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Lloyd, M, "The theology of The Lord's Supper expressed in The Book of Common Prayer & The 39 Articles of Religion"

© Marc Lloyd, January 2006

The Reformation Theology of the Lord's Supper

Professor MacCulloch's authoritative account of the English Reformation suggests that the Lord's Supper in the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion1 is at the heart of its theology, not least because the Reformation can be seen as issuing from a crisis of assurance. The priestly sacrifice of the Mass had been a meritorious propitiatory work offered to God on which people depended without confidence to lessen the purgatorial pains of themselves and their dead loved-ones2. The authors of the BCP & AR came to see that justification is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. The theology of the LS expresses this since it is as we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving that we are assured that we are put right with God and will be welcomed as his friends to the King's Table at the Heavenly Feast.

We will principally seek to interpret the texts of the BCP & AR according to the original intended meaning of the authors3 in their historical context4. Some attention will also be given to the thorny question of what (other) readings of their words might be "legitimate"5.

We may examine the theology of the BCP & AR to see who is doing what to whom in the LS.

Who?

God

The BCP & LS, with the Magisterial Reformers, recapture and emphasise that the LS is primarily God's action towards his people not their action towards God. Thus, God feeds "us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood" of Jesus "and dost assure us thereby of... [his] favour and goodness towards us."6

People & Presbyter

Yet people and priest (properly presbyter, elder7) are involved in the service and not merely passive. The great change in the BCP is that the LS is not something the priest does which the people watch and hear in part. The very fact that the service is required to be in the language understood of the people8 and that the BCP directs people to come up for Communion much earlier9 and sets up the architecture and drama of the liturgy so that people can see10 demonstrates that the people are now included in a new way. There are to be no private masses or even semi-private public masses11 where priest mumble the hocus-pocus12 (a parody of the virtually magical words of consecration, hoc est corpus meum, 'this is my body' (Matthew 26:26)13. As Article 30 requires, communion in both kinds, which had been denied to the laity since the thirteenth century as it was thought they could not be trusted with the blood of Christ14, was restored to the people, thus suggesting a different theological understanding of the eucharistic presence.

Article 23 "Of Ministering in the Congregation" instructs that only those lawfully called to minister the Sacrament should do so15. Though the reasons are not spelled out in detail, it seems likely that this is because ministering the sacrament is related both to the ministry of the Word and to church government and discipline. This coheres with the instruction for the Curate to read out any excommunications in the Communion service16.

Does what?

The Lord's Supper not the Sacrifice of the Mass

The LS has become again a meal at a "table" not a propitiatory sacrifice at an altar in the BCP. The meal is "the banquet of that most heavenly food"17 where we feed on Christ in our hearts by faith to our comfort and growth in grace.

The BCP LS Prayer of Consecration18 and AR clearly reject the view that the sacrament is a propitiatory sacrifice or in any way deals with sin in similar terms. "The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is no other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits."19

The Presence of Christ

Above all, God offers us the true and spiritual presence of the whole Christ in the Supper to be received by faith. Cranmer's service and doctrinal basis reject the idea of the corporeal presence of Christ in the elements (by trans- or con-substantiation), at one extreme, and mere memorialism at the other. Believers genuinely spiritually receive the whole Christ by faith.

The BCP rubric clearly states that by kneeling: ... "no Adoration is intended, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental Bread or Wine there bodily received, or unto any Corporal Presence of Christ's natural Flesh and Blood. For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored; (for that were Idolatry, to be adored of all faithful Christians;) and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at one time in more places than one."20

Offer?

In the Communion service, the Priest begins the Offertory at the Table and the "Alms for the Poor, and other devotions of the people" are collected and those assisting "reverently bring it to the Priest, who shall humbly present and place it upon the holy Table. [and] ... the Priest shall then place upon the table so much Bread and Wine as he shall think sufficient." Some have taken this to suggest that the unconsecrated bread and wine are being offered to God (to be set apart for a holy purpose). It would seem liturgically clumsy to place the bread and wine on the table with the offertory at this point if this notion is deliberately being avoided. In the prayer: "We humbly beseech thee most mercifully [*to accept our alms and oblations, and] to receive these our prayers, which we offer to thy Divine majesty;"21 it is possible that the "oblations" (a term which is used twice of the death of Jesus in the LS service) are or include the unconsecrated bread and wine. Beckwith and Drury think it more likely that the oblations are the other financial gifts of the people which are not alms for the poor, such as money given to support the ministry, but they conclude: "We need not, however, condemn those who include the bread and wine among the 'other devotions'."22

The communicants are to receive (rather than offer) the consecrated bread and the wine "with thanksgiving"23 (Eucharist) and it is after the Communion that we ask the Father "mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of thanks and praise."24

The dead

MacCulloch eloquently describes the relationship between the Mass & the Lord's Supper and the dead, which is so transformed by the BCP and Articles:

"For the late medieval Church, the mass had become as much something for the dead as for the living.... Behind the crowds of the faithful in the medieval parish church... jostled invisible ... crowds of the dead. ... because the church maintained a model of the afterlife in which the mass could speed the souls of the faithful departed though purgatory. A gigantic consumer demand of the dead fuelled the services of the Church.... It was to change all this that the reformers struggled. Insisting that the just shall live by faith alone, they believed that the medieval Church, with the papacy as its evil genius, had played a gigantic confidence trick on the living by claiming to aid the dead in this way. They sought to banish the dead, and to banish the theology which had summoned them into the circle of the living faithful gathered around the Lord's table."25

However, this is not entirely accurate as a statement concerning the 1662 BCP: the dead are not wholly banished. Beckwith and Drurry point out that the "thankful Commemoration of the Faithful Dead" without which "our Eucharist would hardly be complete"26 was restored in 1662. This is appropriate to the Communion of the Saints and the doctrine of fellowship with the universal church but it must be emphasised that in the Reformed service we pray for our final rest with (like) them not theirs27.

To whom?

For believers

The LS supper is only for those who "do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins" who "draw near with faith."28

Since the spiritual feeding in the LS is by faith in heaven, "The Wicked, and such as be void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth (as Saint Augustine saith) the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, yet in no wise are they partakers of Christ: but rather, to their condemnation, do they eat and drink the sign or Sacrament of so great a thing."29

Conclusion

The BCP and AR teach a Reformed and Biblical theology of the LS.

  1. 1. Hereafter, 'Lord's Supper'=LS; 'Book of Common Prayer' = BCP and '(39) Articles of Religion' = AR.
  2. 2. For popular pre-Reformation and later views of the Mass see Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale, Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chapter 3. For the official reassertion of Roman Catholic dogma against Reformed views see The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent.
  3. 3. Thomas Cranmer can fairly be said to be the author of the BCP and AR but on their complex redactional history and literary life see e.g. Beckwith, R. T. (revised) and Drury, T. W., How We Got Our Prayer Book Latimer Studies 22 (Oxford, 1986).
  4. 4. The Royal Declaration attached to the AR commands that: "no man... shall... draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning... in the literal and grammatical sense... [and] shall [not] affix any new sense to any Article.", BCP, p610.
  5. 5. It is not possible to treat the methodological, literary, historical, liturgical and ethical issues raised by these approaches here. Some directions might be suggested by Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Is There A Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the reader and the morality of literary knowledge (Leicester, Apollos, 1998).
  6. 6. BCP, Holy Communion, prayer after Communion, p258.
  7. 7. See, for example, Cocksworth, Christopher and Brown, Rosalind, Being A Priest Today: Exploring priestly identity (Norwich, Canterbury Press, 2002), chapter 1 and Beckwith, R. T., Elders in Every City: The Origin and Role of the Ordained Ministry (Carlisle, Paternoster Press, 2003), chapter 2 for the authentic historical understanding that Anglican "priests" are presbyters / elders.
  8. 8. According to Article 24: "It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have publick Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understood of the people.", BCP, p621. This fits with a Reformed emphasis on receiving the LS with faith and understanding.
  9. 9. "Draw near with faith" before the general Confession, BCP, Holy Communion, p251.
  10. 10. Extraordinarily, the Church of England is the only church to practice North Side Communion and no contemporary explanation survives. Despite Motyer, Stibbs and Stott's theological defence in Why I Value the North Side Position, CPAS Fellowship Paper 238 (1963) this visibility seems to be the purpose of north side communion. Professor MacCulloch explains: "Motyer and co. have clearly misunderstood what happened at the Reformation. The English reformers wanted to move their communion table away from the site of the altar, so they were faced with the problem of where to put it. One place would be at the top of the nave, and that seems to have been one common experimental place in Edward VI's reign, but particularly in Elizabeth's reign they seem to have decided to use the chancel, mostly because Elizabeth didn't want chancel (rood) screens demolished, and so you had to do something with the separate chancel space beyond the screen. They had the long narrow chancels of English medieval parish churches with a lot of space in the middle, so the obvious solution was to put the table there, but naturally it was best placed on the long axis of the chancel. So where to stand then? On the north side, obviously, for maximum visibility of the manual actions, with the sunlight pouring in from south or east, so that there could be no counterfeiting popish trumpery. This position then got frozen once the altarwise position of the table became the norm again, and became a shibboleth in evangelical circles in the nineteenth century in reaction to Anglo-Catholic realignments. It's as simple as that." (by email, 18/4/05).
  11. 11. The notes at the end of the BCP LS say: "And there shall be no Celebration of the Lord's Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest, according to his discretion." At the least three people should communicate with the Priest, p261.
  12. 12. "Hocus pocus" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable Millennium Edition revised by Room, Adrian (London, Cassell & Co, 1959-2001) p577. For magical associations with the Mass see Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England (London, Penguin, 1971) esp. pp36-40, 60f, 303, 319, 326.
  13. 13. See McGrath, Alistair, Reformation Thought: An Introduction second edition 1993 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988), p169.
  14. 14. See ibid., p167.
  15. 15. BCP, AR, p620
  16. 16. BCP, "notices"! etc. after the creed, p241.
  17. 17. BCP, Holy Communion, Exhortation (2) ... in case the people [be] negligent to come to the holy Communion, p247ff.
  18. 18. BCP, Holy Communion, Prayer of Consecration, "Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world...", p255.
  19. 19. BCP, AR, p624.
  20. 20. BCP, Holy Communion, p262. This is a rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of the physical ubiquity of Christ's glorified humanity. The BCP is closer to Calvin's view that we spiritually feed on Christ in heaven. The AR likewise reject views of the corporeal presence of Christ in the sacrament: "Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions." and devotion to the elements: "The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.", BCP, AR 28, p623. It seems Jesuitical to suggest that this article intends only to point out that Jesus did not command such (allowable) practices: they are clearly being condemned.
  21. 21. BCP, Holy Communion, p244.
  22. 22. Beckwith and Drury, op. cit., p47. Likewise, Beckwith, Beckwith, R. T., Praying With Understanding: explanations of the words and passages in the Book of Common Prayer Latimer Briefings 2 (Oxford, 1992): "Here the reference is to our own gifts, conceivably meaning the unconsecrated bread and wine, but more probably those parts of the collection [of money] which are not 'alms' (i.e. not for the poor).", p17.
  23. 23. BCP, Holy Communion, words of administration, p256.
  24. 24. BCP, Holy Communion, p257.
  25. 25. MacCulloch, Cranmer: A Life, op. cit., p614.
  26. 26. Beckwith and Drurry, op. cit., p46
  27. 27. Notice that we pray for "the whole state of Christ's Church militant here on earth", BCP, p244, though Beckwith, Praying, op. cit., points out that "... printed Prayer-Books ... prove that there was a desire on the part of some to omit the words 'militant here in earth' They are first erased and then restored in handwriting.", p46.
  28. 28. BCP, Holy Communion, p251.
  29. 29. BCP, AR 29, p624