#thirtyninearticles

A number of Cranmer’s articles didn’t get included in the final 1571 Articles of Religion, including what Cranmer had to contribute in regards to eschatology. In these articles, Cranmer advanced no opinion regarding whether any member of mankind would be utterly condemned- a matter which rests with God. But he did react to the pretension that none would be. Why? According to O’Donovan: 

“For such an opinion has hedged its bets about Christ. It has claimed universal effects for the atonement, right enough, but only out of a certain nervousness that the atonement itself has not achieved true universality. What is God’s love to do, it has asked itself, if Christ has failed to incorporate the whole of mankind in his representative triumph? Why, then, those who have slipped through this net must be caught in another one! But it is not in that spirit that God has offered us his Son to represent us - not so as to leave it to us to decide whether Christ shall in fact be the last Adam or not. There before Pontius Pilate was that new mankind, there and nowhere else. No choice of ours can enhance or detract from the universality of that figure; no subsequent refusal can turn the future of redemption into another course. The question that is asked of us in our time is not: shall all mankind, then, be saved in Christ? - for that question has been answered by him in his time and does not need the living of our lives to answer it further. The question is this: shall we ourselves be saved with all mankind in Christ? For if we refuse and are lost, we have carried away no part of mankind with us to perdition, we have recorded no dissenting votes. Our time is of itself nothing, and represents nothing; but between the living of our lives and that eclipse of our time into nothingness, God has set his time, the day of Jesus’s resurrection.”

In comparing the Westminster Confession to Cranmer’s Thirty Nine Articles, O’Donovan shows that by placing the doctrine of predestination within the doctrine of creation, the Westminster Confession poses and answers the wrong question. Cranmer, however, places predestination within the doctrine of salvation and so avoids grappling with the question Westminster could not avoid (ie. ‘how can an omnipotent and transcendent divinity live in the same universe with a world of free agents?’). O’Donovan writes:

The Reformer’s past-tense juridical language (‘accounted righteous’) easily led to the objection that the moral renewal of humankind was unimportant to them. This was especially the case in the context of progressive (or factitive) justification (ie. becoming righteous), dominant in mediaeval discussions. 

O’Donovan, though, points out the importance of the finality of the Reformer’s metaphor (it was, after all, taken from the Apostle Paul). Jesus, having been risen and ascended, denotes finality, completeness and victory!