Ashley Null Writes on Cranmer and the Assurance of Salvation
For [Archbishop Thomas] Cranmer, assurance of salvation is essential for the Christian life. The medieval Church had no such notion of assurance. Catholics were to face the future with a sober uncertainty about their fate, striving to lead a godly life in a constant state of both hope and fear. For Cranmer, however, only assurance makes clear the true, unconditional love of God for humanity, and only this assurance begins to birth in believers the power to love God more than sin. How? Gratitude - the gratitude that can only come from the assurance of salvation.
The Holy Spirit working through God’s Word assures believers of his promised salvation. This assurance, in turn, engenders in them saving faith which calms their turbulent hearts and inflames in them a grateful love in return. This new love for God has to fight continually to restrain human nature’s on-going hidden tendency to self-gratification. Nevertheless, because of the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, believers now have the necessary desire and ability to do so. Empowered by the overfilling joy that comes from a heart made thankful by assurance, believers can at last begin to say no to the deceitful devices and desires of their own self-centeredness.
In Cranmer’s view, the medieval teaching of conditional salvation based on human performance actually promoted self-righteous pride or self-damning despair, but neither inspired true love for God. Only the promise of free salvation made possible by God’s utterly gracious love inspired a lasting, grateful human love:
“But, if the profession of our faith of the remission of our own sins enter within us into the deepness of our hearts, then it must needs kindle a warm fire of love in our hearts towards God, and towards all other for the love of God,-a fervent mind to seek and procure God’s honor, will, and pleasure in all things,-a good will and mind to help every man and to do good unto them, so far as our might, wisdom, learning, counsel, health, strength, and all other gifts which we have received of God, and will extend,-and, in summa, a firm intent and purpose to do all that is good, and leave all that is evil.”
Only the certainty of being eternally knit to God by his love could empower human beings to love him and one another in return: “For the right and true Christian faith is . . . to have sure trust and confidence in God’s merciful promises to be saved from everlasting damnation by Christ: whereof doth follow a loving heart to obey his commandments.” When the benefits of God’s merciful grace were considered, unless they were “desperate persons” with “hearts harder than stones,” people would be moved to give themselves wholly unto God and the service of their neighbors. Naturally, Cranmer intended this Christian love to be extended to foes as well as friends, for “they be his creation and image, and redeemed by Christ as ye are.” Thus, assurance made possible the necessary inner change in the justified - a loving, living faith that purified the heart from sin’s poison and made “the sinner clean a new man.” This gospel of transforming gratitude was what Cranmer tried to spread with his evangelism of excessive leniency.
Ashley Null, “Thomas Cranmer’s Theology of the Heart” (Trinity Journal for Theology and Ministry, Fall 2007)