On Thomas Cranmer

...Archbishop Cranmer was a literary and liturgical genius, but theologically a convinced protestant, more in the mould, I think, of a high virtualist-Calvinist than a Zwinglian. Good scholarship in the last two decades seems finally to have debunked Dom Gregory Dix's claim that Cranmer was a disciple of Huldrich Zwingli, although the modern scholars admit that Archbishop Cranmer was definitely a continentally-minded protestant who denied the Objective Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice, at least as those truths were defined by the Western Church in the late medieval period.

Some very clever Anglican historians have attempted to cast Thomas Cranmer as an orthodox Augustinian when it comes to Eucharistic doctrine, and to oppose his Augustinian 'symbolistic' or symbolical theology to the stronger sacramental realism of Saint Ambrose, a view I would dearly love to hold but one which probably does not bear the weight of historical fact. Mercifully, Anglicanism is not a protestant system dependent on one figure or theological school, not a Lutheranism or Calvinism, and certainly not the 'Cranmerianism' some opponents of Anglicanism intend to construct. The official formularies and liturgies of the Church of England from the days of her orthodoxy commit us to a Catholic and Orthodox doctrinal system, one which Archbishop Cranmer himself personally would likely not have held. Because we are a living branch of the Catholic Church and not a sect, we are not bound to Thomas Cranmer's personal views, but only to the official formularies that constitute Anglicanism's magisterium, in particular the Book of Common Prayer, which is more a compendium of ancient and patristic teaching than the work of one writer or theologian.

Archbishop Cranmer's contributions to the Common Prayer Book were purposely imprecise and flexible enough concerning the specific dogmas of the Real Objective Presence and the objectively-anamnetic Sacrifice of the Mass as to allow to spring up over time a variety of 'Eucharistologies' within the national Church, a result one could anticipate given those confused times and especially in the light of the remarkable diversity of views on the Eucharist that emerged throughout the reformation era. For the orthodox Catholic Anglicans of today, those engineered 'ambiguities' are corrected and remedied by the use of our additional authorised liturgical texts. Lord Halifax, of blessed memory, deeply desired to replace the 1662 English BCP permanently with the 1549 English BCP, which book he viewed as a vastly more Catholic liturgy in spite of its origin and theological provenance - there is a part of me that has always agreed with him, as the 1549, for the Mass and other Sacraments, is so much closer to Sarum and the ancient liturgies than any subsequent revision. But the Continuing Church has solved any theological ambiguities which may yet inhere in Cranmer's works by the introduction of such supplemental liturgical materials as the Missals and the Priest's Manual, which are now commonplace and undoubtedly part of the lex orandi of Continuing Anglicanism. The Book of Common Prayer is thoroughly orthodox and contains an unparalleled expression of ancient Catholic orthodoxy in that language which was normative in the early Church, language in mysterio, language which expresses necessary truths without over-elaboration or dogmatisation; but where questions of theology arise, the supplemental texts answer those questions in accordance with the Tradition, and with more precision...