Ashley Null: Cranmer's Doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone

[The following is from the Anglican Church League:  Ashley Null on Cranmer]

Justification by faith alone is the key

The Homilies are very much neglected in the experience of most Anglicans. How do they fit into the scheme of things?

Most people don’t realise that the first liturgical change Cranmer made was to insist on good solid biblical preaching in every Sunday church service. To ensure that, he and others gathered together a set of Homilies that were to be read in course throughout the year.

The first six of these sermons explain how one comes to a biblical understanding of having Jesus Christ as your Saviour by faith alone – and the gratitude that one receives from knowing God has saved you, even though you are not able to make yourself worthy of salvation.

That gratitude means that you live your life in service of him and of other people. God’s divine gracious love, shown in saving the unworthy, inspires a grateful human love, by which we serve God and other people.

For Cranmer, the glory of God is to love the unworthy – that’s his fundamental theological tenet. He understood that medieval theology, despite its clear intellectual breadth and brilliance, had a distinct Achilles’ heel – its insistence that you had to be made personally worthy for salvation before God could accept you.

Cranmer believed that this emphasis on merit produced only two possible alternatives – either you had great pride that you were worthy – or you had great despair that you never could be worthy. Neither one, of course, inspired loving obedience.

So this is the key to justification by faith.

Exactly.

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Reasonable Christian Blog Glory be to the Father, and to the Son : and to the Holy Ghost; Answer. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be : world without end. Amen. 1662 Book of Common Prayer