A Defence Of The True And Catholic Doctrine Of The Sacrament Of The Body And Blood Of Our Savior Christ

Thomas Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury (1533-1556) in the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI. He was deposed under Mary Tudor and burned at Oxford as a heretic. The charges brought against him were based chiefly on the doctrine of the Lord's Supper expounded in this book. The core of Cranmer's teaching was that the sacrament was essentially spiritual in nature. The body of Christ was not present in a physical or carnal way, as the Church of Rome taught by its doctrine of transubstantiation. Cranmer based his position on Scripture, in particular St. John's Gospel, where, he showed, Christ meant eating and drinking His body and blood to be understood as receiving by faith the benefits of His death for sins. To think of eating and drinking Christ's actual body and blood with the mouth is, he argued, a gross misunderstanding; the purpose of the sacrament is to satisfy spiritual hunger. The Roman doctrine, he maintained, was also contrary to the true Catholic teaching of the two natures of Christ - His humanity and His divinity. In the creeds we confess that Christ has ascended bodily into heaven, not to return to earth in that manner until the last day. The true Catholic faith, therefore, requires us to believe that He is not present with us in the nature of His humanity but that He is present in the nature of His deity. To teach, as the Church of Rome does, that He is present bodily in the sacrament is to deny this teaching of the creeds, to assert a heretical doctrine of the one nature of Christ and to deny His real humanity. For this reason Cranmer called his book 'A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament'. The errors of Rome also extended to the notion that the sacrament was a sacrifice offered by the priest to take away sins. Cranmer refuted this from the Scriptures and the ancient Fathers.

This study commends the public theology of the English Reformation as a fruitful though neglected resource for a critical analysis of the contradictions of freedom that riddle late-modern liberal democracies and a constructive response to them. Drawn from the key legal, liturgical, homiletic and confessional elements of the English Reformation, this foundational Anglican tradition provides a theological vantage point for understanding current moral and political impasses in the western legacy of natural rights. The extensive development of natural rights in pre-modern scholastic theory and practice and its continuity with theoretical development from the 17th century onward make the Reformers' criticisms of scholastic moral, political, and ecclesial thought germane to identifying the problematic features of the prevailing modern tradition and to furnishing a theological alternative to them. These features are: an individualistic and voluntarist conception of moral agency, a regulative and juridical orientation to human relationships, and an anthropocentric concentration on human rather than on divine right, judgement, and freedom. The humanity they portray is detached from its created ordering to Christological perfection and bound within a self-enclosed ethical and political self-understanding. This is effectively countered by the English reformers' presentation of the salvation of creation in Christ, faith working through love, the spiritual fellowship of the church, and the provisional character of political jurisdiction.

This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

Between 1548 and 1551, controversies over adiaphora, or indifferent matters, erupted in both Germany and England. Matthias Flacius Illyricus in Germany and John Hooper in England both refused to accept, among other things, the same liturgical vestment: the surplice. While Flacius' objections to the imperial liturgical requirements were largely contextual, because the vestments and rites were forced on the church and were part of a recatholicizing agenda, Hooper protested because he was convinced that disputed vestments and rites lacked a biblical basis. The Devil behind the Surplice demonstrates that, while Flacius fought to protect the reformation principle of justification by grace alone through faith alone, Hooper strove to defend the reformation principle that Scripture alone was the source and norm of Christian doctrine and practice. Ultimately, Flacius wanted more Elijahs, prophets to guide a faithful remnant, and Hooper wanted a new Josiah, a young reform king to purify the kingdom and strip it of idolatry.

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