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Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar

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This collection of essays deals with a useful array of topics that will be of special interest to those of the Anglican theological tradition. This book serves as a needed balance to the biography from MacCulloch that paints Cranmer as a rabid protestant with no real interest in the beliefs of the early church. It also helps to dispel many of the misconceptions about Cranmer's sacramental theology that are widely held by both "anglo-catholic" and puritan "evangelical" alike. In these essays Cranmer emerges as the chief reformer of a church that he envisioned as one founded on the Scriptures, the ancient Fathers, and right reason. Rather than being against the concept of a "via media" church (as MacCulloch claims) Cranmer is the very author of it.

Unbelievable in this age of information that folk still Laud a man who even his contemporary Bishop of Winchester reviled for his duplicity and hypocrisy .This is the man, after all,who while the Tyrant Henry Rex still reigned ,tied many a protestant to the stake for not being Catholic,yet on Henry's death turned about face and started burning folk for being Catholic.No amount of Hume-like Historical whitewash can detract from the facts of History as we now have them.William Cobbett-Historian, describes Cranmer as the prince of hypocrites.The English Protestant reformation was a work of lust and plunder from beginning to end and Cranmer and his ilk quashed the true and natural religion which for 900 years had sustained England and kept her happy and free.They had to initiate change of course to give some sort of legitimacy to their rapine.Compare the peaceful introduction of Catholicism into England by St Augustin and a handful of monks to the industrially cruel and violent nature of the imposition of Protestantism.Apples and Oranges!

To quote Cobbett (1824)(A Protestant)"..a fair and honest inquiry will teach us that this was an alteration greatly for the worse; that the "Reformation," as it is called,was engendered in lust,brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy,and cherished and fed by plunder,devastation,and rivers of innocent English and Irish Blood; and that as to its more remote consequences,they are,some of them,now before us,in that misery,that beggary,that nakedness,that hunger,that everlasting wrangling and spite,which now stare us in the face,and stun our ears at every turn,and which the "Reformation" has given us in exchange for the ease,and happiness,and harmony, and Christian charity,enjoyed so abundantly and for so many ages by our Catholic forefathers..."

Englishmen would better spend their time researching that idyll of a country that was so cruelly ripped from them for the gain of an elite few and how Pauperism and Poor-laws were unknown before Henry's diabolical theft of Church property,property used for the beneficence,education and hospitality (in its true sense) of the entire community.