Fr. David Curry on Cranmer’s Eucharistic Liturgies, 1549/1552
An address delivered at the University of King’s College, Halifax, 19 March 2018.
Like eagles in this life
Thank you for the privilege of being with you and speaking with you this evening. It is nice to be back in familiar surroundings and in a place that has been so much a part of my own life. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Fr. Gary Thorne for his ministry as College Chaplain here at King’s College and for his excellent labours in the challenge of opening young and inquiring minds to the wonders of the Gospel in its engagement with other religions and philosophies.
“We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father which taketh away the sins of the world … by whose passion we are filled at His table … being made the guests of Christ, having Him dwell in us through the grace of his true nature … assured and certified that we are fed spiritually unto eternal life by Christ’s flesh crucified and by his blood shed.” An intriguing and suggestive passage, it conveys, I think, much of what belongs to Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology and which contributes to an Anglican sensibility, to use a much later term (19th century).
There are many others who are far more qualified than I am to speak on the matter of Cranmer’s liturgies.[1] Sam Landry has asked me to speak about “Cranmer’s alterations of the Liturgy (especially those of the very Protestant 1552 BCP),” as he put it and “how we might understand his theological project in relation to our own Prayer Book, which has re-introduced some of the practices which Cranmer removed.” These are important questions that speak to the many confusions that belong to our thinking about Cranmer’s reformed project. Not the least of which has to do with the word ‘Protestant’.
We might respond by asking, ‘which form of Protestantism?’ It is a problematic term, so much so that Diarmaid MacCulloch in his magisterial biography on Cranmer eschews its use almost entirely. The important point is that the First Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 is just as ‘Protestant,’ if you will, (or ‘Catholic’ for that matter) as the Second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. Both reflect Cranmer’s basic Eucharistic theology at the same time as the two books reveal the pressures and tensions that were part of the reformed world in England and on the continent about which Cranmer was fully aware. There was constant debate about what constituted an adequate and proper reform. Cranmer himself was part of that debate which continued long after him.
