Bucer and the Prayer Book
If you love the Book of Common Prayer, you can thank Martin Bucer. Bucer (1491-1551) was the German Strasbourg Protestant reformer that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer invited to England to help him write the Book of Common Prayer. He arrived in England with the returning Protestant exiles who had fled England during the reign of Henry VIII. He served as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University until his untimely death two years later. Earlier, Bucer and John Calvin had become neighbors and close friends during the three years Calvin lived in Strasbourg. Calvin described Bucer as a man “who on account of his profound scholarship, his bounteous knowledge about a wide range of subjects, his keen mind, his wide reading, and many other different virtues, remains unsurpassed today by anyone, can be compared with only a few, and excels the vast majority.”
Cranmer was still working on the first Book of Common Prayer when the well-known reformer arrived. To a great extent the 1549 Prayer Book was a translation of Bucer’s liturgy for Cologne. The term "Book of Common Prayer" comes from Bucer, and many of the changes made in the 1552 edition are thanks to him. From the approximately 60 criticisms of the 1549 Prayer Book offered in his book “Censura,” 23-25 were addressed in the 1552 revision. He made sure that a lectionary was included in the new Book in which the Bible was read in church services completely in one year, and he added the congregational involvement and responses that are so much a part of Anglican worship today. Bucer was not happy with the 1549 “epiclesis” (fancy word for “invoking the Holy Spirit” to change the bread & wine into the body and blood of Christ), and suggested that the prayer be focused instead where Christ’s real presence is found: in the hearts and affections of those who receive the grace of the sacrament by faith. The epiclesis was removed altogether in the 1552 Prayer Book revision along with other ceremonial gestures and practices that suggested a Medieval Catholic understanding of “real presence” and transubstantiation. It remained buried shallowly and was absent from Church of England rites altogether until it was resurrected like an unwelcome house guest for the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer.
On January 31, 1517 Martin Bucer began his studies at the University of Heidelberg where he stumbled into the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. Martin Luther came to make the audacious claims that people are incapable of doing good because they do not have free will, and that “law and gospel” are two different parts of the Bible’s teaching: the law says “Do this” and it is never done; grace says “Believe this” and it is already done (Disputation # 26). Bucer was especially convinced by Luther’s 25th Thesis: “He is not righteous who does much, but he who without work believes much in Christ.” Bucer was convinced that the gospel (Jesus was crucified and buried, and after three days rose from the dead) is the answer to the law's demands, and he would never be the same. When the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, was enthroned, she considered Bucer’s ideas so dangerous that she had his bones dug up and burned. This didn't bother him a bit.
The Theology of the Cross: Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation and Reflections on its 28 Theses, Ed. Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara
Thomas Cranmer: A life, Diarmaid MacCulloch
Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest, Samuel Leuenberger
On Being A Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, Gerhard O. Forde
Luther’s Theology of the Cross, Alister E. McGrath
A History of Anglican Liturgy, G.J. Cuming