Reformation in a Fish Belly
On this day, July 23, 1626, a darn curious thing happened in the market square of Cambridge, England. A codfish that was caught that morning was being gutted and prepared for sale, and found inside its belly was a half-digested, sail-wrapped manuscript containing three very small treatises later attributed to the English reformer John Frith (Fryth). Frith had been a brilliant scholar who came to evangelical conviction through his friendship with the Lutheran English reformer Robert Barnes. Frith was tried and put to death at the stake at Smithfield in 1533, initially for the crime of carrying a bag of Tyndale Bibles, and then for his views on “real presence” in the Lord’s Supper. While in prison in the Tower of London wrote an extensive essay against transubstantiation. He famously wrote: "We must eat and drink the body and blood of Christ, not with the teeth, but with our hearing and through faith.” Frith held a more Lutheran view of the Lord’s Supper than did Thomas Cranmer and some of the other reformers. He felt that Christ is present in the bread and wine AND in the hearts of the people who receive the real presence by faith (Cranmer believed that Christ is bodily present in heaven and spiritually present in the hearts and affections of those those who receive the grace of the sacrament by faith).
How Vox Piscis: Three Treatises found its way into the ocean and then into a fish belly and then into the public domaine is a mystery to this day. When it was found and published it was seen by fervent Calvinists in the Church of England as a sign and warning against “the ghostly dangers which doe on every side besiege us” (Thomas Goad wrote in the preface of its first edition). He was referring to the threat of the anti-Calvinists (Arminians) of his day who were threatening to take the Church of England from its Reformation grounding.
“The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.”