Thomas Cranmer was not a remarkable theologian. That is to say, his theology was more or less the opposite — it was almost thoroughly un-remarkable.

Cranmer, as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533 to 1555, shepherded the Church of England as it separated from the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. He is therefore something of the British equivalent of Germany’s Martin Luther or Geneva’s John Calvin: one of the major architects of one of the largest movements in the Protestant Reformation. But on those occasions when Cranmer found the leisure, or felt the need, to spell out his theology in any kind of systematic way, he was clearly not the equivalent of those other giants of the Reformation. His ideas seem ordinary and his writing largely forgettable; he lacks the searing heat of a Luther or the cool and comprehensive brilliance of a Calvin. If theology per se had been his primary work — well, either he would have produced more interesting work, or he would have been simply forgotten.

But Cranmer, and especially the books that were his primary work, are anything but forgotten. In 1549, he produced the first Book of Common Prayer. Just three years later, in 1552, he produced a second one, revised to reflect his mature theology but largely similar in form and language. The latter was essentially re-instituted in 1662, and this edition remains the official prayer book of the Church of England. It has also served as the template for a whole family of prayer books for churches in the Anglican Communion — meaning that, on any given Sunday nearly 500 years after Thomas Cranmer’s death, countless millions of people across the globe are still holding services and praying prayers that, in spirit and quite often in letter, are decidedly “Cranmerian.”

Thomas Cranmer’s great legacy is therefore not as a theologian, but rather as what is best termed a “liturgical editor” — liturgical because his attention was fixed on the public worship of the church; editor because, instead of composing ex nihilo, his method was primarily to translate, adapt, and fine tune what he could glean from other sources. Of course, this extraordinary labor was always guided by Cranmer’s theology, ordinary though it may have been, and most of the rest of this essay will attempt to show how.

First, however, a further note on the Archbishop’s biography seems necessary. Throughout his life, Cranmer was a man largely moved by others, and for most of his career, the primary mover was King Henry VIII. It was Henry’s need to annul his first marriage that famously precipitated the English Reformation, and it was this very project that first brought Cranmer to Henry’s attention. (Cranmer was a scholar whose biblical interpretation bolstered Henry’s argument; Henry thus employed him to win others to his cause, and then elevated him to Archbishop, much to Cranmer’s chagrin.) 

It is astounding that Cranmer survived Henry’s patronage. Intimacy with such a capricious king was no less dangerous than enmity — yet somehow the Archbishop managed to keep his head on his shoulders, though it required a series of appeasements, compromises, and outright capitulations that now seem to many at best distasteful, and at worst downright craven. Whether this excuses him or not, Cranmer, like many of his fellow reformers, was genuinely convinced of the monarch’s absolute sovereignty, even over the church. (This attitude Cranmer maintained even under the Catholic Queen Mary, who did put him to death.) There were, moreover, a number of crises in which Cranmer did stand up to Henry, at significant personal risk.

But surely the greatest gift Henry ever gave Cranmer was to die before his Archbishop did. The accession of Henry’s son to the throne in 1547 allowed Cranmer finally to say what he meant and do what he intended for the English Church. It was during Edward’s six-year reign that nearly all of Cranmer’s significant work — some of it begun over a decade before — came to light, and to this work we now finally turn.

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 The full title of the first BCP indicates its comprehensive scope: The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the use of the Churche of England. This was a book meant to script the whole of public worship in the English Church. And the fact that we can understand it today is actually less of a shock than it was that 16th-century worshippers themselves could understand it. Cranmer’s BCP mandated that services would now be in English, not Latin as before. This simple but monumental change already gestures towards the animating principle of Cranmer’s theology: that personal faith was the vital thing for each Christian.

There is a short phrase that resounds in the Eucharistic rite in Cranmer’s Prayer Books: the priest says to those assembled to receive communion, “Draw near, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort…”

“Draw near.” This is more than mere stage direction. This is precisely what Cranmer’s entire project aims at — to invite, and enable, each member of the Body to come closer and know the presence of God, who has already drawn near to them in Christ.

The whole injunction from minister to congregation is worth quoting at greater length, since its content as well as its location in the service reveal another characteristic feature of Cranmerian theology. Nearness, for Cranmer, is the fruit of repentance. The approach to the Lord, who is present through the sacrament of communion, is made through confession of sin: 

You that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and offences committed to Almighty God, and be in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, and heartily to follow the commandments of God, and to walk from henceforth in his holy ways; draw near, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort; make your humble Confession to Almighty God… (1)

 Though sometimes, to modern ears, Cranmer’s liturgies sound overly pessimistic and penitential, for Cranmer penitence was sheer gift to any who found themselves burdened by sin, whose evil “is to put us away from God, the very well-spring of all goodness.” Through repentance “we be returned to God,” (2) and thus by making confession (and absolution) truly common in the church’s prayer — i.e. by making it regular and public, by putting it in English, and by giving it a memorable, and memorize-able, form — Cranmer offered a potent salve to any conscience burdened by sin.

Confession freed one truly to enjoy the Lord’s Table, as mentioned above, and we will conclude below with a return to Cranmer’s treatment of Communion. But before that, it is crucial to mention Cranmer’s high esteem for the Word alongside the Sacraments. Cranmer conceived of “common prayer” most precisely as those services held in addition to the sacramental rites — offices such as Morning and Evening Prayer. And he is most focused on these services in the Preface he penned for the very first BCP. “[T]he common prayers in the Church,” he writes, were originally structured so that “all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over once in the year.” He means to restore that emphasis, and to embed the Scriptures into the lives of all Christians. (3)

Once again, Cranmer’s intentions for his reformed liturgy simply echo a universal Reformation principle. But he describes this design with some particularly Cranmerian language, and ultimately achieves it in a particularly Cranmerian way. More Scripture, and Scripture in the common tongue, would ensure that ministers were “stirred up to godliness,” and congregations would “be the more inflamed with the love of [God’s] true religion.”

Beyond prescribing public, continuous reading of the Bible, Cranmer also succeeded in integrating Scripture so deeply into his liturgies that it certainly does settle into, and stir up, the hearts of those who attend them. Cranmer’s famous “collects,” for instance — those pithy prayers that change each Sunday and mark other particular occasions — are suffused with the language and images of Scripture, as are all of the other elements of Cranmerian liturgy. Cranmer is famous for his rich and dynamic, but sublimely balanced, language, which means that any consistent exposure is sure to leave his words — and thus the Word of Scripture — ringing in one’s ears.

Through Scripture, too, one encounters the grace to “draw near” to God. Although for Cranmer, Christ’s presence is indeed known through the reception of Communion, this divine presence is neither inherent to the consecrated bread and wine, nor is it exclusive to them. The truly vital thing is not the external rite and its elements, but the faith internal to the participant. By this faith, Christ is known — and communed with — when a Christian meditates on God and God’s love, especially as demonstrated in the cross. (Thus Scripture alone, prompting such a meditation, might lead to real communion.) What the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper offers is an “effectual sign of grace” (4) through which faith is sure to find its divine object — but there are other means and moments of grace.

What Cranmer himself defined as a doctrine of “true presence” was a significant change from Catholic (and also Lutheran) theology, with its insistence on Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist. (5) It was significant enough, in fact, that Cranmer would be condemned for heresy and burned at the stake when Catholics temporarily regained power in England. But what was clearly spelled out in his polemical treatises still remained somewhat ambiguous in Cranmer’s liturgies.

The Archbishop did attempt to clarify things in his final revision of the prayer book. Perhaps the most significant change between the 1549 and 1552 BCPs was the removal of the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the elements, paired with the priest’s manual act of blessing. (From the 1549 rite: “Hear us (O merciful father) we beseech thee, and with thy holy spirit and word, vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these thy gifts,” etc.) With these omitted, and the rite now moving directly from Christ’s command, “do this in remembrance of me,” to the distribution of the elements, the focus was drawn to faithful reception rather than priestly consecration. Still, there remained in the service numerous other references to eating and drinking Christ’s body and blood (albeit always “spiritually”) that one still very much anticipates communion with the presence of God. 

Apparently Cranmer left things just broad (and opaque) enough that, despite objections from those who would pull things either back towards Catholic doctrine, or further away from it, there was never enough will in Cranmer’s own church to overturn his liturgical legacy. And though in England there have been supplements to the BCP, and in other branches of the Anglican family much fuller revisions to the prayer book itself, Cranmer still remains the primary source and the backbone of the church’s prayer, worship, and sacramental celebration. Thus Thomas Cranmer’s prayed theology has, for generations and for multitudes, offered a means of grace to encounter God’s presence and a gateway through which to “draw near.”

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For Further Reading:

• The texts of the 1549, 1552, and 1662 Books of Common Prayer can be found online here: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/england.htm. See also “The Order of the Communion,” Cranmer’s collection of English prayers tacked onto the Latin Mass that served as a prototype for later liturgies, and included numerous elements retained almost verbatim in the BCP: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Communion_1548.htm.

• Oxford University Press also publishes a volume that includes all three major versions of the English BCP, with valuable notes by editor Brian Cummings: The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662.

• As noted above, Diarmaid MacCulloch has written the definitive modern biography: Thomas Cranmer: A Life. For those with less time or energy for historical minutiae, An Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer is a serviceable little volume (that largely summarizes MacCulloch).

• Peter Newman Brooks’s slender volume Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist does an enormous service for non-scholars by summarizing and interpreting Cranmer’s treatises and other theological writings focused on the Lord’s Supper. Brooks, refuting certain scholars who preferred to understand Cranmer as still Catholic-leaning in his sacramental theology, demonstrates quite clearly the Archbishop’s allegiance to Reformed notions of the Eucharist.

• The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs is another excellent (and short) book that traces the origins and development of the BCP in England and beyond. Jacobs is a deft narrator, with an eye for the most memorable quotations and illustrative anecdotes, and the book is both a handy reference for the vital facts and a lot of fun to read.

1. This paragraph, quoted from “The Order for Holy Communion” (1548) that actually pre-dates the 1549 BCP, is included with only slight alterations in all subsequent Church of England BCPs, and also appears in the American Rite I service (p. 330).

2. Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon Concerning the Time of Rebellion,” in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. John Edmund Cox for the Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 200, emphasis mine. Accessible online here: https://wesleyscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Cranmer-Sermons-Letters-Writings-1846.pdf.

   Torrance Kirby has demonstrated that this sermon, though delivered (in English) by Cranmer, was originally composed (in Latin) by fellow reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli. Obviously, though, Cranmer endorsed its theology — and this kind of translation and application of others’ material is characteristically Cranmerian. See Kirby, “‘Synne and Sedition’: Peter Martyr Vermigli's ‘Sermon concernynge the tyme of rebellion’ in the Parker Library,” Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIX, No. 2 (2008). Accessible online here: https://www.mcgill.ca/religiousstudies/files/religiousstudies/synneandseditionscj08.pdf .

3. The current American BCP includes a “Daily Office” lectionary that respects Cranmer’s project, but adjusts its rigor, by including the majority of Scripture over a two-year cycle.

4. This phrase comes from Article XXV, “Of the Sacraments” in the Church of England’s Articles of Religion. Though not necessarily penned by Cranmer himself, it would have required his endorsement to be included and certainly reflects his theology articulated elsewhere.

5. See Peter Newman Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development, Second Edition (Hampshire: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1992), esp. Ch. 4.