Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, shaper of the Anglican Way

-an article for the Light Magazine

By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

If you have ever been to a wedding service, you can thank Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for his contribution of these new words:  ‘to love and to cherish.’ Cranmer beautifully translated from the Latin Sarum rite these now familiar vows: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us depart.”  He had a liturgical gift, a poetic ability to develop English-language worship services, marriage services, and funeral services that still speak to people over five hundred years later. 

Cranmer birthed an English Reformation that was not only the via media (middle way) between Catholic and Protestant, but also the via media between Luther and Calvin.  Cranmer was not the first Archbishop of Canterbury, but rather the 67^th and the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. As of today we have had 105 Archbishops of Canterbury. The Anglican Church was not created by Cranmer, but rather reformed and renewed. He has been described as the most mysterious person in the English Reformation.

Born in 1489 at Aslockton Nottinghamshire, he was sent at age 14 to Jesus College, Cambridge after the death of his father.  During his Master's degree, Cranmer studied the Renaissance humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus. Shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College. Many are unaware that Cranmer had initially been kicked out of Cambridge University in 1515 for the ‘sin’ of getting married.  To support his new wife, he worked as a reader at Buckingham Hall in Cambridge.  After his first wife Joan died in childbirth, all was forgiven and Cranmer was allowed to return as a lecturer at Jesus College in Cambridge.  In 1520, Cranmer was ordained as an Anglican priest.  Continuing his studies, he received his Doctor of Divinity in 1526.  Cranmer was a brilliant scholar who read not only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but also French, German and Italian.  As one of the most learned men of his age, he had a private library larger than the Cambridge Library, with nearly all the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers.

King Henry 8^th, who needed a divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn, liked Cranmer’s idea of consulting with leading European university theologians. After unsuccessfully appealing to Rome, Cranmer was appointed the resident ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.  While negotiating in 1532 with the Lutherans on behalf of King Henry 8^th, Cranmer married his second wife, Margaret, the niece of the famous Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander. Unexpectedly, King Henry 8^th chose Cranmer as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, a position in which he served for twenty-three years.  With the implicit knowledge of Henry 8^th, Margaret was smuggled into England. King Henry 8^th kept changing his mind about whether clergy could be married, so Margaret was smuggled back to Germany when it was too dangerous.  Given King Henry 8^th’s extreme volatility, it was a miracle that Cranmer survived, especially with so many enemies seeking to take him out.  In 1543, Henry 8^th denounced Cranmer as ‘the greatest heretic in Kent’, alluding to his secret marriage, and allowed the opponents to charge Cranmer with heresy. Then he put Cranmer in charge of the investigation, after personally giving him his royal signet ring of protection.  After Edward 6^th became the next King, Margaret was allowed to openly be Cranmer’s wife with their two children Margaret and Thomas. 

Cranmer wrote the English Prayer Book in two versions, 1549 and 1552, the first one more catholic, the second more protestant.  He brought change slowly and cautiously.  The compulsory usage of the new English Prayer Book, however, resulted in a Prayer Book rebellion in Devon and Cornwall where Cornish was spoken rather than English.  Queen Elizabeth, after the death of her sister Queen Mary in 1558, combined her late godfather’s two prayer books into one: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life (1549); Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving (1552).” Cranmer affirmed the presence of Jesus by the Holy Spirit in Holy Communion, which must be fed on in the heart by faith with thanksgiving: “Doth not God’s Word teach a true presence of Jesus Christ in the sacrament is a spiritual presence?”

                In the Prayer Book, Cranmer restored the giving of both bread and wine to the congregation, not just the clergy. He also wrote a healing service in the Prayer Book, focused directly in praying to Christ, rather than to the saints. Cranmer wrote 25 of the 70 collect prayers in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. This helped people meditate on the Word of God, ‘to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his Word.’ Professor Simeon Zahl of Cambridge recently described Cranmer’s Prayer Book as a ‘technology of the heart’ that helps us psychologically experience the consolation of the Holy Spirit. 

Cranmer wrote the preface for the Great Bible, the first English bible ever used in English Churches, an adaptation of William Coverdale’s translation. To protect the bible, it was chained to the lectern desk.

He gave refuge to many European Protestant scholars like Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Bernardino Ochino who were invited to teach at English universities.  In March 1552, Cranmer invited the foremost Continental reformers, Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, and Philip Melanchthon to come to England and to participate in an interdenominational council. Sadly, none were able to come.

The death of 15-year-old King Edward 6^th from tuberculosis left a leadership vacuum. First cousin Lady Jane Gray only lasted as a Protestant Queen for nine days.  Then Mary was made Queen, and Imprisoned Cranmer for over two years. He was charged by Mary with sedition, treason, and heresy.  During that time, she burned over 300 protestants at the stake, giving her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’, the same as the drink.  Forced to watch the burning of his two fellow bishops Latimer and Ridley, Cranmer renounced the prayer book six times before he was burned at the stake. 

Was Cranmer a weak-willed, flipflopping, compromiser, or was his real issue his strong allegiance to obey the King/Queen?  Was this what caused him to recant the Prayer Book? Was he much like the Apostle Peter who denied Jesus three times, yet turned back and helped others? (Luke 22:32)

In his final sermon, he renounced his renunciation, before being rushed off to be burnt at the stake at the same location as his fellow Protestant Bishops Ridley and Latimer. As he was being burnt, he intentionally put his right hand in the fire so that it would be burnt first: “And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall first be burned…”  Cranmer's death was immortalized in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, placed beside the Bible by Queen Elizabeth the First in every English Cathedral. The Anglican Communion commemorates Thomas Cranmer as a Reformation Martyr on 21 March, the anniversary of his death.

As he was being burned at the stake, he prayed: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Cranmer finished well on a fiery stake, faithful to God at the end, despite his vacillating.  Perhaps this is a hopeful metaphor for the struggles of contemporary Anglicanism.  May the rediscovery of Cranmer help both Anglican Christians and the wider Christian community to also finish well.

Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

 

CS Lewis: Waking up to the Father’s Love

Previously published in the Feb 2020 Light Magazine article

By Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Have you or your parents ever treated education as more important than family? CS (Jack) Lewis and his father Albert were like ships passing in the night, not knowing how to connect.  Being very close to his calm, cheerful mother, her sudden death from cancer left ten-year old Lewis feeling like the mythical Atlantis was sinking.  Jack’s mother Flora Hamilton, who tutored him in Latin and French, was brilliant, earning an honors degree in mathematics at Queens University in Belfast.  Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been Anglican (Church of Ireland) clergy, the latter being a bishop. As a child, Jack shared his mother’s strong faith.  It was like God had died with his mother’s tragic death.

Jack’s secure Irish childhood dissolved into a nightmare of six years of painful residential school living in England.  He later commented that English accents at the boarding school sounded to his childhood ears like some strange demonic chatter. Both Jack and his older brother Warren were traumatized by a brutal schoolmaster at their first boarding school Wynard in Watford. Jack called Wynard “Belsen” after the Nazi concentration camp.  A few months before Jack’s death in 1963, he stated that after fifty years of struggling, he had finally forgiven the headmaster Capron who had so damaged his earliest boyhood. In a letter to a young person, Lewis wrote “I was in three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrid.  I never hated anything so much, not even the front-line trenches in World War I.  Indeed, the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age.”  Jack’s second residential school Malvern was rife with bullying and sexual abuse. After Jack threatened to shoot himself, his dad relocated him to Great Bookham, Surrey, to be taught by a private tutor William Kirkpatrick who had trained for the ordained ministry in Ireland. Kirkpatrick, as an ardent atheist, was portrayed in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength as MacPhee, a humourless, freethinking Ulsterman.

His father Albert was so swallowed in grief and self-pity that he pushed his two sons away physically and emotionally. Being afraid of his father as a child, CS Lewis described his dad as a man with “a bad temper, very sensible, nice when not in a bad temper.” His father’s emotional ups and downs taught Jack a distrust of emotions that would stay with him throughout his life.  He called his father’s family “true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, rhetorical” people who moved quickly from laughter to wrath to tenderness, but with no gift for steady contentment.  His father, who dreamed of becoming an MP, instead served as a prosecuting solicitor in the Belfast police court.  Swallowed by his work, Jack’s father was sometimes cold, remote, distracted, and morose.  He had a tendency to cross-examine his sons as if they were on trial.  Jack learned to pretend, avoid and lie to his dad to keep him happy.  His father, said Jack, “could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought.” His dad’s life was so orderly one could set a clock by his schedule.  When away from his job, he became fidgety and bored, eager to return to his legal responsibilities. Jack was so alienated from his father that he missed how much he was like his dad.  With swift imaginative minds and resounding voices, they both could persuasively make intricate arguments.  Jack and his dad shared a delightful sense of humour.  Albert’s sons claimed that their dad was the best storyteller in the world as he loved to act out the character parts. 

His father was very strong on regular church attendance as the right thing to do, but never explained to his sons why.  Religion was very private. On Sunday Dec 6th 1914, Jack a confirmed atheist was confirmed in the Church of Ireland in order to avoid a fight with his dad, “one of the worse acts of his life”.  Jack later commented, “Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy.” At age seventeen, C.S. Lewis explained bluntly to a Christian friend he’d known since childhood, “I believe in no religion.  There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint, Christianity is not even the best.” One of his prep school friends described Jack as a “riotously amusing atheist.” As a teenager, he resented God for not existing, and for creating such a flawed world.  Just after World War I, Lewis, a wounded veteran, boasted that during his time in the trenches, he “never sank so low as to pray.” To a friend about the same time, he said “You take too many things for granted.  You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” 

After ending up in hospital on April 15th 1918 from WWI shrapnel injuries, Lewis wrote his father Albert, saying “I know that you will come and see me…(I was) “never before so eager to cling to every bit of our old home life and see you…Please God, I shall do better in the future.  Come and see me.” His dad however stayed in Ireland, refusing to change his busy work schedule.  In October 1918, after successive requests for his father to visit him in hospital, CS Lewis wrote his dad saying “It is four months now since I returned from France, and my friends laughingly say that ‘my father in Ireland’ is a mythical creation.” The father wound and resulting emotional cutoff became ever deeper.

While teaching at Oxford, Jack kept running into Christians, like JRR Tolkien, who persuaded him that Christianity is a true myth, a real story grounded in history.  Jack’s atheist background helped him reach out to spiritual seekers through books and BBC radio. His voice became the most widely recognized in Britain after that of Winston Churchill. His books, which still sell six million copies a year, led him to become one of the most influential voices in contemporary Christianity.  The late Chuck Colson, converted by Lewis’ book Mere Christianity, contended that Lewis is ‘a true prophet for our post-modern age.’ As one of the few Christians read extensively by non-christians, he became known as the Apostle to the skeptics. 

Was it a mere coincidence that CS Lewis turned to God in the very summer of his father’s death?  In August 1929, Lewis went to Belfast to visit his seriously ill father, bringing significant family reconciliation.  Lewis said that his dad was taking his cancer surgery ‘like a hero.’ After his dad’s death, Lewis commented, “As times goes on, the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality…how he filled a room.  How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a big man.” Lewis deeply regretted how insensitively he had treated his dad.  How might CS Lewis’ restoration to his father’s love inspire us to deeper family reconciliation in 2020?
Click to view the first article in a three-part series on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

-co-authors of the new novel Blue Sky

George Whitefield: Waking Up to the Fire of Christ -HIRD

George Whitefield: Waking up to the Fire of Christ

By Rev. Dr. Ed &Janice Hird

-an article previously published in the April 2019 Light Magazine

When is the last time that your pastor had to be hoisted, like George Whitefield, through a window into your crowded church building, because there was no other way in?  The Rev. George Whitefield took part in a Great Awakening that is still impacting many congregations today.  Charles Spurgeon called Whitefield “all life, fire, wing, force.”

After being ordained at age 21, Whitefield was accused of driving fifteen people mad in his first sermon.  His Gloucester Bishop Benson ironically said that he wished that the madness might not be forgotten before next Sunday.  The so-called madness was actually people waking up to the life-changing love of Christ.  In his 34 years of ordained ministry, Whitefield preached more than 18,000 sermons to around ten million people.  Dr. Thomas S Kidd holds that “perhaps he was the greatest evangelical preacher the world has ever known.” Because of his speaking gift, Whitefield’s nickname was the Seraph (type of angel).  He was once described by UK Prime Minister Lloyd George as the greatest popular orator ever produced by England.  David Hume, a famous agnostic commented that “Mr Whitfield is the most ingenious preacher I ever heard. It is worth going twenty miles to hear him.” The famous English actor David Garrick held that Whitefield could “make men weep and tremble by his varied utterances of the word ‘Mesopotamia’.” (the ancient land that Abraham came from)

While in Oxford, he became close friends with John and Charles Wesley who helped him in the spiritual disciplines. After reading the book The Life of God in the Soul of Man, Whitefield became convinced that good works would not earn him heaven: “God showed me that I must be born again....” Experiencing the new birth gave him a fresh love of the beauty of spring: “At other times, I would be so overpowered with a sense of God’s Infinite Majesty that I would be compelled to throw myself on the ground and offer my soul as a blank in his hands, to write on it what he pleased.” The new birth became the heart of an unprecedented evangelical revival. 

Whitefield accepted the Wesley’s invitation to join them as missionaries in Savannah, Georgia. He waited however for months to sail to Georgia with his patron General Oglethorpe.  During this delay in England, tens of thousands came to hear him preach about the new birth.  After passionately preaching outside to 10,000 miners in Kingswood near Bristol, he wrote: “The fire is kindled in the country; and, I know, all the devils in hell shall not be able to quench it.”  Whitefield became the Billy Graham of the 17^th century, preaching that all people need to be born again.  He was very countercultural, doing the unthinkable thing of preaching in fields, without notes, to tens of thousands. In 17^th century England, sermons were only supposed to be given inside church buildings. In 17^th England, because of the fear of revolution, the worst thing you could be accused of was enthusiasm. Whitefield sought to reach the heart as well as the head, saying that many people “were unaffected by an unfelt, unknown Christ.”

On his way to Georgia, Whitefield had such a strong voice that when the two other ships travelling with them drew close, he was simultaneously able to preach to all the people on the three ships. At a time when travel was precarious, Whitefield had seven visits to America, fifteen to Scotland, and two to Ireland.  Whitefield was the best-known person to have travelled extensively in the thirteen American colonies.  By 1740, he had become the most famous man in both America and Britain, at least the most famous aside from King George II.  Reminiscent of the Beatles, he was the first ‘British sensation.’ 

Whitefield was radically generous even to a fault.  Wherever revival meetings took place, Whitefield received offerings, including from Benjamin Franklin, to help with the most famous orphanage in North America, Bethesda in Savannah, Georgia.  After Benjamin Franklin scientifically established that Whitefield was able to preach to 30,000 without a microphone, he became his publisher, and a close friend and ally. Between 1740 and 1742, Franklin printed forty-three books and pamphlets dealing with Whitefield and the evangelical movement.  He even built Whitefield a building for preaching that became the University of Pennsylvania.  That is why there are statues of both Franklin and Whitefield as co-founders of the University of Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin commented: “It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world was growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families in every street.”

The Bishop’s Commissary (superintendent), Alexander Garden, in Charleston was offended by Whitefield’s article challenging slave owners over mistreatment of slaves, and by Whitefield’s preaching both in other parish areas and among other denominations. Garden declared that the slave owners were going to sue Whitefield for libel. During his sermon, Garden attacked Whitefield, and refused him communion.  Then he dragged Whitefield into an ecclesiastical court, trying to defrock him.  Jonathan Edwards of Northhampton, a co-leader in the Great Awakening, wrote: “Whitefield was reproached in the most scurrilous and scandalous manner...I question whether history affords any instance paralleled with this, as so much pains taken in writing to blacken a man’s character, and render him odious.” Whitefield did not let criticism stop him, saying “The more I am opposed, the more joy I feel.”  

On a Sunday morning in Philadelphia, Whitefield preached to perhaps 15,000 people.  Then, he attended an Anglican Communion service where Commissary Cummings publicly denounced him and his followers. Whitefield followed this right after with preaching a farewell sermon to an outdoor assembly of 20,000.  The relentless pace was brutal to Whitefield’s health. At another time in Boston, “Whitfield was running himself ragged and becoming extremely ill, violently vomiting between sermons. He was feverish, dehydrated, and sweating profusely.”

During his four years away from England, the Gentleman’s Magazine and other English newspapers listed George Whitefield as having died.  He changed so many lives that even the English upper classes began to give Whitefield a hearing.  Lord Bolingbroke, after hearing Whitefield at Lady Huntington’s place, wrote: “Mr Whitefield is the most extraordinary man of our times. He has the most commanding eloquence I ever heard in any person...” One Anglican minister claimed that Whitefield had set England on fire with the devil’s flames. Whitefield countered. “It is not a fire of the Devil’s kindling, but a holy fire that has proceeded from the Holy and blessed Spirit. Oh, that such a fire may not only be kindled, but blow up into a flame all England, and all the world over!”

Dying at 55, Whitefield had been used to set many people on fire with love for Christ.  He memorably prayed: “O that I could do more for Him! O that I was a flame of pure and holy fire, and had a thousand lives to spend in the dear Redeemer’s Service.” Whitefield was passionate about awakening to the new birth.  We in Canada also need to wake up to the fire of Christ. We too need to recapture the priority of the new birth. Have you, like Whitefield, awoken yet to the new birth?

Rev Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Co-authors of ForBetter, For Worse: discovering the keys to a lasting relationship

Old Parr: From Cottage to Palace - Lawrence

A number of years ago my aunt gave me a package of photocopies relating to my grandfather, Edwin Davies. At that time, I had no interest in my ancestors and I filed the documents away. Twenty years later, heavily into my genealogy, I regretted the lost opportunity to have my many questions answered.

The drawing of Old Parr’s Cottage in Shropshire, England, where my grandfather was born, began to hold great fascination for me as I searched for my ancestors’ lost lives. Who was Old Parr? Had he really lived to 152 ½ years? Which of Edwin Davies’ sons had written the caption at the bottom of the drawing? What was cousin Bert’s last name?

I set out to do some research on the Internet but the words “Old Parr” in the search engines brought no results. I e-mailed the genealogical society for the area and by coincidence they had just received information on a Thomas Parr from Shropshire who had lived to a great age. The surprise to me was that his life was five centuries ago—I had assumed that Old Parr was living at the time of my grandfather’s birth.

Having gone this far on my search for Old Parr I couldn’t let it go. I now knew that his first name was Thomas and that he was indeed buried in Westminster Abbey. I went to their web-site. His burial there, I found, was by order of King Charles 1st, and the inscription on the white marble gravestone gave his birth as AD 1483, his burial as November 15, 1635, and his age as 152 years. The gravestone also told us that he lived through the reigns of ten monarchs: Edward 4th, Edward 5th, Richard 3rd, Henry 7th, Henry 8th, Edward 6th, Mary, Elizabeth, James, and Charles.

What would make Thomas Parr uproot himself and go to London at his great age? A change from his simple Shropshire life would surely be hard on him. It is recorded that he did not smoke and that his diet consisted of green cheese, onions, coarse bread, buttermilk, and mild ale. He gave his recipe for long life as, “Keep your head cool by temperance and your feet warm by exercise. Rise early, go soon to bed, and if you want to grow fat [prosperous] keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.” (Quoted from John Taylor’s pamphlet of 1635, The Old, Old, Very Old Man.)

He did not leave his home of his own volition. The Earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard, while visiting one of his Shropshire estates in 1635 heard about the great age of this man and decided to take him to London to see King Charles. Thomas Parr, I suppose, had no say in the matter. The journey was made in easy stages and the Earl provided a jester for Old Parr’s entertainment along the way. But the venture would have brought him little joy given his old age and his blindness of some 20 years.

When they at last came to Court, King Charles asked him what he had done differently from other men in his long life. Old Parr answered that he had done penance when he was 100 years old. Parr’s penance entailed standing draped in a white sheet in the parish church, according to Taylor’s pamphlet, and was a result of his unfaithfulness to his wife and the fathering of an illegitimate child by Katherine Milton. His first marriage, from which he had two children both of whom died in infancy, was when he was aged 80. Ten years after his wife’s death he married again, but there were no children by this second marriage.

The alteration from his country lifestyle and plain diet caused Parr’s demise according to a post mortem carried out by Dr. William Harvey, who cited a diet change, rich wines and London’s pollution as the cause of death. Though he might just have succumbed to old age! After all, he was 152 years of age!

The point of interest for me, of course, is my grandfather’s connection to Old Parr. Why was he born in Thomas Parr’s cottage some 225 years after his death? Was it just coincidence that my great-grandmother went into labour while she was visiting there? Was she a descendant through Parr’s illegitimate child and calling on a relative? Was there some superstition that anyone born in this cottage would live to as great an age as Thomas Parr?

Apart from the fact that the caption under the drawing tells me that Edwin Davies was born in Old Parr’s cottage in 1859, I have found nothing to suggest that there is any relationship between Parr and my ancestors. By continued research, I hope to get answers to the mysterious connection of my family to Old Parr.
Meanwhile, Thomas Parr is certainly worthy of note and provides us with an interesting tale.