Bp. J.C. Ryle: Review of Evangelical Anglicanism, 1829-1879

The ever-wise, well-read, scholarly, evangelical, kind, firm, courageous, unblinking and old Anglican Prayer Book man and Bishop, John Charles Ryle, gives his review of Evangelical Anglicanism from 1829 to 1879.  The principles of steadfastness and courage are ever-timely.  May it be said that the frivolities and entertainments—then, as now—disappear as the brain-dead jokers (what else can they be called given their lifelong hostilities and irreverent thoughts?) near death and the old Reformation verities, affirmed by old school Churchmen, acquire new force.  Some die like dogs without hope.  Offended by the terms? 
You haven't, then, recognized how wicked you are.  Get a Biblical perspective for starters.  You're a madman if opposing His Majesty. Others, as death approaches and the eternal matters approach, are sobered and repent.  As Ecc. 12.1 advises, the old entertainments disappear. What kind of stupidity is it to wait until older?  Rather, may one number his or her days and walk in wisdom (Ps. 90.12). God makes the differences.  For the faithful Churchmen, we are reminded of old Wycliffe’s dictum—our verities will never be outlived.  Here’s Bishop Ryle.

http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/os/01-1_030.pdf

Where are We?

Bishop John Charles Ryle

It may clear the way if I remind my readers that the state of things as to religious parties within the Church of England has undergone a complete change since 1829. At that date it is not too much to say the Evangelical body formed the only distinct party of any activity within our pale, and that it had almost a monopoly of the life and zeal of the Establishment.  Doubt from the days of Bishop Hooper and the Vestiarian controversy there were always two Schools, a "High" and a "Low" School of thought, among our clergy. But in 1829 the immense majority of Churchmen took very little interest in religious matters beyond a formal use of the Church's services, and perhaps the only bond of union among them, with a few bright exceptions, was a common dislike to Evangelical principles and practices, and to all who followed them. In short, outside the Evangelical body, as a general rule, sleepiness and apathy was the order of the day. I need hardly say that this Breotian state of things has utterly and entirely passed away. Within the last fifty years two other distinct and active Schools of thought, beside the Evangelical, have crystallized and come into existence. I mean, of course, the High Church and the Broad Church. Each of these two schools has its own distinctive opinions, and makes its mark on the nation. Each has attracted round it numerous adherents, each has also its own peculiar phraseology, its own literature, and its own organs in the press. Each party is rich in preachers, speakers, and writers, and zealous in pushing and maintaining its own views. Not least, each of the two can show as much laboriousness and diligence in ministerial work as we can ourselves, however much we may think it misdirected. The logical tendencies of the two parties at first sight seems to be in diametrically opposite directions. High Churchmen who push their principles to legitimate conclusions seem in danger of returning to Rome, and swallowing the creed of Pope Pius IV. Broad Churchmen who go all lengths seem likely to give up all creeds, and articles, and dogmas as fetters, and to cast them overboard like useless lumber. Within the three great Schools in 1879 the greater part of the energy and life of the Church will be found ranged. The modifications, and subdivisions, and shades, and half-tones of these three great Schools of thought are so many and so delicate that I cannot pretend to enumerate them. Their name is legion. There are honest, old-fashioned High Churchmen of the School of Andrewes. There are equally honest Broad Churchmen of the School of Burnet. There are Ritualists, pure and simple, who make no secret of their dislike to Protestantism. There are Evangelical Ritualists, and Ritualistic Evangelicals. There are Broad Church Evangelicals, and Evangelical Broad Churchmen, and Broad Church Ritualists. There are Eclectics, who try to pick a tit-bit out of every School and partly agree with none, and partly agree with all. There are some zealous and active Churchmen who hold such rabidly outrageous opinions that, like the fly in amber, you wonder how they are in the Church at all, and why they do not go to their own places. There are some decidedly non-Evangelical men who

really work so hard, and preach so much truth, that you feel "Cum talis sis utinam noster esses." There are other zealous fellows much run after and admired, on whose pulpits you might justly write "Mangling done here!" and whose sermons, like Solomon's ships, contain not only gold and silver and ivory, but worthless apes and gaudy peacocks. In short, there are such complications of opinion in the present day that it baffles any attempt to classify all. For all this tinkle, we must remember, there remains outside all Schools of English ,Churchmen a large residuum of men who are ever proclaiming that they belong to "no party," and hold "no extreme views," not knowing in their Arcadian simplicity that they form about the most distinct party in the land! Never, I suppose, were there so many distinct schools and religious parties as there are in England at the present day. It need not surprise us; it is the natural consequence of increasing intellectual life and thought; men are awake and will think and act. It is not an unmixed evil; we provoke each other to emulation; we keep each other in order. We almost all stand in loyal love to the Church of England; the man who tries to destroy the Church, because we are divided, will find that he might as well interfere in the quarrels of husband and wife, We may scratch each other's faces, but we will not allow anyone else to do it.  One curious fact, however, remains to be mentioned. Of the three great parties in the Church, the most isolated and unpopular among the clergy is our own. Whenever a question has to be settled by voting, all Schools of thought combine in voting against the Evangelical. But after all, when we balance party against party within our pale, and measure their comparative strength, what is the precise position which the old Evangelical School occupies in 1879 as compared with fifty years ago? Are we weaker or are we stronger? Is our influence in England increasing or diminishing? Do we hold our own, or, like the late Roman Empire, are our boundaries contracting every year? Is our strength like that of Caleb, equal to anything, or are we silently decaying and melting away? Is there any vigour left in our School?  Or, are we, like extinct volcanoes, the cold memorials of a bygone power to shake the world? These are deeply interesting questions which ought to be looked in the face. I shall not shrink from looking at them and giving an answer. Now, it is the fashion in many quarters just now to speak of the Evangelical School of Churchmen as an effete and worn-out body. It pleases some to proclaim everywhere that our day is past and our work is done. We were once useful, like the old wooden three-deckers, but are now only fit to be laid up in ordinary or broken up. We are distanced in the Ecclesiastical race and left far in the rear. We shall soon be as useless as an old almanack or a stranded wreck on a sand-bank. Such is the talk of many. Mr. Gladstone once wrote in the Contemporary that Evangelical Churchmen are deficient in learning, and that their system “contains in itself the elements of disintegration." The organs of extreme ritualism declare that we are destitute of theological knowledge, and are rapidly falling to pieces. I believe some weak folk are frightened by all this "tall talk," and are preparing like rats, to quit the sinking ship, or, like rabbits, to bolt into their holes. For my own part, I regard it all as “talk," which there is nothing whatever to justify. The wish is father to the words of these men. I see facts, great patent facts, which lead me to a very different conclusion. No doubt the faults and infirmities of the Evangelical body are not few, and it does not need a Solomon to discern them. No doubt we are only a minority in the Church of England. We never were anything else, and probably never shall be. If we pleased men, and all spoke well of us, we should not be servants of Christ. We are completely outnumbered by all the other Schools of thought combined together. We are comparatively a little flock among the clergy, while" the Syrians fill the country." But if any man means to tell me that on striking the balance of parties and analyzing the spiritual condition of each, he sees in the Evangelical party the signs of decay, I take leave to tell him that he is utterly and entirely mistaken. I will give him some plain facts to digest, and in the face of those facts I defy him to prove the truth of his assertion.

I. Does it look like decay when the Evangelical body occupies a commanding position, both in the pulpits of London and almost every other large town in England, which it certainly did not occupy fifty years ago? Where and in what number were the Evangelical clergy in the metropolis, in Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, Westminster, Chelsea, St. Giles's, St. George's, Bloomsbury, Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Islington, Stepney, Greenwich, Southwark, in the year 1829, and where are they now? Where at the same date was the Evangelical body in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Macclesfield, Bradford, Sheffield, Newcastle, Sunderland, Gateshead, Hull, Nottingham, Derby, Cheltenham, Bath, Bristol, Clifton, Plymouth, and where is it now? I cordially dislike this numbering and counting. But necessity is laid upon me. Does this look like a dying party, or a failing cause? Is this decay ? I think not.

2. Does it look like decay when all over the land we possess the confidence of the majority of lay Churchmen-that is, of the middle classes and intelligent lower orders? That we are in a minority among the clergy I fully admit, and probably in the ratio of four to one in the south of England. An Evangelical clergy has very little chance of being elected a proctor in Canterbury Convocation. But I firmly believe a return from the laity, if it could be obtained, would tell a very different tale. When the Public Worship Bill was before the House of Commons, which is the true representative of the middle classes, Mr. Gladstone, with all his tail of Ritualistic and Broad Church followers, never dared to go to a division. When Diocesan Conferences containing clergy and laity from all the parishes are brought together, and the churchwardens are fairly represented, you soon find that the speeches which elicit the most hearty response are those which are most thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical. When large masses of the population are brought together for religious objects in places like Manchester or Liverpool or Birmingham, you soon see that the good old principles of the Reformation-the principles of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and not of Laud-are the only principles they cheer and applaud.  And does this look like decay or a dying cause? I think not.

3. Does it look like decay when our most distinctive doctrinal views and opinions can stand the test of sifting, searching, judicial inquiry, and can come out from such ordeal not merely unscathed and unharmed, but triumphant and victorious? Men used to say fifty years ago that Evangelical clergymen were little better than "tolerated heretics." They might be good earnest ministers, but they were not sound Churchmen. And too many of our party, I fear, with more meekness than book-knowledge, and more grace in their hearts than learning in their heads, used to hold their tongues, assume an apologetic attitude, and find nothing to answer. But since the Gorham case, and the Denison case, and the Mackonochie case, and the Purchas case, and the Bennett case, have been argued, and the arguments made public, I note that men have altered their tone a good deal, and changed their minds. Moreover, such books as Dean Goode's volumes on Scripture, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, and Dr. Blakeney on the Prayer-book, and Canon Mozley on the Baptismal Controversy, have made their appearance and stand to this hour unanswered and unrefuted. In short, people have found out that Evangelical Churchmen are as loyal and true Churchmen as any in the land. We hold our ground at Church Congresses, and are recognised as an honest integral part of the Church of England which has the Evangelical body not represented would hardly be considered a Church Congress at all. We can set our foot down firmly, and speak with our enemies in the face, and defy anyone to convince a jury that our distinctive views are not the views of the Articles and Prayer-book, if fairly, honestly, and harmoniously interpreted. If any are "tolerated heretics" nowadays, at any rate it is not the members of the Evangelical body. And does this look like decay? I think not.

4. Does it look like decay when every kind of Evangelical machinery has been borrowed from Evangelical Churchmen by clergy of other Schools, and adapted to their own purposes? They confess by their actions that they find no tools like ours and can invent no better. To hear some people talk, one might fancy there never was any hymn-book before Ancient and Modern, and never any Mission Weeks till the Ritualists began them! But this notion is ridiculously and entirely incorrect. I boldly assert, and I defy contradiction, that lively hymn singing, special Missions at home, non-Liturgical Services, Lay Agency, Mission Women, Pastoral Aid Societies, Missions to the Heathen, Missions to the Colonies, Missions to Seamen, Missions to our brethren on the Continent-all, all, all were first started by the Evangelical body. Other parties have had the wisdom to borrow our engines, but have too often not had the grace to acknowledge where they got them. But does it look like decay when the rival Schools of thought are continually coming to our arsenals, like Russians to Woolwich, and getting patterns to work by in their own way? I think not.

5. Does it look like decay when the religious societies, supported by Evangelical Churchmen, are continually growing in wealth, power, attractiveness, and influence? Let any intelligent Englishman quietly study the history of such institutions as the Church Missionary Society, the Jews' Society, the Pastoral Aid Society, the Colonial and Continental Church Society, the Irish Church Missionary Society, the Bible Society, and the London City Mission. Let him mark the constant increase of income which, comparing one decade of years with another since 1829, each of these great societies can report. Let him remember that each of these societies  represents and expresses the voluntary confidence of that important body, the middle classes in England, and that this confidence is evidently increasing. And then let him note the huge fact that the 4000 or 5000 Evangelical congregations of the Church of England raise more money by annual voluntary contributions for their own distinctive religious societies than is raised by all the non-evangelical congregations put together! Does this look like a decaying School, a dying body, a worn-out party, a failing cause? I think not.

6. Does it look like decay when gatherings of Evangelical Churchmen are increasing and multiplying every year in numbers, size, and importance? Fifty years ago, the well-known Islington Meeting stood almost alone, and used to assemble with ease in the Vicar's library. I need hardly say no clergyman's library in London would hold it now. Within the last thirty years the annual meetings of the West of England lay and clerical, the Midland lay and clerical, the Northern Counties lay and clerical, the Home Counties lay and clerical, the Southport lay and clerical Societies-all based on Evangelical principles have sprung into healthy existence and been most successful. I hear of no such large meetings being held by Ritualists and Broad Churchmen. Specious and plausible as their principles are, they appear to have no power of self-propagation and vital theology like our own Evangelical views. And does this look like decay? I think not.

7. Finally, does it look like a falling cause and a decaying School of Theology when the very doctrines which are the glory of the Evangelical body, and which we are constantly accused of teaching too prominently and exclusively, are resorted to at last with avidity by members of other parties. Not a year passes over my head but I hear of such cases, and I have no doubt that my experience is that of many. I hear of people who have spent their lives and strength in the ranks of Ritualism and Broad Churchism eagerly grasping simple Evangelical truths in their last hours, and taking comfort in the very thing which they used to hold cheap and even despise. I hear of them, as they go down the valley of the shadow of death, casting aside all their old favourite tenets, and talking of nothing but the blood of Christ, the righteousness of Christ, the intercession of Christ, justification by faith, and all those precious corner-stones of our system which in former days they used to say we used to make too much of. On the other hand, I never heard of one single case of a truehearted Evangelical Churchman forsaking our principles in his last hour for Ritualism or Broad Churchism. Oh, no I the nearer men draw to the grave, the more they find out the value of simple Evangelical truth, without subtraction or addition, and the more determined they feel not to give it up. To use the words of William Romaine, "The truths, which they held as doctrinal principles in life, they find comforting in death."  And does this look like decay? Does this look as if Evangelicalism were an effete and worn-out system? I think not.

In saying all this, I hope I shall not be mistaken. I abhor even the appearance of boasting. The defects and blemishes of our School of thought are so many that we have nothing to boast of and much cause for humiliation. I could easily put my finger on not a few blots and blanks which require our serious attention. But I refrain, and leave this point for future consideration.

I have said what I have to show my readers that a calm review of our position in 1879 affords strong reasons for thankfulness and encouragement. I have said it for the special benefit of my younger brethren in the ministry. I ask them not to be moved by the taunts and gibes of our rivals in other Schools, but to look at plain facts, and see what a tale those facts tell. To appreciate facts and depreciate talk is one mark of a wise man. I ask them, in short, to believe that the Evangelical party, with all its faults, shows no symptoms of decay, and is as strong as my School of thought within the Church of England, if not stronger. We are not a sinking ship. We are not worn out yet. We are not dead, but alive. Yes! By the help of God we continue unto this day, and by the same help I believe we shall continue and hold our own for many a long day, in spite of ridicule, contempt, and persecution.  "We shall live and not die," as Wycliffe said to the Friars, and be a thorn in the side of the Pope and the infidel, and all their satellites and allies. We shall live and not die if we are only true to our old principles, if we will only work, and watch, and pray, and read, and understand the times.

But I repeat emphatically, we must be true to our old principles-the principles revived by Henry Veun, Romaine, Berridge, and Grimshawe, kept alive by Newton, Scott, Milner, anrl Cecil, handed down to us by Simeon, Daniel Wilson, Legh Richmond, and Bickersteth, kind and courteous to everybody, but stiff as steel in our adhesion to the old lines. We must steadily refuse to exalt things indifferent and secondary to the same level with the primary verities and weightier matters of the Gospel. We must beware of trimming, compromising, and conceding, under the vain hope of conciliating our rivals and catching them by guile, or keeping our young people from adopting what we disapprove. It is wretched policy to try to out-manouvre our opponents by borrowing their uniform and imitating their drill. It is a policy which gains over no enemy and disgusts many friends. Saul's armour will not fit David. It is useless to go down to Egypt for chariots and horses. We cannot do better than stick to our sling and stones-the Word of God and prayer. We cannot improve on our old principles; then let us not lightly forsake them. We cannot make them popular; they never were and never will be. Let us put up with unpopularity if conscience tells us that Christ and truth are on our side. I am no prophet, and in a changing world I dare not conjecture where the Evangelical party will be when another fifty years have passed over the Church of England. The drying-up of the Turkish Empire, the prevalence of Popery, infidelity, lawlessness, are dark signs of the age. It may be that sifting, trying times are before us. It may be that our numbers may be thinned, and many may desert our cause under the pressure of incessant official frowns, persecution, ridicule, and unpopularity. But, come what may, I trust the Evangelical cause will always have a representative body in the Church of England, and a faithful remnant who can stand fire, and stand alone. If gaps are made in our ranks, I hope the cry will always be, as it was in the squares at Waterloo, "Close up, men, close up; let none give way." It was a grand saying of Lord Clyde on a memorable occasion, when someone talked of a battalion of the Guards retiring, " Sir, it would better that every man in Her Majesty's Guards should die where he stands, than that Her Majesty's Guards should turn their backs to the enemy." So say I this day to my Evangelical brethren, we have no cause for discouragement, despondency, or despair. Things are in a better condition in 1879 than they were in 1829. Then let us stand firm and tight on.

J. C. RYLE.

ABC Thomas Cranmer's Ambitious Legacy

http://www.historytoday.com/diarmaid-macculloch/cranmers-ambiguous-legacy

 

Cranmer's Ambiguous Legacy

By Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch reflects on the 'after-life' of Henry VIII's archbishop, burnt at the stake as a Protestant martyr under Mary.

 

Portrait of Cranmer after Henry VIII's death by an unknown artistArchbishop Thomas Cranmer died at the stake in 1556, a martyr for the English Reformation; but did he die a martyr for the Church of England or for Anglicanism? If we examine Cranmer's career after he parted company in the early 1530s with the Catholicism of his first forty years, we find a man of international perspective, who sought to move England into the path of the wider European Reformation: in particular towards the Reformations to be found in the churches of south Germany and Switzerland. After Cranmer's death, most of these churches would be labelled 'Calvinist' or 'Reformed'. He would not have recognised these descriptions, but if he had lived, it is very likely that he would have done his best to take the English church in the same direction.
What would the Church of England have looked like if instead of Queen Mary's triumph in 1553, Queen Jane's quite reasonable hereditary claim to the throne had succeeded in establishing her regime? The Lady Mary would have to have been effectively neutralised, and one fears that neutralising her for good would have involved the block, in a return to Henrician savagery. The Lady Elizabeth could have been married off to Lord Robert Dudley, a good catch for a royal bastard, and a good chance for them both of a happy love-match.

Archbishop Cranmer, living to his allotted three-score years and ten or beyond, could produce a third version of his two earlier Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, in the light of friendly criticism from continental reformers whom he respected, like Peter Martyr, Johann Heinrich Bullinger and Calvin. He would be succeeded as archbishop by Nicholas Ridley or Robert Holgate, with energetic younger reformers like Edmund Grindal ready to make their mark and pick up good ideas from the best reformed churches of Europe. The Scots immigrant John Knox, mellowed by an increasingly successful career in the Church of England, would be appointed Bishop of Newcastle, benevolently taking no notice of the advanced congregations in his diocese who received communion sitting; this was a practice in any case increasingly common throughout Jane's Church, despite Cranmer's grumbles. Cranmer's cherished reform of the old popish canon law would be achieved; the primer and catechism published at the very end of Edward's reign in 1553 would become the standards; the Forty-two Articles would have been unmodified by Elizabethan hesitations about relegating the significance of the sacrament of Holy Communion to that merely of a symbolic repetition.

Out in the parishes, metrical psalms in the style of Geneva would quickly have spread: these were the best secret weapon of the English Reformation, making its public worship and private devotional practice genuinely popular throughout increasing areas of the kingdom. This congregational music would also take over in the cathedrals, now devoid of choirs or polyphony, and with their organs (where they survived) used mainly for entertainment in the Dutch fashion. The conservative nobility would continue the sullen public compliance with religious change which they had shown under Edward VI, their private celebration of ceremonial worship tolerated as eccentricity, like the Lady Elizabeth's patronage of choral music in her own chapel.

The traditionalist higher clergy would gradually die off in senior church offices and the universities, with no possibility of like-minded replacement: since the universities produced no major haemorrhage of exiles in the 1560s, the Jesuits and other religious orders would find it difficult to recruit potential clergy to train for their attempt to treat Jane's England as a mission field. England would have become the most powerful political player in the Reformed camp, with Cranmer a cordial if geographically distant partner with John Calvin. It is powerfully symbolic that it was Cranmer's son-in-law Thomas Norton who translated Calvin's Institutes into English, and Cranmer's veteran printer Reyner Wolfe who published it. With a Cranmer-Calvin axis, the profile of Reformed religion across the whole Continent would have been changed, and with the help and encouragement of Bishop Knox, the Reformation in Scotland might have followed a close path to the Reformed Church of England.

That is the history that never happened. Instead, in 1558 Queen Elizabeth had to cope with the consequences of Mary's steadily more successful effort to integrate a traditionalist comeback with the Counter- Reformation's new dynamism. At home, Elizabeth wanted to conciliate conservatives; abroad, she wanted to conciliate suspicious Catholic Spain and France, and also to win friends among the Lutheran princes of Germany and Scandinavia, who were increasingly hostile to the Calvinist and other Reformed Churches to their south. At the same time, however, she was identified with the Protestant cause by her birth, she had a team of advisers who were senior administrators from Northumberland's regime, and she faced a triumphalist Protestant grouping already creating a mythology of glorious resistance to evil in the deaths of so many martyrs. Of these martyrs, Cranmer's name headed the list. Elizabeth herself shows signs of having preferred his discredited first Prayer Book of 1549 to his second of 1552, but virtually no-one at the time agreed with her: to reintroduce 1549 was not practical politics.

Elizabeth's solution to her dilemmas was remarkable: quite deliberately, she established what proved to he a snapshot, frozen in time, of the Church as it had been in September 1552, ignoring the progress made in further changing the Church of England after that date. This meant that the 1559 Prayer Book was the 1552 rite, devoid of the last-minute 'black rubric' denying that kneeling at communion represented adoration of the eucharistic elements of bread and wine (an addition probably demanded by Cranmer himself to preserve the custom of kneeling after John Knox's criticism). No government sympathy was offered to attempts in 1559 and 1571 to revive the arch- bishop's 1553 scheme of wholesale replacement for canon law. The 1553 catechism and primer were set aside, the primer in favour of a modified version of that issued in 1551 – itself a reworking of Henry VIII's 1545 primer.

One of the most striking features of Elizabeth's 1559 Settlement was that it began the Church of England's long march away from Cranmer's eucharistic theology, if only in small details. Cranmer wanted to ensure that people did not think that there was any physical or corporal presence of Christ in the elements of bread and wine, and he carefully recast his 1552 communion service to make this clear. Christ was only present to those communicants who had faith in him, and faith could not be earned by any human being; it was a predestined gift of God to those to whom he chose to give it. The clarity of Cranmer's sacramental intentions was undermined by restoring to the communion service the 1549 formulae of administering bread and wine to communicants which he had replaced in 1552, now simply shackled to the later formulae: was the communicant receiving the body and blood of Christ, or taking the elements in remembrance that Christ had died for human salvation? This, the omission of the 'black rubric', and a baffling instruction that the permissible ornaments and vestments of the Church were those in use in the year before the 1549 Prayer Book was authorised, were the only modifications of significance to the 1552 book in 1559.

Similarly, the most material alterations made by the 1565 Convocation to the Forty-two Articles of 1553 concerned eucharistic doctrine. Lutherans believed in a real presence in the eucharist. Although advocates of such views were virtually non-existent among English higher clergy, there were foreign diplomatic considerations. Most significantly, the Article statement 'of the wicked which do not eat the body of Christ', was omitted in 1563 to spare foreign Lutheran sensibilities, and it was only restored in 1571 when Lutherans no longer mattered. The 1553 argument that Christ's body could not be on earth because he was locally present in heaven was also left out for ever. It was true that the replacement wording still emphasised spiritual presence: 'the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner; and the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the supper is faith'. However, Edmund Guest, the architect of this phrase and one of the bishops on Elizabeth's bench farthest from the Reformed ethos, gave it a spin which would not have appealed greatly to Cranmer: it 'did not exclude the presence of Christ's body from the sacrament, but only the grossness and sensibleness in the receiving thereof.

One should not exaggerate the extent of the drift at this early stage. Edwardian establishment evangelicals who survived the Marian holocaust, either through exile or some form of discreet invisibility at home, resumed their careers. To men like Bishop Edmund Grindal, who had been a major help to John Foxe in compiling his collections on the Marian persecutions, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were shining examples whose work needed to be upheld and extended. Even more radical evangelicals who had clashed with Cranmer under Edward Vl could forget their differences in view of what had happened under Mary: John Knox was generous in his comments on the three Oxford prisoners' 'lenity, sincere doctrine, pure life, godly conversation, and discreet counsel' and he called the martyred Cranmer 'the mild man of God'.

Yet the plain fact was that the Supreme Governor would not allow the Edwardian Reformation to proceed on its path, at least if it meant bringing structural change to her Church. Famously, she ruined Archbishop Grindal's ministry because of his refusal to suppress the 'prophesyings' – gatherings of clergy for the improvement of their preaching, and much more useful and less dramatic occasions than their name implied. The generation of Parker and Sandys found themselves defending this fossilised version of the Edwardian Church in the face of criticism from those who had been their companions in misfortune under Mary – increasingly also from a new generation who had no such personal links to restrain their expression of anger at the bewildering immobilism of the Church establishment.

In the face of this unexpected turn of events, the Oxford martyrs became as much the property of those who deplored the Elizabethan Church's half-reformed polity, as of Cranmer's remaining colleagues. A tussle, indeed, took place for the honour of being the heirs of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley between groups within the Church which from the late 1560s can be distinguished as Puritan and conformist. Both sides claimed the myth-making of Foxe's Book of Martyrs for their own, and chose what they wanted from the myth. For conformists, Cranmer's legacy was his Prayer Book, so that he was the symbol of their defence of the liturgy against Puritans, just as he had been in the disputes among the Marian exiles about how far they could depart from the 1552 Book. For Puritans, this was a distortion of the Cranmer legacy, tragically cut off before it could be completed.

Notoriously, for John Field and Thomas Wilcox, the authors of the Admonition to the Parliament in 1572, the Prayer Book was 'an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass-hook full of all abominations'. Even John Foxe, in his 1571 introduction to the published text of Cranmer's canon law revision, felt compelled to point out the one serious flaw in this document prepared by his hero, that it ordered the exclusive use of the Prayer Book. The way to avoid the seeming contradiction of attacking Cranmer's Prayer Book while regarding him as an example to all good Protestants was the quite reasonable supposition that his work had been interrupted: the tradition that in time he would have 'drawn up a book of prayer a hundred times more perfect than this that we now have'.

The separatists who resisted a state- sanctioned Church encompassing both godly and ungodly alike who emerged on the fringe of the Puritan movement were much more equivocal towards Cranmer than mainstream Puritans, but they were by no means totally hostile; they too could use the Oxford martyrs as sticks with which to beat the Elizabethan hierarchy. Robert Browne, a Cambridge Puritan who had taken the rare step beyond the official Church into separatism, sneered about Elizabeth's bishops that 'neither Cranmer nor Latimer, nor Hooper, nor Ridley were so meet for the prison houses, as these are for their bishoprics'. He regarded the Marian persecution as God's way of. trying to save Edwardian establishment evangelicals from repeating the follies of the old Church; however, the Elizabethan hierarchy had not learned from Cranmer's and Ridley's mistakes, and 'these have got again that false popish government'. John Greenwood, a separatist who bitterly detested the Prayer Book which Cranmer had created, coupled his rather condescending view of the Oxford trio's 'ignorance' in borrowing a liturgy from Antichrist with the affirmation that 'I reverence those good men as much as I may by the word of God ... In that they knew, they shewed themselves faithful unto the death; therefore they [were] gatherers with Christ and not with antichrists ... God did pardon Cranmer for making that vile book, and his being metropolitan', he affirmed confidently. Only among the real radicals, those who were conscious heirs of the anabaptist martyrs whom Cranmer had helped to burn in Edward VI's reign, was there a consistent tradition that scorned the Oxford martyrs even amid the Marian troubles.

Another less positive view of Cranmer emerged from the 1.580s in a different quarter, among members of the established Church who wished to lay greater stress on its sacramental life. Most early significant figures (like many Puritan leaders), were Cambridge dons, notably Lancelot Andrewes, the Master of Pembroke: later the movement would widen, until under the patronage of the two first Stuart monarchs it gained an edgy self-confidence and a leading role in the Church. It is difficult to find a satisfactory general label for the grouping, except for the vague and variable description 'High Church'. At first without much public group identity, by the second decade of the seventeenth century these sacramentalists were being given. the nickname 'Arminians', by comparison with the movement in the Netherlands pioneered by the maverick Calvinist theologian Jacobus Arminius. The common factor was a revolt against the orthodoxy established by the great figures of the Reformation, of whom Calvin was the most obvious reference-point. However the English 'Arminians' predated Arminius' emergence as a disruptive force, and they had other priorities: a predisposition to emphasise continuity rather than discontinuity in the English Church through the Reformation struggles, and a willingness to appreciate afresh the devotional traditions of the medieval West. Above all, the sacramentalists wished to restore the notion of real presence in the eucharist to what they regarded as its rightful key place in Christian doctrine.

For saccamentalists or Arminians, Cranmer's 1552 Prayer Book as lightly revised in 1559 was not promising territory; nor did they enjoy contemplating the work of the Edwardian Church over which the Archbishop had presided. For most of them, there was no question of open criticism, Arminians made much of heir loyalty to the established Church, and they were fond of citing the homilies to prove controversial points which were often far from the intentions of the homilies' original compilers. Rather, their disapproval manifested itself in a discreet lack of comment about the virtues of the Edwardian Church, and also an increasing interest in the 1549 Prayer Bonk, for the very reason that Cranmer had revised it, because of the possibilities that it offered of reinstating a more extrovert Catholic practice and devotion than was possible with the 1559 rite. Lancelot Andrewes, once he had become a bishop, set an example in his private chapel by rear- ranging the order. of material in the 1559 communion service and multiplying the accompanying ceremonial to suit his theological predilections, an interesting action for a bishop who always emphasised uniformity and obedience to the Church in his public statements. When in 1.637 the sacramentalists had the chance to create an entire new liturgy for the kingdom of Scotland (alas, a liturgy which was not appreciated by the recipients), it was to 1549 and not to 1559 that they looked for a model.

Matters were made worse when the Arminians' growing ascendancy in the early Stuart Church and their frequently aggressive promotion of their remoulding of its life and practice met with opposition from the older Church establishment. One of the best examples of how Cranmer could now be used to embarrass the Arminians comes from the bitter dispute between William Laud and Bishop John Williams of Lincoln over the correct positioning of the communion table, and the symbolism or lack of it which the positioning might imply. In his 1637 justification of the general practice of the Elizabethan Church, Holy Table: name and thing, Williams naturally drew .heavily on the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and on the Homilies. He also appealed directly to Cranmer's arguments as presented in the Defence and the Answer, since Cranmer's was 'the most learned in this theme of our late divines'. The 'theme' was eucharistic sacrifice, and Cranmer's usefulness to Williams was to restrict the idea of sacrifice, oblation or offering in the communion to the 'sacrifice of laud and thanksgiving', so that the holy table could not be regarded as a place of sacrifice, an altar.

Cranmer indeed became powerfully symbolic for all Laud's enemies. William Dowsing has entered history- books (to a limited extent) as the man who turned iconoclasm into, if not a fine art, then at least a careful bureaucratic duty. He was an East Anglian Puritan who, in the Civil War, gained a commission from Parliament to wreck churches; he was also an admirer of Thomas Cranmer and the Oxford martyrs. He possessed both Cranmer's Defence and his Answer: his surviving copy of the Answer, bought in 1637 at the height of the confrontation with Laud and now far from home in St Andrews, is filled with his customary lavish marginal annotations. Having read Cranmer's book, Dowsing drew particular attention to what he called 'Cranmer's prayer', an acrid rebuke to the Catholic Bishop Stephen Gardiner. The passage culminated with the ringing call: 'I pray God, that we have not rather been figures of bishops, hearing the name and title of pastors and bishops before men, than that we have in deed diligently fed the little flock of Christ with the sweet and wholesome pasture of his true and lively word'. Dowsing summed this passage up as Cranmer's 'desire he may answer his call of bishop'. Here was an archbishop after his own heart. a sad contrast to the contemporary occupant of the office in 1637.

After the 1641 national crisis, attitudes to the Marian prelate-martyrs became more divided. William Prynne, for instance, can be found re- evaluating the deaths of Cranmer and Ridley, whom (like Dowsing) he had previously seen as symbolic allies in his campaigns against Laudian prelacy. Most hostile of all was John Milton, in his bitter attacks on the whole notion of episcopacy during the Interregnum. Cranmer and Ridley became 'halting and time-serving prelates' who were only brought to a better understanding of truth by the persecution which they endured, although it must be said that Milton's opinion of the tyranny of Genevan church government was no higher! Conversely, moderate defenders of the pre-war established Church redoubled their praise of bishops who could be seen as redeeming episcopacy from Laud's follies. However, perhaps the most impressive Interregnum verdict on the martyred archbishop's memory was spoken more quietly, throughout the parishes of England. That verdict was neither one of Laudian embarrassment nm of anti-episcopal antagonism. It was the unobtrusive continuing use of the Book of Common Prayer at a time when it was illegal and officially replaced by the Westminster Assembly's Directory of Public Worship. The Prayer Book itself had attracted little open hostility during the course of the Civil War, while bishops were abolished and church furnishings and ornaments were destroyed by the likes of Dowsing. In the years after the war, through all the turbulence of Commonwealth and Protectorate, its use continued in very many churches, adapted to local needs in the way sought by Elizabethan Puritans. After a century of use, it had become part of an English popular culture.

Given this testimony to the Prayer Book's place in the fabric of English Protestantism, the nature of Charles II's Restoration Settlement of 1660-62 with its startling triumph of militant Anglicanism becomes more comprehensible; Cranmer played his part in that victory. Whether he would have been happy with the aftermath of the triumph is less certain. Perhaps he would have understood the need to modify his liturgy after a century of use; after all, he had only been given four years in which to experiment with its practice in Edward VIs reign. However, the author of the Defence and the Answer might have looked askance at the delicate subversion of his sacramental outlook by the 1662 revisers.

Likewise, he is unlikely to have been happy that Anglicanism's new,, more narrowly-drawn, identity in 1662 which excluded many Protestants who would have found a home in. the pre-Laudian Church; almost single-handed, the triumphalist Anglicanism of the Restoration created that phenomenon which is so distinctive in English religion – large-scale Protestant nonconformity. At the moment in the eighteenth century when that 'Old Dissent' seemed to be fading, a new outburst of energy within the established Church burst its banks and formed a family of 'Methodist churches. Particularly in the Wesleyan Connexion which lay at the heart of the Methodist phenomenon, this rebellion remained true to the spirit of Cranmer's Prayer Book, and was sustained by the spirituality of the English Reformation. When archivist at English Methodism's oldest surviving theological college, Wesley College, Bristol, I had in my custody two quarto copies of the Book of Common Prayer used in the college's original chapel from its opening in Manchester: they were worn frail with regular use in leading the community's communal worship.

Later, attitudes to Cranmer among historians and biographers remained divided. On the one hand there was a tradition of praise, led by John Strype and Gilbert Burnet; on the other, a tradition of blame, which stemmed naturally from Catholic sources, hut which found some unexpected adherents during the nineteenth century. Most bizarre was the virulent stance taken by William Cobbett, whose view of the Reformation as an act of deliberate plunder inflicted on the helpless poor needed a villain, provided by Thomas Cranmer. Besides this, however, came a revival of coldness towards Cranmerian religion among the heirs of Laud and the Arminian tradition: the Tractarians and churchmen of the Oxford Movement, whose ideas were absorbed into the wider Anglican movement known as Anglo-Catholicism. They were embarrassed that the Church of England had been permanently shaped by the reign of Edward VI; the responsibility for that shaping was in the hands of the one man who remained at the centre of religious policy throughout Edward's reign, Thomas Cranmer.

There was at least one escape-route for Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics from the worst consequences of the reign of Edward VI. As the Arrninians and Laudians had done two centuries before, they could see Cranmer's first Prayer Rook (quite mistakenly) as a welcome refuge from the theological implications of his second. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, reorderings of the eucharistic rite in the mould of 1549 became common in Anglo-Catholic parishes and convents, particularly in dioceses which had been created by the world-wide spread of Anglicanism in the wake of the successive British empires. Yet the 1549 Prayer Book's compiler remained Ioved more for his prose than for his theology. There are not any statues to him in the beautiful churches built in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

Today Anglicanism makes much of its position as a 'middle way' (via media) between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Standing as he did in the developing Reformed tradition of Europe in the 1550s, Cranmer's conception of a 'middle way' in religion was different. The middle ground which he sought was the same as Bucer's: an agreement between Wittenberg and Zurich which would provide a united vision of Christian doctrine against the counterfeit being refurbished at the Council of Trent. For him, Catholicism was to be found in the scatterered churches of the Reformation, and. it was his aim to show forth their unity to prove their Catholicity.

Perhaps the most widespread use of Cranmer's original texts in pure form remains Anglican evensong, where twentieth-century forms have failed to win admirers away from the majestic rhythms of his prose. One of the glories of the Anglican tradition is the choral performance of this even- song in the setting of great churches such as cathedrals: again a situation replete with irony. Cranmer had little affection for cathedrals, and no discernible love of complex choral music. He would have deplored the long-term survival of the Anglican cathedral tradition which Elizabeth I's obstinate traditionalism made possible. At a. deeper level, he would have been appalled at the spirituality which may be represented in the love of evensong. This is the exploration of religion by those who have decided to remain on the fringe of the Church, genuinely concerned to pursue their dialogue with God, yet not prepared to demonstrate the degree of commitment demanded by the eucharist. The encounter with the Anglican offices, however infrequent, can provide a place where they can show that they still wish to look beyond the surface of events and say that there is more to human life and creation than the obvious, the every- day. That home has been bequeathed them by Archbishop Cranmer.

Cranmer could hardly complain about adaptability to different times, since the consistent evangelical drive apparent in his career from 1532 was coupled with a remarkable penchant for temporary adaptations to circumstances, and adaptations of alien means to evangelical ends. No-one has made a very satisfactory defence of his conduct in taking the archbishopric (which involved simultaneously swearing an oath of loyalty to the pope and rejecting papal authority). Neither is his part in the annulment of Henry VIII's Aragon and Boleyn marriages inspiring. Yet to sneer at these three events and others as proving his craven wish to advance or present himself is a had misjudgement. The thread running through them all is his fierce determination to promote the evangelical reform of the Church. He cut legal corners. Equally, he captured the Devil's best tunes for the Lord's service. He cannibalised the writings of a Roman cardinal, Quiñones, for his liturgical reforms, and the prose of another contemporary cardinal, the theologian Cajetan, for his homilies, without the slightest respect for the theology which underlay their work. He redirected some of the riches of the Church's liturgical heritage for his Prayer Book, and only gradually discovered that this was a risky thing to do. In all this, one could compare another great metropolitan of the Church Universal who in the 1540s failed where Cranmer succeeded, and whom Cranmer clearly regarded as following the same policy: Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne. With archbishops like these, Calvin need never have turned Calvinism into a Presbyterian system, and. Andrew Melville need not have waged his long war against bishops in the Church of Scotland.

The widest aftermath of Cranmer's life and work is to be found in the realms of language and cultural identity. It was the happiest of accidents that this ecclesiastical functionary, propelled into high office by the accidents of politics, had a natural feel for English prose. His genius was limited to prose, and we can be grateful that, ever-practical, Cranmer knew that he could not write poetry. Cranmer's prose, however, has done much to guide the direction of the English language. He was a connoisseur of English who was not ashamed to borrow what he liked from other people's efforts, so what we think of as Cranmer's Prayer Book English is in fact a patchwork of his adaptations of other writers like Miles Coverdale, George Joye and Richard Taverner. If he were writing liturgy today, he would face crippling lawsuits for breach of copyright. However, his motive was not sinister; it was an expression of his natural modesty and practicality, and his alterations of existing texts were almost invariably improvements. And it came at a crucial time, for Cranmer was doing his work at a time when English, like all Western European languages, faced a double challenge: the effect of the universities' enthusiasm for humanist Latin, and the standardisation and centralisation caused by printing. Every Western European language has certain key texts of literature from this era and for English-speakers one of that handful of texts is the Book of Common Prayer. Millions who have never heard of Cranmer or of the muddled heroism of his death have echoes of his words in their minds.

The Prayer Book inevitably had a key role in deciding what was good English: it was one of the most frequently-printed and often most heard texts in the language. Whatever its content, it would have become decisive. For this reason, Cranmer deserves the gratitude not merely of the Church of England, but of all English speakers throughout the world. Through his connoisseurship, he created a prose which was self-consciously formal and highly-crafted, intended for repeated use until. it was polished as smooth as a pebble on the beach. Yet he spared the users of the Prayer Book the worst pomposities of humanism and the sprawling sentence constructions which are only too common in the English prose writers of the sixteenth century. He stands prominently amid a select band of Tudor writers from Tyndale to Shakespeare who set English on its future course.

In an ecumenical age, which honours honest doubt and hesitancy as a lesser evil than clear-eyed ideological certainty, Cranmer may win admirers and sympathisers and take his due place in Anglican history. He would not have known what Anglicanism meant, and would probably not have approved if the meaning had been explained to him, but without his contribution, the unending dialogue of Protestantism and Catholicism which forms Anglican identity would not have been possible. Beyond the concerns of Christianity, for all those who criticise his politics, or find his theology alien, Cranmer's language remains as the most enduring monument to Henry Vlll's and Edward VI's most faithful servant. Twentieth-century scholarship has reminded us just how fundamental is the structure of language to the way in which we construct our lives and our culture. Cranmer's language lies at the heart of our own English-speaking culture, which has now become so central to the destiny of the world.

Lee Gatiss: The 350th Anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer

http://leegatiss.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/the-book-of-common-prayer/

The Book of Common Prayer

This month sees the 350th anniversary of the official adoption of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662.

 

 

 

Last year we celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. This year the history buffs and antiquarians are in joyful mood because it is the 350th anniversary of that famously Anglican date — 1662.

 

In these days of spiritual ignorance in the country and doctrinal laxity in the church, many Anglicans look back to former times with a certain degree of wistfulness.

 

Declining electoral rolls speak of a nation less focused on the things of God than seems to have been the case in centuries gone by when our ancient and airy church buildings must, we imagine, have pulsated with activity and vibrancy.

 

In a period of liturgical diversity and confusion, other Anglicans feel the disappearance of a uniform standard of worship across the denomination to be an incalculable injury, particularly as it permits both a lack of gravity in church services and the propagation (often) of dubious theology.

 

In an era of polarisation in ecclesiastical politics, with pressure groups and ‘turbulent priests’ disturbing the peace of the Church, the search for authoritative leadership to impose order on a fractious, wayward communion is an understandable desire.

 

One date lingers in the collective Anglican memory as suggestive of a golden era: 1662. Weren’t churches full in the seventeenth century? Didn’t the Prayer Book, hallowed by over a century of sacred use, ensure unity and uniformity in the public meetings of every English parish, with a reverent dignity and stylistic polish often wanting in modern expressions of church?

1662 is an emblem of the liturgical good old days.

 

Reformers

 

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) was not actually invented in 1662. The first such book in English was edited by Archbishop Cranmer in 1549, under good king Edward VI.

 

It was quickly revised again and re-issued in an even more Protestant and Reformed version in 1552. So this year is the 460th anniversary of that second Edwardian prayer book too.

 

Playing a key role in the composition of that book was the Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli. As Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Vermigli had a huge influence over Cranmer and Ridley and other English reformers, and was a great link between the English and Continental Reformations.

 

Vermigli, incidentally, died in 1562. So this year is also the 450th anniversary of this great man going to glory.

 

What Cranmer and Vermigli did with the Prayer Book was concentrate Reformed Protestant theology into a useable liturgical form. So that, from then on, every day in every parish, and every Sunday morning and evening, the English people (and soon the peoples of their far flung empire) began to pray in a new way.

 

The new Prayer Book was in English, ‘understanded of the people’, as the 39 Articles put it, not the Latin of the medieval Mass. It took the best of Augustinian medieval piety, translated it, and fed it into the spiritual diet of the English people, strengthened by the renewed emphases of the Reformers on salvation by grace alone, through faith alone.

 

Not only that, but the Prayer Book prescribed a healthy and robust diet of Bible reading and preaching for every church. If one follows all the set readings laid down in the BCP, one gets through the Bible once a year and the Psalms every month.

 

True worship

 

This exceeded the expectations of every other Church, whether in Rome, Wittenberg, or Geneva. So the Anglican Church had, from this moment, an emphasis on Bible reading and preaching par excellence.

 

This in turn shows us what the authentic Anglican understanding of church is. It is not, as so many would like to make it, merely a religious social club where we gather each week to celebrate ‘community’ — though community is important, and the corporate nature of the church in prayers and responses trumps our more modern individualism and performance mentality.

 

Church is not all about ‘me and my felt needs’ being met by a distant God, who comes down to give me a particular experience. Vermigli once complained of church services that ‘everything is so noisy with chanting and piping that there is no time left for preaching. So it happens that people depart from church full of music and harmony, yet they are fasting and starving for heavenly doctrine’.

 

So in the classic Anglican understanding of church as seen in the BCP, church is not to be centred on any earthly mediator, whether that is a celebrity pastor, a mediating priest or a worship band leader.

 

In 1662, church was about gathering to hear God speak through his Word, confessing our sins and our faith, and responding to the Spirit, in prayer for each other and for the world.

 

Lord’s Supper

 

The Reformers Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer all died as martyrs because they refused to submit to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass.

 

So-called transubstantiation — the changing of the substance of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper into the body and blood of Christ himself — was the great dividing issue of that era. Our Reformers refused to believe this, to teach this, or to countenance the superstitious practices that had grown up around it.

 

Why? Because they did not find such a doctrine in the Scriptures that they were now reading afresh. And in every case, it was this very thing which led to these martyrs’ execution. They literally went to the stake and were burned for their view of the Lord’s Supper.

 

But what did they put in the place of the Mass? What was it that they taught Anglicans to pray and to remember as they gather around the Lord’s Table?

 

They taught that the Supper is a divine instrument of assurance. There we confess ‘our manifold sins and wickedness’ to God. Then we are assured by the words of Scripture itself, that ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ and that ‘he is the propitiation for our sins’.

 

Grace

 

We come to the table (not, notice, an altar), ‘not trusting in our own righteousness, but in God’s manifold and great mercies’. We come with nothing in our hands to receive God’s mercy. It’s all about God doing something, not us.

 

The movement of the action in the BCP liturgy is from God to us — God in his grace reaching down to us in our sinfulness. We simply take and eat, in remembrance of what Jesus has done. Read theologically, the 1662 service shows us that, although we are more wicked than we ever thought, we are also more loved by a merciful God than we ever dreamed.

 

The result is that, pastorally speaking, our consciences are assured of God’s love towards us in Christ, even when we’ve been most searingly honest about our shortcomings and failures.

 

We praise God that, ‘by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we and all thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his Passion’.

 

1662 makes it very clear that what is going on at the Lord’s Table is not a sacrifice on an altar made by a mediating priest on behalf of the people, which has to be repeated again and again each week to be effective.

 

Finished work

 

That was the wrong message you got from the Mass. In the Mass something is offered to God. What the BCP says, however, is that Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrifice on the cross for us was utterly, completely and totally sufficient to pay for our sins. No additional sacrifices are necessary:

 

‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, which 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…’

 

All the language of us making a sacrifice is kept until after we’ve eaten. Only then do we pray that God would accept from us (to use the language of Hebrews 13) a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

So after we’ve fed on Christ in our hearts by faith, we offer and present to God not the bread and wine but ourselves (to use the language of Romans 12), as a holy and lively (or living) sacrifice.

 

There is of course more we could say about the BCP as it was definitively ordered in 1662. It was almost the same as Cranmer’s book, with surprisingly few alterations considering all that happened in the interim.

 

One thing that was specifically added in 1662 was a service for the baptism of adults or ‘those of riper years’, who may not have been baptised as infants during the confusions of the tumultuous Civil War period.

 

But, generally speaking, the book and liturgy remained unchanged: the same elegant expression of the profoundly liberating gospel. That is something to give thanks for in this 350th anniversary year.

 

This is an article I wrote for the Evangelical Times, Britain’s leading non-denominational evangelical Christian newspaper (published earlier this month). It is reprinted here with their permission.

Lee Gatiss: The Great Ejection of the Puritans

http://leegatiss.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/the-great-ejection-of-the-puritans/

The Great Ejection of the Puritans

Today is the 350th anniversary of the Great Ejection of the Puritans from the Church of England.

 

1662 may have been a significant year for the Book of Common Prayer. It was not, however, a good year for those to whom the gospel and a good conscience were more precious than the institutional church.

We can rejoice, as we think about the triumph of the Prayer Book and its glorious exposition of the Reformed faith in polished liturgical form. But we also need to remember that 1662 was the year that ‘evangelical’ Puritans were excluded from, and then persecuted by, the established Church of England because they could not accept certain aspects of the new religious settlement.

The main problem in 1662 was not with the Prayer Book as such, but with the terms of subscription to it. That is, the issue was what to do with those who in conscience could not agree to everything contained in that book.

Consensus

For a century or more, the Puritans, as they were called, had been calling for further godly reformation of the Church of England.

They were delighted with the Reformation, but they thought the English church ‘but halfly reformed’ compared to many Reformed churches on the Continent. The Elizabethan Settlement had not gone far enough for them in eliminating superstition and Catholicism from the church.

They wanted to push on with further reform, in response to God’s Word in the Bible. Such people were usually able to remain within the Church of England. How? Because there was a theological consensus between the official stance of the national church and these Puritans.

In general terms, they were all agreed on what the Coronation Oath calls ‘the true profession of the gospel … the Protestant Reformed religion’. Historians speak of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ in England, until at least the 1630s. With that general agreement on primary issues of faith and salvation in place, other issues were usually kept in perspective.

Those who did not conform in every detail of clerical vesture or ceremonial and had issues with phrases here and there in the Prayer Book, continued to play an active and prominent role within the Church of England, some of them at the highest levels.

Yet these people had been in charge of the national church during the Commonwealth and Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. They hadn’t all been in favour of chopping Charles I’s head off — many had vigorously protested against it — but they had helped to banish the high church royalist bishops and their prayer book.

Revenge

So when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he brought with him an Anglican episcopal hierarchy thirsting for revenge. They quickly established themselves in the royal court and grabbed hold of the levers of power.

The king wanted peace and toleration, but the bishops were in no mood for compromise. For much of 1661 they pretended to make concessions to the Puritans, but only until they were comfortable enough in their palaces and in Parliament to deal the Puritans a fatal blow.

The tide turned quite quickly. The bishops and their allies now had such strength that there was no longer any question of Puritans attaining a favourable compromise. The issue for the latter had become whether anything could be salvaged from the wreck of their hopes.

Some of our greatest and most internationally famous theologians were from the more evangelical, puritan sections of the church, but the consensus on primary issues was breaking down. And there was less appetite for tolerance on the part of those holding the reins of power.

Without uniformity and theological consensus on what the gospel is, the bishops looked to enforce outward conformity as their way to bring order to chaos. With a more liberal turn in theology at the Restoration, came a more ceremonial, Catholicising style of church.

It was the imposition of this which had helped cause the Civil War in the first place. Most famously, Archbishop Laud, the most prominent and disliked advocate of this anti-Calvinist movement, had been executed on Tower Hill in 1645 to popular applause.

The Puritans could never accept Laudianism. And hitherto had never been forced to, always finding that the Anglican formularies acted as a sufficient guard against the worst excesses of ceremonialism, superstition and persecution.

But now, things were different; the state decided to enforce uniformity across the board.

Act of Uniformity

The Act of Uniformity in 1662 required all ministers not merely to use the set forms of prayer — which may have allowed them some leeway in practice — but to swear an oath they could not in good conscience swear. They had to give ‘unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained and prescribed’ in the new Book of Common Prayer.

This, lamented Richard Baxter, was ‘a weight more grievous than a thousand ceremonies, added to the old conformity, with grievous penalty’.

Furthermore, all ministers, lecturers, and even schoolteachers, had to declare themselves entirely in favour of this new political correctness; they had to swear an oath never to attempt to change anything in church or state!

They had to declare ‘that it is not lawful, upon any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the king … that I will conform to the liturgy of the church of England as it is now by law established’ and renounce the oaths of the Solemn League and Covenant, swearing not ‘to endeavour any change or alteration of government either in church or state’.

What’s more, those who had taken the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ oath — that they would work hard to reform the church according to the Bible — had to renounce that oath and declare now that it was an illegal thing to promise in the first place.

All this, they felt they could not do. Why? Because it was saying in effect that the Prayer Book and Church of England were inerrant, whereas they only ever said such things about the unerring Word of God itself.

They did not want to perjure themselves, having made oaths to reform the church in Cromwell’s day; and they could not swear on oath that they agreed with every single word of the liturgy.

Great Ejection

Those with the levers of power in their hands sought to impose a new conformity to the Church of England, to which there could be no legally recognised exceptions whatsoever.

All this was to be enacted on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1662. A significant day, because it was the day that tithes and rents were due, in arrears, to the clergy. So if any clergy did not conform, they did not get paid and were unceremoniously thrown out of their vicarages, often into poverty.
Attempts were made in Parliament and Convocation to water things down — to provide for ejected ministers, perhaps give them more time and soften the terms of conformity. But these votes were all lost by small margins.

The King and the Lord Chancellor claimed to want a more lenient solution. But they were ignored by those voting.

In total, over 1800 ministers — about 20 per cent of the whole clergy — were forced to leave the Church of England in 1662. They were silenced from preaching or teaching by law. They were barred from positions in church or state and forbidden from meeting, even in small groups in their homes.
The penal code against these dissenters was often enforced with unnecessary brutality and malice. They were spied on, taken to court, fined, and sent to plantations in Virginia for hard labour.

Anglican persecutors could now appeal to a formidable legal arsenal which, potentially, made possible a puritan holocaust. Although the worst possibilities were never realised, 1662 began a persecution of Protestants by Protestants without parallel in seventeenth-century Europe. That was the tragedy of 1662.

Remembering 1662 today

There was a ‘Service of Reconciliation’ at Westminster Abbey in February to mark this anniversary, with CofE and URC ministers joining together in an attempt to ‘heal the memories’. But the established church still needs to face some big questions about whether this sort of thing could be repeated.

Will the Church of England again force its own members’ consciences to accept things they see as clearly unbiblical (such as women bishops or homosexuality)? Will it make no exceptions and tolerate no diversity from the current political correctness?

Will the Church of England again become an agent of persecution against Reformed and evangelical Christians? Those who dissent from the prevailing scepticism of the powerful few at the heart of church and government may yet find themselves in an unenviable position, similar to that of Restoration-era Puritans.

The ghosts of 1662 may yet return to haunt the Church of England. Please pray for those attempting to push the denomination back into the great central currents of Christian faith, and away from the dangerous rocks of current fads and baptised worldliness.

This is an article I wrote for the Evangelical Times, Britain’s leading non-denominational evangelical Christian newspaper (published earlier this month). It is reprinted here with their permission, to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Great Ejection today.

See also my little book The Tragedy of 1662: The Ejection and Persecution of the Puritans.