26 September 2010

Cranmer's Typology

"Our sacraments contain presently the very things signified no more than theirs [the Jews'] did".

Chilling words, revealing the depth of Dr Cranmer's Zwinglianism. I am no expert in Reformation theology, but I doubt if even Dr Calvin would have written that.

I suppose he had in mind the saxum mobile of I Corinthians 10. But I wonder how he can have reconciled his dreadful heresies with the exposition in I Peter of Noah's Ark as the Type of Baptism.

2 comments:

William Tighe said...

I have sent this posting on "Cranmer's Typology" on to one or two friends who have much more expertise on "Reformed Theology" than do I, but I will venture the guess that Calvin's views on this particular theological locus were identical to those of Cranmer, as were (another ventured guess) those of Bucer and Vermigli (Calvin's colleagues) as well as Bullinger and John Jewel -- although *maybe* not Richard Hooker.

Unknown said...

Fr. Hunwicke and Bill, Calvin (he was no doctor, but had his magister artium) would have been hesitant to agree with Cranmer on the one hand, for he held there to be a virtue attached to the elements. This he shared with Bucer. Yet this virtue did not come because the elements themselves, having become our true food, were altered, but because of the spoken word. He would have assented (on the other hand), because he held also that the OT rites were nothing other than the NT rites. His commentary on Acts 19 is most telling where he says that the baptism of John the Baptist that was known by the disciples in Ephesus was the same as our baptism, and that these disciples needed no other baptism, but that Paul was only accommodating them.

Hooker certainly goes beyond this though: “The church is in Christ, as Eve was in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every of us in Christ and in his church, as by nature we were in those our first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam; and his church he frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man. His body crucified and his blood shed for the life of the world, are the true elements of the heavenly being, which maketh us such as himself is of whom we come. For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly words of Christ concerning his church, ‘flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bones;’ a true nature extract out of my own body.” Nonetheless, this union does not come from our partaking of the Eucharist per se, but by faith. It may come coincidentally in the Eucharist, but Christ is not “there”.