Formulary Friday: Thomas Cranmer and the fear of death

On 21st March 1556, Thomas Cranmer, was marched out to Oxford’s University Church. However many thousands of services he had attended in over twenty years serving as Archbishop of Canterbury, this was to be his last. Condemned as a heretic, he was to be burned, like so many of his protestant colleagues and friends under the short but bloody reign of Mary. A small cobbled cross on Oxford’s Broad Street still marks the spot to this day.

It had been a tumultuous few months for Cranmer, in which, under extraordinary psychological pressure, he had signed no less than six recantations of the evangelical protestant faith he had so systematically and thoroughly introduced across the land over the previous decades. For his Roman Catholic opponents this was as significant a victory as any could hope for. The plan now for this final church service was simple: he was to read the written statement he had prepared himself, publically recanting his protestant faith for the final time. Cranmer however had other ideas. As he reached the part of his statement that recanted his protestant writings, he instead recanted of his recantations! “All such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation” he declared, “are contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death.”

Nine years earlier, as part of a wider effort to reform a church led by an often corrupt and ignorant clergy, Cranmer had produced a book of twelve Homilies. Every parish in the land was required to own them, and every parish priest to preach them. The ninth of these homilies is entitled: An Exhortation Against The Fear Of Death. Cranmer outlines three reasons why men fear to die: a fear at losing worldly honours, a fear of the suffering and pain that attends dying, and the ‘chief cause’ of fear, namely, ‘the dread of the miserable state of damnation’. He then goes on,

“There is never a one of all these causes… that can make a true Christian man afraid to die, but plainly contrary, he conceives great and many causes undoubtedly grounded upon the infallible and everlasting truth of the Word of God, which moves him not only to put away the fear of bodily death, but also (for the manifold benefits and singular commodities which ensues to every faithful person by reason of the same) to wish, desire, and long heartily for it. For death shall be to him no death at all, but a very deliverance from death, from all pains, cares and sorrows, miseries, and wretchedness of this world, and the very entry into rest, and a beginning of everlasting joy… And we ought to believe that death being slain by Christ cannot keep any man that steadfastly trust in Christ under his perpetual tyranny and subjection…”

But there is a large difference between words written in the safety of an archbishop’s study, and words believed in the shadow of a looming stake! How Cranmer wrestled in those months leading up to his death! And only after his own dark night of the soul did he emerge with the kind of composure that allowed him finally not only to recant of his recantations, but to stretch out the hand by which they had been signed, declaring to the crowd “this unworthy right hand, this hand hath offended.”

Thirty-five archbishops have been and gone since then, and this Easter Justin Welby, the present incumbent, spoke publicly of a new age of Christian martyrdom. 450 years after Cranmer’s homily, the ‘everlasting truth of the Word of God’ continues to give these believers great hope in the face of such death. In Christ death is as defeated now as it was on that first Easter morn. And yet, how we must pray for those who are in the midst of it, that they would know that death is no death to them, and so at the last, remain faithful. And how we must cultivate a determination to do the same, whenever, and however, Christ calls us home.