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…
[M]orality enjoins no observance of one day in seven – no feast of faith in sacramental rites upon the body and blood of the Redeemer.[1] It is a commonly told story in Anglicanism. In the century before 1833, Anglican sacramental practice and spirituality was a “drab and spiritually barren environment.”[2] Communion was infrequent; altars (or should…
Part III of III: After Article 29 SUMMARY OF PAST TWO ESSAYS In Part One of these essays, I sought to demonstrate that the Fathers held a real, objective view of Christ’s presence under the form of bread and wine, and that this can be distinguished as differing from the view of the “Jewel-school” of…
II of III: A Comparison of Formularies In part one of my essay I argued that the Church Fathers and the “Jewel School” of Anglican theologians teach a different thing with regard to the Holy Eucharist. I also asserted (without argument) that there is a real difference between the teaching of the Jewel school and…
I of III: Fathers vs. Reformers The Challenge “Show that Hooker and Jewell and Ussher don’t know what they’re talking about. Until that happens, it is hard to take seriously these arguments that one cannot hold both “the faith” of the Fathers and of the Reformers.” Thus Mr. Ramsey threw down a gauntlet back in…
Introduction As Anglican churches across the country have scrambled to adapt to mandates from civil and ecclesial authorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of tenets of Eucharistic theology have been asserted and circulated across the province that have been received without sufficient theological analysis. In a time of crisis, quick decisions are…
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us…
Flesh he tookInterceding he blestDying he brokeRising he gaveThe manna that savesThe draught of his bloodThat ran over the woodWhich he bore to the pyreWhere he passed through the fireAnd Eve’s tempter was crushedThe death of her deathRaised up for all lifeThat her sons may be savedBy the flesh Mary boreFor the good of the…
Anyone who reads the early church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.), knows that they used the language of ‘sacrifice’ to describe the Eucharist. The Protestant Reformers also read the fathers, and read them more thoroughly than most of us today. As recent scholarship in Post-Reformation Reformed theology has shown, for all the confessional agreement among the…
When Christ lives, dies, rises, and ascends, He does so for us, for you.
Jesus never sheds His humanity. To this day, He is fully God and fully man. He is the only One who possesses the resurrected and renewed body awaiting the renewed creation. And by virtue of what He has accomplished for us, He brings humanity into the heavenly realm. He walks – yes physically walks – in the resurrected body in the heavenly realm. He walks into the heavenly temple, the true temple, and He brings Himself, the perfect sacrifice, into the true temple of God, not the temporary man-made temple.
