Customer Reviews

Thomas Cranmer: A Life

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Traditionally, one is to give something up or take something on as a Lenten discipline. I did the latter, albeit inadvertently. Around Ash Wednesday of 1998, I began Darmaid MacCulloch's magisterial biography of Thomas Cranmer (Yale University Press 1996). I finished this magnificent tome on Holy Saturday. As the time passed, I came to realize that this Lent was for me a time to study a key figure in the Church and compare his often--to modern Episcopalians-- unorthodox theology against what I have come to believe.

Thomas Cranmer is a pillar of Episcopal history (and hagiography). One literally cannot participate in a Sunday service without reciting or hearing his words. In 1549, he compiled the first Book of Common Prayer. Many of the collects we say are either his original compositions or alterations upon existing texts. MacCulloch says of the Collects:

There is little doubt we owe him [Cranmer] the present form of the sequence of eighty-four seasonal collects and a dozen or so further examples embedded elsewhere in the 1549 services: no doubt either that these jewelled miniatures are one of the chief glories of the Anglican liturgical tradition, a particularly distinguished development of the genre of brief prayer which is peculiar to the Western Church. Their concise expression has not always won unqualified praise, especially from those who consider that God enjoys extended addresses from his creatures; but they have proved one of the most enduring vehicles of worship in the Anglican communion.

To me, today, the Collects focus and gather the scripture for each service.

Cranmer's beliefs were distinct, certain, and in some respects quite different from what I had thought. He was a strong predestinarian, and for this reason felt that "good works" had no effect upon where a soul went after death. He viewed the Pope as the Antichrist, and profoundly believed that the Ruler of England was the Head of the Church. (This led to his profound spiritual disorientation and crisis when the Catholic Mary succeed Edward VI; suddenly the person whom he viewed as Head of the Church was allied with evil personified).

Cranmer was decidedly "low church" in his beliefs and liturgy. The Eucharist, for him, was purely a memorial, and the bread and wine were not the true Christ. In his view, Christ was sacrificed once only at Golgotha; to say that each Eucharist was a new sacrifice was for him anathema. (A vestige of Cranmer's clear belief survives in the language of the Rite One Eucharist--"one oblation of himself once offered.") During his time, he had rood screens and images removed from churches, removed many saints' and holy days from the Church calendar, moved altars away from the church wall and toward the worshipers (this, at least, agrees with our modern theology), and changed the language of worship to English.

What made the Cranmer biography a Lenten discipline, and not just leisure reading, was for me to see again how literally every rite, word and image in our service comes from serious theological reflection and humankind's continuing effort, sometimes stumblingly, to find and reflect God's will in worship. I do not agree with Cranmer's view on predestination, although I certainly understand the sincerity with which it was held, and the struggles which brought him there. I have always found the Eucharistic language "one oblation of himself once offered" terribly stilted and prosaic; I now understand that Cranmer and subsequent Prayer Book compilers said exactly what they meant to say. (One of the great gifts of the "big tent" of Episcopalianism is that all of us --both those who view the Eucharist as memorial only and those who see the true body and blood transformed--may worship at the same table). While and since reading this fine biography, I find myself approaching almost everything we say and do in worship in a different, more reflective, posture. Next year for Lent I perhaps will give up chocolate. (I have tried this in other years, never making it as far as Refreshment Sunday.) Reflective Christians, however, who do not mind serious scholarship (this is not light reading) conveyed through lively prose could do worse than to take up this life and biography of Archbishop Cranmer.

MacCulloch has penned a prodigious and comprehensive biography of Thomas Cranmer. Serious questions about the development of his thought, theology and ecclesiology are given special attention. These are cast in relations to the contemporary political (local and international) situtations to better enable a reader to understand the man, his times and his influence. Given the stages over which the Henrician and Edwardian church reformations progressed, understanding Cranmer's central and guiding actions seems to be MacCulloch strongest sections. Emphasis, then, on Cranmer's central work in life is properly and comprehensively treated, without being severely colored by all that has been penned about his final days. Nevertheless, MacCulloch has done a convincing job of helping one to see Cranmer's sincerity of reform purposes, his pragmatic concerns about the pace of change, his understanding of the needs of commonfolk (as opposed to the middle and upper classes), his fierce opposition to established orders (friers and, later, radicals [nonconformists]). Especially instuctive is the secion on Cranmer's Prayer Book writing purpose, style and method, his borrowings, his innovations, and his synthses. For a 600 page, book, I found it a thoroughly compelling reading experience from first to last (about 6 days).

I took "Thomas Cranmer" on in order to make sense of a seeming paradox: What I already "knew" of him did not square with the theology I had begun to discover in his Collects and Prayer Book. I was curious!

MacCulloch does a masterful job at presenting this complex, and sometimes contradictory figure of the early English Reformation. Despite the derrogatory review given by "a reader," I found very little bias and no axe-grinding in this work. Actually, I came to the book expecting some bias. Even being thusly prepared and properly skeptical, I found only a very few times that MacCulloch let his own opinions show through. (When he does, it is in parentheses with exclamation points!!) You can almost hear him chuckle at times.

I read the book in 9 or 10 days, and never found it to be a chore; in fact, the most difficult thing was putting it down and going to bed! While the book is scholarly, and masterfully written, it is definitely not tedious or boring.

I came to the end of the book with a deep respect for Cranmer. I have many points of disagreement with him, and yet a certain admiration for his eventual willingness to heroically stand where he believed the Gospel compelled him to stand. Fr. James DeKoven, an early Anglican theological hero in Wisconsin, once said "We live at a time when cowardice in matters of religion has been elevated to the status of virtue." Archbishop Thomas Cranmer proved, in the end, to be anything but a coward.

I have corresponded several times now with Professor MacCulloch, and find him to be humble, dedicated, and helpful. I am now reading his "The Reformation: a history," and I plan to read everything else of his that I can get my hands on!

Many Anglican history books have an axe to grind. But not this masterful biography. The Thomas Cranmer of MacCulloch is very human, but no villian nor an unblemished hero.

We see his theological evolution from a fairly orthodox Catholic to a stauch Protestant who went to the stake in defiance of Bloody Mary and the "Antichrist" Pope.

MacCulloch also takes the reader into the historical sources and their reliability. These, along with his extensive footnotes will be of interest to any serious student of Anglican history.

Yet this longish book is very readable and rarely gets bogged down, again unlike some other Anglican histories.

If you want to learn about Thomas Cranmer or about early Anglicanism, this book is a must read.


Mark Marshall is the author of God Knows What It's Like to be a Teenager.

Exquisely researched and engagingly written, Diarmaid MacCulloch brought to life a figure who played a substantial role in both English and church history during the Reformation, and whose legacy lives on. I feel that for the first time in more than 30 years of bumping into Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury, and of regularly using the Book of Common Prayer that he master-minded, I have properly met the man. MacCulloch obviously adores Cranmer, but is not blind to his shortcomings. He also shows the cost to Cranmer of bringing about fundamental change in the English Church -- ultimately losing his life. I came away from the book marveling at the richness and stature of the Anglican way of believing, and the part Cranmer played in making it happen. I have been heralding it from the housetops! Like all good books, I was sorry when it ended.

MacCulloch's book provides access to the singularly foundational figure of the reformation in England. Most who recognize Cranmer's name at all know him only as the author of the first Prayer Book or the man who attained Henry VIII's annulment from Catherine. MacCullogh gives depth to Cranmer as a flawed yet faithful agent of the Church, one who sought with conviction the reformation of the Church of England but was also willing to slavishly follow his prince in order to achieve that reformation. The final chapter, chronicling Cranmer's fall and ultimate martyrdom, reads with the pace of a good novel. For Episcopalians and others with an affinity for the Anglican tradition, insight into Cranmer's life and thought is crucial, and MacCulloch presents that insight with skill.

I am not much of a biography/history reader, but I was forced to read this hefty volume for a research paper on Cranmer (took me all of nine days, reading for several hours a day). This is quality, scholarly research, well-written and keeping a good balance between describing the events of Cranmer's life and career, and analysing his theological development. MacCulloch writes favourably about Cranmer, and his account is bound to inspire sympathy and admiration for someone who was a flawed hero, but a hero nevertheless.

In an age of badly researched, "quickie" biographies, it is refreshing to read one by an author who does his homework with an almost maniacal intensity yet never loses the thread of the narrative or the sense of what might matter to the general reader.

This is an excellent book, and it gives a particularly strong insight into the complex personality of Henry VIII, to often portrayed as a one dimensional, lecherous caricature of a monarch. The author demands at least a nodding familiarity with Tudor England, but this is still a marvellous read for anyone interested in the origins of English Protestantism.

This work gives the reader an excellent historical account not only of the life of Cranmer, but of the chaotic situation in Tudoe England during the Reformation. Cranmer's extraordinary ability to develop a new and moving liturgy with a basis in history yet more moving and compassionate than ever in such a political climate is a miracle in itself.

This work is remarkable in that it is not only eminently readable and well written, but it is also scholarly and extremely reliable on the academic level. This is a landmark work and has been dutifully cited in other works on Cranmer since its publication. MacCulloch shows himself as well acquainted with Cranmer's theology, with not much, if any, of an axe to grind along with a penetrating grasp of the historical complexities that engulfed the Reformer's life. Few works read so well as biographies and remain viable academic resources. MacCulloch has performed a real service for English Reformation studies.