Thomas Cranmer, Signs of God's Promise by Bridget Nichols

http://tandtclark.typepad.com/ttc/2009/05/review-signs-of-gods-promise.html#more

Review: Signs of God's Promise

The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church has published a review of Gordon Jeanes' book on Thomas Cranmer, Signs of God's Promise by Bridget Nichols:

"This book has been impatiently awaited by those who have encountered it at earlier stages of its evolution. Their reward is a study of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s developing sacramental theology that is likely to take its place as a definitive account, if it is legitimate to speak in those terms of such a fiercely contested subject.

Through much of his career, Cranmer seems to have been engaged in a quest to define the nature of a sacrament and what it signifies. Jeanes picks up the trail in the late 1530s, drawing on an awe-inspiring range of material. Discussion of contemporary documents, including the anonymous, but probably Cranmerian treatise, De Sacramentis (which the author has edited), ancient sources, a large corpus of secondary literature (some of it usefully re-examined) and very recent publications ensures an invaluable presentation of the current state of research. Here, we see the beginnings of the Archbishop’s commitment to a sacramental theology that keeps both dominical sacraments in view. Indeed, it is Jeanes’s contention throughout that Cranmer’s thinking on baptism and the Eucharist was closely interlinked. In particular, his understanding of consecration, sacramental grace and growth in the Christian life involve parity between the major symbolic components – bread, wine and water – as well as between eating and drinking at the Eucharist, and the application of water in baptism.

This leads unavoidably to the question of sacramental presence, and Jeanes illustrates Cranmer’s not always successful attempts to employ analogies showing that the substance of the thing signified need not participate in the sign, though its benefits could be indicated and conveyed. The fact that Cranmer often used words in a sense different from that intended by his fellow-Reformers (‘seal’ in the case of baptism is a prominent example) adds a further degree of complexity.

By the end of the 1530s, Cranmer was articulating a view of sacramental efficacy as God’s work, by grace conveyed by the Holy Spirit, in the recipient. Christ is spiritually present in the faithful recipient – a strong Christological emphasis rather unfortunately subduing the pneumatological element in Jeanes’s view. Jeanes shows Cranmer working with an idea of sacramental grace that is developmental; in other words, grace acts in the recipient over time.

Hence his emphasis on signification: the sacraments are signs of God’s promise of grace. They neither presuppose grace already present in the recipient, nor confer grace at the time of reception – views which, broadly speaking, might be said to be represented respectively by Bucer and Calvin. In Cranmer’s thought, they are a sign that God’s grace is offered to the faithful eucharistic recipient and the candidate for baptism. This is why parents and godparents can make promises on the child’s behalf, just as it explains why the priest may, in 1552, take the remaining bread and wine home for his own use.

The lurking presence of the doctrine of election in all of this is not ignored, but Jeanes notes that it is played down. His excellently organised and illuminating analyses of the 1549 and 1552 baptismal rites perhaps give a clue to this muted treatment of a prominent aspect of Reformation thought. These demonstrate Cranmer’s pastoral–liturgical interpretative instinct, especially in modelling the loving reception of the newly baptised into Christ’s Church by careful integration of Scripture, baptismal promises and prayers, and manual action. Wrestling with the contradiction between doctrine and practice in this case might well have engendered a sense of reserve.

The striking and welcome impression conveyed by this work is that it is a liturgist’s book, for together with his own scholarship, Jeanes brings an intelligent, canny and well-earthed instinct for the practical aspects of rite. His argument returns frequently to the conditions under which services would have been conducted in church, and the perceptions of those attending them. Direct experience is thus not discounted in the face of textual research.

To offer one example, if the 1549 Rite of Baptism was influenced most powerfully by Lutheran models, those participating in the service would have had, as comparison, experience of the Sarum baptism service. Both comparisons are sensibly made available in tabulated form. The search for sources and origins can, of course, be pressed too far, and it is salutary to see Jeanes’s warning that ‘sources must not be multiplied beyond necessity’ when good practical explanations lie nearer to hand (p. 275).

The same careful good sense and well-earthed liturgical instinct informs a conclusion which resists extreme claims and offers a compelling evaluation. For just as some parties involved in the struggles leading to the failed 1928 Prayer Book tried to reclaim Cranmer for Anglo-Catholicism, so Jeanes warns in his conclusion against dismissing his sacramental theology as ‘low’. ‘Rather his theology is coherent, prominent in what in the twentieth century we would call spirituality, and able to speak of the grace of God with a clarity and immediacy lacking in many other theologies of the time’ (pp. 290–1).

This is a meticulous piece of historical research and a fascinating insight into the theological development and working methods behind the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. Its contribution to Reformation and Cranmerian studies, as well as to liturgical scholarship, is timely and considerable."