Holy Communion
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This Thy Table: The Anglican Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper
One of the hottest debated questions among Anglicans is the doctrine of the Eucharist, or, as the Articles of Religion refer to it, the Lord’s Supper. When I began investigating the Anglican tradition, what I discovered sent me down a path of reformation and renewal. Rather than looking to the Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman…
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The 1928 and Cranmer’s Shape
As I have noted previously, Cranmer’s Eucharistic liturgy of 1552 had a distinctive shape – Law-Gospel-Repentance-Supper-Thanksgiving – which was retained for most Anglican rites down to the middle of the twentieth century. The main, and for almost two hundred years the only, exception was that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which was a hybrid of…
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Cranmer Versus Dix on the Eucharist
One of the old saws when I was training for the ministry, was that Cranmer had the shape of the Communion service all wrong. This assertion was, of course, based on a 1945 book called The Shape of the Liturgy by an Anglican Benedictine called Gregory Dix. Leaving aside the fact that Dix rejected Cranmer’s…
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Book Review: “The Lost Supper”
The Lost Supper: Revisiting Passover and the Origins of the Eucharist. By Matthew Colvin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. 188 pp. $90.00 (cloth). Debates over eucharistic theology are as predictable as they are unending. It’s not just that various dogmatic interpretations have congealed such that advancing theological reflection on the eucharist may seem futile;…
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The Center of Gravity in Cranmer’s Communion Liturgy
Where is the center of gravity in Cranmer’s Order for the Lord’s Supper (of 1552, Cranmer’s final version of the Communion liturgy) and to what extent does the 1928 American Prayer Book affect or move this center? Before beginning, let me clarify my approach. The following observations represent the thinking of someone steeped in the…