Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer

Summary: A brief biography of the compiler of the original Book of Common Prayer and the first Protestant head of the Church of England.

I am a low church evangelical by history, but very few things have been as important in my faith development over the past 15 years as the Book of Common Prayer. As I have said before, my theology has become more in line with traditional Episcopal/Anglican theology and away from my Baptist heritage (episcopal ecclesiology, openness to infant baptism, more sacramental in theological orientation, etc.), even though I think I will likely remain non-denominational in my actual church membership.

While I am a fan of the Eerdman's Library of Religious Biography series and picked Emblem of Faith Untouched in part because of that, I started reading because I am trying to work through ideas of how we should think of flawed Christian “heroes.” Thomas Cranmer was certainly flawed while being a very devoted Christian. He was a younger son of a minor noble and, as was common, went into the church and academy. He was very slow in school, taking roughly twice as long to get his bachelor's degree as usual. But he continued and became the rough equivalent of a professor before dropping out of the academy (which required celibacy and singleness) to get married. But his wife died, and he returned to the academy, albeit with some controversy.

While staying with some friends during a period of plague when people were avoiding larger cities, he walked through how he would approach Henry VIII's desire for a divorce theologically instead of through the ecclesiastical courts. In other words, Cranmer thought what was more important was whether the divorce was right according to scripture rather than whether the ecclesiastical courts agreed. Based on recounting that conversation, Cranmer was summoned to Henry and led a committee to investigate the marriage and reasons for divorce theologically and build support for divorce politically and geopolitically.

One part of Henry's divorce from Catherine that I had not understood with my previous reading was that Henry was betrothed to Cathrine when he was 13. Cathrine had already been married to Henry's brother, but Arthur died just a couple of months after the wedding, while Arthur was only 15. The marriage between Catherine,  the youngest child of the Spanish king and queen Ferdinand and Isabella, and Arthur, and then Henry was for geopolitical reasons, not love. According to Emblem of Faith Untouched, Henry's confessor was convinced, and convinced Henry very early in their marriage, that Henry marrying Catherine was violating Christian ethics and that their marriage would be cursed because she had been married to his brother first. The first four pregnancies of Catherine and Henry ended in either miscarriage, stillbirth, or early death of the child. Only the fifth resulted in Mary, who was the only child of that marriage, to live to adulthood.

While there are some theoretical arguments justifying Henry's divorce of Catherine, later divorces were even less justified. Henry had affairs throughout his marriages, and it had to have been clear to Cranmer that regardless of Cranmer's theological support of the divorce of Catherine, there was no theological support of mistresses and continued divorce and remarriage. Part of Cranmer's commitment was the divine right of kings and the positional authority of the king as an ecclesiological leader, not just a political one. In addition to this, Cranmer eventually was convinced by his interaction with German Protestants that the Pope's authority was geographically and theologically limited and that local countries should have primary political and ecclesiastical control of their territory. Practically, this meant that for Cranmer, there was almost nothing that would be inappropriate (sinful) for Henry to do if Henry wanted it. While Cranmer was the Bishop of Canterbury, Henry took many income-producing properties from the church and exchanged them with other properties so that the church was left with less and the crown with more. Cranmer rarely pushed back against these exchanges.

While Cranmer was acting as the King's ambassador and traveling throughout Europe on a variety of business for Henry, he married the daughter of a German Protestant. At the time, Cranmer was not ordained and did not have a church position. But Henry drew him back to England and appointed him as Archbishop of Canterbury, which required both ordination and celibacy, and Cranmer was married. So he came back took the position, and his wife remained in Germany until later when Cranmer reformed the rules to allow for married clergy.

I am not going to spend a lot of time on his history, other than to note that when Henry died, and eventually Mary rose to the throne and started a bloody persecution of Protestants, Cranmer was eventually arrested and spent years in prison before being executed. During that time in prison, Cranmer was very clearly tortured and wrote or had written for him at least eight confessions. Some were mild confessions, and some were more extensive confessions repudiating his Protestant beliefs. Nearly all of them are tainted by torture and threats. But at his execution, he renounced all prior confessions.

Two quotes I thought were worth sharing here. First, in 1534 Cranmer ordered all pastors to stop preaching on several subjects while a theological consensus was built. He prioritized slow change that was more broad-based.

That summer of 1534, Cranmer issued a proclamation ordering silence from the pulpit on the subjects of masses for the dead, prayers to saints, pilgrimages, and the celibacy of the clergy. Most likely, Henry had not made up his mind on these topics, and wanted the space to figure out what to do. Cranmer, who had been swayed by the reforms he'd seen in Germany, took a slow but steady, drip-by-drip approach to reforming the English church under an absolute monarch. He realized that any reformation could take place only in subtle moves. Without creating a splash, he took every opportunity to license men with the same inclinations, promoting like-minded reformers to the bishop's bench.

Second, as I have hinted already, Cranmer struggled with what it meant to follow Christ as king and Henry as king. He had an influential dream that illustrated this.

This dream represented the hub of his dilemma: Was service to Christ incompatible with service to the supreme head of the Church in England? Which king would win his soul? The horror in the dream was that both kings rejected him. Silent, Henry excluded him from his court, condemning him to death, while Christ turned away and closed the gate of heaven. “Cranmer, shut off from both life and the afterlife, could turn only to the mouth of hell.”

I do not, in the end, really have a better model for how to think about our Christian “heroes” of the past after reading this, but I do think that at least part of the answer is that we should better understand both the good and bad of those that have come before us. We need to see and discuss where people were right and wrong and where there is more ambiguity. Two, I think there really should be some limitations to how we honor people of the past. I heard someone say this past week, “well maybe we should stop naming buildings after people,” and in many ways, I think that may be right. No one is worthy of honor in all areas of life, even if they do individual things that are worth honoring. My classic reflection on this is AW Tozer's wife, who, after she was widowed and remarried, said, “Aiden loved Jesus, but [my new husband] loves me,” is a very classic illustration. She was not saying that AW Tozer was not a good Christian or hadn't done many good things. But she was illustrating the limitations of his honor. He should be honored for the way he brought people to Christ, but he was still a lousy husband and father. And we need to be able to see the whole person because we are all flawed and limited creatures.