Jonathan Linebaugh writes about the “law & gospel” distinction in Thomas Cranmer

Linebaugh writes:

It is worth recalling that in Cranmer’s carefully ordered collection of homilies, the “Homily of Salvation” followed the homily on the “Misery of Mankind.” This reflects Cranmer’s Reformational understanding of the order and function of the law and the gospel:

“The Commandments of God lay our faults before our eyes, putteth us in fear and dread, and maketh us see the wrath of God against our sins, as St. Paul saith [referring to Rom 3:20]…The gracious and benign promises of God by the mediation of Christ sheweth us, (and that to our great relief and comfort,)…that we have the forgiveness of our sins, be reconciled to God, and accepted, and reputed just and righteous in his sight.”

This sequencing of the homilies also allows Cranmer to open the “Homily of Salvation” with an assumption: “Because all men be sinners and offenders against God…” The result of this hamartiological starting point is that “No man can be justified by his own good works because that no man fulfilleth the law,” a conclusion Cranmer offered as a reading of Galatians 2:21; 3:21. This “excludeth the justice of man” and means that the only hope for justification - that is, the forensic pronouncement that one is judged righteous by God - is the miracle of “another righteousness,” a iustitia aliena “received from God’s own hands” in the form of the “forgiveness of sins.”

Jonathan Linebaugh, “The Texts of Paul and the Theology of Cranmer,” Reformation Readings of Paul: Explorations in History and Exegesis, Ed. Michael Allen and Jonathan A. Linebaugh