Cranmer’s Church

After trying to avoid the appointment by extending his stay in Europe, Thomas Cranmer was finally consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury at St. Stephen’s College Westminster Palace on March 30, 1533.

He is the lesser-known of the sixteenth century reformers but, as recent scholarship has shown, Cranmer was a first-class thinker alongside the best minds of the Protestant Reformation. Comparatively, he shies from the limelight and he never relishes the hand-to-hand combat with the popes and potentates that seems to fuel some of the other reformers. He is the quiet rector behind Henry VIII and Edward VI using “the full powers of his position as Primate of All England to inculcating the Protestant faith into every fibre of English life and law” (Ashley Null).

He is the most important theologian of the English Reformation, and arguably the most important in the five hundred year history of the Church of England, if for no other reason but that he is responsible for all the recognized formularies of our Anglican heritage: the Articles of Religion (including the Ordinal), the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer. In so many ways it it fair to call this “Cranmer’s Church.”

King Henry VIII changed Cranmer’s family shield from cranes to pelicans, declaring to him that pelicans should signify to him “that he ought ‘to be ready, as the pelican is, to shed his blood for his ‘young ones, brought up in the faith of Christ’.” (John Stryp, Historical and Biographical Works: Memorials of Thomas Cranmer ). The legend of the pelican is significant and beautiful: that in a time of famine, the mother pelican wounds herself, striking her breast with her beak to feed her young with her own blood, and in turn loosing her own life. On Thomas’ coat of arms is the gospel: Jesus did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself, even to death on the cross, so that every knee will bow and every tongue confess (Phil 2).