Evaluating Liturgical Continuity and Change at the Reformation: a Case Study of Thomas Müntzer, Martin Luther, and Thomas Cranmer

Abstract

In his now classic work,The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945, the Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix, was concerned to demonstrate that in the origin and development of the eucharistic liturgy, and underneath the verbal differences, the cultural diversity, and the growth of the centuries, a particular unchanging core shape could be identified. His study was primarily concerned with the eucharist from its institution in the New Testament to the sixth century, and it was not his intention in that work to survey in any depth the later medieval developments, East or West, or the Reformation. Nevertheless, as an Anglican in the Anglo-Catholic tradition Dix felt obliged to use his findings of the earlier period to embark upon a not too subtle criticism of the sixteenth-century Reformation liturgies, and particularly those revisions of his own denomination instigated and presided over by Thomas Cranmer. For Dix, the later medieval liturgical development saw a shift of emphasis to an unhealthy preoccupation with the Passion, and was brought to its logical unfortunate conclusion in the rites of the Reformation. With reference to Cranmer, Dix could thus write: ‘With an inexcusable suddenness, between a Saturday night and a Monday morning at Pentecost 1549, the English liturgical tradition of nearly a thousand years was altogether overturned.’ We should note the phrase, ‘inexcusable suddenness’. When combined with rhetoric such as ‘a horrible story all round’ and ‘enforcement by penal statutes of a novel liturgy’, it is clear that Dix was using a different set of criteria from earlier Anglican apologists. Compare Jeremy Taylor in 1658, who wrote: ‘the Liturgy of the Church of England hath advantages so many and so considerable as not onely to raise it self above the devotions of other Churches, but to endear the affections of good people to be in love with liturgy in general.’