulloch wrote this:
Much of this book works; a significant amount doesn’t; none of it
is dull. It opens with polemical surveys of how English reformation
history has been written and Protestant English identity created,
and it moves on to delicious though elegiac studies of how English
parish life was transformed in the Tudor age. There are insightful and
empathetic portraits of two Catholic prelates. First is the gaunt but
hospitable Bishop John Fisher, a great theologian and a martyr for
papal obedience at the hands of Henry VIII. Then we meet the refined,
aristocratic and enigmatic Cardinal Pole, who despite knowing that
Martin Luther was right in his theology of justification by faith alone,
created martyrs in two contrary senses, resurrecting the reputations
of Fisher and Thomas More, while enthusiastically hounding leading
Protestant clergy to death at the stake; Thomas Cranmer was the most
exalted victim. Duffy is very good at seeing the realities of Mary
Tudor’s regime, for good or ill: he even mentions that she burned
quite a lot of Protestants...
Reading through this pageant with much enjoyment, I kept
applying the brakes with a ‘Yes, but …’ Repeatedly I noticed assertions
1 E Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege & Sedition, London, 2012
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Faith & Worship 76
pushing evidence beyond what is justified in the interests of making
a tidy and cogent case. For instance, it may be true, as Duffy says,
that it was only in the late 1650s that Mary Tudor was called ‘Bloody
Mary’ in print, but a century before, Edwin Sandys, vice-chancellor
of Cambridge and Elizabethan Protestant bishop, was fond of calling
her just that; only propriety during the reign of Mary’s half-sister
prevented more widespread public abuse. In Duffy’s account of the
grand and hauntingly beautiful parish church of Salle in Norfolk, he
wants a particular clergyman, Roger Townsend, rector of Salle, not to
be a pioneer Protestant at all. So he devotes three pages to explaining
away all the evidence that Townsend was indeed a pioneer Protestant,
while missing the significance of one killer fact he actually cites:
Townsend left a big pot of money for commemorative sermons by
one of his clerical neighbours, Robert Nicolles, who just happened
to be one of Archbishop Cranmer’s chaplains and one of the most
aggressive Protestants in Henry VIII’s Norfolk.
Of wider importance is Duffy’s take on the great East Anglian
popular commotions of 1549, now known as Kett’s Rebellion. He is
patently uneasy with a heap of evidence that the mood and rhetoric
of the crowds involved were pro-reformation; that’s just too many
Protestants for mid-Tudor England, who on Duffy’s reading shouldn’t
be there. So he seizes with relief on the fact that when one village
contingent marched off to Robert Kett’s great camp at Norwich, they
carried with them the banner from their village church. That does
look a rather pre-reformation or even anti-reformation thing to do,
until you realise that is precisely what a lot of villagers had done in
the great German popular uprisings of 1525, inspired by Martin
Luther’s revolution against the Pope.
Duffy should consider the significance of the next two upheavals
of Tudor England: Mary Tudor’s coup d’état against Queen Jane Grey
in 1553 and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Queen Mary six
months later. Neither Mary nor Wyatt laid any emphasis on the
religious cause that really excited them—Roman Catholicism in
Mary’s case, Protestantism in Wyatt’s. Instead Mary talked about her
claim to the throne as Henry VIII’s daughter, Wyatt tried to arouse
English fear of foreigners. Why was that? Because they both realised
that they would alienate too many potential supporters across the
religious divide if they talked about religion; they knew that England
6
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
was already deeply split between Catholics and Protestants. That is
the reality of mid-Tudor England.
The last sentences in the book are frankly silly. Playing with recent
assertions that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, Duffy
asserts on the strength of a single famous but elusive phrase in one
Shakespeare sonnet about ‘bare ruin’d quiers’ that ‘In the mind and
mouth of the most illustrious of all Elizabethans, the Tudor religious
revolutions had elicited not even the most equivocal of endorsements’.
This is said of the playwright who systematically, though with his
usual subtlety, turned Henry V, that most popish of medieval English
kings, into a Protestant avant la lettre, who cast Archbishop Cranmer in
the role of prophet of a golden Elizabethan age in his collaborative
play Henry VIII, who used the craggily Calvinist Geneva Bible as much
if not more than any other biblical translation, and all through his
career, fruitfully (though with increasing discrimination) drew on
the classic Protestant historical narratives created by John Foxe.
That illustrates the besetting fault of this collection. You wouldn’t
expect Duffy to write a book about Protestants, because he is writing
a book about Catholics. But to write a really effective book about
Catholics, one has to listen in a balanced fashion to voices on the
other side. There are a number of fine leading historians in this
country who are Catholics, but you wouldn’t know it when they
write about the reformation: they are historians of Tudor England
who happen to be Catholics. At times here, Duffy ceases to be a Tudor
historian who is a Catholic, and becomes a Catholic historian. That
will please many, but it’s a shame: almost as bad as being a Protestant
historian, rather than an historian who is a Protestant.
Whew! The big beasts of Reformation history with locked horns. To
be honest, I haven’t seen any riposte by Duffy. Perhaps, graciously, he
has declined to issue one. But you can see now why I want to make
the judgments of historians about the Reformation my theme for
this lecture—and to ask, more broadly: What shapes and moulds an
historian’s judgment?
This is not a new question. Theologians have long known that
theological writing is heavily influenced by the individual’s perspectives,
and that these perspectives are not just influenced or conditioned by
religious faith—and different and differing beliefs and doctrines—but
7
Faith & Worship 76
also by upbringing and childhood influences, schooling, environment,
even climate. One of the questions I attempted to tackle in my Oxford
entrance examination back in 1968 was ‘Liberty never flourishes where
the orange grows—discuss’. Think about it. Little did I imagine as I
attempted to answer that question that one day Professor Geoffrey Parker
would publish a magnum opus of nearly 900 pages entitled Global Crisis:War,
Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.2
To stay with the theologians for a moment, listen to this extract from a
book written by a Roman Catholic monk, Klaus Klostermaier, who in the
1960s found himself teaching at a Hindu college for boys in Vrindaban,
in northern India—the little town where Lord Krishna romped with the
milkmaids and fell in love with Radha:
A short, uncomplicated article on the Christian idea of God had
to be done for a Hindu magazine. Nothing modern, something
quite ordinary. The subject had been discussed in all the theological
textbooks, of course. All that need be done is to argue a few single
points a little. However, what was written there and what one had
studied with adequate zeal only a few years ago now seemed so
inadequate, so irrelevant, so untrue. Theology at 120° F in the
shade seems, after all, different from theology at 70° F. Theology
accompanied by tough chapatis and smoky tea seems different from
theology with roast chicken and a glass of good wine. Now, who is
really different, theós or the theologian? The theologian at 70° F in a
good position presumes God to be happy and contented, well-fed
and rested, without needs of any kind. The theologian at 120° F tries
to imagine a God who is hungry and thirsty, who suffers and is sad,
who sheds perspiration and knows despair.3
That’s about writing theology. But why should writing history be any
different? Well, one answer of course is that theology is about beliefs,
ideas, dogmas. Surely history is about facts? But facts are slippery things.
Historians have so many of them that they need to edit. History is
always edited. And inevitably the historian will select the facts that most
support his or her point of view. To put it crudely, imagine that you had
an argument with your next-door neighbour this morning. And when
you arrived here this evening you told your friend about the row. Now,
be honest. Did you tell your friend the whole story? No. You selected the
2 G Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Yale, 2013
3 K Klostermaier, Hindu & Christian in Vrindaban, ET London 1969, p.40
8
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
facts most favourable to you. You edited the details to show yourself in
the best light, and your neighbour in the worst. We all do it. Theologians
do it. Historians do it.
To complicate matters, historians of religion and religious movements
also have to deal, just like theologians, with beliefs, doctrines and
dogmas. And so their own faith (or non-faith) positions and prejudices
determine how they interpret the evidence, and arrange it. Think for
example of everything you know about the Crusades. From whom did
you learn it? Was it from Sir Steven Runciman’s seminal three volumes
published in the early 1950s?4 Or from one of the many western
analyses ever since (of which perhaps the best is Jonathan Phillips, Holy
Warriors5)? But I wouldn’t mind betting that you didn’t learn about the
crusades from, for example, Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes6.
You would have a different understanding of the Crusades if you had.
So, what are we to conclude from this excursus into theology
and Crusader history? Simply this. The good historian, like the good
theologian, needs profound self-knowledge. Both also need the ability and
readiness to move imaginatively out of their particular faith or non-faith
position to assess how the evidence might be viewed from a different
perspective. The judgments of historians need to be, in the best sense of
the word, professional. But there remains plenty for historians to disagree
about—and they do. The history of disagreements between historians has
become almost a profession in itself. It is called historiography. So it is to the
historiography of the Reformation to which we must now turn.
Scholars tend to date a big sea-change in Reformation studies to 1964.
Before then, the received wisdom—which many of us here imbibed at
school—was that Henry VIII was a conservative Catholic who wanted
to marry Anne Boleyn; that the Pope—afraid of Catherine of Aragon’s
uncle, the Emperor Charles V—was reluctant to grant a divorce; that
Thomas Cranmer, an obscure academic and archdeacon, figured out a
way forward; that Henry therefore broke with Rome whilst remaining
a conservative Catholic in all other respects; that Thomas Cromwell
enforced the break and dissolved the monasteries for their wealth; that
Edward VI, under the influence of evangelical tutors, sought to impose
far more radical reforms upon a generally unwilling Church and nation;
4 S Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols, Cambridge, 1951, 1952 and 1954
5 J Phillips, Holy Warriors: A modern history of the Crusades, London 2009
6 A Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, Paris 1983, ET London 1984. See also P M Cobb, The Race for
Paradise: an Islamic history of the Crusades, Oxford, 2014
9
Faith & Worship 76
that Queen Mary tried to put the clock back but failed, and that Elizabeth
I engineered a Settlement with which most people except really ardent
Catholics and really ardent Puritans could accept. And if that is, broadly
speaking, how you have always understood the Reformation, fear not—
so do most people to this day.
The change in 1964 was brought about by the publication of The English
Reformation by A. G. Dickens.7 Dickens, who was born in 1910 and died in
2001 at the age of 91, had taught at Oxford and Hull. When The English
Reformation was published he was Professor of History at King’s College,
London. The book was beautifully written and highly accessible—I
read it for A-level—and it became a bestseller. It was also informed by
Dickens’ own original research, particularly into religious faith and
practice in late-medieval and Tudor Yorkshire. In the court records of
the Diocese of York he had discovered a good deal of what might be
called ‘popular heresy’—that is, ordinary Yorkshire men and women
who were late Lollards (followers of John Wycliffe) and early Protestants.
The big write-up of that research was Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese
of York, published in 1959.8 Here were people who were at odds with
the Catholic Church, its clergy and their expression of faith long before
Martin Luther: men and women who were to embrace ‘Protestantism’ as
soon as it became available.
The notion that the Reformation in England was not just a King’s
whim or a movement of ideas imported from Europe—that it flowed
from a deep and authentic English stream of Lollardy and anticlericalism,
and was not just ‘top-down’, but ‘bottom-up’ also—caused something
of a palace revolution amongst professional historians in the 1960s, not
least young Turks researching their PhDs who made a dash for County
Record Offices, some to count heretics, some to read wills. Dickens had
made the creative suggestion that sixteenth-century wills were not just
about the disposition of worldly goods, but also testimonies—in the
sense of ‘Last Will & Testament’—of the religious views of the testators.
Tudor wills characteristically contained such a testament, or preamble,
and Dickens believed that those preambles could identify the testator’s
religious beliefs and so be used to track the progress of religious change.
This all raised further questions. Dickens had concentrated onYorkshire.
Had the Reformation really been longed for and then welcomed all
7 A G Dickens, The English Reformation, London 1964
8 A G Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, Oxford, 1959
10
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
over the country? If so, why? Some scholars in the 1970s challenged
him hard on this, in particular Christopher Haigh who used the same
methods as Dickens but this time in Tudor Lancashire.9 And there he
found something different—no great waves of ‘popular heresy’ but
considerable support for pre-Reformation Catholicism and significant
resistance to Reformation change.
This led Haigh to conclude that there was not one Reformation, but
several. Different counties had different levels of affection for the preReformation Church, and responded differently to subsequent changes.
To some of us, that came as no surprise. More conservative areas of the
country mourned the loss of their monasteries. In Sherborne, the great
Benedictine community—reduced to an abbot and sixteen monks by
1539, with no great record of recent spiritual or academic vitality—was
not greatly missed by the local folk, who gladly subscribed to buy the
Abbey from Sir John Horsey, who had acquired the monastic estate, and
gleefully pulled down the little church of All Hallows into which they
had been decanted by the monks, in order to regain possession of what
for nearly four centuries had been their cathedral.10
In other words, England and Wales (and Scotland too, but Scotland—
as always—is another story) responded to religious change differently,
from region to region, from county to county, from town to town and
even from village to village. Why scholars should have expected to find
anything different is a puzzle. The same phenomenon characterises
the years leading up to the Civil War in the seventeenth century, and
local responses to the Commonwealth and Protectorate. It is extremely
interesting to compare Dorchester and Sherborne during the Civil War
and its aftermath: two towns then of comparable size, just eighteen miles
apart, and Dorchester so Puritan—so Calvinist—that it was described as
the ‘English Geneva’ and Sherborne the most royalist and Anglican town
in the West Country.11
9 C Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, Cambridge, 1975
10 It is interesting that, apart from some small indication that Brother John, the Almoner of the
Monastery, tried around 1223 to found a ‘House of Mercy’ in the town, the Benedictine community
seems to have shown little interest in providing Sherborne with an almshouse. The first initiative of
which there is documentary evidence was taken by a secular priest named William Dodill, who in 1406
gave a dwelling house in the Hound Street Tithing for the use of the poor. C. H. Mayo in his A Historic
Guide to the Almshouse of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, Oxford 1933, and J Fowler in his Medieval
Sherborne, Dorchester, 1951, give very full accounts of how that foundation metamorphosed in 1437 into
the present Almshouse just across the Close from the Abbey. The Vicar of Sherborne (another secular
priest) and the Bishop of Salisbury (Robert Neville) were closely involved in the 1437 foundation. The
monastery is conspicuous by its absence.
11 See especially David Underdown’s splendid study of Dorchester, and his references to Sherborne, in
Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century, London, 1992
11
Faith & Worship 76
The mistake which many historians made in their reaction to Dickens
was to try to discern, or impose, clear patterns on a national analysis of
the Reformation where they simply do not exist. And this is where Eamon
Duffy and his fellow Roman Catholic Professor Jack Scarisbrick have, in
my view, been most at fault. They have taken the ‘revisionist’ argument
(as it has come to be known) to a new extreme. To caricature their
positions slightly (but not much) England just before the Reformation
was a happy and holy Catholic land, with happy and holy Catholic lay
folk led by happy and holy clergy and religious. The revisionists’ England
did not want the Reformation, and was extremely reluctant to accept it
when it came.12
So, of course, the revisionists love to tell us about the reactions of
folk in the conservative north and southwest of England. They are
less eloquent about the east and southeast, where the European ‘New
Learning’ naturally had its first big impact. We can follow this through
their accounts of the reception of the Edward VI Prayer Books. The first
prayer book called The Book of Common Prayer received the Royal Assent
on 14 March 1549 and by 9 June that year, Whit Sunday, it was the
sole legal form of worship in every parish in every diocese in England.
Almost immediately there flared-up the so-called ‘Prayer Book Rebellion’
which raged throughout Devon and Cornwall until August. Its leaders
produced a manifesto demanding the restoration of the Latin Mass, with
communion in one kind only for the laity, and that only at Easter; a
ban on the Bible in English; the restoration of ashes and palms and that
the sacrament should be reserved and ‘worshipped’ as before. The rebels
described the new Prayer Book as ‘but like a Christmas game ... and so
we Cornish men (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly
refuse this new English’. Interestingly, the rebels seemed to have no
interest in restoring the power and authority of the Pope over the English
Church: they wanted simply to return to the days of King Henry VIII ‘of
blessed memory’. Their manifesto was answered by the Archbishop of
Canterbury himself, Thomas Cranmer, who could not resist asking those
who ‘understood no English’ whether they understood Latin better.
Fair enough. In at least two respects, the revolt was characteristic of
many popular conservative movements before and since. First, it came
from an essentially rural rather than an urban population and, second,
12 For the ‘revisionist’ case see especially E Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, Yale, 1992 and C Haigh, The
Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, Oxford, 2007.
12
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
that population was in a part of the kingdom far from London. To
illustrate the first point, we discover that attitudes were very different
in the south west’s towns and cities, and amongst those who regularly
travelled further afield. And while there was another, smaller, revolt
in 1549 in Yorkshire, elsewhere popular demonstrations—like Kett’s
revolt in Norfolk—produced manifestos which, if they had a religious
dimension at all, were Protestant in flavour. As Judith Maltby puts it, ‘The
Book of Common Prayer has a ‘social’ history as well as an intellectual
history, because the church has a social history as well as an intellectual
history.’13 Maltby reminds us that the Reformation ‘took a long time’, and
that when we reflect on its social history it stops looking like a Rubicon,
and we may question the stark ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures put forward
by traditional Whig historians like Dickens as well as revisionists like
Duffy. ‘A story of continuity and discontinuity needs to be told’.14 But we
are beginning to realise that the Book of Common Prayer became hugely
formative of private devotion as well as having a profound influence on
the population through its use in public worship. Alec Ryrie has shown
that the Prayer Book was used in private prayer much like the Bible itself.
The Prayer Book model in general, and some aspects of it in particular,
were extremely influential on models of private prayer throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not only amongst conformists
and conservatives. By the early seventeenth century the Prayer Book was
the third most widely circulated volume in England, after the Bible and
the metrical psalms. All three were commonly bound together.15
So, we may conclude that the history of the Reformation is messy,
inconsistent and not readily susceptible to the imposition of clear and
neat patterns. Patrick Collinson makes exactly this point in his splendid
and succinct account of the Reformation across Europe, when he entitles
his eighth chapter ‘Exceptional cases: the Reformation in the British
Isles’.16 He has one passage which I want to quote at length:
The last generation of Catholic Englishmen believed that their dead
grandparents and children were in purgatory and that prayers and
masses could be efficacious in winning them remission. The evidence
is in the hundreds of chantries founded by the rich and the many
13 J Maltby, ‘The Prayer Book and the Parish Church: from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Restoration’,
in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, edd. C Hefling and C Shattuck, Oxford, 2006, p. 79.
14Loc.cit.
15 A Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, Oxford, 2013, pp. 232ff
16 P. Collinson, The Reformation, London 2003
13
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thousands of guilds and fraternities (’poor men’s chantries’) to
which ‘everyone’ paid their subscriptions, the main function being
the perpetuation of what has been called a religion celebrated by the
living on behalf of the dead. So how was it that a government whose
instruments of forcible coercion were limited was able, in a short
space of time, to make such associations illegal and to confiscate
many of their assets? This has been called the ‘riddle of compliance’.
We may be forced to construct the following syllogism: a religious
change so drastic and so unwelcome cannot have happened,
but it did happen; ergo, it cannot have been all that drastic and
unwelcome. Among those who believe there was a great change,
there is a consensus that it must be understood in terms of the
interplay of what have been called ‘from above’ and ‘from below’
factors and forces. Neither top-down nor bottom-up explanations
will work on their own. The history of the English Bible provides a
good illustration of the double process. The Bible was translated by
self-appointed volunteers, beginning with William Tyndale. This was
reformation not only from below but from outside, since Tyndale
worked in exile. The printers and booksellers naturally had their own
interests in the process. Soon, however, Henry VIII adopted the Bible
as a symbol and instrument of his majesty and it was placed, by
order, in all churches.
There was no symmetry or perfect match in this process. Not
even Henry VIII could control what all those people might make
of scripture. The English Reformation in its secondary and tertiary
developments produced a variety of dissenting nonconformities
and a long-term future of religious pluralism. It was another of
history’s jokes that the first of these nonconformities should be
the Catholicism that survived the Reformation as a repressed and
disadvantaged minority, ‘the popish sect’ as Protestants disdainfully
called it, until in the nineteenth century Irish immigration and papal
ultramontanism made it something more than that.17
The same contradictions are apparent in what historians make of
Henry VIII’s own views. No one but the most rabid Protestant would
nowadays deny that the apparent trigger of the break with Rome—
Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon—was anything other than
a shabby business. But it is becoming increasingly obvious—whatever
17 Ibid, pp. 108-109
14
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
the most rabid Catholics say—that the Reformation in England was not
something cooked-up overnight to get Henry out of a tight corner. As
Glyn Redworth of the University of Manchester has put it,18 ‘Rather it
was the unforeseen culmination of trends that went back to the start of
the reign.’
Redworth was writing as long ago as 1987, but I am not sure his
arguments have been given the consideration they deserve. He shows,
for example, that Henry VIII began tinkering with the Coronation Oath,
possibly almost at the moment his father died. There is an undated copy
of the oath revised in the King’s hand. The original required the King to
swear to uphold the ancient liberties of the Church, including its right
to make laws binding on his subjects. Yet the eighteen-year old monarch
altered it to read that a king need uphold the Church’s rights only so
far as his royal conscience would permit and (most important) only so
long as these privileges were ‘lawful and not prejudicial to his Crown or
Imperial jurisdiction’.
At the same time there was developing a legal debate about the often
rival claims of papal and state power. This was true on the continent of
Europe as well as in England, where many rulers of German states had
wrested considerable powers from the papacy, and both the Most Catholic
King of Spain (Rex Catholicissimus) and the Most Christian King of France
(Rex Christianissimus) had acquired increasing influence over ecclesiastical
appointments and property. Henry was always enigmatic about religion.
Sometimes he took a friendly interest in the New Learning; more often
he stood for conservative doctrine and practice in all except the Royal
Supremacy. That has prompted one historian to ask if Henry was a pope
without Catholicism, or a Catholic without a pope. Towards the end of
his reign he certainly seemed to shy away from some of the Protestant
ideas being pressed upon him: he used Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester,
as a kind of brake on Thomas Cranmer, but always protected the latter
from too vigorous an assault. In Diarmaid MacCulloch’s phrase, he
became an umpire between competing factions, while the leaders of the
factions practised the tricky and sometimes dangerous art of presenting
their ideas to Henry already dressed up as though they were his own.
I have made a brief reference to continental Europe, and that must
be expanded. If in the 1960s A. G. Dickens was the great historian of
the Reformation in England, the English historian who wrote most
18In History Today, Volume 37, October 1987
15
Faith & Worship 76
influentially about the Reformation in the rest of Europe was the
German-born G. R. Elton. Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg, or Sir Geoffrey
Elton as he became, was the son of Jewish parents who fled to Britain in
1939. He was elected a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, in 1949 and
was Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988. His
nephew, incidentally, is the writer and comedian Ben Elton.
So no-one could accuse Elton of writing either as a Protestant historian
or as a Catholic historian. In fact he represents the successful secularisation
of Reformation studies. He liberated the history of Protestantism from
being written almost exclusively by Protestants, and the history of
Catholicism from being written almost exclusively by Catholics. For that
alone the study of Reformation history is hugely in his debt.
Elton believed that the history of the Reformation—indeed, the history
of all major movements and events—needs to be placed into a political
narrative context. But he was also a traditionalist who had no time for
those who try to interpret history in socio-economic terms, like the
Marxist historians Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.
For Elton, the historian’s role was the empirical gathering of evidence
and then the objective analysis of what that evidence had to say. But,
having no time for interpreting the evidence in terms of abstract,
impersonal forces, he placed great emphasis on the role of individuals
in history. Thus it was that his 1963 book Reformation Europe, 1517-1559
is largely organised around what he saw as the duel between Martin
Luther and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. You will look in vain
in his book for cross-disciplinary efforts to combine historical analysis
with that of anthropology, economics or sociology. He was dedicated
to political history, and political history is about the big players on the
stage. I can hear my own history master at school declaiming ‘geography
is about maps; history is about chaps’.
Interestingly, in one respect at least Elton is back in fashion. His emphasis
on the role of the individual rapidly began to look old-fashioned as his
academic enemies became more influential. But now biographies are
the books of the moment. David Starkey—who is not averse to the genre
himself—has nevertheless complained about the undue attention being
given to women as a result: for example, Henry VIII’s wives rather than
Henry himself. Starkey calls this ‘feminised history’—another category
16
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
for sixteenth-century historiography!—adding ‘so many of the writers
who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a
female audience.’19 Talking to the Daily Telegraph, Starkey said that while
writing about Henry VIII, ‘even I fell into the trap of subjugating the
history of Henry ... to that of his wives’. He said he did so because ‘they
are a gift to the writer—you end up with six stories for the price of one.’
But he warned that the ‘soap opera’ of Henry’s personal life should come
second to the political consequences of his rule, such as the Reformation
and the break with Rome.
We ought to note that Starkey went further, claiming that modern
attempts to paint many women in history as ‘power players’ falsify the
facts: ‘If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five
minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power
players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify.’ For example, while he
considered Elizabeth I to be a great monarch, ‘the way she is presented as
some sort of female icon is ludicrous’. Small wonder, perhaps, that Lucy
Worsley has labelled his comments as ‘misogynistic’.20
But to return to Elton. Once again, as with Dickens, his picture of
things was too clearly drawn, too un-nuanced. Just as in English regions,
so in European countries the state of the Catholic Church before the
Reformation varied widely. We simply should not generalise from
Luther’s sweeping criticisms of the German Church to reach conclusions
about the Church in Europe as a whole. That is why in many parts of
Europe Luther’s teaching fell on stony ground—which has prompted
some more recent historians (not least of the Catholic variety) to talk of
the ‘failure’ of the Reformation.21 But this is an over-reaction. As Andrew
Pettegree, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrew’s,
has put it,
It is certainly true that a geographical survey of late sixteenthcentury Europe does reveal the failure of Lutheranism to put down
deep roots in many parts of the continent. Historians are only now
becoming aware that the reformation went through a profound midcentury crisis around the time of Luther’s death (1546), coinciding
as this did with reverses for the evangelical movement in several
other parts of Europe. A sense of this makes clear why the emergence
19 Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2009
20 Daily Mail, 31 March 2009
21 Eg Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, Baltimore, 1978
17
Faith & Worship 76
of Calvinism as an international force was so vital in consolidating
the Reformation’s achievement. But beyond this, to talk of ‘failure’
in any fundamental sense is overdrawn, because we now realise that
the reformers’ own ambitions of transforming religious behavior in
a single lifetime were hopelessly unrealistic. Much more in recent
years, historians have begun to talk of a ‘Long Reformation’, a
process requiring many generations before the changes in belief and
behaviour anticipated by the reformers could be accomplished. This
is true on the part of both Protestant and Catholic churches. Scholars
of Catholic reform, in much the same way, now recognise that it was
deep in the seventeenth century—if not later—before the reforms
anticipated by the Council of Trent (1545-63) began to take root in
the parishes.22
I suppose the key question in Reformation studies is whether we as
historians should concentrate on the principal protagonists, or the great
mass of the population. Elton preferred the former; Duffy in, for example,
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village23, prefers the
latter. Personally, I believe we need both. And of course the ‘great mass of
the population’ can only be explored by intensely local studies, which
is why Duffy et al need to remember that what was happening in one
English village was not necessarily happening in the village down the
road. Dorset is a good example here. For some reason which has more to
do with geography than history, Dorset villages tend not to ‘blend’ into
one another in the way that many villages in the neighbouring county
of Wiltshire do. There are exceptions, of course, but the rural clergy of
Dorset will testify to being extremely high-mileage as they race between
the parish churches of their benefices. And that gave plenty of room for
local animosities dating from medieval times to harden into religious
differences in the Reformation and political differences during the Civil
War. To this day, there are villages in Dorset which make uncomfortable
bedfellows in a single benefice: they have not ‘got on’ for centuries and
they see no reason why they should now.
We need to recognise that we are in a new world in historical studies.
Both Dickens and Elton—and remember, these were the heroes of the
historical studies of so many of us, less than half a lifetime ago—would have
been bewildered by the way in which we now have to take into account
22 A Pettegree, ‘Reformation Europe Re-formed’, History Today, Volume 49, January 1999
23 E Duffy, The Voices of Morebath, Yale, 2001
18
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
the impact of the Reformation on family life and gender relationships and
popular culture and local parish expenditure and so on and so on.
There is also a serious question to ask about the date when the
Reformation ceased to happen because it had happened. Dickens regarded
the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 as the end of the Reformation
in England. Others dispute whether or not Protestantism had taken
any meaningful hold on the country even by the end of the century.
Christopher Haigh has suggested that, by 1600, the efforts of Protestant
clergy had created ‘a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants’.
Haigh and his fellow revisionists insisted that, not only were there
a series of Reformations rather than just one, but they were slow
Reformations imposed ‘from above’ on a largely reluctant population.
Dickens hit back in 1989 in the second edition of his The English
Reformation with a new chapter containing new material on both popular
anti-clericalism and popular Protestantism. He also drew on the work
of Susan Brigden to demonstrate the importance of young people in
spreading abroad the Reformation ‘from below’.24 In his 1989 preface
he added this:
In my preface of 1964 I urged that throughout this story the
development of Protestant convictions in English society, however
varied as between the regions, should be regarded as having a far
more prominent role than hitherto. I also criticised the tendency
of earlier historians to allow ordinary men and women ‘to fall
and disappear through the gaps between the kings, the prelates,
the monasteries and the prayer books’. This has sometimes been
misinterpreted as a naïve ambition to write the history of the
Reformation purely ‘from below’. Yet I also wrote then that ‘one
dare not lose grip of the conventional themes, for governments and
leaders remain important; the story will not cohere in their absence.’
I still believe that this dual approach must be firmly maintained. To
make the Reformation merely socio-biographical would be as stupid
as to make it purely political and constitutional. Whether I have now
got this balance right—and meaningful for today—readers must
again judge for themselves.’25
24 S Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’ in Past & Present, xcv
25 A G Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd edition, London, 1989, p.11. I am conscious that, like Dickens,
I have said little or nothing in this paper about the Reformation in Scotland or Wales. For the former see
I Cowan, The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, London, 1982, and A Ryrie, The
Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485 – 1603, Harlow, 2009. For the latter see G Williams, Wales
and the Reformation, Cardiff, 1997
19
Faith & Worship 76
Dickens rightly warned against an over-tidiness in our interpretation
of Reformation history. If you want a thoroughly good read that will
demonstrate that with verve and colour, I recommend—if you do not
know it already—Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic.26 I was so
intoxicated as an undergraduate by that amazing book that I simply
had to read it again, from cover to cover. Thomas, a former Professor of
Modern History at Oxford and President of Corpus Christi, is avowedly
an atheist. He paints a picture of late medieval Europe as a place of
magical, semi-pagan and ancient folk belief which was what had the
real grip on the lives and the superstitions of most ordinary people in
Europe. To simplify (and therefore to caricature) their beliefs, they saw
the Catholic Church as a kind of sympathetic repository or reservoir of
all sorts of magical powers, ready and available to be deployed in the
ordinary secular needs of everyday life. The Catholic clergy were seen as
an agency of these powers—and were respected as such—but were by
no means regarded as their sole agency. Witchcraft, astrology, alchemy,
sorcery, the creation of spells, and potions, the invocation of ghosts and
fairies: few people in early sixteenth-century Europe doubted that these
things were real.
Then along came the Reformation, which waged war on these things.
So when the ordinary folk objected to Protestantism, it may be that they
were fighting for something much less clearly-defined than the Church
of Rome. They were fighting for a much murkier religious, spiritual
and cultural environment which often seemed more accessible than the
religion of their new Protestant pastors.
So for me, the Jester in the Reformation pack is that great mass of
relatively unformed religious, spiritual and superstitious belief which was
owned by the vast majority of the population. Here is where ‘Catholic’
and ‘Protestant’ historians unite: they do not like this pulsating mass of
inchoate and indefinable religious attitudes, and they feel uncomfortable
with it. It suits them, therefore, to ignore it. But as the parish priest of
Sherborne for over twenty-one years, I know perfectly well that the vast
bulk of my parishioners take their religious opinions, not from me or
my Roman Catholic and Free Church colleagues. They take their religious
views from what we used to be able to call a ‘Woolworths’ Pick & Mix’
range of opinions, attitudes and prejudices. ‘Pick & Mix’ is how the people
of these islands now do their religious opinions, beliefs and attitudes.
26 K Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971
20
Who’s Coming From Where? Different Perspectives on the English Reformation
I have a pretty shrewd suspicion that that is how they have always
done them. And upon that historians attempt to impose their patterns
in vain.27
(The Revd Canon Eric Woods is Vicar of Sherborne Abbey in Dorset, a Deputy Lieutenant
of Dorset and a former Trustee of the Prayer Book Society. This lecture was originally
addressed to the Sherborne Historical Society, October 2014.)
27 The historiography of the ‘witch craze’ which was at its height in the latter part of the sixteenth and
the earlier part of the seventeenth centuries is almost as broad in its range of different interpretations of
the phenomenon as the historiography of the Reformation. Most recently, see B Levack (ed) The Oxford
Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford, 2013
21
Two Addresses from the
Annual Conference
(Addresses at the Prayer Book Society Conference 2014 were under the general rubric ‘What
does the Prayer Book say about...?’ Further addresses from the Conference will appear in the
next number of Faith & Worship.)
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the
Book of Common Prayer
DAV I D H A R R I S
T
he question ‘What does the Prayer Book say about Marriage?’
could be answered in two ways. First: ‘Nothing—that is, nothing
particularly original to the Prayer Book.’ By this I mean that
Cranmer, and subsequent editors of the Prayer Book tradition, (together
with most of the Reformed tradition) merely took what they had
inherited from the medieval tradition and tweaked it a little bit and voila,
we have the Rite of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony in the Book
of Common Prayer. There are certain bits, particularly the preface and
the address, that were added by Cranmer, but there is nothing unique in
them that wouldn’t be found in any late medieval doctrine of marriage.
Even the language didn’t have to change, since most of the marriage
service in England, even prior to the Reformation, was said in English.
That said, often Cranmer’s genius lay precisely in his lack of
innovation—his patient restraint—as an editor of the Christian rites and
ceremonies. Like in his scheme for the recitation of the daily offices, and
even the service of Holy Communion, his gift (with some exceptions)
was in preservation and restraint rather than in outright innovation.
I promised two answers to the question before us, ‘What does the
Prayer Book say about Marriage?’ On one level, as I said, nothing—that
is, nothing particularly original to the Prayer Book. But on another level,
particularly to us as modern people (who, I think have lost the real
Christian sense of what marriage is) it says a lot. The very fact that the
Prayer Book rite preserved so much of the ancient understanding of
marriage is why it is so illuminating.
22
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer
Before we look at what the Prayer Book says about marriage, I think
I should offer you a very speedy history of the Marriage Rite itself, the
pedigree (if you will) of the rite we have in the 1662 prayer book.
A brief history of Marriage
There has always been a certain tension, in the Church, when it comes
to marriage. Is marriage a natural necessity—that is, is it simply an
anthropological and sociological phenomenon that is embedded within
the natural and social dimensions of our humanity, or is it something
more? If it is something more, what is that something more?
The Church has consistently argued that the essence of Matrimony
is (at its most primal level) a natural compact not a religious ceremony.
The blessing pronounced upon a marriage is subordinate—almost an
afterthought—to the contract made by the bride and groom. Although
religious rites have almost always accompanied marriage ceremonies
(in Judaism, in the Greco-Roman tradition, and throughout the entire
history of the Christian West), they are always only secondary, and
(even at the time Cranmer composed his rites) not at all essential to the
matrimonial bond. Put simply, matrimony outside the context of the
Church is still matrimony.
You get a glimpse of the historical reality in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Jaques warns Touchstone against being married by Sir Oliver Martext. He
advises him that he should ‘get you to a church, and have a good priest
that can tell you what marriage is’ perform the ceremony. Irregular, that
is, entirely secular marriages—in the late medieval period, and well into
the seventeenth century—were by no means uncommon. No priest, no
Church, no prayers, no blessing, and yet a marriage nevertheless.
This being the case—this purely natural essence of marriage, born
out of the necessity of the world, and not out of the freedom of
Grace—it shouldn’t surprise us that the Christian Rite of Marriage is
not that different, at least in the outward structure of the service, from
the ancient pagan rite of marriage from which it evolved. According to
the old customs of Rome in heathen times a sacrifice accompanied the
legal transactions of marriage: when Christian Matrimony began, the
Christian Sacrifice of the Eucharist, together with a solemn blessing of
the couple (usually just the bride), took the place of the heathen rites,
but otherwise the old transactions went on and continue down to the
present time.
23
Faith & Worship 76
The ancient rites fell into two parts, sometimes kept distinct and
sometimes joined; first came the betrothal, at which the documents
were signed and four symbolic ceremonies took place: (i) the giving
of presents, representing the marriage settlement, (ii) the kiss, (iii) the
ring, and (iv) the joining of hands. The second part was the wedding
itself. The principal features of this were that the bridegroom and bride
wore special nuptial attire, both of them wearing crowns and the bride
covered with the nuptial veil. The couple would take part in the sacrifices,
and especially they would consume together the panis farreus or sacrificial
cake made for the purpose by the Vestal Virgins.
Already in the time of St Ignatius (early second century) it was recognised
that the marriage of Christians needed the recognition of the Bishop. But it
is amazing (or perhaps not) that very little transformation was needed to
make the pagan ceremonies acceptable to the Christian conscience.
The references to the rites of marriage in early Christian writers are few,
but the ones we have bear witness to the adoption of the customs of the
old Roman law. Tertullian speaks of the happiness of a marriage which is
‘made by the Church, and confirmed by the Holy Sacrifice, and sealed by
the Blessing, and reported by the angels, and ratified by the Father’: and
elsewhere he speaks of the veil, the kiss, and the joining of hands.
There is no fuller description of the Western Rites until 866, in the
Reply of Pope Nicholas I. to the Bulgarians, which shows once again the
continuance of the old customs.
If we use the Sarum Rite of Matrimony as representative of all the late
medieval English Rites (and Cranmer for the most part did), we see that
it embodies (i) the old Roman ceremony of Espousal, followed by (ii)
the Benediction and (iii) the nuptial Mass: this arrangement was closely
followed in Cranmer’s First Prayer Book. The changes made subsequent
to 1549 in the English service have been few and small, with the obvious
exception (and I think a critical one) of the making of the celebration of
the Holy Communion now optional instead of required.
The pre-Reformation service began at the Church door (which
explains the peculiar rubric at the beginning of the service: ‘the persons
to be married shall come into the body of the Church’). At the Church
door the final banns were read, and the groom standing at the right hand
of the bride, the priest was to say...
Lo brethren we are comen here before God and his angels and all his
halowes in the face and presence of our moder holy Chyrche for to
24
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer
couple and to knyt these two bodyes togyder, that is to saye of this
man and of this woman, that they be from this tyme forthe but one
bodye and two soules in the fayth and lawe of God and holy Chyrche,
for to deserve everlastynge lyfe, what somever that they have done
here before.
This was enlarged in 1549 by the addition of an explanation of the
purpose of marriage: and then followed the address to the parties, also
following the old lines.
I charge you on Goddes behalfe and holy Chirche that, if there be
any of you that can say any thynge why these two may not lawfully
be wedded togyder at this tyme, say it nowe outher pryuely or
appertly in helpynge of your soules and theirs bothe. Also I charge
you boythe and eyther be your selfe as ye will answer before God at
the day of dome that yf there be any thinge done pryuely or openly
betwene yourselfe, or that ye know any lawfull lettyng why that ye
may nat be wedded togyder at this tyme say it nowe, or we do any
more to this mater.
The rubric dealing with any case where any impediment was alleged
also is continued in the new service.
The espousal followed also in the vernacular: first the question
addressed to each in turn in slightly varying form.
N. Wylt thou have this woman to thy wyfe and love her and wirschipe
her [to the woman ‘and to be buxum to him, luf hym, obeye to
him and wirschipe hym, serve hym’] and kepe her in syknes and in
helthe and in all other degrese be to her as husbande sholde be to
his wyfe, and all other forsake for her, and holde thee only to her to
thy lyves ende?’
Answer: I will.
The following question came into the English service though there is
no sign of it in the Sarum Manual but only in that of York ‘Who gyves
me this wyfe?’ or, as it evolved in 1662, ‘Who giveth this woman to be
be married to this man?’
This is the first part of the service, the traditional betrothal; the
wedding proper follows, and the Prayer Book follows very closely the
lines of the old service. After the exchange of vows, and a ring we have
the first of several solemn blessings.
25
Faith & Worship 76
The impressive words ‘Those whom God hath joined together let
no man put asunder,’ are actually of Lutheran origin, and Cranmer
introduced them in the First Prayer Book.
Then (in both the medieval and Prayer Book tradition) there was (i)
the psalm, to be sung as the bridal procession moves into the choir,
and the bride and bridegroom take their place, kneeling before the
Lord’s Table; (ii) The suffrages follow; (iii) the two first Latin prayers
were compressed into one English prayer; (iv) the prayer for fruitfulness
follows the old lines; but before (vi) the final blessing there is interpolated
in the English service (v) a third English Collect which represents the old
nuptial benediction of the early sacramentaries which took place after
the Canon in the nuptial Mass—it was transferred to the present position
in 1549 so that all the special ceremonies and prayers of Matrimony
might be kept together and be distinct from the Eucharist, which was to
be celebrated at the close of the marriage ceremonies in its usual form.
This is where Cranmer did propose an innovation. The old prayer had
been designed as a solemn blessing especially of the Bride, while she
was covered with the veil, which, according to Roman custom even in
pagan times, was the symbol of her marriage. The whole ceremony, like
the Mass itself, had the Bride and not the Bridegroom in view. In later
times when the old Roman view was no longer current, the veiling of
the Bride was so far modified that a veil or canopy was held over both
Bride and Bridegroom, but the prayers still remained unaltered. Cranmer
carried the same line of development a stage further and altered the
prayer so as to make it include the Bridegroom as well as the Bride. In the
familiar prayer at the wedding service, it was Cranmer who introduced
the reference to Abraham and Sarah, before this only Sarah (and Rachel)
were referred to.
In the first Prayer Book it was still ordered that‘The new married persons,
the same day of their Marriage, shall receive the Holy Communion’: but
this was altered in the 1662 Prayer book, in compliance (some say)
with the objection of the Presbyterians, though some scholars suspect
it had more to do with the reality that many of the couples who would
be married according to the rites of the Church, were actually far from
being in real communion with it.
The Address which was provided in 1549 is of the nature of a homily,
and shows the relative duties of married persons. Until 1661 it was to
be used as the homily in the Communion Service when no other took
26
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer
its place, and the present practice is an adaptation of this to the altered
conditions.
From Nature to Grace
It is clear from the preface to the Marriage Rite in the Prayer Book,
that Cranmer was in agreement with most of the Christian tradition in
arguing that Holy Matrimony is fundamentally about sex. Two of his
three causes for matrimony are about sex. This is the natural side of
things, from which all ancient rites of matrimony sprang, including
Christian marriage. It’s interesting that Cranmer calls them the three
causes for which matrimony was ordained—and not purposes, or even
reasons.
It is clear that the Prayer Book understands very well the natural
rootedness of matrimony—unlike so many of the mysteries of the
Christian faith, like Baptism and the Holy Communion, which are
in fact rooted in their reasons, or their purpose, (you would never
hear the Prayer Book talk about the causes of Baptism, or the causes
of Holy Communion, or even the causes of Ordination)—Marriage is
fundamentally rooted in cause, that is, in the natural necessity of our
biological existence, or more precisely, our subjection to the natural
necessity of three things (thus the three causes listed in the preface):
(i) The organic perpetuation of our species through procreation; (ii)
the eros of our human desire which is chiefly expressed in our sexual
impulses; and finally (iii) the necessity of companionship. Those are the
causes, and Matrimony is what is made necessary when all three are
combined.
And that’s it. That’s all there is to the natural phenomenon of marriage,
and that is why marriage is fundamentally a compact between two
persons—it is caused by nature—and only in a secondary sense is the
blessing of the Church superadded onto it. But together with an added
blessing, the Church also offers an interpretation, and ultimately a
transformation from something natural to something supernatural. And
this is where things get very interesting.
The Marriage Rite is one of the most explicit locations of the Prayer
Book doctrine of the harmony of nature and grace in the Christian life—
or more precisely, the doctrine of the transformation of nature through
grace.
In the mystery of marriage the Church intervenes (as it were), into an
ordinary and natural event, in order to exercise our erotic love according
27
Faith & Worship 76
to its full dimension. The Church wants to free the loving power of
man and woman from its subjection to natural necessity, and through
their union, she displays this married couple as an image of the Church
herself. It really is quite remarkable.
In the mystery of Marriage, as in every other mystery of the Church,
though perhaps in a less explicit manner, man brings his natural life
to the Church in order to graft it into her own redemptive existence.
Marriage then no longer remains simply within the realm of the loving
power—the eros—of our own individual natures, it becomes what the
theologians would call an ‘ecclesial event’, realized no longer simply
in nature, but through the Church herself, it becomes something
that happens in Christ. The marriage becomes a particular location,
or manifestation, of the Communion of Saints—not through the
overcoming of the natural, but through its transformation in Christ. Even
sex (that most problematic phenomenon for the theologians!) is set free
from subjection to natural necessity and impulse, and becomes a real
means of personal communion between two people. Sex, the ultimate
expression of eros, becomes a means of caritas.
It is interesting to note that the only times a priest is required to
actually say a person’s name in a service is at a Baptism and at a Marriage.
I think that’s really important, but I don’t have time to explore it.
This transformation of nature, by grace (which is ultimately what
the whole of the Prayer Book is about) is wonderfully illustrated in the
second last prayer in the Prayer Book, the one that comes just before the
final blessing. I know of no other prayer like it, anywhere in the Prayer
Book. The prayer starts as we might expect, but then halfway through
it seems to start again, ‘O God’, it begins, and then for eight or so lines
it embeds marriage in the necessity of the natural order, and it does so
quite remarkably. It begins where no other collect that I am familiar with
begins, and that is, at the absolute beginning:
O God, who by thy mighty power hast made all things of nothing . . .
And then it remains fixed within nature, until at last it seems to break
free with a fresh new start:
O God, [again] who hast consecrated the state of Matrimony to such
an excellent mystery . . .
28
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer
And then it points marriage out not as merely natural, but as something
supernatural, that unity betwixt Christ and his Church.
Eros transfigured
All that said, it is critical to note that marriage is not magic. The couple
are not made into a fully realized communion of saints, no more than
at our baptisms we are we made into perfect saints. At our baptism we
are born again into Christ, and made the children of God, and we are
given the means, the way, the grace, of becoming perfect saints. So too,
in marriage, the couple is made one so that they may become one. And this is
what Cranmer, and the Prayer Book tradition, make so clear in several of
the prayers, but most explicitly in the final address to the couple.
If Matrimony is the quintessential expression of the transformation
of our natural life into supernatural life, so too the Prayer Book
understanding of a marriage—that is, the ongoing living of a marriage
is the perfect articulation of the Prayer Book vision for the whole of the
Christian life lived in the world.
Marriage, in the Prayer Book, is most definitely rooted (like the
whole of our life) in the necessities of our biological, psychological and
sociological existence. This is what I think Cranmer was arguing with his
three causes of Matrimony. But that is only the starting point. Moving
from this starting point, the Prayer Book’s understanding of marriage
very quickly transcends the necessities of our natural existence, and
transforms it into a means of salvation. Ultimately, Matrimony in the
Church has very little to do with the reproductive necessities of life.
It certainly does not aim to simply give this process legality or even
metaphysical authority (as we saw at the beginning, the legality and
even the metaphysical authority of Matrimony is not rooted in the
Church, but in sociality—the couple simply coming together). An entire
mythology has grown up around the bourgeois ideal of the ‘Christian
Family’; and this can and does serve a variety of worthy ends, but it has
little to do with the mystery of Marriage in the Church.
We have to remember that the Gospel itself, our Lord Jesus himself,
uses particularly harsh words about the natural institution of the
family, despite its undeniable usefulness, demanding from Christians
abandonment, even hatred, of their kinsfolk:
If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother and wife
and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.
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Faith & Worship 76
These words remain incomprehensible if we are unaware of the aim
they have in view—just as marriage itself remains incomprehensible (at
least from a Christian standpoint) unless we are aware of the aim the
Church has in view when it brings a couple together.
I am convinced, after reading and rereading the prayers, the vows
and the address to the couple in the Prayer Book, especially when
connected with Cranmer’s insistence that all marriages take place within
the context of the Holy Communion, that what we have in view here is
the freedom from the bonds of simple natural necessity, and even from
the exclusiveness of the biological bond created by carnal relationship
and natural kinship. That said, within the mystery of marriage the carnal
relationship and the natural bonds of kinship are not done away with,
they simply cease to be all that marriage is.
For the Prayer Book, marriage is not the opposite of the life of
celibacy—or better said, the life of ascetic virginity, of monks and
nuns. In actuality it is not something substantially different from it.
We tend, I think, to think of monastic virginity as something negative,
and marriage as something positive—or at the very least, of monastic
virginity as being a negation, whereas marriage is an affirmation. But in
truth both express a similar negation and affirmation, but in different
ways. Monastic virginity was (and is) eros set free from the natural
constraint of lust and pleasure, and that same eros is set free within the
bounds—within the ascetic—of Holy Matrimony.
True virginity, and true marriage are reached by a common road: the
self-denial of the cross, and ascetic self-offering—this is expressed in the
vows (the husband is called to love, absolutely and sacrificially, to the
point of death, and the wife is called to obey, in total trust and humility).
And this is the fundamental lesson expressed in Cranmer’s address
at the end of the service. The address is an articulation of the precise
ascetic of matrimony; it expresses the how of the transformation from
eros to caritas; it describes the practical expression of what the particular
cross of marriage involves. Typical of Cranmer, it is mostly just a weaving
together of texts from Holy Scripture. As difficult as the paradigm is, as
it is set out in the Address, I think our ability to understand it is a real
measure of our spiritual maturity as individuals and as a Church.
This said, I totally admit that the Prayer Book understanding of
Marriage—understood as it is within the relation between Christ and
the Church—is incomprehensible, and even scandalous, so long as we
30
Eros Transfigured: Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer
conceive marriage to be but a natural bond, an institutionalized form
which simply binds together two autonomous individuals. The mystery
of Marriage, like the mystery of the Christian life generally, presupposes
a reality, a real life, beyond our natural existence. Christianity presumes
a life where eros is never the definition, or even the prescription, of our
new life, but simply the ground from which our eros is transfigured into
charity.1
(The Revd David Harris is Rector of St Giles’ Church, Reading. Fr Harris was formerly
Assistant Priest at St Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He is a Trustee
of the Prayer Book Society.)
1 For further details of the history of the marriage rite see Proctor & Frere’s New History of the Book
of Common Prayer (1901 with many subsequent editions). I am indebted to the work of Christos
Yannaras in his Elements of Faith (1991).
31
What Does the Prayer Book Have to
Say About Sin and Redemption?
DA N I E L N E W M A N
Introduction
I
nstead of devoting pages and sermons ‘to extolling the sky splashed
with stars, or mountains and green forests, seas and dawn choruses…
the Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. What
a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life.’1 Thus writes
Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion. The concept of sin is the
source of some of the strongest vitriol levelled by the New Atheists at the
Christian Faith and this scathing remark is illustrative of its unpopularity
in our broader culture. At best, the Prayer Book with its talk of ‘miserable
offenders’ is laughed away. But according to Dawkins, this perceived
preoccupation with sin which the Prayer Book represents isn’t only nasty:
it’s unhealthy. And many today would agree with him. The blame for many
of our social ills, including mental illness, behavioural problems, teenage
pregnancy, addiction and joining gangs is frequently laid at the feet of
the concept of low self-esteem, the solution to which is to boost one’s
own sense of self-worth. Glynn Harrison, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry
at Bristol and former consultant psychiatrist has studied this trend and
noted its impact on the Church. Using the example of children’s songs, he
writes, in his book The Big Ego Trip, ‘For Christians the time had now arrived
to cast off the legacy of guilt-laden children’s anthems inherited from our
Victorian forebears and begin to love ourselves just like the rest of the
world.’2 He could easily have extended that back to guilt-laden liturgies
inherited from our Tudor and Stuart forebears. Harrison goes on to write:
Slowly, gradually, the Self was being moved to the centre of the story
in Christian culture, in the same way that it had repositioned itself
in secular culture. Self-esteem ideology colonized the Christian
world with the same absorption with self, my needs, my Saviour, my
salvation, Me! as everywhere else.3
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2007), p.285
2 Glynn Harrison, The Big Ego Trip (Nottingham 2013), p.64
3 Ibid., p.67
32
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
For many both without and within the church, then, the Prayer Book
is a dangerous virus against which we need to be immunised. In his
superb little biography of The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs writes
of the criticism of the Prayer Book made by chaplains during the First
World War:
One group of theologically liberal chaplains said bluntly that the
usual prayer-book services—especially Morning and Evening Prayer,
with their strong, some might say relentless, penitential tone—were
‘uninstructive and misleading to some, irritating and alienating to
others.’4
In his book The Rage Against God, the journalist Peter Hitchens describes
the much more recent incident of his reception in one Oxfordshire
church when he enquired of a cozy-looking well-padded old priest
if they ever used the Prayer Book: ‘He stared at me, his eyes hot with
dislike. “Never!” he pronounced, and then almost spat out the words “I
hate Cranmer’s theology of penitence.”’5 For the pragmatically-minded,
the Prayer Book’s inescapable emphasis on sin is unattractive and
especially off-putting to non-Christian visitors; cheerful, upbeat praise
is preferable to lament and mournful penitence, and confession of sin is
best minimised or eschewed altogether.
I want to take issue at this point with the question which forms the
title of this paper: ‘What does the Prayer Book have to say about sin and
redemption?’ While it is important to understand what the Prayer Book
has to say about sin and redemption, not least because Canon A5 identifies
the Book of Common Prayer as one of the historic formularies in which
the Church of England’s doctrine is to found, a better question would
be: ‘What does the Prayer Book have to do about sin and redemption?’ As
Professor Brian Cummings writes:
We have to look beyond the text. The words are only the beginning,
the outline; to understand the book in its fullness, we have to see
it as a form of life. The Book of Common Prayer is a performative
book, more like a play text than like a novel in the way that we must
approach it as readers.6
4 Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ 2013), p.159.
5 Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God (2011), p.81
6 Brian Cummings (ed.) The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662 (Oxford 2011),
p.xxxiv.
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Faith & Worship 76
The Prayer Book not only tells us about, but has the power to draw us
into the grand drama of what the Father has done in sending his Son to
suffer death upon the cross for our redemption, and what the Spirit is
now doing, in which we find an end to our alienation, and our true and
lasting significance in this world and the world to come.
Sin’s Intolerable Burden
A natural starting point from which to discover what the Prayer Book
has to say about sin is its general confessions. General confession was
first introduced in the Communion Service in 1549. Thomas Cranmer
drew on older sources: a form of verbal confession at Compline in the
Sarum breviary, as well as in the introduction to the Missal, spoken by
the priest privately. Cranmer here is largely following Hermann von
Wied, the prince-archbishop of Cologne, in his Consultation, which was
an attempt at a unified Reformed liturgy. Cummings writes: ‘The whole
congregation gives voice to communal confession, combining the formal
act of the priest with a personal performance of humility and critical
self-analysis.’7 This confession is retained in subsequent revisions of the
Prayer Book, although from 1552 it is moved from after the Prayer of
Consecration to before, taking place as part of the preparation for worthy
reception of the sacrament, rather than as part of the rite itself. This
prayer reflects what is essentially a biblical emphasis on sin as something
that is committed against ‘Almighty God’, who is ‘maker of all things,
judge of all men’, in a variety of ways—‘by thought, word, and deed’.
The effect of our sin is to provoke God’s just ‘wrath and indignation
against us’. The burden of our sins is described as ‘intolerable’, which
just comes from the Latin and simply means ‘too heavy to be carried’8.
The consequence of our sins is also identified in a number of Collects.
The Collect of Septuagesima Sunday refers to ‘we, who are justly punished
for our offences’ and the Collect of the Fourth Sunday in Lent to ‘we,
who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished.’ The warning
about God’s judgement upon sin is expounded at considerable length in
the service for the beginning of Lent, first introduced in 1549, which by
1552 had received the title ‘A Commination’, from the Latin, meaning
‘a threatening’. In the mediaeval rite for the beginning of Lent, public
penance originally included the Penitential Psalms, a set of suffrages
(intercessory petitions), six Collects and a solemn public absolution.
7 Ibid., p.73.
8 Jacobs, p.153.
34
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
By the end of the Middle Ages, the public act of penitence had mainly
come to consist of the blessing and distribution of ashes, with the cross
marked with ash on the forehead of all the people.9 The Commination
is in large part a concatenation of biblical images for the wrath to come:
‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God: He shall
pour down rain upon the sinners, snares, fire and brimstone, storm and
tempest; this shall be their portion to drink. For lo, the Lord is come
out of his place to visit the wickedness of such as dwell upon earth.’ The
homily goes on to draw on the image of being ‘cast into utter darkness,
where is weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Returning to general confession in the Prayer Book, one of the
significant changes that took place in the Prayer Book from 1549 to 1552
is the addition of confession and absolution to Morning Prayer.The reason
behind this may have been the emergence of Morning Prayer as the major
service on Sundays for congregations reluctant to take communion more
than once a year and now deprived of the visual spectacle of the elevated
host. The mediaeval Office based on monastic practice became more
fully adapted to the needs of a mixed congregation. Penitential sentences
were prefixed to Morning Prayer and a new exhortation was composed.
The General Confession, too, was another original composition for
1552, although it was modelled on older confessional forms. While it
is included as a daily discipline, its addition to Morning Prayer may
also be an indication of the way it was taking on some of the functions
of Communion in regular Sunday worship.10 This confession further
characterises the nature of sin: straying from God’s ways, breaking God’s
laws. We sin by commission—doing ‘those things which we ought not
to have done’—and by omission—leaving ‘undone those things which
we ought to have done’. Behind this is the Bible’s description of human
beings in Isaiah 53.6, so familiar to us from Händel’s Messiah: ‘All we like
sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.’ Or
Romans 7.19, where Paul writes: ‘For the good that I would I do not:
but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ Or the definition in 1 John 3.4:
‘sin is the transgression of the law.’ The result is that ‘there is no health in
us’, that is to say, there is no salvation in us. In Latin, the word for health
and salvation is the same, just as in Greek, to heal is the same as to save.
We are ‘miserable offenders’. As Jacobs notes, ‘To modern ears the phrase
9 Cummings, p.719.
10 Ibid., p.153.
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Faith & Worship 76
sounds unhealthily self-lacerating’ but it means simply ‘a sinner in need
of mercy’, from the Latin miserere.11
As I remarked earlier, this is not just a text that conveys information
about the condition of humanity: it is a text which, as we pray it aloud
together, reshapes the way we view ourselves.The Prayer Book is admired,
in Eamonn Duffy’s words, for ‘Cranmer’s sombrely magnificent prose’.12
What contributes to the effectiveness of this prayer is the rhetorically
masterful way in which Cranmer has composed it. ‘Devices and desires’
is an example of his use of alliteration and doubling; another instance
of the latter is ‘erred and strayed’. Power accumulates as one clause
builds on another, linked by a simple conjunction: ‘We have left undone
those things, which we ought to have done; And we have done those
things, which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.’
Cranmer’s striking use of pronouns is reminiscent, to use Jacobs’ image,
of the tolling of a bell: ‘We have erred… We have followed… We have
offended… We have left undone… We have done…’13
That example of alliteration and doubling—‘devices and desires’—
takes us to the common source of sin conceived in these various ways:
our hearts. ‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our
own hearts’.The broad scholastic consensus at the eve of the Reformation
held that human beings had a higher rational soul and a lower sensitive
soul. The human soul naturally sought to do good but had to fight against
disordered passions in the lower sensitive soul which sought to rebel
against reason in the higher rational soul. The will was meant to act in
accordance with right reason in this rational soul to constrain passions
in the lower sensitive soul. On the basis of passages such as Romans 3,
Reformers such as Luther challenged this view of the basic disposition
of human beings to do good. There Paul writes: ‘As it is written, There
is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there
is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are
together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not
one.’ Every aspect of human nature can become thoroughly twisted by
sin, including the reason and the will. The entire person was opposed to
God and the will was shacked into a sinful attitude of rebellion against
God and his commandments. Melanchthon disputed the anthropology
which distinguished between a lower sensitive soul and a higher rational
11 Jacobs, p.153
12 Quoted in Jacobs, p.59.
13 Ibid., p.62.
36
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
soul, proposing instead that there were only two parts to the soul, a
cognitive faculty, by which people discerned and made deductions from
information received through the senses, and a faculty subjected to the
affections of love, hate, hope, fear, and so on, which caused people either
to follow or flee the things they had come to know. For Melanchthon,
the affections were inextricably linked to the will in the same faculty.
The inner attitudes of the human heart determined the direction of
the will. As the Anglican theologian Ashley Null writes: ‘The passions
of the heart ultimately determined human conduct.’ Moreover, as he
goes on to say, ‘Humankind had one overarching affection that twisted
every other affection into its service—the affection of self-love’.14 This
became Cranmer’s mature view of the source and extent of our sin and
it is reflected in the Prayer Book. One place it emerges is in the Collects.
An example is the beginning of the Collect of the Fourth Sunday After
Easter, which was actually added at Convocation after the Bishops’ Reply
to the Puritans’ Exceptions in 1661 asked for the Collects after Easter to be
altered: It refers to ‘the unruly wills and affections of sinful men.’
According to Cranmer and the Prayer Book, this condition of the
human heart can be attributed to original sin, which French theologian
Henri Blocher defines as ‘universal sinfulness, consisting of attitudes,
orientations, propensities and tendencies which are contrary to God’s
law, incompatible with his holiness, and found in all people, in all areas
of their lives’.15 It belongs to human nature, that stable complex of
characteristics typical of human beings, inherited and present from birth,
stemming from the disobedience of Adam, the progenitor of the human
race, and leaving us already subject to God’s wrath. Conspicuously, the
corruption of our nature is absent from the Prayer Book confessions, in
contrast, for instance, to Hermann von Wied’s Religious Consultation, which
Cranmer largely followed, perhaps to leave us with no excuse for our
wrongdoing—‘It was Adam’s fault, not mine’—although the phrase
‘there is no health in us’ may gesture towards this.16 Original sin is much
more strongly emphasised in the Baptism service. The service opens with
the declaration, based on Luther’s German baptismal rite of 1523, that
‘all men are conceived and born in sin’, an allusion perhaps to Psalm
51.5: ‘Behold, I was shapen in wickedness: and in sin hath my mother
conceived me.’ The priest then refers to the words of Jesus to Nicodemus
14 Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance (Oxford 2006), p.100.
15 Henri Blocher, Original Sin (Leicester 1997), p.18.
16 Andrew Atherstone, Confessing Our Sins (Cambridge 2004), pp.14-15.
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Faith & Worship 76
in John 3, that ‘none can enter into the kingdom of God, except he be
regenerate and born anew of water and the Ghost’. Entrance into God’s
kingdom is ‘that thing which by nature he cannot have’. The first prayer,
based on Luther’s Flood Prayer via Hermann’s Consultation, regards the
child as in need of deliverance from God’s wrath. The priest’s prayer
before the baptism itself asks that God would grant ‘that the old Adam in
this child’ may be buried and ‘that all carnal affections may die in him’.
This is also a repeated theme in the Collects. The Collect of the Fourth
Sunday After Epiphany describes how ‘by reason of the frailty of our
nature we cannot always stand upright.’ In the Collect of the First Sunday
After Trinity God’s grace is implored ‘because through the weakness of
our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee’, and in the
Collect of the Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity his help sought ‘because the
frailty of man without thee cannot but fall’.
Whilst some of the confessions in Common Worship stick closely to these
Prayer Book confessions, attempting simply to update the language, the
multiplicity of others vary in their strengths and weaknesses and are at
best moderate in their penitence by comparison. Some, for instance,
mention the prevalence and delineate the nature of sin but fail to lament
its seriousness, only going so far as to say that ‘we are mindful’ of our
sins. Jacobs observes:
‘We have not loved you with our whole heart’ could be read as
‘We’re not perfect, but we’re not so bad,’ a construal that can scarcely
be placed on ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and
wickedness.’ To be ‘truly sorry’ is one thing; to be ‘heartily sorry for
these our misdoings’ and to go on to say that ‘the remembrance of
them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable’—that,
traditionalists argue, is something else altogether.17
Kyrie confessions may be used as a general confession with short
penitential sentences before each petition, but arguably these, too, are
not able to convey the depth of lament or the seriousness of sin to the
same extent. One further contrast between Prayer Book confessions and
those in Common Worship is the notable absence of explicit mention of
sin against other people. Sin against God and against our neighbour
are not equivalent and it is perhaps misleading to combine them into
one phrase. While sin may bring disgrace to ourselves or suffering to
17 Jacobs, p.186.
38
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
others, they are primarily a rebellion against God. Many of our sins are
committed against other people, but we confess them to God because
they are first and foremost sins against him.18 In Psalm 51.4, which is
attributed to David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and
arranged for Uriah, Bathsheba’s lawful husband, to be killed in battle,
David confesses: ‘Against thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in
thy sight.’
The overall effect of what the Prayer Book has to say about sin is
expressed by Jacobs’s assessment: ‘All who stand in the church are naked
before him together, exposed in public sight.’19 But this is not where
Cranmer wishes to leave us. Once we have first appreciated the bad news
of our bondage to sin, we are able to grasp the good news about salvation
through Christ, and it is to this we now turn.
God’s Inestimable Love
Perhaps the most concise and familiar statement of how God
redeems the world is found in the Communion service in the Prayer of
Consecration: ‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender
mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the
Cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of
himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation,
and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.’
Describing the atonement as a satisfaction is not uncontroversial in
the contemporary church. Its presence in modern hymns is protested:
‘the wrath of God was satisfied’ is changed—illegally, it should be
added—to ‘the love of God was magnified’. One variation even has ‘his
mother Mary at his side’. It is alleged that the language of satisfaction
is a metaphor for the atonement which we owe ultimately to St Anselm
and reflects a now non-existent feudal world. Feudal society was rigidly
stratified, each person insisted on the dignity which had been accorded
him, the appropriate conduct of inferiors was laid down, breaches of
this code demanded punishment and all debts had to be discharged to
make satisfaction for offended honour. Some treatments of satisfaction,
notably by Reformers including Cranmer, place the emphasis on the
need for God’s law or God’s justice to be satisfied. Is satisfaction a
suitable metaphor in a society which is structured rather differently?
The language of satisfaction is problematic, if what is being satisfied is
18 Atherstone, pp.17-18.
19 Jacobs, p.38.
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Faith & Worship 76
something external to God—a legal code, a feudal code of honour, or
a code of justice—to which God is subordinate and accountable and
which controls his actions, particularly if that is culturally conditioned.
But as John Stott writes:
‘Satisfaction’ is an appropriate word, providing we realise that it is
he himself in his inner being who needs to be satisfied and not
something external to himself. Talk of law, honour, justice, and the
moral order is true only in so far as these are seen as expressions of
God’s own character… To say that he must ‘satisfy himself’ means
that he must be himself and act according to the perfection of his
nature or ‘name’. The necessity of ‘satisfaction’ for God, therefore is
not found in anything outside himself, but within himself, in his
own immutable character.20
This satisfaction for sin is achieved by Christ’s death as a sacrifice,
language which is pervasive in the New Testament’s description of Christ’s
work.The significance of Christ’s death as a sacrifice is substitutionary.The
ritual for blood sacrifices in the Old Testament involved the sinner laying
his hands on the animal, identifying himself with it, and designating the
victim as standing in for him, even symbolically transferring his sins to
the animal. The substitute animal is then killed in recognition that the
penalty for sin is death. The words of the Prayer of Consecration would
have been heard with the Comfortable Words still in recent memory,
which quote 1 John 2.1, describing Jesus Christ as the propitiation for
our sins. Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross in the place of sinners
turns aside God’s holy wrath against sin. This is reinforced in the
Commination, which echoes these Comfortable Words and understands
Christ’s death in terms of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53: ‘For he was
wounded for our offences, and smitten for our wickedness.’
The Prayer of Consecration resists being caricatured like certain crude
presentations of the atonement.This is not an angry Father being placated
by a loving son. Martin Parsons writes:
The redemption of the world originated in the loving heart of God.
Neither Scripture nor Prayer Book countenances for one moment the
notion of a loving Jesus saving mankind from the wrath of an offended
God. It was the Father himself who of his tender mercy… gave his Son.21
20 John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Leicester 1986), pp.123-4.
21 Martin Parsons, The Holy Communion (1961), p.98.
40
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
Nor is this an angry Father lashing out at an innocent third party:
Jesus Christ offered himself as an oblation.
Cranmer’s Prayer of Consecration reflects the emphasis of the letter to
the Hebrews that Christ’s death on the cross is a unique and unrepeatable
event to which nothing needs to be added by us. The vocabulary of
oblation, used of the offering presented to God in the elements of the
Eucharist in the Roman canon, is retained by Cranmer but he attributes
it only to Christ’s action on the cross.22 Cranmer makes this even more
explicit in 1552 when the words ‘of himself’ were added after the word
‘oblation’.23 According to Martin Bucer in the Censura, his comment on
the 1549 Prayer Book, the offerings of alms for the poor were the true
meaning of the ‘sacrifice’ or ‘oblation’ of the Mass, in clear contradiction
of the Roman missal.24 The reintroduction of the word ‘oblation’ in
the phrase ‘alms and oblations’ in the Prayer for the Church Militant
in 1662, where before the text just read ‘alms’, is fully consistent
with this. This was the interpretation of Matthew Wren, whose notes
on the Prayer Book were among those which influenced its revision
at the Restoration.25 Moreover, from 1552, the canon of 1549 is split
into three, with intercession placed earlier in the service, and the third
section, which describes our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and
our offering of ourselves, is removed until after the communion of the
people.26
The nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as ‘full, perfect and
sufficient’ can be seen in the Funeral Service of the Prayer Book, where,
in addition to those in Communion, some of the most visible and
controversial transformations took place in the church’s liturgy. Andrew
Atherstone comments that
Funerals are unique as the one service for which the Anglican
Reformers decreased rather than increased the penitential content…
Cranmer wanted Christian funerals to be celebratory, with an emphasis
on the ‘sure and certain hope’ of resurrection to eternal life.27
Thus the text of the Funeral Service from 1552 was less than half
the length of 1549. Cummings describes it as ‘an office embodying the
22
23
24
25
26
27
Cummings, p.701.
Ibid., p.731.
Ibid., p.730.
Ibid., p.770.
Ibid., p.727.
Atherstone, p.25.
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Faith & Worship 76
bare minimum of a proper removal of the corpse to the earth. The rest
was left to God’.28 The body was committed to the ground but the soul
was no longer commended to God as it had been in 1549. The Collect
had been altered to remove direct prayers for the dead. Psalms which
had been included in 1549 were omitted, although the provision of
one or two is restored in 1662. There was no mass for the dead. No
continued labour of the souls after death towards salvation in Purgatory
was needed. Cummings quotes Robert Parkyn, a Yorkshire curate who
commented that there were no more dirges and devout prayers sung and
said for the dead. ‘Why? Because their souls were immediately in bliss
and joy after the departing from the bodies, and therefore they needed
no prayer.’29 As Jacobs puts it, ‘Once death has come, the words of the
prayer book are simply full of hope’.30
While Cranmer in The Book of Common Prayer was more traditionalist
than the continental Reformers in retaining saints’ days in the Kalendar,
the way the saints are treated further reflects how the perfection and
sufficiency of Christ’s death on the cross obviates the need for any other
mediator. Jacobs observes how Cranmer ‘wrote prayers for those days
that strenuously avoid any implication that the saints could intercede
for the living or that they might be prayed to for any reason’ and more
broadly how the continual invocation of saints in mediaeval rites and
festivals were ‘invocations the Book of Common Prayer largely expunges from
its pages and from the common religious life’. He writes:
For anyone accustomed to traditional Catholic practices, these
liturgies are most noteworthy for what they lack: the saints, the
blessed departed, the whole panoply of ritual and invocation that
connects those now alive on earth with those now alive in the
presence of God—or suffering the pains of Purgatory
He goes on to remark that ‘this absence is particularly striking in
the rite for the sick, because it would ordinarily be at such times that
people would call with special urgency on the saints, begging their
intercession’. Jacobs illustrates this movingly with a description of the
way Archbishop Cranmer ministered to his dying sovereign, King Henry
VIII. There were ‘no prayers to the saints, no anointing with oil, no rite of
extreme unction, none of the liturgical spectacle that had accompanied
28 Cummings, p. 742.
29 Ibid., p.743.
30 Jacobs, p.41
42
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
generations of Christians through their last moments; rather, just the
simple request that the king somehow indicate his trust in Jesus Christ.’
When Cranmer asked the king to make some sign that he placed his trust
in Jesus Christ, Henry squeezed Cranmer’s hand, and then died.31
The Prayer Book both describes and is a means by which this
redemption becomes ours: the intervention of the Holy Spirit from
outside ourselves implanting into a heart captive to sin a new set of
godly affections by means of word and sacrament, leading to heartfelt
repentance and true faith, and resulting in a transformed life. Null writes:
The Spirit working through God’s Word assured believers of his
promised salvation, engendering in them a faith which justified
them before God and transformed their conduct. For confidence in
God’s gracious goodwill towards them reoriented the affections of
the justified, calming their turbulent hearts and inflaming in them
grateful love in return.32
He observes how ‘in his prayers for the English people Cranmer
gradually enshrined turning to God in repentance and faith as the chief
effect of saving grace and its chief means’.33
This can be seen in all the absolutions of the Prayer Book. Thus the
absolution in the Communion service, first introduced in 1549 recalls
how ‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father… of his great mercy hath
promised forgiveness of sins to all them that with hearty [i.e. heartfelt]
repentance and true faith turn into him’ and prays for him to ‘confirm and
strengthen you in all goodness’. Similarly, the new precatory absolution
introduced into the Daily Office from 1552 declares that God ‘pardoneth
and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy
Gospel’ and invites us to pray for the gift of ‘true repentance and his Holy
Spirit, that those things may please him which we do at this present, and
that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy’. Even in the
order for the Visitation of the Sick, which retains the mediaeval ‘I absolve
thee’ form, the efficacy of the absolution is confined to ‘all sinners who
truly repent and believe in him’.
This understanding of repentance as the fruit of God’s grace exhibited
in Christ’s death on the cross is also writ large in Cranmer’s reordering
of the Communion service in 1552. The reception of the Eucharistic
31 Ibid., p.41.
32 Null, pp.100-1.
33 Ibid., p.236.
43
Faith & Worship 76
elements is the immediate response to the words of institution which
end so abruptly and becomes the climax of the liturgy, not their prior
consecration. With the prayer of oblation removed from the canon and
used as a post-communion prayer, the community now offer nothing
themselves to propitiate God but simply respond after communion with
renewed and strengthened wills in praise, thanksgiving and a life of
service. In the words of Null:
Now the sacramental miracle was not changing the material
elements but drawing human hearts to the divine, not increasing
personal righteousness but strengthening the communicants’ ‘rightwilledness’… At last grateful love clearly flowed from gracious love.34
Cranmer moved the Lord’s Prayer from before the reception of the
elements to immediately afterwards: communicants could now pray that
they would forgive others because their wills had been strengthened
by receiving afresh God’s forgiveness in Christ. The positioning of the
Gloria, too, after the post-communion prayers and immediately before
the blessing also captures the essence of Cranmer’s understanding of the
Christian life as believers give glory to God because of his loving good
will towards them which had bought them peace through Jesus Christ,
and continue to acknowledge their ongoing dependence on his mercy.
Null concludes: ‘Cranmer intended his Eucharistic liturgy both to inspire
loving repentance in the hearts of the English and to make this new
affection possible through Word and Sacrament properly presented’.35
The Communion rite of 1552 thus continues to deserve the familiar
assessment of Dom Gregory Dix as ‘the masterpiece of an artist’, ‘a
superb piece of literature’ and ‘the only effective attempt ever made
to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of “justification by faith
alone”’.36 But we must not let this obscure the rehearsal of the gospel in
the shape of the Daily Office, too. Australian Anglican theologian Peter
Adam writes:
Participation in these services every day or every week provides a
constant reminder of the need to turn to God the Saviour through
Christ for the forgiveness of sins, to hear and obey the Scriptures,
to believe in God the Holy Trinity, and to pray to him for his mercy.
Being trained to pray gospel prayers must bear gospel fruit. The
34 Ibid., p.242.
35 Ibid., p.245.
36 Quoted in Jacobs, p.173.
44
What Does the Prayer Book Have to Say About Sin and Redemption?
services of Morning and Evening Prayer are designed to convert by
immersing people in the truths of the biblical gospel.37
Conclusion
The Book of Common Prayer, perhaps best of all the current liturgies
of the Church of England, by its detailed dissection of the types,
consequences, and source of sin, strips our souls bare and invites us to
form a realistic assessment of ourselves and turn to Christ in repentance
and faith. Far from damaging us psychologically, as our society would
have us believe, this gives us true worth in the story of God’s redemption
as people justified and forgiven through Christ’s perfect sacrifice, with a
new power to live for the glory of God and the loving service of others
in this life, and the assurance of eternal joy in the life to come. In the
words of Alan Jacobs:
People gather in the church to speak to God, and to be spoken to
by Him, in sombrely straightforward (though often very beautiful)
English. Again and again they are reminded that there is but one
Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. None other matters;
so none other is called upon. The one relevant fact is His verdict
upon us, and it is by faith in Him alone that we gain mercy at the
time of judgement.38
(The Revd Dr Daniel Newman is the Assistant Curate at St John’s Church,Weymouth,
in the Parish of Radipole and Melcombe Regis.)
37 Peter Adam, The ‘Very Pure Word of God’ (2012), p.21
38 Jacobs, p.38.
45
‘...Sweet, Pleasant, and Unspeakable
Comfort’: Predestination in the
Thirty-Nine Articles
C H R I S TO P H E R K W M O O R E
I
PREDESTINATION to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby
(before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly
decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and
damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind,
and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made
to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a
benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit
working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they
be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be
made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk
religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain
to everlasting felicity.
Article XVII
n the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, a significant
number of English Baptists were caught up in a controversy over
hymn singing. At issue was the matter of ‘promiscuous singing’,
whereby one might sing words which were not actually true or, worse,
led to theological error. After all, were not hymns simply human
inventions and therefore prone to err? Might not one be led astray by
singing words which gave a distorted portrait of God? So it was that the
1686 General Baptist Assembly passed a resolution to the effect that ‘it
was not conceived anywise safe for the churches to admit such carnal
formalities’.1
The Baptists had long been suspicious of liturgy for the same reason:
liturgies are simply human words, and therefore carry in them the
thoughts of the author. A service book is not a neutral document, but
rather a theological statement of those who compiled it. One need only
look at the liturgical controversies of the twentieth century to see the
truth of this, and the controversies surrounding liturgy are all the more
sharp since the words we use in worship shape our understanding of
1 Ian Bradley,‘Non-Conformist Hymnody’ in Robert Pope, ed. T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity
(Edinburgh 2013), p.236.
46
‘...Sweet, Pleasant, and Unspeakable Comfort’
God. The motto lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of praying is the law of
believing) rings true here: we absorb the words we pray which, in turn,
form our belief. This was something argued by Jeff Astley and Bridget
Nichols in the Trinity 2011 edition of The Prayer Book Society Journal.2
Of course the Book of Common Prayer is a staple of the Anglican, and
not Baptist, churches but one might profitably take note of the concerns
of the early Dissenters; not so as to dismiss the Prayer Book but rather to
try and understand the thoughts and doctrines which shape its liturgies.
The thoughts and debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
but distant echoes to a contemporary congregation, and our theological
language has changed over the centuries. Astley and Nichols wondered
if those who read (and pray) of ‘the elect’ are aware of the idea of the
doctrine of Predestination which lies behind these words. The answer to
that particular question is: ‘highly unlikely’; not least because disputes
concerning predestination are infrequent in England.
By way of example of this lack of debate, one would do worse that
to turn to a report commissioned by the Archbishops of York and
Canterbury in 1922 which was to:
consider the nature and grounds of Christian doctrine with a view to
demonstrating the extent of existing agreement within the Church of
England and with a view to remove or diminish existing differences.3
The report was published in 1937 and in the introduction William
Temple, then Archbishop of York, commented that the theological issues
considered by the report:
...are not the same as those which cause most concern to Continental
theologians. If any such honour us by reading this Report they will
be startled to find so little said about the Fall; about Freedom, Election
and Predestination; about Justification by Faith; about the Order of
Creation and the Order of Redemption; about the possibility of
Natural Theology.4
Temple then went on to discuss what he saw as the different foundations
upon which Anglican and Continental theology was based (he saw a
greater reliance upon the Eastern rather than the Western Church Fathers
2 Jeff Astley and Bridget Nichols, ‘The Formative Role of the Book of Common Prayer’, The Prayer Book
Society Journal Trinity 2011.
3 From a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Davidson) to the Bishop of Oxford (Dr.
Burge) dated 28th December 1922 giving the terms of reference of the commission. Doctrine in the Church
of England. (1938), p.19
4 Doctrine in the Church of England, pp.4-5
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Faith & Worship 76
within the Church of England), and it is fair to say that in the main this
distinction still prevails. Certainly attention is not commonly given to the
Fall etc. in the theological colleges and parish churches of England, and
it remains true that the theological climate is somewhat distinct from
that on the continent (or in the United States). This was not always the
case, and as the Reformation took shape in England, Thomas Cranmer
was in contact with many of the continental reformers and sought unity
with them.
All of this is to suggest that if one is to gain a fuller appreciation of the
liturgy handed down to us in the Book of Common Prayer, one could
do worse than to engage with the Continental theology mentioned
by William Temple, and in particular the Continental theology of the
sixteenth century. The clearest exponent of the doctrine of predestination
in that century was the one who was published by Cranmer’s son-inlaw: John Calvin.
Cranmer was in cordial contact with Calvin—although one would
not go as far as to say the two were firm friends—and he possessed a
copy of the Frenchman’s Institutes in English translation. Moreover, the
article on predestination, which was quoted at the head of this paper,
first appears in the Forty-Two Articles completed by Cranmer in 1552,
and in March of that year the Archbishop wrote to John Calvin hoping
that some statement of belief might be formulated by a group of divines
which would unite Protestantism.5 Against this background, it would
be odd for the Articles to contain anything sharply divergent from the
prevailing views of continental Protestantism, and it certainly would be
unexpected for Cranmer to produce a set of articles which would offend
Calvin, the man to whom he expressed a hope of harmony.6
Salvation in the European Context
As noted by Temple, predestination forms part of a larger system of
theology which is grounded upon the Fall (i.e. Eden, Adam, Eve, the
serpent and the fruit). Unfortunately many are content simply to argue
over the historicity or otherwise of Genesis, and what is commonly
overlooked is the theological import of what is recorded. This is not
the place to argue for or against a literal understanding of a six-day
creation, but it is the place to insist that regardless of these arguments
these chapters speak of something fundamental to human nature itself.
5 See Mark D. Chapman, Anglican Theology (2012), pp.67–68.
6 MacCulloch notes the cordiality of the two, and also finds it significant that Cranmer’s son-in-law
translated Calvin’s Institutes into English for them to be published by Cranmer’s old publisher. Diarmaid
MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life. (New Haven 1997) pp.619-620.
48
‘...Sweet, Pleasant, and Unspeakable Comfort’
Luther was influenced by Augustine in his thinking concerning the
Fall, and in particular the latter’s insistence that Adam’s fall into sin
resulted in a corruption of human nature. Since Adam stands at the
head of the human race all who come after share in this corrupted
nature which was understood to encompass our physical bodies but
also our will. This understanding was not only held by Luther, but was
commonplace amongst the reformers such that Calvin could write that:
...both Luther and all of us define nature in two ways: first as it was
established by God, which we declare to have been pure and perfect, and
second as, corrupted through man’s fall, it lost its perfection. We assign
the blame for this corruption to man; we do not ascribe it to God.7
This corruption—or ‘bondage’—of the will was something on which
both Luther and Calvin insisted, and it was firmly argued that it resulted
in an inability to act in full accordance with God’s will. This does not
mean that humans are as bad as they can be, but simply that with regards
to God we are ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ (Ephesians 2:1). As an early
Lutheran confession puts it:
Concerning free will it is taught that a human being has some
measure of free will, so as to live an externally honorable life and to
choose among the things reason comprehends. However, without
the grace, help, and operation of the Holy Spirit a human being
cannot become pleasing to God, fear or believe in God with the
whole heart, or expel innate evil lusts from the heart. Instead, this
happens through the Holy Spirit, who is given through the Word
of God. For Paul says (1 Cor. 2:14) ‘Those who are natural do not
receive the gifts of God’s Spirit.’
Augsburg Confession (1530), Article XVIII
Whilst we may be able keep the ‘external’ commands of God—do not
murder and so on—we are incapable of loving ‘the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all
thy strength’ which Jesus taught as the supreme commandment. The
corruption of the will renders the individual not only unable to love God
in this way, but also, it was argued, even to place faith in God. We might
see in the seventh chapter of Romans a description of this corruption of
the will at play:
For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my
members another law waging war against the law of my mind and
7 Jean Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will (Grand Rapids 1996) p. 40. Calvin wrote this in 1543.
49
Faith & Worship 76
making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Romans 7:22–24
It is therefore impossible for humans to attain their own salvation. In
fact, it was argued, it would make a mockery of the life and ministry of
Christ if humans could simply bypass the cross and be saved on their
own account. So it is that the ninth of Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles of
1553 reads:
We have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God,
without the grace of God by Christ preventing8 us, that we may have
a good will, and working in us, when we have that good will.9
It is against this background that the necessity of God’s activity in
salvation becomes clear: humans cannot be saved by their works. In fact
they are incapable of producing good works which are acceptable to
God even if they desire to do so, as can be seen in the testimony of Paul,
‘I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve
the law of sin’ (Romans 7:25).
So what hope is there? Paul continues a few verses later: ‘God has done
what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do’ (Romans 8:3). In
other words salvation is an activity of God, and not the human. Later in
chapter eight, Paul goes on to sketch this activity of God in the broadest
possible context:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together
for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For
those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to
the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among
many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and
those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified
he also glorified.
Romans 8:28-3010
Here is the Reformed argument in brief: we are unable, through the
corruption of our will, to please God, so God through His Spirit works
in us to draw us to Himself. This can be seen in Ephesians 1:4-6:
8 Preventing, in this instance, meaning ‘going before’.
9 Later versions of this article, including Article X of the Thirty-Nine Articles, have an introductory,
explanatory sentence. The 1553 version is taken from G Bray, ed. Documents of the English Reformation
(Cambridge 2004) p.290
10 Bicknell notes that the ‘Latin of the Article and the Vulgate is especially close’, and cites Romans
8:28-30, 9:21 and Ephesians 1:3-11 as the relevant passages. E.J. Bicknell, A Theological Introduction to the
Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1925), p.279.
50
‘...Sweet, Pleasant, and Unspeakable Comfort’
He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we
should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us
for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose
of His will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has
blessed us in the Beloved.
Here we have God acting ‘according to the purpose of His will’ in an
act which clearly precedes even our conception.
There is a sovereignty in God’s actions here, which has raised many
questions for some: on what basis does God predestine individuals?
How did he choose? What of those whom He did not choose? What sort
of God acts in this manner?
‘Unspeakable Comfort’ or a ‘Destroyer of Comfort’?
So it is that many have objected that the doctrine of predestination is
positively immoral. In 1740 John Wesley stood to address the people of
Bristol, expounded on the theme of predestination, and convinced those
who did not already know that he had little time for this belief. The great
Methodist stated that he held that God’s grace is free for all people, whereas
those who hold to predestination would answer (according to Wesley):
No: It is free only for those whom God hath ordained to life; and
they are but a little flock. The greater part God hath ordained to
death; and it is not free for them. Them God hateth; and, therefore,
before they were born, decreed they should die eternally. And this
he absolutely decreed; because so was his good pleasure; because
it was his sovereign will. Accordingly, they are born for this, to
be destroyed body and soul in hell. And they grow up under the
irrevocable curse of God, without any possibility of redemption; for
what grace God gives, he gives only for this, to increase, not prevent,
their damnation11.
‘This doctrine tends to destroy the comfort of religion, the happiness
of Christianity’, he preached and it is easy to see why. Surely God is
capricious! Why choose one and not the other?
However, the Reformers found the doctrine to produce precisely
the opposite result and we find in the Prayer Book that the Article on
Predestination continues:
As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ,
is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons,
and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ,
11 John Wesley, Sermon 128 (from the 1872 edition) ‘Free Grace’ Preached at Bristol, in the year 1740.
51
Faith & Worship 76
mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and
drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it
doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be
enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love
towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit
of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s
Predestination, is a most dangerous downfal, whereby the Devil doth
thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most
unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.
Article XVII
So who are correct: those who follow Wesley in seeing no comfort in
predestination and thus reject the notion; or those who follow Cranmer
for whom predestination was a ‘basic and central assumption’?12 Is it a
destroyer of the ‘comfort of religion’, or an ‘unspeakable comfort’? The
answer lies in how the doctrine is applied.
The key to Cranmer’s stance is his insistence upon a ‘godly
consideration’ which brings with it an assurance of salvation for the
believer. This ‘godly consideration’ is an internal one, looking for signs
of the activity of the Spirit in one’s own being, such as a moving away
from sin and the mind being drawn to ‘high and heavenly things’. These
signs are assurances that God is at work, and as such are signs that one
has been chosen by God. In other words Cranmer views it as something
to be experienced.
However, there is also a warning not to dwell on the ‘sentence of God’s
Predestination’ which brings with it two dangers: firstly, ‘desperation’ at
the thought of not being of those chosen; or, secondly, the view that
being chosen means that behaviour is no longer of any consequence—
after all salvation is entirely of God—and consequently there is no moral
barrier to sin.
So it is that we can see that the doctrine, for Cranmer, is something to
be handled carefully and to be used for the comfort and assurance of the
believer. Like a medicine, the doctrine of predestination can cause damage
if it is not used appropriately. As one has put it, ‘the article avoids the more
tendentious aspects of the doctrine ... which came under the spotlight
later in the century’13. Cranmer is content not to develop the doctrine so
as to produce a scheme detailing the mechanics of salvation—how does
God choose, how does this relate to the scope of Christ’s sacrifice on the
12 MacCulloch, op.cit., p.428.
13 Mark D. Chapman, Anglican Theology (2012), 67–68.
52
‘...Sweet, Pleasant, and Unspeakable Comfort’
cross?—rather he focuses solely on its comfort for the Christian. Therein
lies his wisdom: he is unwilling to speculate upon the doctrine and to
attempt to gain a ‘God’s eye view’ of salvation. Rather, like Paul, he sees
it simply as something to strengthen the believer. In other words, to be
content to keep with a ‘human’s eye view’.
A great comfort
So what is this comfort?
First of all, there is comfort in holding a realistic view of the human
will. To attempt to live a sinless life can only lead to despair (remember
the seventh chapter of Romans discussed above), and an acknowledgment
that humans will fail can bring relief.
Secondly, once that acknowledgement is made there is great comfort
in knowing that God will provide precisely the help which is needed,
and do so not on the basis of anything that we can offer. All that is
needed is faith.
Thirdly, the fact that a mind is drawn to ‘high and heavenly things’ and
that the Christian seeks to overcome his or her basest desires are marks
of the Spirit of Christ working within that person, which in turn is a
mark of their ‘election’, or being chosen by God. So it is that comfort can
be drawn in times of spiritual darkness that God holds each and draws
each by His sovereign will and that, in the end, is what is important.
According to Article XVII, predestination is best understood from the
human side: an experience of the grace of God. To try and delve into the
whys and wherefores of the doctrine can lead to despair: best to leave
this as a mystery of God. In fact, Cranmer’s view is nicely summed up
in the Collect for Tuesday in Easter Week: Christ has opened the gate to
everlasting life; God’s grace goes before (‘prevents’) us to strengthen our
will and helps us to live out our calling.
ALMIGHTY God, who through thy only-begotten Son Jesus Christ
overcame death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We
humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace preventing us thou
dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we
may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one
God, world without end. Amen.
(The Revd Dr Christopher Moore is Rector of the Fownhope Benefice in the Diocese of
Hereford, and has a background in higher education in both Baptist and Anglican settings. He is a member of the Hereford Branch Committee of the Prayer Book Society.)
53
The People’s Book: The Prayer Book
and Politics 1590-1660
JASON FROST
Moreover by this book are priests to administer the sacraments, by
this book to church their women, by this book to visit and housle
the sick, by this book to bury the dead, by this book to keep their
rogation, to say certain psalms and prayers over the corn and grass,
certain gospels at crossways, etc. This book is good at all assaies [on
every occasion]; it is the only book of the world.1
S
o wrote Protestant separatist Henry Barrow in 1590, attacking
English parishioners for their apparent zealous over-attachment to
the Book of Common Prayer; its rites and ceremonies. Such censure
reflected two things, firstly, that for a small, but highly vocal minority
the Reformation in England still had far to go. Secondly, and more
significantly, the deliberate targeting of the Prayer Book by this minority
(history would come to know them as the ‘Puritans’) was indicative of its
fundamental importance within the religious consciousness and identity
of the vast majority of English people; something which had become
apparent in the thirty years or so since the Elizabethan Settlement and
the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book. As one historian has noted ‘...
the liturgy had earthed itself...and sunk deep roots into popular culture’2
within a generation of its introduction.
In many ways this outcome fulfilled Archbishop Cranmer’s original
noble intention. During the early years of the Reformation a key
objection of the reformers was that worship within the late medieval
Catholic Church was far too disunited. ‘The medieval Mass involved a
set of parallel liturgical activities, with the clergy involved in one set of
devotions and the laity another; the great moment of union of the priest
and the people coming at the elevation of the consecrated host.’3 The
concept of ‘common prayer’ emerged, through figures like Cranmer, as
1 Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, quoted in Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in
Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Cambridge 1998, p.1
2 John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: 1603-1714, Harlow 2006, p.279.
3 Judith Maltby, op. cit., p.40.
54
The People’s Book:The Prayer Book and Politics 1590-1660
an alternative vision to the traditional compartmentalised nature of the
Catholic Mass, presenting a new understanding of corporate worship.
The Book of Common Prayer was to become the medium by which
this new ideal in faith might be born. Cranmer believed that what was
needed was the forging of a new devotional uniformity, not merely in
ritual and ceremony, but the union of priest and congregation in the
same aspects of liturgy and prayer. This was true worship, one in which
the common confession of the community bound all together; high
and low, clergy and laity, man and woman, as equals before the majesty
of the Lord. Common prayer, in its essence, brought a glimpse of the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth, if only ever for one moment in time.
Such an ideal can be no more beautifully articulated than in the words
of the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet, George Herbert,
who wrote ‘...pray with the most: for where most pray, is heaven.’
Put simply the Book of Common Prayer brought before an English
parishioner an image of paradise, but it was an image in which they
were part of the dialogue, spoken in their own language.
It is easy to understand how the Common Prayer ethos became so
embedded in the hearts of so many during this period. Indeed one
does not have to look far in order to find evidence of how sacred the
sense of popular ownership of this ideal had become. The ecclesiastical
court records are alive during this period with instances in which the
people sought to uphold the tradition of conformity they had so come
to love. In Hemingby, Lincolnshire, in both 1595 and 1597 parishioners
complained of the minister’s reading of the service ‘...in a hasty and
irreverent manner, but also of his obstruction of the active participation
in the service.’4 In Kimcoate, Leicestershire, in 1602 Churchwardens
presented their minister for not reading the whole of the Common
Prayer: ‘in manie things he breaketh the order of the church and the
book of Common Prayer.’ Similarly at Husband’s Bosworth, parishioners
wanted ‘...the entire Prayer Book service and complained that the curate
Mr Hall was not reading the whole service, which indicates that some
of the laity there knew what the order of service should be.’5 In Taporley,
Cheshire, in 1639 parishioners could tell that their curate John Jones ‘...
was omitting the Ten Commandments from the Communion service and
4 Ibid., p.43.
5 Ibid., p.44.
55
Faith & Worship 76
other parts of the divine service contrary to the law and to the...scandall
of well affected people.’6
So determined were some to ensure that common prayer was adhered
to that they brought with them their own copies of the Prayer Book to
follow the service in. A case from Flixton, in the diocese of Norwich,
in 1590 reveals that the Reverend Thomas Daynes was actually deprived
of his living in the consistory court in a case in which all the witnesses
against him were parishioners ‘...he rebuked his flock and called them
“papists” for bringing their prayer books in order to see if he was
observing lawful service.’7 At a time of a deferential society, still very
limited literacy amongst the vast majority of the people and the relatively
substantial expense of printed books, this is somewhat remarkable.
In addition to the policing of the minister, attempts by ‘Puritan
radicals’ in Parliament to abolish the Prayer Book in the period between
1640-42, in a series of bills known as Root and Branch, led to numerous
countrywide petitions being submitted in defence of common prayer.
In Staffordshire, Cheshire and Huntingtonshire petitions sought to
outline an argument supporting the efficacy of the continued use of the
Prayer Book which would outflank the arguments put forward by the
‘Puritan radicals’. They presented ‘...the Prayer Book, its rites and liturgy
as the principle force for engendering the Reformation in the previous
century.’8 It was posited that the Book of Common Prayer provided the
‘...spiritual equivalent for the nation of regular exercise and a balanced
diet, its continued use ensured a continuous reformation and kept the
Church of England healthy; its regular use was the greatest guarantee
of a Church free from popery and schismatic heresies.’9 Supporters of
the Church demonstrated a conviction that the Prayer Book made their
worship of God even more edifying. In Cheshire pro-Church activists
argued that the Book of Common Prayer
...was viewed by the people with such general content [and] received
by all the laity, that scarce any family or person that can read, but
are furnished with the Book of Common Prayer in the conscionable
use whereof many Christian hearts have found unspeakable joy and
comfort; wherein the famous Church of England, our dear mother
6 Judith Maltby, ‘By this Book’ in The Early Stuart Church 1603-1642, Ed. Kenneth Fincham, Basingstoke
1993, p.119.
7 Loc. Cit.
8Ibid.,p.131.
9 Loc. Cit.
56
The People’s Book:The Prayer Book and Politics 1590-1660
hath just cause to glory; and may she long flourish in the practice of
the blessed liturgy.10
Faced with such a chorus of conviction in opposition the Root and
Branch Bill never passed, the ‘Puritan faction’s’ determination to overturn
the Elizabethan Settlement in order to impose their own particular
brand of Presbyterianism was defeated by an overwhelming majority.
For the people, the common prayer ideal brought the Church as near to
perfection as humanity was able to devise, contrary to what any ‘Puritan’
might believe.
Yet, this did not prevent the ‘puritans’ from trying once more to
destroy the common prayer doctrine.
Only months following the defeat of Root and Branch the English
Civil War broke out. The ‘Puritan radicals’ now saw an opportunity to
exploit the disruption brought by war in order to seize control of the
nation’s religious culture once more. And this time, there was nothing
to stop them.
By 1645 the King’s forces were on the back foot and the Parliamentarian
armies were beginning to consolidate their control around the country.
Meanwhile in London, the ‘radical Puritan faction’ was now in
ascendency over Parliament. Freed from any effective opposition, and
with the war turning very much in their favour, the ‘radical Puritans’
now sought to finish the revolution in faith. In January 1645 Parliament
voted to ban the Book of Common Prayer; its rites and ceremonies, and
in its place a suitably reformed text was produced, one which satisfied
the faction’s delicate collective conscience. The new text was called the
Directory of Public Worship. By Parliamentary decree the Directory was
to be introduced in all parishes forthwith. The county committees were
to ensure that all Books of Common Prayer were collected and destroyed,
implementing fines or imprisonment as punishment for non-conformity.
Effectively a small, radical faction was using the mechanisms of state,
supported by judicial sanction, to enforce their particular idea of what
constituted a truly Reformed Church. However, they had not learnt the
lesson of four years before. The ‘Puritans’, for all the powers of the State
and military behind them, could still not break the common prayer ideal
cherished in the hearts of so many English men and women.
Despite having passed the Ordinance in January, fewer than 10% of
parishes had acquired the new book six months later. This widespread
10 Ibid. p.132.
57
Faith & Worship 76
public disobedience was quickly acknowledged by Parliament, which
was forced into passing another Ordinance in August placing the
responsibility for collection of copies of the Book of Common Prayer, and
distribution of the Directory, upon the heads of Members of Parliament.
This changed precisely nothing however, as the records of the county
committees and quarter sessions bear out. Almost no evidence exists of
a single fine or penalty being levied due to non-conformity, nor is there
much evidence to suggest that the Directory was actively distributed.
Inventories record the survival of the Prayer Book in more than onethird of all parishes. Fewer than 25% of churches record purchasing the
Directory across the period, and less than 25% of inventories record
it. Furthermore, evidence from individuals at the time demonstrate
its continued use. ‘John Evelyn had no difficulty in finding churches
in London which used it throughout the 1640s and 1650s,’11 while
Sir John Bramston ‘...wandered in off the street into a church in Milk
Street and found the old liturgy in use.’12 The presence of his father’s
carriage outside the church quickly aroused interest and before too long
the church was filled to bursting, such was the continued draw of the
common prayer doctrine. Even in such bastions of State as the colleges
of Oxford and Cambridge, the use of the Prayer Book continued long
after its prohibition.
The persistent ministry of the Prayer Book, in blatant disobedience to
the State authorities, was most powerfully demonstrated in the frequent
attempts by the State to oust a non-conforming minister which led to
resistance from the parishioners. ‘This sometimes took the mild form
of a petition, but it could also take the form of a tithe-strike against his
successor, the physical protection of the parsonage against the attempts
of a minister intruded by the committee of plundered ministers to take
up residency or even—after a period of disillusionment with the new
minister—the violent re-intrusion of the sequestered minister usually
with the Book of Common Prayer in hand.’13 Held aloft this formed a
very visible symbol of the nation’s determination to resist the State’s
interference with their Church.
By and large the ‘radical Puritan’ campaign to destroy the Elizabethan
Anglican Church and with it, its doctrine of common prayer, was an
unmitigated disaster. Although the legislation banning the Book of
11 Reactions to the English Civil War: 1642-1649, ed. John Morrill, Basingstoke 1982, p.103.
12 Loc. Cit.
13 Ibid., p.103.
58
The People’s Book:The Prayer Book and Politics 1590-1660
Common Prayer was not formally revoked until the Restoration of King
Charles II in 1660, the authorities effectively abandoned any attempts
at preventing its use. Even the tyranny of Cromwell’s Commonwealth
acknowledged that it could not break the bond between Englishman and
common prayer; at best, all that could be done was to drive it from its
most visible place in the public sphere. Yet, this would last only as long
as Cromwell. It is impossible to deny that the passionate outpouring of
love and support for the return of the Monarchy was owed, in part, to
the people’s desire for the return of their Church, and its common prayer
tradition, into the light of day once more.
I decided to write this piece on the history of the common prayer
struggle within the Church in England in part for the lesson which the
modern Church may draw from it. The doctrine of common prayer, most
visibly represented in the Book of Common Prayer, survived what, for
all intents and purposes, was a mortal threat against its existence as the
official rite of the Church of England, because it lived in the hearts and
minds of the English people. Common prayer was and is more than just
a form of worship, it is the means by which we are all made individually
equal, yet united as one nation before God. It is a Church which exists
within its people, it does not merely exist among the people. As in
faith, so in government. The State exists as the mechanism by which to
administer the nation, yet to do so, it must exist within the people (that
is it must have the support of the people) and not outside of them. Nor
must it belong to just one part of them, but be for the common good of
all. Over recent years the State in Britain has often been employed to suit
the ends of a number of small minority interests and groups, and not to
serve the common good.
I would draw attention to the historical example above as inspiration
for the modern Church not to fear the tyranny of the State, but to once
again become the institution, with the common prayer doctrine at its
heart, that stands tall in the defence of the common will of the people;
the body speaks with the heart and voice of the nation
To close this piece I am reminded of Richard Hooker’s words, ‘...
one man’s contempt of common prayer (or the common good) of the
Church of God, maybe and oft times is the most hurtful of the many.’14
How right he was.
14 Quoted in Spurr, op. cit., p.279.
59
REVIEW
Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, Princeton University
Press ISBN 978 0 691 15481 7 Hbk. £16.95
This excellent new history of the Prayer Book is part of a Princeton
University Press series called ‘Lives of Great Religious Books’—a series
which includes, besides a number of biblical books, such diverse items
as Augustine’s Confessions, the Book of Mormon, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity,
the I Ching and the Bhagavad Gita. Alan Jacobs’ The Book of Common Prayer is
subtitled, as are other volumes in the series, ‘a biography’.
The conceit that books have ‘lives’ is fair enough of course—after all, a
book’s history doesn’t stop on the day of publication (unless it falls dead
from the press). On the other hand biographies are usually written about
lives that have ended, while the books in this series must be considered
to have at least enough life left to make them worth writing about. In the
case of the Prayer Book the last chapter is nevertheless a diminuendo—the
old lady is less active than she used to be, and her biographer fears that
she is destined to genteel retirement on the library shelf:
Cranmer’s book, and its direct successors, will always be acknowledged
as historical documents of the first order, and masterpieces of English
prose, but this is not what they want or mean to be. Their goal—now
as in 1549—is to be living words in the mouths of those who have
a living faith.
Professor Jacobs aims to be even-handed between the older services
and their modern replacements (this is probably a requirement of the
series) but his own sympathies are pretty clear.
Of course the biography of the Prayer Book is bound to be the
biography of a family rather than an individual. English readers will think
of the 1662 book. American readers (Professor Jacobs is American) have
a slightly different perspective. But the variations between the ‘classic’
versions still bear a strong family resemblance—a quite different claim
is being made when, as in the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer,
the Prayer Book’s ‘numerous descendants’ are thought of as including
all modern Anglican liturgies1. Critics of the latter position will want
to insist that family honour requires questions of legitimacy not to be
1 See the late Andor Gomme’s review in Faith & Worship 61, pp. 56-8: ‘ . . . it is in no normal sense a guide
and it strays so far from the Prayer Book into the distant suburbs of the so-called Anglican Communion
that the Prayer Book itself becomes as unrecognisable as it is in most of the present ‘Anglican’ churches’.
60
Review
brushed under the carpet. Professor Jacobs quite rightly avoids dealing in
detail with the newer liturgies, but gives a fair-minded review of what lay
behind them and the arguments they occasioned in the English-speaking
world (including a mention of the English Prayer Book Society).
The main lines of the story from 1549 are broadly familiar, of course,
but Jacobs writes well, and has pondered and digested the wide reading
that has gone to the making of this book. Naturally there are occasional
errors (surely ‘No Bishop, No King’ was the ‘rallying cry’ of James I
rather than of ‘the most reckless Puritans’ [p. 69]?), and judgements with
which one disagrees (I think he’s unfair to F.D. Maurice and perhaps to
Archbishop Tait); and I’m not persuaded that he’s right to say that after
1689 ‘most English men and women would hear [the Prayer Book’s]
cadences only at the weightiest moments of life—baptism, marriage,
burial—and many would never hear them at all’—‘most’? ‘many’? But
these are fairly minor reservations, and there are many compensating
virtues—the brief discussion of Cranmer’s language is excellent, indeed
I wish it had been longer.
In short the book is well worth reading and very nicely produced at
a reasonable price.
John Scrivener
61
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