Members only: The Doctrine of the Sacra­ments in the Thirty-Nine Articles

The sacraments were one of the main topics of controversy at the Reformation, and it was chiefly for their teaching on the Lord’s Supper that the martyred Anglican bishops (Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper and Ferrar) were put to death. We have in Oxford, where I come from, a great stone cross in the surface of the road, marking the stop where Ridley and Latimer, and afterwards Cranmer, were burned to death; and 100 yards away stands an elegant memorial erected in the 19th century, which those who have visited Oxford will have seen, from which the figures of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley look out northward, westward and eastward across the university city.

Latimer was the great preacher among the Reformers, but Ridley was an able theologian, who led the way for his companions in his reformed eucharistic beliefs while Cranmer was the great man of learning, slow in reaching conclusions but establishing them with great care, and it is to him that we owe not only very extensive theological writings on the Lord’s Supper but also most of the brief summary statements on the sacraments which are included in the Thirty-Nine Articles. As commentary on these Articles we have not only Cranmer’s own writings, but the Latin text of the Articles, which is of equal authority with the English; the Book of Homilies (of which two homilies in particular are concerned with the sacraments); the sacramental services of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer; and the Prayer Book Catechism, of which the part on the sacraments was added by Bishop Overall slightly later, in 1604, though drawing to some extent on the Elizabethan catechism of Alexander Nowell.