THE LORD'S SUPPER

THE DAWN BREAKS THROUGH (AD 1500 – AD 1571)

 

It must surely have been over many years that the Holy Spirit had been working in the minds and temperaments of the men he had chosen to be the instruments of his truth. However, the visible Reformation did not commence until Luther’s immortal stand for the truth in 1517. He and those who followed him, developing and continuing the advance of reform, were God’s appointed agents as surely as were the Prophets of old to idolatrous Israel.

 

The new teaching was immediately denounced and condemned by Rome, and was attacked with as much ferocity as the old organ of terror could muster. However, the teaching which was, of course, not so much new as revived after having been buried for many centuries, quickly spread through Northern Europe including our own country. England was not the first country to embrace as a nation, a reformed religion.

 

The story of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon is well known and it was the primary reason for the English break with Rome. Cessation from Rome was not in itself the reformation of the Church of England, although it paved to way for it. During the last years of Henry’s reign the new Church of England moved slowly towards Reformation. Henry VIII died at Greenwich in 1545 and during the next four years the Reformation firmly took hold of England. With the first English prayer books of 1549 and 1552 came the end of the Mass and a true doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in its place. Thrust out with the Mass was the whole medieval medley of superstition and error which surrounded it. During the unhindered years of Reformation in England (1548–1553) a dedicated body of men emerged who were to lay down the foundations of our reformed Protestant Church of England.

 

Under the leadership of Archbishop Cranmer the godly zeal for the truth of men like Bishop Hugh Latimer, Bishop John Ridley, Bishop John Hooper, Bishop Ferrar, Archdeacon Philpott, John Bradford, Rowland Taylor and John Rogers, impressed the reformed truth of the gospel on the minds of the men and women of England under spiritual their care and protection.

 

In 1549 Cranmer invited Martin Bucer, a German protestant reformer, to Cambridge to teach theology and assist in the English reformation. It was during the years of Edward VI’s reign that Cranmer worked on the first book of homilies. Especially to be noted is his homily on ‘Justification by Faith’.

 

The reformation years came to an abrupt end in 1553 with the death of King Edward VI and the accession to the throne of his eldest sister Mary. Queen Mary, the daughter of a devout Roman Catholic, Catherine of Aragon, swiftly proceeded to do all in her power to extinguish the reformation in the English church. Cranmer and his best Bishops and clergymen, those with reformed views, were quickly imprisoned; the reformed English prayed book of 1552 was immediately withdrawn and replaced by the Mass. Papal authority and rule was quickly re-imposed. The infamous anti-reformists Bonnor and Gardiner were elevated to the primary sees of Canterbury and London, and there followed five years of the severest persecution of Christians that England has ever known.

 

The leading reformers and all those who held reformed views were ruthlessly hunted down. They were to renounce their reformed views, affirm the universal supremacy of the Pope, or Bishop of Rome, and the truth of the leading Roman doctrines. In subsequent trials of the leading reformers, it was the doctrines concerning the Lord’s Supper which in every case became the focal point of their persecution and condemnation. They were required to affirm that “in the sacrament of the altar the sacramental bread and wine became the literal flesh and blood of Christ”, or that “the body and blood of Christ are present under the forms of bread and wine after consecration”. Almost to a man, the leading English reformers refused at this time. Other humiliation they could bear, but that Christ’s body and blood could be reproduced in the sacramental bread and wine, they would not admit. And so they were condemned to be burned.

 

One by one the champions of the reformation were led out to be publicly burned: Bishop Hooper outside his own Cathedral in Gloucester. Rowland Taylor in his own parish of Hadleigh in Suffolk, Bishops Latimer and Ridley back-to-back in Oxford where the majority of the martyrs died. The accounts of their martyrdom, though gruesome, are moving and awesome. They went to the stake, not struggling, not in terror, but with an eager joy to meet their Lord face to face. Did they die like criminals? Were they mocked and jeered? – only by a few of their tormentors! They were surrounded by crowds of people, praying for them and encouraging them. The men and women of England, the poor and ordinary, were with them and behind them. Nothing did so much to strengthen the reformed Church of England than the martyrdom of her leading reformers. As the flames engulfed the two Bishops, Latimer cried out to Ridley: “This day we shall light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out”. Under the persecution of Queen Mary the reformed faith continued to grow. Just as in the early Church of the second century the truth flourished and the church grew under the persecution of the Roman Empire, so it was again in England in the days of Mary Tudor.

 

Of all the leading reformers only Archbishop Cranmer weakened and recanted his reformed views, even on the Lord’s Supper. But at the end God graciously enabled him to repent of his recantation and he died a true martyr of the reformation denouncing the blasphemy of the Mass and its vile doctrine of transubstantiation. The history is well known of how he held out his right hand in the flames crying “this hand shall burn first” – the hand that signed his false recantation – “for it sinned”.

 

The leading reformers were dead and the truth once again held down under a ruthless tyranny: but the reformation was not dead and the position was again reversed. Elizabeth I, Mary’s younger half-sister and daughter of Anne Boleyn, was a confirmed protestant. She immediately re-established the independence of the Church of England and re-instated the reformed 1552 prayer book with a slight revision of 1559. In 1562 the 39 Articles of Religion were agreed upon by the Archbishops and Bishops of both provinces, and the whole clergy in a convocation held in London that year. As their inscription states, their purpose was ‘for the avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishing of consent touching true religion’. The articles gave official ecclesiastical and doctrinal standing to the Homilies, many of which had been drawn up earlier by Cranmer, Hooper and other reformers. The Articles were again ratified by the clergy and assented to by Queen Elizabeth I as supreme Governor of the Church of England in 1571. Article 28 on the Lord’s Supper states “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but it is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture… The Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is FAITH.

 

The forty five years of Elizabeth I’s reign provided a continuity in which the reformed principles became established throughout England. The medieval mystery of the ‘Mass’ was replaced by the simple communion act of remembrance. The communion tables were brought down from their East wall positions and placed in the body of the church. The trappings of the Mass were also removed – the bizarre ornamentation and any elaborate ceremonial which might give rise to any of the superstitions of the Mass. The communion tables stood bare without any hangings that might give the appearance of an altar. During the prayer of consecration the minister stood at the North side of the table so that his actions were clearly visible to the congregation, removing the mystery that surrounded the prayer when the minister stood with his back to the people. Neither was there to be now any lifting up of the sacraments or any manual acts. (It must be remembered that in the medieval rite it was at the moment of ‘elevation’ that the alleged change was supposed to take place in the bread and wine).

 

During the reign of Elizabeth I the Church of England was in soundly reformed and doctrinal position, but it was never free from the dangers of unprotestantizing influences. It must be stated that the Elizabethan church had shortcomings. Partly because of the Queen’s jealousy of her power in respect to Bishops, and partly because of her conciliatory policy towards Roman Catholics in seeking to ‘win them over’, the reforming work was not carried forward as energetically as it might have been. Petty rules were invoked on main points of church order, paving the way towards the great dissention of the 1660s. When any church begins to uphold orthodoxy at the cost of spirituality, the way is prepared for spiritual decay and danger. Such was the case at the close of the sixteenth century. This is one reason for the extraordinary rise to power of William Laud, who we examine under the next heading.