Members only: The Implicit Escha­tol­ogy of the Prayer Book Com­mu­nion

In what follows, I shall try to make strange again the magnificent Communion of Thomas Cranmer in that form which finds such enduring expression in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. I ask my reader temporarily to embrace a second naivety about this liturgy, for I shall be claiming that it has a distinctive eschatological dimension (though one left largely implicit), and this is a somewhat controversial claim.

Let us begin by defining eschatology. For our purposes, eschatology is the branch of theological reflection that considers what God has revealed concerning the last things (ta eschata). Eschatology in this sense is a Johnny-come-lately to the theological scene. Partly for this reason, it is not obviously fit-for-purpose as a tool for examining Tudor reforming theology, which is a key element of what one is doing when elucidating the contours of Anglican doctrine.

Is eschatology an appropriate tool for evaluating an early modern liturgy like the Communion? Isn’t that anachronistic? That instinct would be well-founded: it is not clear that eschatology is useful for evaluating the Communion in any historiographically serious way. The term was only coined in 1804 by Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, and has long been muddled with related ideas from messianism and apocalyptism to millenarianism and kingdom. It is also suspiciously voguish. Recall that it was against the backdrop of 19th-century theology’s inviolable optimism that Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) asserted an absolute breach between earliest Christianity’s ascetic apocalypticism and its subsequent secularization / political establishment. It was Overbeck who so impacted Karl Barth – Barth, sharing Overbeck’s diagnosis of modern Christianity as a gutless orthodox facade, while, unlike Overbeck, remaining very much a Christian. We know the rest of the story: how two world wars shattered that 19th-century optimism, inaugurating what Christoph Schwöbel called the ‘century of eschatology’, in whose vanishing corona we now live.